But there is more.  George Sand was a woman, with a woman’s ideal of gentleness, of “the charm of good manners,” as essential to civilization.  She has somewhere spoken admirably of the variety and balance of forces which go to make up true civilization; “certain forces of weakness, docility, attractiveness, suavity, are here just as real forces as forces of vigor, encroachment, violence, or brutality.”  Yes, as real forces, although Prince Bismarck cannot see it; because human nature requires them, and, often as they may be baffled, and slow as may be the process of their asserting themselves, mankind is not satisfied with its own civilization, and keeps fidgeting at it and altering it again and again, until room is made for them.  George Sand thought the French people,—­meaning principally, again, by the French people the people properly so called, the peasant,—­she thought it “the most kindly, the most amiable, of all peoples.”  Nothing is more touching than to read in her Journal, written in 1870, while she was witnessing what seemed to be “the agony of the Latin races,” and undergoing what seemed to be the process of “dying in a general death of one’s family, one’s country, and one’s nation,” how constant is her defence of the people, the peasant, against her Republican friends.  Her Republican friends were furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage.  Again and again does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly and danger of their false estimate of him.  “The contempt of the masses, there,” she cries, “is the misfortune and crime of the present moment!"[337] “To execrate the people,” she exclaims again, “is real blasphemy; the people is worth more than we are.”

If the peasant gave us the Empire, says Madame Sand, it was because he saw the parties of liberals disputing, gesticulating, and threatening to tear one another asunder and France too; he was told the Empire is peace, and he accepted the Empire.  The peasant was deceived, he is uninstructed, he moves slowly; but he moves, he has admirable virtues, and in him, says George Sand, is our life:—­

“Poor Jacques Bonhomme! accuse thee and despise thee who will; for my part I pity thee, and in spite of thy faults I shall always love thee.  Never will I forget how, a child, I was carried asleep on thy shoulders, how I was given over to thy care and followed thee everywhere, to the field, the stall, the cottage.  They are all dead, those good old people who have borne me in their arms; but I remember them well, and I appreciate at this hour, to the minutest detail, the pureness, the kindness, the patience, the good humor, the poetry, which presided over that rustic education amidst disasters of like kind with those which we are undergoing now.  Why should I quarrel with the peasant because on certain points he feels and thinks differently from what I do?  There are other essential points on which we may feel eternally at one with him,—­ probity and charity."[338]