reading a Frenchman’s praise of England.  He envies our liberty, our public spirit, our trade, our stability.  But there is always a reserve in his mind.  He never means for a moment that he would like to change with us.  Life seems to him so much better a thing in France for so many more people, that, in spite of the fearful troubles of France, it is best to be a Frenchman.  A Frenchman might agree with Mr. Cobden,[481] that life is good in England for those people who have at least L5000 a year.  But the civilization of that immense majority who have not L5000 a year, or, L500, or even L100,—­of our middle and lower class,—­seems to him too deplorable.

And now what has this condition of our middle and lower class to tell us about equality?  How is it, must we not ask, how is it that, being without fearful troubles, having so many achievements to show and so much success, having as a nation a deep sense for conduct, having signal energy and honesty, having a splendid aristocracy, having an exceptionally large class of gentlemen, we are yet so little civilized?  How is it that our middle and lower classes, in spite of the individuals among them who are raised by happy gifts of nature to a more humane life, in spite of the seriousness of the middle class, in spite of the honesty and power of true work, the virtus verusque labor, which are to be found in abundance throughout the lower, do yet present, as a whole, the characters which we have seen?

And really it seems as if the current of our discourse carried us of itself to but one conclusion.  It seems as if we could not avoid concluding, that just as France owes her fearful troubles to other things and her civilizedness to equality, so we owe our immunity from fearful troubles to other things, and our uncivilizedness to inequality.  “Knowledge is easy,” says the wise man, “to him that understandeth";[482] easy, he means, to him who will use his mind simply and rationally, and not to make him think he can know what he cannot, or to maintain, per fas et nefas, a false thesis with which he fancies his interests to be bound up.  And to him who will use his mind as the wise man recommends, surely it is easy to see that our shortcomings in civilization are due to our inequality; or, in other words, that the great inequality of classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we maintain because we have the religion of inequality, that this constitution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect, under present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.[483] And this is to fail in civilization.