The English are a domestic race, living a sequestered, peaceable, family life, and the Englishman seeks in the circle of those connected with and pertaining to him that easy state of mind which is denied to him through his innate social incapacity.  The Englishman is, therefore, contented with that liberty which secures his most personal rights and guards his body, his property, and his conjugal relations, his religion, and even his whims, in the most unconditional manner.  No one is freer in his home than an Englishman, and, to use a celebrated expression, he is king and bishop between his four walls; and there is much truth in the common saying, ‘My house is my castle.’

“If the Englishman has the greatest need of personal freedom, the Frenchman, in case of necessity, can dispense with it, if we only grant him that portion of universal liberty known as equality.  The French are not a domestic, but a social, race; they are no friends to a silent tete-a-tete, which they call une conversation anglaise; they run gossiping about from the cafe to the casino, and from the casino to the salons; their light champagne-blood and inborn talent for company drive them to social life, whose first and last principle, yes, whose very soul, is equality.  The development of the social principle in France necessarily involved that of equality, and if the ground of the Revolution should be sought in the Budget, it is none the less true that its language and tone were drawn from those wits of low degree who lived in the salons of Paris, apparently on a footing of equality with the high noblesse, and who were now and then reminded, it may have been by a hardly perceptible, yet not on that account less exasperating, feudal smile, of the great and ignominious inequality which lay between them.  And when the canaille roturiere took the liberty of beheading that high noblesse, it was done less to inherit their property than their ancestry, and to introduce a noble equality in place of a vulgar inequality.  And we are the better authorized to believe that this striving for equality was the main principle of the Revolution, since the French speedily found themselves so happy and contented under the dominion of their great Emperor, who, fully appreciating that they were not yet of age, kept all their freedom within the limits of his powerful guardianship, permitting them only the pleasure of a perfect and admirable equality.

“Far more patient than the Frenchman, the Englishman easily bears the glances of a privileged aristocracy, consoling himself with the reflection that he has a right which renders it impossible for others to disturb his personal comfort or his daily requirements.  Nor does the aristocracy here make a show of its privileges, as on the Continent.  In the streets and in places of public resort in London, colored ribbons are seen only on women’s bonnets, and gold and silver