It was realised that America knew very little of what the French were doing in this great war.  We knew, of course, that they were holding a tremendous battle line and that they were fighting bravely.  Rumours we had heard of the great destruction done by the French seventy-five millimetre gun, and the names of numerous towns had become familiar to us in print, even when we could not pronounce them.  The Paris omnibuses had gone to the front.  Paris fashions were late in coming to us, and showed a military trend.  For the first time the average American knew approximately where and what Alsace-Lorraine is, and that Paris has forts as well as shops and hotels.

But what else did we know of France and its part in the war?  What does America generally know of France, outside of Paris?  Very little.  Since my return, almost the only question I have been asked about France is:  “Is Paris greatly changed?”

Yet America owes much to her great sister republic; much encouragement in the arts, in literature, in research.  For France has always extended a kindly hand and a splendid welcome to gifted and artistic Americans.  But her encouragement neither begins nor ends there.

It was in France that American statesmen received the support that enabled them to rear the new republic on strong and sturdy foundations.  It is curious to think of that France of Louis the Sixteenth, with its every tradition opposed to the democracy for which America was contending, sending the very flower of her chivalry to assist the new republic.  It is amazing to remember that when France was in a deplorable condition financially it was yet found possible to lend America six million dollars, and to exempt us from the payment of interest for a year.

And the friendship of France was of the people, not alone of the king, for it survived the downfall of the monarchy and the rise of the French Republic.  When Benjamin Franklin died the National Assembly at Paris went into three days’ mourning for “the great American.”

As a matter of fact, France’s help to America precipitated her own great crisis.  The Declaration of Independence was the spark that set her ablaze.  If the king was right in America he was utterly wrong at home.  Lafayette went back from America convinced that “resistance is the most sacred of duties.”

The French adopted the American belief that liberty is the object of government, and liberty of the individual—­that very belief which France is standing for to-day as opposed to the nationalism of Germany.  The Frenchman believes, like the American, that pressure should be from within out, not from without in.  In other words, his own conscience, and not the arbitrary ruling of an arbitrary government, is his dictator.  To reconcile liberty and democracy, then, has been France’s problem, as it has been that of America.  She has faced the same problems against a handicap that America has not had—­the handicap of a discontented nobility.  And by sheer force and determination France has won.