whom you could not present to your own?' This
answer is a fatal one. The fact is so; the most rigid censor of morals
leaves his conscience at the Ship Hotel at Dover; he has no room for
it on a voyage, or perhaps he thinks it might be detained by a
revenue-officer. Whatever the cause, he will know at Baden--ay, and walk
with--the man he would cut in Bond Street, and drive with the party at
Brussels he would pass to-morrow if he met in Hyde Park.

This 'sliding scale' of morality has great disadvantages; none greater
than the injury it inflicts on national character, and the occasion it
offers for our disparagement at the hands of other people. It is in
vain that liberal and enlightened measures mark our government, or that
philanthropy and humanity distinguish our institutions, we only get
credit for hypocrisy so long as we throw a mantle over our titled
swindlers and dishonourable defaulters. If Napoleon found little
difficulty in making the sobriquet of 'La Perfide Albion' popular in
France, we owe it much more to the degraded characters of our refugee
English than to any justice in the charge against the nation. In a word,
I have never met a foreigner commonly fair in his estimate of English
character, who had not travelled in England; and I never met one unjust
in all that regarded national good faith, honesty, and uprightness, who
had visited our shores. The immunity from arrest would seem to suggest
to our runaways an immunity from all the ties of good conduct and
character of our countrymen, who, under that strange delusion of the
'immorality of France,' seem to think that a change of behaviour should
be adopted in conformity with foreign usage; and as they put on less
clothing, so they might dispense with a little virtue also.

These be unpleasant reflections, Arthur, and I fear the coffee or the
maraschino must have been amiss; in any case, away with them, and now
for a stroll in the Cursaal!

CHAPTER XXIV. THE GAMBLING-ROOM

Englishmen keep their solemnity and respectful deportment for a church;
foreigners reserve theirs for a gambling-table. Never was I more struck
than by the decorous stillness and well-bred quietness of the room
in which the highest play went forward. All the animation of French
character, all the bluntness of German, all the impetuosity of the
Italian or the violent rashness of the Russian, were calmed down and
subdued beneath the influence of the great passion; and it seemed as