This is, indeed, worth your attention.  Of course all mankind are, as Mr. Gladstone says, of our own flesh and blood.  But you know how often it happens in England that a cultivated person, a person of the sort that Mr. Charles Sumner[466] describes, talking to one of the lower class, or even of the middle class, feels and cannot but feel, that there is somehow a wall of partition between himself and the other, that they seem to belong to two different worlds.  Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, susceptibilities, language, manners,—­everything is different.  Whereas, with a French peasant, the most cultivated man may find himself in sympathy, may feel that he is talking to an equal.  This is an experience which has been made a thousand times, and which may be made again any day.  And it may be carried beyond the range of mere conversation, it may be extended to things like pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking, and so on.  In general the pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking of English people, when once you get below that class which Mr. Charles Sumner calls the class of gentlemen, are to one of that class unpalatable and impossible.  In France there is not this incompatibility.  Whether he mix with high or low, the gentleman feels himself in a world not alien or repulsive, but a world where people make the same sort of demands upon life, in things of this sort, which he himself does.  In all these respects France is the country where the people, as distinguished from a wealthy refined class, most lives what we call a humane life, the life of civilized man.

Of course, fastidious persons can and do pick holes in it.  There is just now, in France, a noblesse newly revived, full of pretension, full of airs and graces and disdains; but its sphere is narrow, and out of its own sphere no one cares very much for it.  There is a general equality in a humane kind of life.  This is the secret of the passionate attachment with which France inspires all Frenchmen, in spite of her fearful troubles, her checked prosperity, her disconnected units, and the rest of it.  There is so much of the goodness and agreeableness of life there, and for so many.  It is the secret of her having been able to attach so ardently to her the German and Protestant people of Alsace,[467] while we have been so little able to attach the Celtic and Catholic people of Ireland.  France brings the Alsatians into a social system so full of the goodness and agreeableness of life; we offer to the Irish no such attraction.  It is the secret, finally, of the prevalence which we have remarked in other continental countries of a legislation tending, like that of France, to social equality.  The social system which equality creates in France is, in the eyes of others, such a giver of the goodness and agreeableness of life, that they seek to get the goodness by getting the equality.