erations which we
have been employing may not be of use to us about England.

We shall not have much difficulty in admitting whatever good is to be
said of ourselves, and we will try not to be unfair by excluding all
that is not so favorable. Indeed, our less favorable side is the one
which we should be the most anxious to note, in order that we may mend
it. But we will begin with the good. Our people has energy and honesty
as its good characteristics. We have a strong sense for the chief power
in the life and progress of man,--the power of conduct. So far we speak
of the English people as a whole. Then we have a rich, refined, and
splendid aristocracy. And we have, according to Mr. Charles Sumner's
acute and true remark, a class of gentlemen, not of the nobility, but
well-bred, cultivated, and refined, larger than is to be found in any
other country. For these last we have Mr. Sumner's testimony. As to the
splendor of our aristocracy, all the world is agreed. Then we have a
middle class and a lower class; and they, after all, are the immense
bulk of the nation.

Let us see how the civilization of these classes appears to a Frenchman,
who has witnessed, in his own country, the considerable humanization of
these classes by equality. To such an observer our middle class divides
itself into a serious portion and a gay or rowdy portion; both are a
marvel to him. With the gay or rowdy portion we need not much concern
ourselves; we shall figure it to our minds sufficiently if we conceive
it as the source of that war-song produced in these recent days of
excitement:--

"We don't want to fight, but by jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, and we're got the money
too."[469]

We may also partly judge its standard of life, and the needs of its
nature, by the modern English theatre, perhaps the most contemptible in
Europe. But the real strength of the English middle class is in its
serious portion. And of this a Frenchman, who was here some little time
ago as the correspondent, I think, of the _Siecle_ newspaper, and whose
letters were afterwards published in a volume, writes as follows. He had
been attending some of the Moody and Sankey[470] meetings, and he says:
"To understand the success of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, one must be
familiar with English manners, one must know the mind-deadening
influence of a narrow Biblism, one must have experienced the sense of
acute ennui, which the aspect and the