was a big family to be helped by her small earnings, and the next morning punctually she was back at work.  In this same work-room the women have one half-holiday in the week, without reduction of pay; yet if an order has to be rushed through for a hospital they give up that one afternoon as gaily as if they were doing it for their pleasure.  But if any one who has lived for the last year among the workers and small tradesmen of Paris should begin to cite instances of endurance, self-denial and secret charity, the list would have no end.  The essential of it all is the spirit in which these acts are accomplished.

The second question:  What are the conditions and qualities that have produced such results? is less easy to answer.  The door is so largely open to conjecture that every explanation must depend largely on the answerer’s personal bias.  But one thing is certain.  France has not achieved her present tone by the sacrifice of any of her national traits, but rather by their extreme keying up; therefore the surest way of finding a clue to that tone is to try to single out whatever distinctively “French” characteristics—­or those that appear such to the envious alien—­have a direct bearing on the present attitude of France.  Which (one must ask) of all their multiple gifts most help the French today to be what they are in just the way they are?

Intelligence! is the first and instantaneous answer.  Many French people seem unaware of this.  They are sincerely persuaded that the curbing of their critical activity has been one of the most important and useful results of the war.  One is told that, in a spirit of patriotism, this fault-finding people has learned not to find fault.  Nothing could be more untrue.  The French, when they have a grievance, do not air it in the Times: their forum is the cafe and not the newspaper.  But in the cafe they are talking as freely as ever, discriminating as keenly and judging as passionately.  The difference is that the very exercise of their intelligence on a problem larger and more difficult than any they have hitherto faced has freed them from the dominion of most of the prejudices, catch-words and conventions that directed opinion before the war.  Then their intelligence ran in fixed channels; now it has overflowed its banks.

This release has produced an immediate readjusting of all the elements of national life.  In great trials a race is tested by its values; and the war has shown the world what are the real values of France.  Never for an instant has this people, so expert in the great art of living, imagined that life consisted in being alive.  Enamoured of pleasure and beauty, dwelling freely and frankly in the present, they have yet kept their sense of larger meanings, have understood life to be made up of many things past and to come, of renunciation as well as satisfaction, of traditions as well as experiments, of dying as much as of living.  Never have they considered life as a thing to be cherished in itself, apart from its reactions and its relations.