FOR AND AGAINST

Let us see France: from North to South, from East to West. Let us travel through it. Let us visit its cities. Let us stop in its villages in a friendly manner. Let us stroll through its countryside. Everywhere, everywhere, the impression is the same: What peace! What tranquility! What wisdom!…

We see only good people attached to their task and their daily life. We hear only reasonable talk. I do not mean, of course, that we meet only happy people. But the unfortunate themselves speak with serenity, at least with common sense... In the city as in the countryside, we gossip. In the city as in the countryside, we smile and we readily joke. In the city as in the countryside, men tease women; and women are not embarrassed, neither in the city nor in the countryside, to answer them with malice and grace. Children, everywhere, are cheerful and well-groomed…

The sweetness of a small town in France is an infinite thing. The peace of a French countryside is a miraculous thing. We breathe tranquility. We drink silence. It is a fresh water that quenches the spirit and cleanses the brain. The land of France, the stones of France are imbued with tranquility, wisdom, moderation... On all the fronts of the French, one senses reflection and patience...

The foreigners who come to us are all immediately won over by the communicative calm of our country, by its composure, by its instinctive order, by its pleasant way of life... There is only one cry among all the foreigners who have traveled to France: "France is an astonishing country admirably healthy, which has neither fever, nor languor, nor disorder, nor madness..." And it is the representatives of this gentle country who spend their time throwing violence, insults and inkwells at each other?...

And it is in the room where the representatives of this tranquil country meet that we fight from morning to night, that we tear each other apart, that we knock each other out?... And we note, astonished, that the "violence and assault" which are very rare things in France and which are, moreover, things immediately repressed by the courts, are commonplace within Parliament? …

We are obliged to say that our representatives have a strange way of representing us. If we were as they “represent” us, if we acted like them, if we lived, in France, as our “representatives” live today in Parliament, our country would, in truth, be a hell next to which that of Dante would seem like an earthly Paradise.-

Maurice Prax.