m the best middle class to the peasantry. This thrift is also
the source of French wealth. A nation is really wealthy when the
fortunes are stable, however small. We have no railway kings, no oil
kings, no silver kings, but we have no tenement houses, no Unions, no
Work-houses. Our lower classes do not yet ape the upper class people,
either in their habits or dress. The wife of a peasant or of a mechanic
wears a simple snowy cap, and a serge or cotton dress. The wife of a
shopkeeper does not wear any jewelry because she cannot afford to buy
real stones, and her taste is too good to allow of her wearing false
ones. She is not ashamed of her husband's occupation; she does not play
the fine lady while he is at work. She saves him the expense of a
cashier or of an extra clerk by helping him in his business. When the
shutters are up, she enjoys life with him, and is the companion of his
pleasures as well as of his hardships. Club life is unknown in France,
except among the upper classes. Man and wife are constantly together,
and France is a nation of Darbys and Joans. There is, I believe, no
country where men and women go through life on such equal terms as in
France.

* * * * *

In England (and here again I speak of the masses only), the man thinks
himself a much superior being to the woman. It is the same in Germany.
In America, I should feel inclined to believe that a woman looks down
upon a man with a certain amount of contempt. She receives at his hands
attentions of all sorts, but I cannot say, as I have remarked before,
that I have ever discovered in her the slightest trace of gratitude to
man.

I have often tried to explain to myself this gentle contempt of American
ladies for the male sex; for, contrasting it with the lovely devotion of
Jonathan to his womankind, it is a curious enigma. Have I found the
solution at last? Does it begin at school? In American schools, boys and
girls, from the age of five, follow the same path to learning, and sit
side by side on the same benches. Moreover, the girls prove themselves
capable of keeping pace with the boys. Is it not possible that those
girls, as they watched the performances of the boys in the study,
learned to say, "Is that all?" While the young lords of creation, as
they have looked on at what "those girls" can do, have been fain to
exclaim: "Who would have thought it!" And does not this explain the two
attitudes: the great respect of