We have more to do, however, than to help Sir Erskine May out of his scrape about France.  We have to see whether the considerations which we have been employing may not be of use to us about England.

We shall not have much difficulty in admitting whatever good is to be said of ourselves, and we will try not to be unfair by excluding all that is not so favorable.  Indeed, our less favorable side is the one which we should be the most anxious to note, in order that we may mend it.  But we will begin with the good.  Our people has energy and honesty as its good characteristics.  We have a strong sense for the chief power in the life and progress of man,—­the power of conduct.  So far we speak of the English people as a whole.  Then we have a rich, refined, and splendid aristocracy.  And we have, according to Mr. Charles Sumner’s acute and true remark, a class of gentlemen, not of the nobility, but well-bred, cultivated, and refined, larger than is to be found in any other country.  For these last we have Mr. Sumner’s testimony.  As to the splendor of our aristocracy, all the world is agreed.  Then we have a middle class and a lower class; and they, after all, are the immense bulk of the nation.

Let us see how the civilization of these classes appears to a Frenchman, who has witnessed, in his own country, the considerable humanization of these classes by equality.  To such an observer our middle class divides itself into a serious portion and a gay or rowdy portion; both are a marvel to him.  With the gay or rowdy portion we need not much concern ourselves; we shall figure it to our minds sufficiently if we conceive it as the source of that war-song produced in these recent days of excitement:—­

  “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo, if we do,
  We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and we’re got the money
  too."[469]

We may also partly judge its standard of life, and the needs of its nature, by the modern English theatre, perhaps the most contemptible in Europe.  But the real strength of the English middle class is in its serious portion.  And of this a Frenchman, who was here some little time ago as the correspondent, I think, of the Siecle newspaper, and whose letters were afterwards published in a volume, writes as follows.  He had been attending some of the Moody and Sankey[470] meetings, and he says:  “To understand the success of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, one must be familiar with English manners, one must know the mind-deadening influence of a narrow Biblism, one must have experienced the sense of acute ennui, which the aspect and the frequentation of this great division of English society produce in others, the want of elasticity and the chronic ennui which characterize this class itself, petrified in a narrow Protestantism and in a perpetual reading of the Bible.”