THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 79 
kingdom were not thick-headed peasants. They were 
mostly skilled and quick-witted artisans, — paper- 
makers, workers in iron, weavers of linen and wool, 
manufacturers of finest silks and laces. Among them 
were eloquent preachers and learned writers, and some 
of the most thoroughly trained soldiers and seamen 
that France had ever possessed, insomuch that the 
royal navy was for a time well-nigh paralyzed by their 
departure. Wherever they went their nimble fingers, 
quick eyes, and ready wits insured them cordial wel- 
come. But even in this statement we do not realize 
how greatly France has suffered by losing them. It 
is a common opinion to-day among English-speaking 
people that the French character is to some extent 
wanting in earnestness and sincerity. Generalizations 
of this sort about national characteristics are apt to be 
untrustworthy, and one can hardly venture to say con- 
fidently how far this opinion about the French people 
may be true. No higher or nobler individual types of 
sincerity and earnestness can anywhere be found than 
some that France can show us, as, for instance, in the 
statesman Malesherbes and the scholar Littré. And 
among the common people it is by no means seldom 
that one meets the earnest, simple-hearted, unselfish 
goodness of the watchmaker Melchior Goulden in 
Erckmann-Chatrian’s charming story of the Conscript. 
To charge the French, as a people, with frivolousness 
and insincerity is to do them gross injustice. Still, 
at the bottom of the English prejudice there lies, no 
doubt, a grain of truth. The Huguenot type of char- 
acter, in its intense earnestness and. uncompromising 
truthfulness, was like the Puritan type. What the 
Puritan has been to England the Huguenot might 
