"Thanks to God"

M. Paul Claudel, the great mystical poet and practical statesman whom France has sent as her Ambassador to the U. S. (TIME, Nov. 22, 1926), bade godspeed, last week at Manhattan, to a great urbane, humanitarian Middle Westerner (Cleveland) who returned, after a five months illness to his post as U. S. Ambassador to France.

Cried Poet Claudel, at a farewell Manhattan banquet:

"My dear Ambassador, our honored and trusted friend, may your way back to the country which loves you and expects you be smooth under your feet. . . .

"You go back after a hard struggle bravely fought and splendidly won. . . . No more sincere thanks went up to God for your recovery than from French hearts. France has lost many sons and therefore she clings much more to her friends. . . . You have many times explained France to America, you will have once more to explain America to France. She will believe you, for, to use an American expression, she knows that Myron Herrick is the man 'who delivers the goods.' "

Statesman Claudel thus made clear that Ambassador Herrick would have to explain to France why U. S. Secretary of State Frank Billings Kellogg has rejected the Franco-U. S. peace pact which Mr. Herrick himself brought back from France before he collapsed in health (TIME, July 4). In a stirring plea for this pact Poet-Statesman Claudel cried: "Casual thinking people, speaking of the proposal, have said: 'It is nothing but words. . . . Can you stop war with paper?' . . . Well, words are great things. It is written: 'In the beginning was the Word. . . . I remember, too, some general declarations, some pieces of writing, which were well worth the paper they were written on. . . . I remember the Declaration of Independence. . . ."