OUR TRIBUTE TO FRANCE.

Taihape Daily Times, 5 September 1918, Page 2

OUR TRIBUTE TO FRANCE.

France! The very name flings day a freshness into the air. So it ever since the day when the FraJ®~ wias Europe's freeman. In that far-off day our English forefathers called the pure sweet aroma that found freedom in the air frank incense, and to them freeholders were franklins. Still do we speak of freedom as as enfranchisement, making fit avowal of liberty’s debt to the land whose name has been a nobly significant oriflamme. i That debt is beyond the power of reckoning. Before the dawn of “the Renaissance, medieval French was the polite language of Europe, aiding the western mind in its sarly struggles for liberty of thought and ease of expression; and after that rebirth of formal classicism, it was in France that there appeared first the reassertion of naturalness in literature. This consistent impatience of mental shackles was born of a liberty loving heart and an adventurous imagination, and they were the springs. of a like impatience of tyranny in life’s practical affairs. Despots ever occupied insecure thrones where Frenchmen were the subjects, and at length there burst into a wondering world the revolt that was a. revolution. In the ashes of the Bastille freedom’s torch was lighted anew, and it has never since gone utterly out. When the onrush of Germany’s brutal masses swept through Belgium, and the blows of matured force fell thick and fast upon her, France bore the brunt bravely. Her lands were despoiled, her art treasures destroyed, her sacred places defiled, her men cut down, her women violated, and her children made homeless?. Still, with never a murmur, she kep>. , her face to the implacable foe. There was no room in her thought for betrayal of liberty’s sacred cause. Let the measure of her suffering be the measure of cur gratitude. For four years and more she has had the invader quartered upon her erstwhile fair acres, pillaging and laying waste in more formidable fashion than the world had hitherto suspected possible. Back and forth over those stretching acres the fight has gone for weary years, until now the fair face of what was once smiling France is scarred and pitted and torn. But a smile s£l" lives in the heart of her, and foot by foot she has TTeroieally struggled, giving no ground without hope of taking it again, and at last beginning to hurl the foe back whence he came. It is war made magnificent. Our hopes for a just as well as a victorious settlement in this struggle centre in France. She fights for more than “revanche.” 0 Her cause is that of the liberty of which her name speaks, a liberty for all peoples. Our tribute to France is no exaction as were tributes of old. It is our spontaneous gift. Nor can its monetary form measure our affection. Graves of ber beloved are shared by our sons, and between us is a sympathy that may make us for ever one. —Auckland “Herald.”