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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



only — the power of social intercourse and man- 

 ners. I speak of France in general ; she has had, 

 and she has, individuals who stand out and who 

 form exceptions. Well, then, if a nation laying 

 no true hold upon the powers of beauty and 

 knowledge, and a most failing and feeble hold 

 upon the power of conduct, comes to demoral- 

 ization and intellectual stoppage and fearful 

 troubles, we need not be inordinately surprised. 

 What we should rather marvel at is the healing 

 and bountiful operation of Nature, whereby the 

 laying firm hold on one real element in our 

 humanization has had for France results so be- 

 neficent. 



And thus, when Sir Erskine May gets bewil-' 

 dered between France's equality and fearful trou- 

 bles on the one hand, and the civilization of 

 France on the other, let us suggest to him that 

 perhaps he is bewildered by his data because he 

 combines them ill. France has not exemplary 

 disaster and ruin as the fruits of equality, and at 

 the same time, and independently of this, an ex- 

 emplary civilization. She has a large measure of 

 happiness and success as the fruits of equality, 

 and she has a very large measure of dangers and 

 troubles as the fruits of something else. 



We have more to do, however, than to help 

 Sir Erskine May out of his scrape about France. 

 We have to see whether the considerations which 

 we have been employing may not be of use to us 

 about England. 



We shall not have much difficulty in admit- 

 ting whatever good is to be said of ourselves, and 

 we will try not to be unfair by excluding all that 

 is not so favorable. Indeed, our less favorable 

 side is the one which we should be the most 

 anxious to note, in order that we may mend it. 

 But we will begin with the good. Our people 

 has energy and honesty as its good characteris- 

 tics. We have a strong sense for the chief power 

 in the life and progress of man — the power of 

 conduct. So far we speak of the English people 

 as a whole. Then we have a rich, refined, and 

 splendid aristocracy. And we have, according 

 to Mr. Charles Sumner's acute and true remark, 

 a class of gentlemen, not of the nobility, but 

 well-bred, cultivated, and refined, larger than is 

 to be found in any other country. For these 

 last we have Mr. Sumner's testimony. As to 

 the splendor of our aristorcacy, all the world is 

 agreed. Then we have a middle class and a low- 

 er class ; and they, after all, are the immense 

 bulk of the nation. 



Let us see how the civilization of these classes 



appears to a Frenchman, who has witnessed, in 

 his own country, the considerable humanization 

 of these classes by equality. To such an observer 

 our middle class divides itself into a serious por- 

 tion, and a gay or rowdy portion ; both are a 

 marvel to him. With the gay or rowdy portion 

 we need not much concern ourselves ; we shall 

 figure it to our minds sufficiently if we conceive 

 it as the source of that war-song produced in 

 these recent days of excitement : 



" We don't want to fight, but, by jingo, if we do, 

 We've got the ships, we've got the men, and we've 

 got the money too." 



We may also partly judge its standard of life, and 

 the needs of its nature, by the modern English 

 theatre, perhaps the most contemptible in Eu- 

 rope. But the real strength of the English mid- 

 dle class is in its serious portion. And of this a 

 Frenchman, who was here some little time ago as 

 the correspondent, I think, of the Steele newspa- 

 per, and whose letters were afterward published 

 in a volume, writes as follows. He had been at- 

 tending some of the Moody and Sankey meetings, 

 and he says : " To understand the success of 

 Messrs. Moody and Sankey, one must be familiar 

 with English manners, one must known the mind- 

 deadening influence of a narrow Biblism, one 

 must have experienced the sense of acute ennui 

 which the aspect and the frequentation of this 

 great division of English society produce in oth- 

 ers, the want of elasticity, and the chronic ennui 

 which characterize this class itself, petrified in a 

 narrow Protestantism and in a perpetual reading 

 of the Bible." You know the French — a little 

 more Biblism, one may take leave to say, would 

 do them no harm. But an audience like this — 

 and here, as I said, is the advantage of an au- 

 dience like this — will have no difficulty in admit- 

 ting the amount of truth which there is in the 

 Frenchman's picture. It is the picture of a class 

 which, driven by its sense for the power of con- 

 duct, in the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, entered — as I have more than once said, 

 and as I may more than once have occasion in 

 future to say — entered the prison of Puritanism, 

 and had the key turned upon its spirit there for 

 two hundred years. They did not know, good and 

 earnest people as they were, that to the building 

 up of human life there belong all those other 

 powers also — the power of intellect and knowl- 

 edge, the power of beauty, the power of social 

 life and manners. And something, by what they 

 became, they gained, and the whole nation with 

 them ; they deepened and fixed for this nation 

 the sense of conduct. But they created a type 



