M. CLEMENCEAU AND M. JAURES.
CLEMENCEAU is an illustrious example of the • men who come late into their inheritance. He was over fifty before he had written a leading article, and he has been the most influential journalist in France. He has only now entered a Cabinet, and he is already one of the strongest Ministers that the Third Republic has seen. He has been specially fortunate in the circumstances of his accession to office. He is not the Prime Minister ; and in France to be Prime Minister is to have very little of your own way and to be the object of constant intrigues. M. Sarrien, indeed, may have better fortune than his predecessors, partly perhaps because there is no way that he much cares to have, and partly because the presence of M. Clemenceau in the Home Department may act as a political lightning-conductor. For the moment, however, the Minister of the Interior is more likely to attract popu- larity than to dissipate enmity. We may expect—always remembering, of course, that in France it is seldom the expected that happens—to see the Cabinet carried over the shallows that have so often proved fatal to French Minis- tries by his success in his new character of Protector of his countrymen against Socialism.
In spite of his extreme theories on some subjects— notably on religion—M. Clemenceau is what all politicians, unless they belong to such exceptional types as M. Jaures on one side and the Comte de Mun on the other, must be. He is an opportunist. He distinguishes, that is, between what is practicable and what is not practicable. He sets before him, not the ideal to which he would aspire if he dwelt in an imaginary world, but only so much of that ideal as he may hope to make his own in the world in which he lives. In the circumstances in which he entered upon his work he was, as it turned out, eminently fortunate. The Socialists proved his best friends. When it was known that he had consented to take office, the enemies of the Republic became suddenly and unusually hopeful. They counted upon the alarm which the appointment would excite in the more sober and conservative districts of France. Even then, probably, they greatly exaggerated this alarm. They forgot that they themselves had done much to weaken it by the pains they had been at to show that a Conservative victory would mean only the substitu- tion of one danger for another. If the new Government stood for injury to property, an anti-Republican triumph would stand for political confusion, and possibly civil war. As it happened, however, the electors were not called upon to choose between these alternative risks. The Socialists went out of their way to give M. Clemenceau an occasion for making the right impression. If they had remained quiet, timid people might conceivably have argued that the Socialists evidently had a Minister to their mind, and so felt that there was no need for them to resist the law, or terrorise employers, or make unprovoked attacks on the soldiery. All that they could hope to get by these means they would get without difficulty from the new Minister of the Interior. Even if people who had something to lose had reasoned in this way, it is not at all likely that the result of the elections would have been markedly different. But at all events there was a chance that it might have been different, and it was from this remote risk that the Socialists saved the Government. They at once resorted to violence, the kind of violence that might have been very damaging to a reactionary Government, which would probably have tried to put it down without giving the offenders any chance of coming to a wiser mind. But it was the reverse of damaging to M. Clemenceau. He at once did everything in his power to bring the strikers to hear reason, and it was only when all his efforts in this direction had failed, and it was impossible any longer to leave the soldiers at the mercy of an armed mob, that he at last ordered the troops to show that force was on their side, and to show it unmistakably. It then proved that M. Clemenceau's plans had been so well laid that order was restored almost at once. Under a less resolute Minister the strikes might have got altogether out of hand, and Paris might have been involved in " a rising the consequences of which no one could estimate." M. Clemenceau's defence is Complete. He has been gentle so long as there seemed to be a chance that gentleness could cope with the situation. He has been resolute when it was evident that gentleness would • be only weakness under a finer naine.
The conflict in the street has been followed by a, conflict in the Chamber. This has been much more than a mere discussion of the particular steps taken by M. Clemenceau for the suppression of revolt. M. Jaures has not only denounced those steps ; he has explained the purpose of the Socialist revolution, and the changes which its victory would work in France. M. James no longer asks for mere makeshifts ; he will have nothing short of Collectivism. All property is to be held by the State, all labour is to be employed by the State, and the small proprietors are to be reconciled to the appropriation of their holdings by the community by the beneficent administration which is to follow upon the transfer. Monday and Tuesday in this week have been taken up -by M. Clemenceau's criticism of the picture M. Jaures has sketched, and by an exposi- tion of the means by which the Government hope to make the completion of the picture unnecessary. To many of the reforms which• M. Jaures desires to see effected M. Clemenceau is himself favourable. But this partial agreement does not prevent him from recognising the under- lying and permanent antagonism between the two ideals. M. Jaures is a Collectivist, M. Clemenceau is an Individualist. He is an Individualist because he is a Republican, for the Republican Party, as the heir of the Revolution, is the defender of the rights of man,—of the individual man. Nothing, probably, could do so much to strengthen -the Republic as this plain statement. It is to the fear which the French peasant proprietors have of Socialism, and of the supposed tendency of the Radical Party to coquet with Socialism, that the reactionary politician has always appealed. He has insisted on treating this tendency as inseparable from the Republican form of government, and from time to time the weakness of the Republicans actually in power has seemed to justify him in identifying the two things. It will be impossible to go on doing this to any purpose after M. Clemenceau's speech. He has interpreted the meaning of the recent elections, and there can hardly be a doubt that his interpretation is the true one. France is Republican to the core. She is Radical to the core. But she is not Socialist; and the Socialists, instead of being, as they have persuaded themselves they are, the very back- bone of the Republic and of the Radicals, are really their most dangerous foes. The one thing which might make France abjure the Radical Party, and even the Republic itself, is the notion that these two things are inseparable from Socialism. There is no politician so fitted by character and antecedents to disabuse Frenchmen of this notion as M. Clemenceau,—no one so much associated with Socialists in the days when they were alike fighting for their lives, no one whose declared, whose almost ostenta- tious, severance from them is so calculated to reassure timid property-holders.
M. Clemenceau did more, however, than mark the funda- mental distinction between the Socialist ideal of the Re- public and his own. He said some notable things about the general policy of the Cabinet of which he is the most important member. M. Clemenceau has often been thought a Jacobin, and in the past his aspirations have undoubtedly seemed to point in that direction. Now, however, he stands revealed, as a Jacobin if you like, but a Jacobin who is not above learning by experience. Since he took office one of the accusations most often brought against him has been that he represents in the Cabinet the temper and policy of H. Combos. What that policy is M. Combos has not tried to conceal. He has described the Separation Law as an imperfect measure, which, unless its defects can :be remedied in the process of carrying it out, must be followed by a far more stringent measure. Until lately M. Clemenceau would have been credited with very much the same intentions. But here comes in his opportunism,— opportunism in the best sense of the word. He sees France as she is, not as his anti-theological fancy might wish to paint her, and he recognises that though Frenchmen are quite willing that the Church should be disestablished, they do not wish religion to be proscribed, or the law to be carried out at the cost of a succession of small, but not for that reason less embittered, riots in churches or at church doors. " Anti-Clerical oppression," says M. Clemenceau with a characteristic touch of cynicism, " has served its time." It has been useful, perhaps, in convincing the clergy that the Government is in earnest, but it can do no more. Now the country wishes that the Clerical difficulty " shall henceforth be settled in accordance with liberty." Whether M. Clemenceau's idea of liberty is quite ours is a question on which it would be rash to speak ; but that he should have admitted that there has been such a thing as anti-Clerical oppression in the past, and declared that it ought to have no place in the present, are indications of a striking, and, as we hope, fruitful, change in Republican policy, and—what is still more necessary—in Republican administration.
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