FRENCH NATIONAL ENERGIES.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 September 1917, Page 2

FRENCH NATIONAL ENERGIES.

The manner in which the unconquerable spirit of the French nation enabled her to tide over her times of crisis was illustrated by Professor A. V. Salmon, president of the British Federation of the Alliance Francaise, in a lecture delivered in London recently. He traced the history of France through several hundred years, marked by a succession iof national trials and disasters, from each of which the nation recovered with a marvellous recuperative energy difficult to parallel in any other country in the world. He emphasised the debacle of 1870-1, when France had imposed upon her by Germany a war indemnity of £200,000,000, which was payable in three years, but which was actually paid off in half the stipulated time, and the vine and silk-culture disasters of 1875-8, involving a loss of £400,000,000, from which the nation had completely recovered by 1880. Coining to the period of the present war the lecturer pointed out that in September, 1914, when Northern France was invaded by the Germans, the nation lost the most important of her coalfields. But French energy and resource speedily found in tho water power of her mountain ranges and plateaux 1 an equivalent for the lacking coal. From that source alone France was not only able to supply her own needs, but during the critical months of June and July of 1915 she provided England with a large proportion of the explosives which she then so badly needed. One of the indirect .gains of the war, as far as France was concerned, would be found in the possession of this now and stupendous source of power from which it was to transmit supplies to centres of consumption as far distant as 500 miles from the source.