Madame Sand is a Frenchwoman, and her religion is therefore, as we might expect, with peculiar fervency social.  Always she has before her mind “the natural law which will have it (the italics are her own) that the species man cannot subsist and prosper but by association.”  Whatever else we may be in creation, we are, first and foremost, “at the head of the species which are called by instinct, and led by necessity, to the life of association.”  The word love—­the great word, as she justly says, of the New Testament—­acquires from her social enthusiasm a peculiar significance to her:—­

“The word is a great one, because it involves infinite consequences.  To love means to help one another, to have joint aspirations, to act in concert, to labor for the same end, to develop to its ideal consummation the fraternal instinct, thanks to which mankind have brought the earth under their dominion.  Every time that he has been false to this instinct which is his law of life, his natural destiny, man has seen his temples crumble, his societies dissolve, his intellectual sense go wrong, his moral sense die out.  The future is founded on love."[331]

So long as love is thus spoken of in the general, the ordinary serious Englishman will have no difficulty in inclining himself with respect while Madame Sand speaks of it.  But when he finds that love implies, with her, social equality, he will begin to be staggered.  And in truth for almost every Englishman Madame Sand’s strong language about equality, and about France as the chosen vessel for exhibiting it, will sound exaggerated.  “The human ideal,” she says, “as well as the social ideal, is to achieve equality."[332] France, which has made equality its rallying cry, is therefore “the nation which loves and is loved,” la nation qui aime et qu’on aime.  The republic of equality is in her eyes “an ideal, a philosophy, a religion.”  She invokes the “holy doctrine of social liberty and fraternal equality, ever reappearing as a ray of love and truth amidst the storm.”  She calls it “the goal of man and the law of the future.”  She thinks it the secret of the civilization of France, the most civilized of nations.  Amid the disasters of the late war she cannot forbear a cry of astonishment at the neutral nations, insensibles a l’egorgement d’une civilisation comme la notre, “looking on with insensibility while a civilization such as ours has its throat cut.”  Germany, with its stupid ideal of corporalism and Kruppism, is contrasted with France, full of social dreams, too civilized for war, incapable of planning and preparing war for twenty years, she is so incapable of hatred;—­nous sommes si incapables de hair! We seem to be listening, not to George Sand, but to M. Victor Hugo, half genius, half charlatan; to M. Victor Hugo, or even to one of those French declaimers in whom we come down to no genius and all charlatan.