Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/249

 bored and perfunctory air, only looking towards the altar and the priest at the moment of the elevation of the Host in a casually respectful way, as an officer might salute the passage of a military chief, and seemingly relieved to be able to examine again the faces and dresses of the women about them. Children barely in their teens, young lads going to school, carefully imitate this attitude of merely tolerant recognition of religious form, and their elders never dream of encouraging them to use a prayer-book, or kneel, or show any sign that the weekly mass is to them more than the bored attendance at an official ceremony.

What is a moral influence with them? High above religion is their sturdy passion for independence. It is this passion that enables them to scrape, and serve, and suffer privation with dignity and patience. However meagre their resources may be, they are content with their lot, provided the roof they sleep beneath is their own, the land they till their own, the goat, the pig, the poultry, theirs to do with what they will. This is no mean standard, and it works miracles in France. Would they were by nature and instinct kinder to their beasts! but this, too, is not a Catholic characteristic. I am assured that the Bretons and Provençals are the worst offenders. However, they do not sink so low in cruelty to animals as the purely Latin races,