ty is,
perhaps, the religion of the modern age. It is a religion not preached
to the rich, but to the poor, and has in like manner its evangelists,
its martyrs, and its Iscariots!"

"Young enthusiast," said the sallow man, "you will not find what you
seek. You may be in the right in believing that Liberty is a new
religion which will spread over all the world. But as every race of old,
when it received Christianity, did so according to its requirements and
its peculiar character, so, at present, every country adopts from the
new religion of liberty only that which is in accordance with its local
needs and national character.

The English are a domestic race, living a sequestered, peaceable, family
life, and the Englishman seeks in the circle of those connected with and
pertaining to him that easy state of mind which is denied to him through
his innate social incapacity. The Englishman is, therefore, contented
with that liberty which secures his most personal rights and guards his
body, his property, and his conjugal relations, his religion, and even
his whims, in the most unconditional manner. No one is freer in his home
than an Englishman, and, to use a celebrated expression, he is king and
bishop between his four walls; and there is much truth in the common
saying, 'My house is my castle.'

"If the Englishman has the greatest need of personal freedom, the
Frenchman, in case of necessity, can dispense with it, if we only grant
him that portion of universal liberty known as equality. The French are
not a domestic, but a social, race; they are no friends to a silent
_tete-a-tete_, which they call _une conversation anglaise;_ they run
gossiping about from the _cafe_ to the casino, and from the casino to
the _salons_; their light champagne-blood and inborn talent for company
drive them to social life, whose first and last principle, yes, whose
very soul, is equality. The development of the social principle in
France necessarily involved that of equality, and if the ground of the
Revolution should be sought in the Budget, it is none the less true that
its language and tone were drawn from those wits of low degree who lived
in the _salons_ of Paris, apparently on a footing of equality with the
high _noblesse_, and who were now and then reminded, it may have been by
a hardly perceptible, yet not on that account less exasperating, feudal
smile, of the great and ignominious inequality which lay between them.
And when the _ca