now
subtend in France. And it certainly ought to interest Englishmen to know
that the example of England is freely cited in Lille, Roubaix,
Tourcoing, and other centres of Flemish life and activity, to support
the 'noble and military' amusement of cock-fighting, to which the good
people of these regions are extraordinarily addicted. A law was passed
against this practice under the presidency of Prince Louis Napoleon in
1850, and many attempts have since been made to suppress it--but with
small success. A Republican prefect of the Nord, some years ago,
actually wrote to the President of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals that he would not hesitate to 'enforce the provisions
of the law against cock-fighting whenever the practice seemed to be
likely to become too general!' I do not know that I ever stumbled on a
more delightful recognition of the Eleventh Commandment of demagogism,
'_vox populi vox Dei_!' Naturally, with such encouragement as this, the
sport of late years has been assuming, I am told, a recognised place
among the amusements of the people. Fighting-cocks go into the arena as
champions of the towns in which their owners dwell; and if the feathered
Achilles of Roubaix does the feathered Hector of Tourcoing to death, the
spectators not unfrequently take up the quarrel, divide into two camps,
and have it out handsomely on the spot. These things I note because they
tend to show how difficult it is to develop an ideal civilisation in a
few years by the simple process of forbidding men to teach, or to
believe in, the existence of a Divine Ruler of the Universe.

For the same reason, and without unduly dwelling upon it, I may here
record the statement made to me by an editor of an influential journal
in Lille, that in no city in France has the evil of juvenile
prostitution taken such root as here. When I expressed my surprise at
this, the French law as to the _detournement de mineures_ being at least
as stringent as the English, he replied: 'How can you expect such a law
to be enforced under this Government?' and he then went on to show me in
an old file of his journal an account, now some years old, of the
adventures of a deputy from Versailles in the Palais Royal at Paris.
'Our Republicans,' he said, 'are firm believers in the great principle
of the solidarity of all the party with all the haps and mishaps of
every member of the party.'

A more confirmed pessimist, by the way, than this journal