Italy, Sweden and Denmark, and which may even record the striking achievement of an arbitration treaty between France and Germany. These treaties, however, are little more than expressions of national good-will.
It is in France that the arbitration movement has shown the greatest vitality. The well-directed efforts of the Baron d’Estournelles de Constant have been largely responsible for this. He has, within a few months, built up a group of more than one hundred deputies who, while still affiliating with various other groups in the Chamber, form a tolerably compact organization in favor of international arbitration. The expenses of militarism, the increasing budgets, the growing difficulties in the effort to make taxation equal government requirements, the constant and enormous additions to the permanent national debts, all spell ruin for the great powers of Europe in the mind of the Baron de Constant. He is most pessimistic in regard to the financial future of the nations of Europe if military expenditures are to keep up to their present scale.
The Baron de Constant impressed me as a man of tremendous earnestness. The strength of his belief in his own pessimistic picture of the future of Europe, unless the tendency toward increasing armament and ever-growing expenditures is checked, undoubtedly has given him great influence, not only in the French Chamber, but with the political leaders of other nations as well. When he talked to me of the financial ruin which he saw ahead, and of the certainty of war which must result by the time the growing strain of militarism reached the inevitable breaking point, he impressed me, not alone with his earnestness, but with the force of his reasoning and the gravity of the peril which he sees. It is not surprising, in view of the budget and balance sheet of France, that a Frenchman sees this peril with special distinctness. The success which the Baron de Constant has met with in bringing together a working group in the French Chamber and in successfully completing a treaty with England is great enough to entitle him to high credit as a statesman. For many years there has been in France a most intense national prejudice against England—prejudice that has frequently descended to scurrilous abuse, and it is certainly remarkable to find so marked a reversal of public sentiment in the few months which have intervened between notable exhibitions of that prejudice and the recent acclaim over the completion of an arbitration treaty and the establishment of a cordial international feeling.
While great credit is due to the Baron de Constant for his efforts in giving practical form to this change in national feeling, the really potent influence was that of King Edward himself. When he planned a royal visit to the French capital, it was in the face of abusive criticism of England over the Boer war. His courtesy, tact, and good-humor produced a remarkable effect on the national temper of France. The return visit of President Loubet and the heartiness of the greeting which London gave him—a greeting more hearty, it was said, than he had ever received in Paris—was all that seemed needed to win the volatile French affections, and suddenly the whole race of journalists began to discover reasons for most brotherly cordiality between Frenchmen and Englishmen. All this worked in happily with the arbitration movement in the Chamber. There followed a visit of the arbitration group to London as the guests of Parliament, and a return visit of Parliamentary members as the guests of the French Chamber, and from this interchange of courtesies have resulted real understandings and sympathies such as have been markedly lacking before in the international relations between those two great powers.
The effect of royal visits, the great diplomatic significance that attaches to them, and the genuine influence which they have in shaping the public opinion of entire nations, are among the aspects that strike an American observer as peculiarly interesting in European politics. Within the last few months in addition to the interchange of courtesies between the King of England and the President of France, there have been important visits by the Italian King to France and Germany, one of which had almost as marked effect in producing cordial national feeling between two nations as had King Edward’s visit. Another royal visit that was planned, that of the Czar to Rome, was interfered with for some reason, and European journalists wrote endless columns of speculation in