Madam, - Briefly away, I returned to a batch of unread copies of your paper. In one you printed a letter from a correspondent who delivered himself of an eloquent denunciation of France, a country from which ours received much help when under alien rule and to which Washington himself acknowledged the United States owed its independence when thanking the commander of the French fleet which had won the Battle of the Virginia Capes and secured the British surrender of Yorktown.
It would be possible to make as eloquent an indictment as your correspondent did of French foreign policy in the past 50 years or so of the foreign policies during the same period of all the great European powers. But such indictments do nothing to help achieve lasting peace in Europe, the greatest political need of our time. They stimulate only suspicion and hate.
The many and varied experiences of a very long life have left me a fervent and permanent Francophile without breeding any hatred of any of the many lands I have lived and worked in, and whose languages I needed to learn - but dislike of those countries' foreign policy was another matter and few won my admiration.
For many years I have been convinced that of all the languages I knew French was the champion for making deep and complicated ideas comprehensible. Among the ideas which the French have popularised more than any other people are the simple but profound liberty, equality, fraternity, which most people in the world now cherish, but before 1789 only a minority.
The French contribution to music, art, literature, medicine (many of my fellow citizens who have availed of it assure me that the French Health Service is well ahead of those elsewhere), science engineering and the marine sciences, is quite remarkable.
The greatest of innumerable tributes I have heard came to me from Algerian patriots in Algiers, Oran and other cities and away deep in the Sahara when I was teaching maritime history to Algerian merchant marine cadets in the years immediately after the success of the Algerians bitter struggle for independence. Many of the Algerians who praised French culture to me had been imprisoned for their activities by the French colonial regime. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN de COURCY IRELAND, Dalkey, Co Dublin.