ON WITH THE WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 July 1918, Page 5

ON WITH THE WAR.

"TIGER" TO FRENCH SOCIALISTS VICTORY IN LAST FIFTEEN MINUTES. From his first day in office, Clemenceau has been heckled by suspicious Socialists. What is his aim? they ask. Is he for a reasonable peace, like President Wilson, or a blind and savage bitter-ender? Because he is an old man himself, with nothing further to live for, would he bleed the world white in mere wanton rage ? Hero as his answer to such an attack immediately before the big offensive: — "I am not a danger to the national defence because I can have no ambition in this world (he is 76 years old) No* thing remains to me but the ardent desire to aid, in the measure of my strength, my country to issue from the situation in which it now is. I am going to tell you all my thoughts—and afterwards you can combat me as you will. As the war keeps on you see that moral crisis developing which is at the end of all wars. After all the material test of armed force, brutality, violence, rapine, murder, massacres, it is the moral crisis in which one or the other side ends. The side that can hold out longest morally is the conquerer. The great eastern people which has undergone for centuries its historic test of wax has expressed this thought in one word: "The conquerer is the one who is able to believe, for a quarter of an hour loDgcr than "his adversary, that he as not conquered!'. "I came to the Government with this idea, that the country's moral must be kept up (a Socialist member bad the grace to call out, Tou have succeeded!') Moral is an excellent thing. You (Socialists) have no property in a moral recipe—it is the great misfortune of the churches to think that, and you are only a church. "All my policy tends to this one end — to keep up the French people's moral through a crisis that is the worst in its history. Our men have fallen by millions. Who ever knew anything like tt? . . .Think of the man fighting, gun in hand, and obliged to turn away his mind to hi 3 wife, who is perhaps in ' the invaded country, to his old parents, from whom he is without news, to his comrades in arms who are dying of ; hunger in abominable German gaols! ; And, in such conditions, you come talk- : ing to me of questions of persons? I i know of no persons I have said publicly i I will do nothing against you (the Soc- I ialist party). I have done nothing against you." A Socialist Deputy, Emile Laurent, felt impelled to answer: "The President of tho Council has not the right'to say that he has taken no measures against us —there is none to be taken." Clemenceau: "I am glad of it—but how do you explain that every time I act you mount the tribune to show me that my act is directed against the working class ? Among our acts I defy you to find a single one that is not inspired by this one thought—to j safeguard the integrity of the French j people's heroic spirit. . . . There may ■be circles in which it has become = more difficult than before. There is the excuse of fatigue and evil words and the talk of enemy agents—the excuse of German propaganda. But, in Bpite of all, the moral of the French people is un- ' changeable—and civilians are not infer- ( ior to poilus. And, I, too, have the de- k nire of peace, and everybody desires it. He would be a great criminal who had any other thought—but we must know what we want. It is not by bleating for peace that we can silence Prussian militarism. "My foreign policy and my home policy are all one—foreign policy, the war! Russia betrays us—l go oil with the war! Rumania is forced to capitulate—l go on with tho war. And I shall keep on to the last quarter of an hour—for it is we who shall have the last quarter of an hour!" ' One Socialist Deputy called out— 1 "Everybody thinks the same!" Even c Jean Longuet, Karl Marx's grandson de- ( ckTed—"There is not a person here who desires peace at any price!" i Clemenceau: "We have repeated our f war aims endlessly—fire speeches of t Foreign Minister IPichon and Lloyd George and President Wilson are identical. Germans will not, need not, tell you l* j