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324 France, Russia, or Germany to undertake our government. Japan, indeed, already dictates our foreign policy. The worst of being conquered by Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides, to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris, and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of financiers, ambitious politicians and soldiers, and great merchants. Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations—there are rival markets, and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly important matters—the great capitalist, the soldier, and the politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children, his books and his flowers, to the artist busied with braver translunary matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with "the white radiance of eternity," to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the angler at his sport—what are these pompous commotions, these busy, bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional not too vociferous nightingale.

The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed reference to Sir Thomas Browne peacefully writing his Religio Medici amid all the commotions of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly recting