EQUALITY. 



4S7 



many years in France. lie says of the Freneb 

 peasantry that they are exceedingly ignorant. 

 So they are. But he adds: "They are at the 

 same time full of intelligence ; their manners are 

 excellent, they have delicate perceptions, they 

 have tact, they have a certain refinement which 

 a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have. 

 If you talk to one of them at his own home, or in 

 his field, he will enter into conversation with you 

 quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly 

 becoming way, with a pleasant combination of 

 dignity and quiet humor. The interval between 

 him and a Kentish laborer is enormous." This 

 is indeed worth your attention. Of course, all 

 mankind are, as Mr. Gladstone says, of our own 

 flesh and blood. But you know how often it hap- 

 pens in England that a cultivated person, a per- 

 son of the sort that Mr. Charles Sumner describes, 

 talking to one of the lower class, or even of the 

 middle class, feels, and cannot but feel, that there 

 is somehow a wall of partition between himself 

 and the other, that they seem to belong to two 

 different worlds. Thoughts, feelings, perception, 

 susceptibilities, language, manners — everything 

 — are different. Whereas, with a French peas- 

 ant, the most cultivated man may find himself in 

 sympathy, feel that he is talking to an equal. 

 This is an experience which has been made a 

 thousand times, and which may be made again 

 any day. And it may be carried beyond the 

 range of mere conversation, it may be extended 

 to things like pleasures, recreations, eating and 

 drinking, and so on. In general the pleasures, 

 recreations, eating and drinking of English peo- 

 ple, when once you get below that class which Mr. 

 Charles Sumner calls the class of gentlemen, are 

 to one of that class unpalatable and impossible. 

 In France there is not this incompatibility. The 

 gentleman feels himself in a world, not alien 

 or repulsive, but a world where people make the 

 same sort of demands upon life, in things of this 

 sort, which he himself does. In all these respects 

 France is the country where the people, as dis- 

 tinguished from a wealthy, refined class, most 

 lives what we call a humane life, the life of civil- 

 ized man. Of course, fastidious persons can and 

 do pick holes in it. There is just now, in France, 

 a noblesse newly revived, full of pretension, full of 

 airs and graces and disdains ; but its sphere is 

 narrow, and out of its own sphere no one cares 

 very much for it. There is a general equality in 

 a humane kind of life. This is the secret of the 

 passionate attachment with which France inspires 

 all Frenchmen, in spite of her fearful troubles, 

 her checked prosperity, her disconnected units, 



and the rest of it. There is so much of the 

 goodness and agreeableness of life there, and for 

 so many. It is the secret of her having been able 

 to attach so ardently to her the German and Prot- 

 estant people of Alsace, while we have been so 

 little able to attach the Celtic and Catholic peo- 

 ple of Ireland. France brings the Alsatians into 

 a social system so full of the goodness and agree- 

 ableness of life ; we offer to the Irish no such at- 

 traction. It is the secret, finally, of the preva- 

 lence which we have remarked in other Conti- 

 nental countries of a legislation tending, like that 

 of France, to social equality. The social system 

 which equality creates in France is, in the eyes of 

 others, such a giver of the goodness and agree- 

 ableness of life, that they seek to get the good- 

 ness by getting the equality. 



Yet France has had her fearful troubles, as 

 Sir Erskine May justly says. She suffers, too, he 

 adds, from demoralization and intellectual stop- 

 page. Let us admit, if he likes, this to be true 

 also. His error is, that he attributes all this to 

 equality. Equality, as we have seen, has brought 

 France to a really admirable and enviable pitch 

 of humanization in one important line. And this, 

 the work of equality, is so much a good in Sir 

 Erskine May's eyes, that he has mistaken it for 

 the whole of which it is a part, frankly identifies 

 it with civilization, and is inclined to pronounce 

 France the most civilized of nations. But we 

 have seen how much goes to full humanization, 

 to true civilization, besides the power of social 

 life and manners. There is the power of con- 

 duct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the 

 power of beauty. The power of conduct is the 

 greatest of all. And without in the least wishing 

 to preach, I must observe, as a mere matter of 

 natural fact and experience, that for the power of 

 conduct France has never had anything like the 

 same sense which she has had for the power of 

 social life and manners. Michelet, himself a 

 Frenchman, gives us the reason why the Refor- 

 mation did not succeed in France. It did not 

 succeed, he says, because la France ne voulait pas 

 de reforme morale — moral reform France would 

 not have, and the Reformation was above all a 

 moral movement. The sense in, France for the 

 power of conduct has not greatly deepened, I 

 think, since. The sense for the power of in- 

 tellect and knowledge has not been adequate 

 either. The sense for beauty has not been ad- 

 equate. Intelligence and beauty have been, in 

 general, but so far reached as they can be and 

 are reached by men who, of the elements of per- 

 fect humanization, lay thorough hold upon one 



