BRIAND

Of Aristide Briand, it can be truly said that the obituary platitudes commonly uttered when a statesman dies, in his case take on some measure of flesh and blood. Although the vision he had of a general peace and a reorganized Europe was by no means unique, circumstances and his oratorical gift gave him a unique position as the spokesman of that ideal. He appeared to the world as the counterpoise, in French politics, to the ingrained chauvinism which has made France the popular ogre of the pacifists. His truest measure is found not in the compromises to which internal policies reduced him, but in his work at Locarno and Geneva, and in the generous eloquence which now and again overcame the deep hostility of the Chamber.

He is one of the fortunate idealists who at length saw a concrete issue of their plans. The pact renouncing war as an instrument of policy was the joint creation of himself and Secretary Kellogg. It may be suggested that the realistic and even cynical Briand was not deceived by the glib pretenses of the pact, but even so he was eminently the man to gauge its psychological value. More important was the Locarno Treaty, which made an epoch in Franco-German diplomacy, and in which the influence of Streseman was vital. The League of Nations, though not of his creating, has taken deeply the color of his personality, and will in all likelihood continue to move, for both good and evil; along the lines which he marked out.

It is true that much of the success he achieved depended on the collaboration of other men, He belonged with that group of weary immortals who guided the world during and after the war, and his best work sprang from cooperation with them. As they dropped away one by one, he was isolated in a world which for the moment at least seems to have drifted far from his ideal of peace and unification. If it ever returns, it will return along paths on which he, for all his occasional deviations, was one of the pathfinders.