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 best of the other, and so mended their ways and became perfect. I do not care on which side the lesson begins, if only Frenchmen will eat as well as Englishmen, and Englishmen will imitate the perfect "tone" of the Frenchman in a drawing-room. The niceties observed by each in its sphere are equally admirable and equally necessary if we are ever to arrive at that indefinable and still distant state called civilisation. But to hear the Anglophobe in France (or, still worse, read him), and the Gallophobe in England talk of one another, it might be believed that these two great races stood farthest off from the goal we all aspire to reach instead of being both in their several ways nearest to it.

I will be honest, and confess that the race of my predilection, France, is far the worse sinner of the two. To soothe her wounded vanity, and an imaginary hurt of honour skilfully exaggerated by the Press, she has descended to foolish misrepresentation of a neighbour with whom she had far better live on terms of amity. The Russian alliance turned her head, and for once she had not wit enough to see that she was being deliberately fooled for purposes not in the least connected with her own interests. Since that memorable date, she has gradually raised the tone of her hostility to England, till now her chief aspiration, if we are to believe the nonsensical Nationalist Press, is to avenge the