hich we may feel eternally at one with him,--
probity and charity."[338]

Another generation of peasants had grown up since that first
revolutionary generation of her youth, and equality, as its reign
proceeded, had not deteriorated but improved them.

"They have advanced greatly in self-respect and well-being, these
peasants from twenty years old to forty: they never ask for anything.
When one meets them they no longer take off their hat. If they know you
they come up to you and hold out their hand. All foreigners who stay
with us are struck with their good bearing, with their amenity, and the
simple, friendly, and polite ease of their behavior. In presence of
people whom they esteem they are, like their fathers, models of tact and
politeness; but they have more than that mere _sentiment_ of equality
which was all that their fathers had,--they have the _idea_ of equality,
and the determination to maintain it. This step upwards they owe to
their having the franchise. Those who would fain treat them as creatures
of a lower order dare not now show this disposition to their face; it
would not be pleasant."[339]

Mr. Hamerton's[340] interesting book about French life has much, I
think, to confirm this account of the French peasant. What I have seen
of France myself (and I have seen something) is fully in agreement with
it. Of a civilization and an equality which makes the peasant thus
_human_, gives to the bulk of the people well-being, probity, charity,
self-respect, tact, and good manners, let us pardon Madame Sand if she
feels and speaks enthusiastically. Some little variation on our own
eternal trio of Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,[341] or on the
eternal solo of Philistinism among our brethren of the United States and
the Colonies, is surely permissible.

Where one is more inclined to differ from Madame Sand is in her estimate
of her Republican friends of the educated classes. They may stand, she
says, for the genius and the soul of France; they represent its "exalted
imagination and profound sensibility," while the peasant represents its
humble, sound, indispensable body. Her protege, the peasant, is much
ruder with those eloquent gentlemen, and has his own name for one and
all of them, _l'avocat_, by which he means to convey his belief that
words are more to be looked for from that quarter than seriousness and
profit. It seems to me by no means certain but that the peasant is in
the right.

George Sand her