That indomitable courage, that energy, bore all before them in the allied armies both in England and America. Force of circumstances as well as the whole bent of his nature made Clemenceau the very pivot of the war. He was the incarnation of the great struggle and of its victorious end.

Georges Clemenceau has a powerful face with marked features, high cheek bones, bushy eyebrows, small and strangely piercing eyes, all denoting his love of struggle and effort. His manner of speaking is abrupt and sharp. The nervous brevity of his sentences, the shortness of his expressions make his conversation appear like a game of fencing. He has always spent much of his time at fencing schools, being a dangerous duellist, and the sharp retort of his conversation has all the swiftness of the thrust of foil and sword.

And underlying all that combative instinct and impetuosity, is a deep undercurrent of idealism and human kindness.

Clemenceau was born in 1841, at Mouilleron-enPareds in the "Bocage Vendean" not far from Fontenay-le-Comte. Vendée is a French Province where. feelings over political convictions and their struggles have always run high. During the French Revolution

the Vendeans rebelled, taking arms against the Republic. They were divided into two parties, the Whites and Blues, the former being Royalists, the latter Republicans. Clemenceau is a Vendean Blue. He has inherited his strong love of politics and the combative instinct from his native soil.

His father, a village physician born in 1811, was full of memories of the Great Revolution. He handed them down to his son, so that one generation only separated Clemenceau from the old Vendean Blue, his father, which goes far to explain certain traits of his political character and personal temperament.

After having graduated as a Doctor in Paris, where his youth was spent in the Latin Quarter, he went to London and from thence to America where he passed some years, and where he married. He knows America well, and has always followed American politics with the keenest interest.

When he returned to Paris at the end of the Second Empire, he flung himself into the political struggle then going on, with all the ardour of his passionate nature. During the siege of Paris and the Subsequent period of the "Paris Commune" he was Mayor of Montmartre. Immediately after the Franco-Prussian war he was made a Deputy to the French Chamber from Paris and he voted against peace, and for the continuation of the war. He was reelected Deputy

for Montmartre in 1876.

From that time dates the first period of his political career; he became leader of the radicals, the most dangerous, the most brilliant leader the opposition ever had to contend against. He founded a paper called "La Justice." His influence as an orator and journalist daily grew. For more than twenty years he was known as "the Great Demolisher" of ministries and cabinets. His writings and speeches all bore the imprint of his abrupt and vigorous nature. His was a tongue that lashed, and a mind that carried all before it in its own headlong impetuosity.

It would be unfair to believe that this part of Clemenceau's life was merely destructive and negative. He was no doubt responsible for the downfall of many ministers, but they were for the most part men who scarcely deserved a better fate.

Clemenceau from the first made a determined stand against Colonial expeditions. He may have been at times somewhat lacking in comprehension and foresight in assuming that attitude; but that anti-colonial mind was derived from two sources. First of all the conviction that sooner or later France would be called upon to fight against Germany, and needed therefor to maintain intact all her resources in men and money. Secondly, that French colonial ambition would to a dead certainty, lead to rivalry with England, "and all for the benefit of the King of Prussia."

One may criticize that anti-colonial attitude, but it reposed on a logical basis and formed a political doctrine to which Clemenceau has tenaciously stuck throughout his long career.

A political adventurer, General Boulanger, who tried to exploit the French nationalist feeling, found his most formidable opponent in Clemenceau. More than any other, Clemenceau succeeded in showing up one who was in reality but a false "great" man, getting him out of French politics for the greater good of his country.

During the Boulangist fever as well as during the Dreyfus affair, Clemenceau proved a redoubtable polemist, gaining fervent admirers, but also bitter enemies.

Great fighter that he was, he ignored the arts of circumspection. He struck with all his might, never doing or saying things by halves. His enemies united against him; cabals and coalitions were formed to combat his influence. Influential newspapers like the "Petit Journal," (whose editor, Ernest Judet, was convicted during the war of being a German agent), spent enormous sums of money in their efforts to ruin him. In 1893 they at last succeeded in expelling him from Parliament.

Clemenceau was no longer a Deputy, but his indomitable energy was not in any way diminished.

He no longer owned a daily Newspaper, but at once began a new life as a political, philosophical, and even dramatic writer.

From that period date most of his books: La Melée Sociale; le Grand Pan, (a novel); les Plus Forts, (a short play); le voile du Bonheur which was produced at the Renaissance Theatre in 1901. Therein may be found Clemenceau's philosophical doctrines, his conception of politics and of life.

At its very outset Clemenceau threw himself body and soul into the Dreyfus affair. As editor of "L'Aurore" he played a very prominent part in that political and judiciary drama. In a series of daily articles, which have since appeared in book form, Clemenceau not only showed his brilliant qualities as a debater, but also his innate love of justice, his philosophical mind, his idealism.

In 1902 he re-entered the political domain, being returned to Parliament by the Department of the Var. That election forms another landmark in his well-filled existence. It might be termed: Clemenceau versus Germany.

For more than 15 years he found an outlet for his superabundant energy in preparing for a more and more probable German aggression. He felt that imperialistic Pan-Germanism was a growing danger for republican and pacific France. He contributed more