FRENCH AND ENGLISH.
MZOLA'S visit has done one thing. It has brought . out the curious contrast between the feeling enter- tained by England towards France, and by France towards England. The French just now are in a frenzy of hate for the English. Our perfidy has risen fifty points in the last six months. We are the arch-hypocrites, the secret instigators of the domestic ills of France,—a nation so mean and contemptible that, instead of openly opposing France, we insiduously bribe her politicians to desert their duty and traffic with the best interests of the country. The mere suspicion of friendship, or even of tolerance for England, means ruin for a candidate. The most damaging and disgraceful charge that could be brought against M. 016menceau was that he was a friend of the English gold, and people felt that his political overthrow was certain when the Petit Journal had depicted him as dancing a hornpipe amid a, shower of sovereigns. At the last election the evil deeds of the Panamists were passed over as if they had never been ; but when once the cry of " Aoh, yes ! "—believed in Paris to repre- sent the essential genius of the English tongue—was raised, all possibility of appealing to common-sense or fair-play completely vanished. Having left public opinion in France in such a condition as regards us, M. Zola expected to find all England bristling with rage and fury at the French. Instead, he found English- men perfectly friendly to France in intention, and only angry that French people should be so foolish as to believe that we scattered gold among their Deputies. The discovery that England does not hate France evidently startled M. Zola not a little. "I have noticed," he said to a farewell interviewer, " one very important phenomenon ; that is, that the Frenchman is more liked in England than an Englishman in France. I am glad you agree with me. We do not like anybody in France P I am afraid that is true ; you see, we have been in sore need, and nobody helped us ; we have been severely wounded, and nobody dressed our wounds ; we have been now isolated for so long, and naturally we are &nerves; we have a grievance against the rest of our neighbours. For all that, this dis- like of the English is as unfortuntite as it is silly, and the feeling is one of old standing. I speak quite apart from politics ; it is between man and man. I am quite positive that you like us; and I shall give the widest publicity to the fact ; may it be productive of some good in our future mutual relations ! " In a word, M. Zola was positive that W3 liked France, and equally positive that France hated us.
It is a curious situation, and produces a new phase of what is perhaps the most curious problem in the politics of the world,—the problem of national animosities. Why should the French hate us, while we do not hate but rather like them ? There are many reasons ; but the chief is, we expect, that the French in almost every quarter of the globe fancy themselves what the man in the street calls "bested" by us,—i.e., not actually swindled, but still got the better of in a way which suggests to them oppressive dealing, and gives an excuse for soreness. The French feel that they had a great career before them in America and in India, and yet somehow we, and not they, rule at Madras and in Quebec. It is the same in the Pacific, and in Africa ; and in Egypt the feeling is especially acute, for there the ousting only took place yesterday. It is no good to say that it was either the fate of war, or else the direct fault of the French, that they did not do better. They care nothing for that, but only feel the rankling fact that it is we, not they, who are in possession. Nor is this all ; in neutral countries, the trade is always slipping away from French into English hands, and this in spite of the fact that the French often start under specially favourable conditions and enjoy Government help. Eighty per cent. of the trade of Siam is in English hands, and some 2 per cent. in French. Englishmen quote this fact to show how unreasonable it is of Frenchmen to press their claims upon Siam. They forget that it is this very circumstance which makes the French mad to get a better hold on Siam. It is a monstrous piece of injustice that England should monopolise that 80 per cent. " by the exertion of her habitual policy of force and fraud," and it is worth while running almost any risk to redress so great an infamy. If, then, the French Government can, by coercing Siam, make arrangements which will be fairer to France, it cannot be in the wrong ; and the English, if they object, are only showing their desire to ruin the noblest country in the world. Yet another source of hatred is the belief entertained by the French that we acted a cowardly, selfish, and hypocritical part in not interfering to prevent France being " pillaged " by Germany after the war. This is what M. Zola means when ho says that nobody helped France, or bound up her wounds when she was in sore need, and that therefore she has a grievance against her neighbours. The French, who strangely enough, considering their geo- graphical position, are the most insular people in the world, find it impossible to believe that we do not attach an extraordinary importance to the fate of France. They sincerely think that England is merely the black-country of Europe, and has to look for all its sweetness and light to Paris. Hence they think nothing but a brutalised. and selfish stupidity could have prevented us forbidding French civilisation being put in jeopardy, and ever since the war they have felt sulky and nursed their grievance. " It is no thanks to you," they say, " that the eye of the world was not put out, and that is a fact which we do not intend to forget." It is useless to try and explain to French. men that England does not go to war unless she is actually attacked, and that we should consider it as not in accord- ance with our national duty to risk bringing war on our own people by interfering in the private quarrels of France and Germany. That sounds to them mere hypocrisy, and they treat it as such. They have always made war for ideas, or have persuaded themselves that they have, and cannot see why we should not,--especially for so noble an idea as the salvation of French civilisation from its enemies. Another source of dislike connected with this, is the uneasy belief that we do not pay sufficient homage to the genius of France, or admit clearly enough that we are far behind her in the arts of life. She detects, besides, a smug in- difference to her opinion about England, which is specially galling. A Frenchman likes to believe that if anything is laughed at, or called barbarous or bad in France, it is killed ; and the feeling that this claim is ignored, not aggressively—that would be a sort of homage—but in a way that shows that it is not even realised, is very bitter. They smart under our returning in kind their own feeling that, if the Home judgment is favourable, it is not necessary to trouble about the opinion of the rest of the world. Lastly, Frenchmen are not a little inclined to hate us because we so stolidly refuse to hate them, and persistently treat their hatred as if it were a mere aberration, and not what they think they mean it to be,—war to the knife. For a quick and irritable people, our refusal to hate them is as galling as contempt. Is there any hope that the French will abandon their present attitude, and come to feel about us as we feel about them,—usually with kindliness, and never with any- thing approaching blind, bitter hate P We fear there is not. As long as the French are our unsuccessful rivals all the world over, so long will they continue to hate us and envy us, and to ascribe their commercial failures to our " unfairness " and scheming. A successful Conti- nental war might for a time possibly restore France to good temper, but that good temper would come to an end with the first collapse of a Colonial enterprise. We must then, we fear, endure the French hate. All we can do is not to return it. This modifies its effect to some extent, for nothing is truer than the proverb, " It takes two to make a quarrel."
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