ase him at least as well as the shut-in Sundays of
England and Scotland. He takes kindly to concerts, enlivened,
without demoralization, by beer, and wonders why he cannot have them
at home. Whatever is distinctive, whatever is national, interests
and delights him; and he seldom feels called upon to decide a moral
issue which is not submitted to his judgment.

I was once in Valais when a rude play was acted by the peasants of
Vissoye. It set forth the conversion of the Huns to Christianity
through the medium of a miracle vouchsafed to Zacheo, the legendary
apostle of Anniviers. The little stage was erected on a pleasant
hillside, the procession bearing the cross wound down from the
village church, the priests from all the neighbouring towns were
present, and the pious Valaisans--as overjoyed as if the Huns were
a matter of yesterday--sang a solemn _Te Deum_ in thanksgiving for
the conversion of their land. It would be hard to conceive of a drama
less profane; indeed, only religious fervour could have breathed
life into so much controversy; yet I had English friends, intelligent,
cultivated, and deeply interested, who refused to go with me to
Vissoye because it was Sunday afternoon. They stood by their guns,
and attended their own service in the drawing-room of the deserted
little hotel at Zinal; gaining, I trust, the approval of their own
consciences, and losing the experience of a lifetime.

Disapprobation has ever been a powerful stimulus to the Saxon mind.
The heroic measures which it enforces command our faltering homage,
and might incite us to emulation, were we not temperamentally
disposed to ask ourselves the fatal question, "Is it worth while?"
When we remember that twenty-five thousand people in Great Britain
left off eating sugar, by way of protest against slavery in the West
Indies, we realize how the individual Englishman holds himself
morally responsible for wrongs he is innocent of inflicting, and
powerless to redress. Hood and other light-minded humourists laughed
at him for drinking bitter tea; but he was not to be shaken by ridicule.
Miss Edgeworth voiced the conservative sentiment of her day when she
objected to eating unsweetened custards; but he was not to be chilled
by apathy.

The same strenuous spirit impelled the English to express their
sympathy for Captain Alfred Dreyfus by staying away from the Paris
fair of 1900. The London press loudly boasted that Englishmen would
not give the sanction