t, who is a Belgian and a
Protestant, and whose testimony, therefore, we may the more readily take
about France, says that France, being the country of Europe where the
soil is more divided than anywhere except in Switzerland and Norway, is
at the same time the country where material well-being is most widely
spread, where wealth has of late years increased most, and where
population is least outrunning the limits, which, for the comfort and
progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary. This may go
for a good deal. It supplies an answer to what Sir Erskine May[464] says
about the bad effects of equality upon French prosperity. But I will
quote to you from Mr. Hamerton[465] what goes, I think, for yet more.
Mr. Hamerton is an excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for
many years in France. He says of the French peasantry that they are
exceedingly ignorant. So they are. But he adds: "They are at the same
time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have
delicate perceptions, they have tact, they have a certain refinement
which a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have. If you talk to one
of them at his own home, or in his field, he will enter into
conversation with you quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly
becoming way, with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humor.
The interval between him and a Kentish laborer is enormous."

This is, indeed, worth your attention. Of course all mankind are, as Mr.
Gladstone says, of our own flesh and blood. But you know how often it
happens in England that a cultivated person, a person of the sort that
Mr. Charles Sumner[466] describes, talking to one of the lower class, or
even of the middle class, feels and cannot but feel, that there is
somehow a wall of partition between himself and the other, that they
seem to belong to two different worlds. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions,
susceptibilities, language, manners,--everything is different. Whereas,
with a French peasant, the most cultivated man may find himself in
sympathy, may feel that he is talking to an equal. This is an experience
which has been made a thousand times, and which may be made again any
day. And it may be carried beyond the range of mere conversation, it may
be extended to things like pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking,
and so on. In general the pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking of
English people, when once you get below that class which