in hearing or reading a Frenchman's
praise of England. He envies our liberty, our public spirit, our trade,
our stability. But there is always a reserve in his mind. He never means
for a moment that he would like to change with us. Life seems to him so
much better a thing in France for so many more people, that, in spite of
the fearful troubles of France, it is best to be a Frenchman. A
Frenchman might agree with Mr. Cobden,[481] that life is good in England
for those people who have at least L5000 a year. But the civilization of
that immense majority who have not L5000 a year, or, L500, or even
L100,--of our middle and lower class,--seems to him too deplorable.

And now what has this condition of our middle and lower class to tell us
about equality? How is it, must we not ask, how is it that, being
without fearful troubles, having so many achievements to show and so
much success, having as a nation a deep sense for conduct, having signal
energy and honesty, having a splendid aristocracy, having an
exceptionally large class of gentlemen, we are yet so little civilized?
How is it that our middle and lower classes, in spite of the individuals
among them who are raised by happy gifts of nature to a more humane
life, in spite of the seriousness of the middle class, in spite of the
honesty and power of true work, the _virtus verusque labor_, which are
to be found in abundance throughout the lower, do yet present, as a
whole, the characters which we have seen?

And really it seems as if the current of our discourse carried us of
itself to but one conclusion. It seems as if we could not avoid
concluding, that just as France owes her fearful troubles to other
things and her civilizedness to equality, so we owe our immunity from
fearful troubles to other things, and our uncivilizedness to inequality.
"Knowledge is easy," says the wise man, "to him that understandeth";[482]
easy, he means, to him who will use his mind simply and rationally, and
not to make him think he can know what he cannot, or to maintain, _per
fas et nefas_, a false thesis with which he fancies his interests to be
bound up. And to him who will use his mind as the wise man recommends,
surely it is easy to see that our shortcomings in civilization are due
to our inequality; or, in other words, that the great inequality of
classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we
maintain because we have the religion of inequality, that this
cons