The Schemes of the Kaiser by Juliette Adam
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page 3 of 219 (01%)
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effective alliance with Russia, and to the cause of nationalism, in the
Balkans, in Egypt, and wherever the liberties of the smaller nations were endangered by the earth-hunger of the great. She disliked and feared the policy of colonial expansion inaugurated by Gambetta and pursued by Jules Ferry, because she felt that it must weaken France in preparing for the great and final struggle with Teutonism which she knew to be inevitable. Thus, when Ferry requested her to cease from attacking Germany, she defied him, assuring him that nothing less than imprisonment would stop her, and that no honour could be greater than to be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck. Juliette Adam has always been intensely sure of herself and her opinions. She has the virile fighting spirit of a super-suffragette. "Always out of rank," as Gambetta described her, "Madame Intégrale" has displayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations. Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies. Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, in spite of her keen sense of justice, she identified the Army with France and was instinctively opposed to Jews, because she regarded their "cosmopolitan" influence as incompatible with patriotism. For her, all things and all men have been subordinate to the sacred cause, to her watch-word and battle-cry of _Vive la France_! Nobly has she laboured for France, confident ever in the _renaissance_ of _la Grande Nation_, and of her country's final triumph. And to-day her unswerving faith is justified, and her life work has been recognised and crowned with honour in her own land. |
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