Let us turn now to France.  Since 1870 we find contending there, with varying fortunes and strength, two opposite currents of sentiment and policy.  One was that of revanche against Germany, inspired by the old traditions of glory and hegemony, associated with hopes of a monarchist or imperialistic revolution, and directed, in the first place, to a recovery of Alsace-Lorraine.  The other policy was that of peace abroad and socialistic transformation at home, inspired by the modern ideals of justice and fraternity, and supported by the best of the younger generation of philosophers, poets, and artists, as well as by the bulk of the working class.  Nowhere have these two currents of contemporary aspiration met and contended as fiercely as in France.  The Dreyfus case was the most striking act in the great drama.  But it was not the concluding one.  French militarism, in that affair, was scotched but not killed, and the contest was never fiercer than in the years immediately preceding the war.  The fighters for peace were the Socialists, under their leader, Jaures, the one great man in the public life of Europe.  While recognizing the urgent need for adequate national defence, Jaures laboured so to organize it that it could not be mistaken for nor converted into aggression.  He laboured, at the same time, to remove the cause of the danger.  In the year 1913, under Swiss auspices, a meeting of French and German pacifists was arranged at Berne.  To this meeting there proceeded 167 French deputies and 48 senators.  The Baron d’Estournelles de Constant was president of the French bureau, and Jaures one of the vice-presidents.  The result was disappointing.  The German participation was small and less influential than the French, and no agreement could be reached on the burning question of Alsace-Lorraine.  But the French Socialists continued, up to the eve of the war, to fight for peace with an energy, an intelligence, and a determination shown in no other country.  The assassination of Jaures was a symbol of the assassination of peace; but the assassin was a Frenchman.

For if, in France, the current for peace ran strong in these latter years, so did the current for war.  French chauvinism had waxed and waned, but it was never extinguished.  After 1870 it centred not only about Alsace-Lorraine, but also about the colonial expansion which took from that date a new lease of life in France, as it had done in England after the loss of the American colonies.  Directly encouraged by Bismarck, France annexed Tunis in 1881.  The annexation of Tunis led up at last to that of Morocco.  Other territory had been seized in the Far East, and France became, next to ourselves, the greatest colonial Power.  This policy could not be pursued without friction, and the principal friction at the beginning was with ourselves.  Once at least, in the Fashoda crisis, the two countries were on the verge of war, and it was not till the Entente of 1904 that their