Mr. Charles
Sumner calls the class of gentlemen, are to one of that class
unpalatable and impossible. In France there is not this incompatibility.
Whether he mix with high or low, the gentleman feels himself in a world
not alien or repulsive, but a world where people make the same sort of
demands upon life, in things of this sort, which he himself does. In all
these respects France is the country where the people, as distinguished
from a wealthy refined class, most lives what we call a humane life, the
life of civilized man.

Of course, fastidious persons can and do pick holes in it. There is just
now, in France, a _noblesse_ newly revived, full of pretension, full of
airs and graces and disdains; but its sphere is narrow, and out of its
own sphere no one cares very much for it. There is a general equality in
a humane kind of life. This is the secret of the passionate attachment
with which France inspires all Frenchmen, in spite of her fearful
troubles, her checked prosperity, her disconnected units, and the rest
of it. There is so much of the goodness and agreeableness of life there,
and for so many. It is the secret of her having been able to attach so
ardently to her the German and Protestant people of Alsace,[467] while
we have been so little able to attach the Celtic and Catholic people of
Ireland. France brings the Alsatians into a social system so full of the
goodness and agreeableness of life; we offer to the Irish no such
attraction. It is the secret, finally, of the prevalence which we have
remarked in other continental countries of a legislation tending, like
that of France, to social equality. The social system which equality
creates in France is, in the eyes of others, such a giver of the
goodness and agreeableness of life, that they seek to get the goodness
by getting the equality.

Yet France has had her fearful troubles, as Sir Erskine May justly says.
She suffers too, he adds, from demoralization and intellectual stoppage.
Let us admit, if he likes, this to be true also. His error is that he
attributes all this to equality. Equality, as we have seen, has brought
France to a really admirable and enviable pitch of humanization in one
important line. And this, the work of equality, is so much a good in Sir
Erskine May's eyes, that he has mistaken it for the whole of which it is
a part, frankly identifies it with civilization, and is inclined to
pronounce France the most civilized of nations.

But we hav