new fact or some novel idea.  I suppose that people bred from childhood to lean their backs against the wall of the Creed and the church catechism find it hard to sit up straight on the republican stool, which obliges them to stiffen their own backs.  Which of these two girls would be the safest choice for a young man?  I should really like to hear what answer you would make if I consulted you seriously, with a view to my own choice,—­on the supposition that there was a fair chance that either of them might be won.”

“The one you are in love with,” answered Number Five.

“But what if it were a case of ‘How happy could I be with either’?  Which offers the best chance of happiness,—­a marriage between two persons of the same country, or a marriage where one of the parties is of foreign birth?  Everything else being equal, which is best for an American to marry, an American or an English girl?  We need not confine the question to those two young persons, but put it more generally.”

“There are reasons on both sides,” answered Number Five.  “I have often talked this matter over with The Dictator.  This is the way he speaks about it.  English blood is apt to tell well on the stock upon which it is engrafted.  Over and over again he has noticed finely grown specimens of human beings, and on inquiry has found that one or both of the parents or grandparents were of British origin.  The chances are that the descendants of the imported stock will be of a richer organization, more florid, more muscular, with mellower voices, than the native whose blood has been unmingled with that of new emigrants since the earlier colonial times.—­So talks The Dictator.—­I myself think the American will find his English wife concentrates herself more readily and more exclusively on her husband,—­for the obvious reason that she is obliged to live mainly in him.  I remember hearing an old friend of my early days say, ’A woman does not bear transplanting.’  It does not do to trust these old sayings, and yet they almost always have some foundation in the experience of mankind, which has repeated them from generation to generation.  Happy is the married woman of foreign birth who can say to her husband, as Andromache said to Hector, after enumerating all the dear relatives she had lost,

  “’Yet while my hector still survives,
   I see My father, mother, brethren, all in thee!’

“How many a sorrowing wife, exiled from her native country, dreams of the mother she shall see no more!  How many a widow, in a strange land, wishes that her poor, worn-out body could be laid among her kinsfolk, in the little churchyard where she used to gather daisies in her childhood!  It takes a great deal of love to keep down the ‘climbing sorrow’ that swells up in a woman’s throat when such memories seize upon her, in her moments of desolation.  But if a foreign-born woman does willingly give up all for a man, and never looks backward, like Lot’s wife, she is a prize that it is worth running a risk to gain,—­that is, if she has the making of a good woman in her; and a few years will go far towards naturalizing her.”