Description

Extended Data

index

25.0

para

With all due respect to my honorable friends I make the statement. This Parliament is too highminded to go behind the spirit and meaning of a resolution which it affirms. There is much in French civilization, and in the French character which claims the admiration of mankind. It must surely be humiliating to a Frenchman to reflect that his country cannot now be regarded as safe unless guaranteed by the other great Powers. I say to the French, notwithstanding my admiration for them, that it is their own fault that that is so. I am friendly to France and to the French people, and it is lamentable that I should have to say from my place here that, had French men and French women been true to themselves in, every respect; had. they acknowledged what was due to their race, they would not now have to get the guarantees of other nations to protect them against Germany. The Leader of the Opposition (Senator Gardiner) referred to the fact that Germany has. a population of 80,000,000 or 90,000,000, while France, we understand, has had her population reduced by the war from 38,000,000 to 34,000,000. In Napoleon's day the French numbered over 30,000,000, and he, speaking of his struggle with the British Empire, said, " Thirty millions of Frenchmen against 15,000,000 of British ! The result cannot be doubtful. History will repeat itself. Rome will destroy Carthage." But Rome, by which he meant France, did not destroy Carthage the second time. Fortunatelv both Rome and Carthage, using his terms for France and England, survive to-day, and are now joining hand in hand to secure the liberties of mankind and their perpetuation. The point I wish to make now, however, is that, while at the time of the Napoleonic wars the population of Britain numbered only 15,000,000, it now numbers nearly 50,000,000; and France, whose population then was 30,000,000, has now only 34,000,000. In Napoleon's day, there were 22,000,000 Germans, and now there are 80,000,000 or 90,000,000 Germans. It is because of the French disregard of the principles that make nations great that France hae been humiliated by having to seek the protection of other countries against Germany. Millions of unborn Frenchmen should now be inhabiting the tabernacles of the flesh. They should be helping us to fill the waste spaces of Australia, where they would be welcome. The French are too few in number. Their language is losing ground before that of the British. I say to them in the verse of one of their own poets - Tis awful odds against the gods When they will match with myrmidons, These spawning, spawning myrmidons. Their turn to-day; they take command- Jove gives the globe into the hand Of myrmidons, of myrmidons. Jove will, indeed, give the globe into the hands of the fecund nations. Since the dawn of time the classic land of Gaul has been inhabited, and the French was the first of the Western nations to become civilized, and yet, afterall the centuries that have passed, she has a population now of only a little over 30,000,000, and has had to seek protection from, amongst others, theCommonwealth of Australia with a population of only 5,000,000, . in occupation of a territory that we have held only a little over a century. In another century, unless the French amend their ways, the population of Australia will outnumber that of France.Let the French take to heart the lesson that they are now being taught. That the French armies are insufficient for the protection of France, and that the French language is being less and less spoken throughout the world are facts due to the French disregard of the divine injunction to increase and multiply. I have great pleasure in supporting the motion. I do so with the full consciousness that it commits the Australian Parliament and people to the protecting and supporting of the French nation should it be attacked by Germany without provocation.