declared:  “We are not biased enemies of the British Nation ... but we have a horror of grasping financiers, the men of prey who have concocted in cold blood this rascally war.  They have committed with premeditation a crime of lese-humanite, the greatest of crimes.  May the blood which reddens the battle-fields of South Africa forever be upon their heads....  Yes, we are heart and soul with the Boers....  We admire them because old men and young women, even, are all fighting like heroes....  Alas! to be sure, there is no more a France, nor yet an America....  Ah!  Ideal abode of the human conscience, founded by Socrates, sanctified by Christ, illuminated in flashes of lightning by the French Revolution, what has become of thee?  There is no longer a common temple for civilized states.  Our house is divided against itself and is falling asunder.  Peace reigns everywhere save on the banks of the Vaal, but it is an armed peace, an odious peace, a poisoned peace which is eating us up and from which we are all dying."[5] Such hysterical outbursts in France were not taken seriously by the Government, and the feeling which inspired them was possibly more largely due to historic hatred of England than to the inherent justice of the Boer cause.

[Footnote 5:  London Times, April 2, 1900, p. 5, col. 5.]

The Ninth Peace Conference, which was in session at Paris in the fall of 1900, without expressly assuming the right of interfering in the affairs of a friendly nation further than to “emphatically affirm the unchangeable principles of international justice,” adopted a resolution declaring that the responsibility for the war devastating South Africa fell upon that one of the two parties who repeatedly refused arbitration, that is, it was explained, upon the British Government; that the British Government, in ignoring the principles of right and justice, in refusing arbitration and in using menaces only too likely to bring about war in a dispute which might have been settled by judicial methods, had committed an outrage against the rights of nations calculated to retard the pacific evolution of humanity; that the Governments represented at the Hague had taken no public measures to ensure respect for the resolutions which should have been regarded by them as an engagement of honor; that an appeal to public opinion on the subject of the Transvaal was advocated and sympathy and admiration were expressed for the English members of the conference.[6]

[Footnote 6:  London Times, Oct. 3, 1900, p. 3, col. 3.]

The usual French attitude toward Great Britain was expressed in these resolutions, but the conference was not prepared to go so far as to adopt a resolution proposed by a member from Belgium expressing the hope that the mistake of depriving the Republics of their independence would not be committed, and favoring an energetic appeal to the powers for intervention.  The resolution was rejected by a large majority on the ground that it would be impolitic and naturally irritating to England and without much probability of favorable results being attained.