This may go
for a good deal. It supplies an answer to what Sir Erskine May[464] says
about the bad effects of equality upon French prosperity. But I will
quote to you from Mr. Hamerton[465] what goes, I think, for yet more.
Mr. Hamerton is an excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for
many years in France. He says of the French peasantry that they are
exceedingly ignorant. So they are. But he adds: "They are at the same
time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have
delicate perceptions, they have tact, they have a certain refinement
which a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have. If you talk to one
of them at his own home, or in his field, he will enter into
conversation with you quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly
becoming way, with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humor.
The interval between him and a Kentish laborer is enormous."
This is, indeed, worth your attention. Of course all mankind are, as Mr.
Gladstone says, of our own flesh and blood.
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