THE .FRENCH
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sra,—I feel unable to contend with Mr. R. Briggs Davenport, author of The Genesis of the Great War, in one respect. When 1 write endeavour to be concise, coherent • and terse : I cannot, and have no desire to, contend with him by a flood of words like his, pursuing its tiresome, irrelevant and turgid course through a column and a half of your valuable space.. I shall, therefore, content myself by fishing out and dealing with one or two samples of his judgment and taste.
Mr. Davenport expresses amazement at the lack of logic in his opponents. May I suggest that his letter shows he is no judge of logic ? My letter dealt purely with a financial question ; yet, after some irrelevant verbosity, he implies I stand "convicted of inhuman callousness and of contempt for the plainest principles of justiee." Could anything be more illogical ? Am I not at liberty to discuss a financial problem without having this ponderous vituperation hurled at me ? I am a warm admirer and friend of France ; but I have yet to learn that, in private life, I am to let any friend, however great, take an unfair advantage of me financially, and I demand for my country no less than I expect for myself.
I do not, therefore, deserve the vituperative clause which Mr. Davenport has concocted about me, but am obliged to him for it, as it so effectively expresses what every decent Englishman must think of him, on reading what he says about that awful tragedy of unemployment in our midst. The misery, the distress and the want existing on this account among so many of our honest working men anxious to obtain a job, striving some of them, without success, for more than two years to get one, the constant hope deferred, the sickness at heart -which must assail them and the patient endurance with which they support their troubles, all fill me and every decent man with the utmost sympathy, -compassion and admiration. But what has Mr. Davenport to say about it ? " Britannicus ' makes requisition again of that banal argu- ment of the suffering of Great Britain through unemployment." There is "inhumanity," there is "callousness," there is "contempt for the plainest principles of justice," expressed, as is -not unfitting, in a good example of "journalese "—an unworthy thought expressed in unworthy language.
Consideration for your space restrains me from further criticism of Mr. Davenport's letter which, besides, it does not merit, and, unrepentantly active in behalf of my country and
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