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596 growth of the nation, identified itself with its habits and manners, and resisted governmental oppression under all its several forms. Every country has its particular agent of opposition to the executive power that rules it. We alone, in this happy island of ours, we being a self-governing set (which is precisely one of those “eccentricities” that no foreigner can understand), escape all necessity of confining the Protestant or opposing element to this or that particular portion of society. We have our House of Commons, our great public meetings, and our “Times.” Of what use on earth would it be to us, who can speak for ourselves on all subjects, and at all times, to commit the guardianship of our rights and liberties to a hundred fine ladies, a hundred sprightly wits, threescore members of the Institute, or a thousand long-haired students with flat woollen caps and sea-spawn pipes. Yet these are the guardians of public liberties both in Germany and in France; and when they do not succeed in guarding liberty from insult or attack, they, at all events, undertake to protest against and worry out of their lives those who have attacked or insulted the glorious goddess. We, perverse, mad-headed, indecorous islanders (disrespect for the conventionalities of decorum is what we are most reproached with abroad), we do all the work for ourselves, and object to being “cared for,” or even “made free,” by lawyers, or bishops, or heroines, or poets, by duchesses, or even by Herr Professors. This is a whim of ours, and it being an averred fact, that we are the most obstinate and “contrairy” race in existence, we had e’en best be left to our own devices, and not meddled with, though not necessarily taken as an example by other better brought-up nations. They do these things in a very different way in France and Germany. When a small German potentate has attempted, by some obscure, incomprehensible enactment, to change the current of civilisation in the state over which he holds sway—when he has ordained something in the matter of beer, for instance, or made it unlawful to enter his metropolis by some one particular gate after ten o’clock at night—we all know what he has to look out for: the Herrn Studenten assemble, and, after some talking, more drinking, most of all smoking, they sally forth by daylight or torchlight, as it may be, and with any amount of patriotic choruses, shouted at the top of their voices, they bring what is termed “public opinion” to bear upon “the State,” which is usually represented by a dozen heavy dragoons and one gunner. Whether Government or the “youth of the schools” gain the victory, is a matter of small moment. Public opinion has not its own way upon every occasion, even in the freest country in the world; but the important thing for us is, to know where “public opinion” resides—where the “corrective” for despotism is to be sought for. The corrective for despotism is to be sought for in Germany in the youth of the schools.

The analogous force in France must be looked for in the salons of Paris. What the German students do by dint of smoke, the salon-haunters of Paris do by dint of talk. Their pipes inspire the former to protect the rights of their fellow-citizens, the noise of their own tongues prompts the latter to a work of protestation that is eternal. What Mr. Bright does at Birmingham or elsewhere, when the spirit moves him to wage war upon the aristocracy of these realms, and declare the existence of dukes and marquises incompatible with the freedom of “the artisans whose labour fills all our shops and all our ships”—what Mr. Bright does upon these occasions, is done in France by great ladies and members of the Académie Française. And far be it from me to seem, in word or tone, disparaging to either. If France at the present hour has still retained any notion of social dignity, or any tradition of what would appear to us the commonest honesty or conviction, she owes it entirely to the steadfastness of opposition of the salons of Paris. Russians, under the reign of the first Emperor, Alexander, and just after the mysterious suppression of his father the madman Paul, used (quoting Voltaire) to say of their own form of Government, that it was “despotism tempered by assassination;” now you may really say of Imperial France, that its Government is “despotism tempered by talk.”

Let us only fancy what a curious state of things it would be in which all our great “houses” should be either closed or hostile, sulky or shut. No Stafford House, or Devonshire House, or Cambridge House. No Houses at all! Suppose all Piccadilly, all Park Lane, Belgravia, and May Fair —suppose all those “family mansions” with their shutters shut, as in the month of September, or opened only to the voice of discontent. The thing would seem odd even to such Londoners as never participate in their stately festivities. When London is alive, and going its usual round of “dinners, balls, and parties,” the very cabman on the stand knows that, though he and the owner of the palace opposite may not think alike on all points, there are some on which there is small difference of opinion between them. Try the unanimity of feeling on such a subject, for instance, as the Volunteer movement, or our Indian heroes, or the Queen, and see whether the duke and the dustman are not of one mind, and whether upon all occasions, when the national heart is touched, every fibre of the national body does not quiver responsively from head to heel! But here is just what does not take place in France. All the houses in Paris, from the Hôtel Pozzo to the Hôtel Duchâtel, are inhabited by masters and mistresses whose business it is, if they open their doors at all, to open them only to people who repudiate and declaim against the acts of the Government. And if you believe that honesty is better than fraud, and freedom preferable to oppression, you are obliged to be very glad for the morality of France that these centres of opposition still exist. They, at all events, keep alive a certain abstract moral sense in the public.

For instance, just take the following as a slight example of the “manners of the day.” We are in a magnificently furnished apartment, upon whose plain white (very soberly gilded) panellings hang a few pictures by masters of the old French school (mostly family portraits). There is splendour everywhere and some comfort (except that the doors shut badly). Quiet is the presiding deity