9 OCTOBER 1915, Page 3

M. Paul Sabatier, lecturing on "The New France" on Thursday

week at Bedford College for Women, paid a noble tribute to the reawakening of our ally. The outbreak of war had been a moment of agony for French idealists, but it was not the French ideal that had disappeared, but the French idea. of German intellectual worth that had collapsed. France was now one in her devotion to the ideal of patriotic sacrifice and of victory, but she was no more militarist than before the war. She had not changed ; "she had merely found her best self again. She had returned to her old ardent faith, so often expressed in creeds so different yet not really antagonistic to each other. She had found the old quality of faith which gave rise in the Middle Ages to the saying, Gaga Dei per Francois."