In Northern Europe the sun is the grateful climate; in Southern Europe shade and cool ness. In Southern Europe a low relief was sufficient for plastic art; in Northern Europe a high relief. You find them joined in the art of Mediaeval France.
Again, consider food. Wheaten bread is the staple of Roman civilization. To the north of it, oats, rye and other poorer cereals; to the east, rice,• and, normally, France grows more wheat than any other of the western European states. France grows more wheat than Italy, England and Spain combined. She grows more than half of Europe, outside Russia. Next to wheat the vine has been the staple of French civilization in the matter of food, but the vine is not easily grown north ward of a certain limit (though in the Middle Ages that limit extended far into Britain). Gaul, though mainly wine-drinking, includes a northeastern belt which has the custom of East ern Britain and the German tribes, and drinks beer, while it has a larger northwestern belt which follows the custom of Western Britain and drinks cider.
The northern use of butter, the southern use of olive oil meet in Gaul. The use of and the partial abstinence of flesh — which is largely a matter of climate — depend upon zones which also meet in that territory. Meat cannot be kept in a southern summer; a northern winter cannot healthfully be passed without it.
The list of such contrasts could be drawn out indefinitely by any man of average travel and reading; and in nearly every one of them he would find that French territory was a com mon ground upon which either type met.
It is in the light of the foregoing general considerations that we must regard the history and character of the French people. They will continue to influence the future as they have influenced the past, and they are the major constants in every far-reaching problem of European importance. But a few closing words upon the immediate conditions of the French will perhaps enable the reader better to appreci ate the articles that follow.
In general, those immediate conditions con sist in this, that upon the general material of a people welded into their unity by ancient customs, and by a method of thought which they are incapable of abandoning, two consid erable discussions are at work. Neither can
ultimately affect the profound mass and struc ture of Gaul, but the victory of one of the two parties in either of these discussions will con siderably affect the form or mold into .which that mass shall be thrown, and therefore in evitably will affect the general structure of , surrounding Europe.
These two discussions are, the discussion upon the purely democratic state, and the dis cussion upon the authority of the Christian religion.
They are of ten confused, and nowhere more so than in France itself. But the connection between them is quite accidental, and no accu rate conception of the position can be arrived at until each is regarded quite separately from the other.
The modern French experiment in democ racy is, in the main, a reversion to the ideal of the old civilization of the Mediterranean. It contains no part of that anarchic ideal of in dividual liberty common in more rudimentary states: an ideal that inevitably ends in oligarchy and usually in plutocracy. The French experi ment in republicanism is an experiment which presupposes a highly organized, a highly cen tralized and a powerful state, capable of crush ing by a common effort all sporadic Ocular energies which may be antagonistic to or even separate from the common life. And ' the experiment is an experiment and not an achieved dne, because the machinery for such a state is so difficult to construct. The experi ment has never been tried before and it may well fail. Democracies have existed in small city states usually dependent upon slave labor; they have endured indefinitely in small isolated agricultural states; they have never permanently existed in large states under conditions of high civilization, So long as the French ex periment endures, so long the conception of democracy at least, and, to some extent, its forms and ideals, will be observed in Western ' Europe. And it is a matter of intense interest to watch the succeeding phases of the experi ment, the moments when it seems nearly ap proaching success and the moments. when the whole conception seems too unworkable for the complexity of the modern world. I repeat, the issue is by no means decided.