as it is, with France--for I should be sorry
to pretend to a thorough knowledge of France, or of any country not my
own--goes back, as I have intimated, to the early days of the Second
Empire. It has been my good fortune, at various times, to see a good
deal of the social and political life of France, and I long ago learned
that to talk of the character of the French people is almost as slipshod
and careless as to talk of the character of the Italian people.

The French people are not the outgrowth of a common stock, like the
Dutch or the Germans.

The people of Provence are as different in all essential particulars
from the people of Brittany, the people of French Flanders from the
people of Gascony, the people of Savoy from the people of Normandy, as
are the people of Kent from the people of the Scottish Highlands, or the
people of Yorkshire from the people of Wales. The French nation was the
work, not of the French people, but of the kings of France, not less but
even more truly than the Italian nation, such as we see it gradually now
forming, is the work of the royal House of Savoy.

The sudden suppression of the National Executive by a parliamentary
conspiracy at Paris in 1792 violently interrupted the orderly and
natural making of France, just as the sudden suppression of the National
Executive in 1649 after the occupation of Edinburgh by Argyll and the
surrender of Colchester to Fairfax had put England at the mercy of
Cromwell's 'honest' troopers, and of knavish fanatics like Hugh Peters,
violently interrupted the making of Britain. It took England a century
to recover her equilibrium. Between Naseby Field in 1645 and Culloden
Moor in 1746 England had, except during the reign of Charles II., no
better assurance of continuous domestic peace than France enjoyed first
under Louis Philippe and then under the Second Empire. During those
hundred years Englishmen were thought by the rest of Europe to be as
excitable, as volatile, and as unstable as Frenchmen are not uncommonly
thought by the rest of mankind now to be. There is a curious old Dutch
print of these days in which England appears as a son of Adam in the
hereditary costume, standing at gaze amid a great disorder of garments
strewn upon the floor, while a scroll displayed above him bears this
legend:

I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
Musing in my mind what garment I shall wear.
Now I will wear this, and now I will wear that,
And now I w