JOIE after seeing
the women and children safely embarked in the boats,--Robertson of
Brighton, referring to the circumstance in one of his letters, said:
"Yes! Goodness, Duty, Sacrifice,--these are the qualities that England
honours. She gapes and wonders every now and then, like an awkward
peasant, at some other things--railway kings, electro-biology, and other
trumperies; but nothing stirs her grand old heart down to its central
deeps universally and long, except the Right. She puts on her shawl very
badly, and she is awkward enough in a concert-room, scarce knowing a
Swedish nightingale from a jackdaw; but--blessings large and long upon
her!--she knows how to teach her sons to sink like men amidst sharks
and billows, without parade, without display, as if Duty were the most
natural thing in the world; and she never mistakes long an actor for a
hero, or a hero for an actor." [166]

It is a grand thing, after all, this pervading spirit of Duty in a
nation; and so long as it survives, no one need despair of its future.
But when it has departed, or become deadened, and been supplanted by
thirst for pleasure, or selfish aggrandisement, or "glory"--then woe to
that nation, for its dissolution is near at hand!

If there be one point on which intelligent observers are agreed more
than another as to the cause of the late deplorable collapse of France
as a nation, it was the utter absence of this feeling of duty, as well
as of truthfulness, from the mind, not only of the men, but of the
leaders of the French people. The unprejudiced testimony of Baron
Stoffel, French military attache at Berlin, before the war, is
conclusive on this point. In his private report to the Emperor, found
at the Tuileries, which was written in August, 1869, about a year
before the outbreak of the war, Baron Stoffel pointed out that the
highly-educated and disciplined German people were pervaded by an ardent
sense of duty, and did not think it beneath them to reverence sincerely
what was noble and lofty; whereas, in all respects, France presented a
melancholy contrast. There the people, having sneered at everything,
had lost the faculty of respecting anything, and virtue, family life,
patriotism, honour, and religion, were represented to a frivolous
generation as only fitting subjects for ridicule. [167] Alas! how terribly
has France been punished for her sins against truth and duty!

Yet the time was, when France possessed many great men inspired b