EVENING REFLECTIONS

The new President

After Drôme and Lot-et-Garonne, Gard: in the person of Mr. Gaston Doumergue, it is the South that triumphs again, for the third time in twenty-five years, but it is not the South that pays with words and gestures, it is the smiling and good-natured South, which hides under its apparent good nature a great finesse, and which, without having the somewhat stiff or distant coldness of the North, has its patience and tenacity.

The new President is a man with a straight, firm and clear-sighted sense, who knows what he wants and goes, without haste, to the goal he has set for himself.

In politics as in everything, it is essential to have this sense and this clear-sightedness. Certainly, one can succeed because one is a brilliant orator, because one has a fertile imagination, but one can only do useful and lasting work when one has judgment and consistency in one's ideas.

Mr. Gaston Doumergue has these qualities and others, without a doubt, which naturally accompany them. We do not intend to include them all in this short portrait. But it is enough for us to be able to count on these ones so that we can be reassured about the seven-year term that is beginning.

At the Elysée, as in Luxembourg, the new President will know how to serve France with this intelligence, this smiling perseverance and this feeling of what is appropriate, which his adversaries themselves have always recognized.

The proofs that he has given of his understanding of the superior and permanent interests of the country and of his attachment to the Republic are a guarantee to us that the confidence that the representatives of the country have placed in him has been well placed.

When one has been able to envisage, as the President has done so far, the solutions best adapted to the great problems of the present hour and resolutely place the dignity and security of France above all discussion, one can assume the highest public charge without fear or embarrassment.

To have been able to look France straight in the face and see it as it is, wounded, but confident; to have been able to keep quiet about one's personal preferences, at a serious hour, is to have courage, and the best of it.

If the presidential function must, more than ever, in a Europe where so many storms are still raging, remain above competitions and rival passions, one can well say that no one better than Mr. Gaston Doumergue is capable of occupying it and maintaining it at this height.

National sentiment, in France, remains extremely strong because it responds to the aspirations of a democracy to which adventures and coups de force are repugnant. We have suffered too much from the calculated violence of aggressive imperialism, we carry too many poorly healed wounds. still, to want anything other than peace, peace in honor and security.

President Doumergue who will work, from today, above the parties, to achieve this continuity of French policy, will remain in this tradition which allowed us to save ourselves by saving the freedom of the world.

France, which instinctively turns away from all those who want to weaken or humiliate it, feels the need, more than ever, to recognize in the high disinterestedness, impartiality and vigilant patriotism of its first magistrate, the essential traits of its moral person. It will not be disappointed.

ANDRE PAYER