But, as far as the promotion of universal brotherhood is concerned, the knowledge of the few may perhaps be as useful as the superficial familiarity of the many. As a means to the above end increased facility of locomotion seems to have failed. Some time-honored superstitions have, it is true, been swept away thereby; we no longer imagine that frogs form the staple article of a Frenchman’s diet, while the French, on their other side, do not now accuse us of selling our wives at Smithfield, although their belief that we prefer raw to cooked meat appears to be ineradicable. Yet there are very few Englishmen—so few that one might venture to make a list of them—who can be said to be at home in French society or to be capable of following the drift of French opinion. This last, it must be confessed, is not an easy feat, and indeed can hardly be accomplished by anything short of a prolonged residence in the country. Foreigners naturally form their opinion of a nation as much from reading as from personal observation, and probably there is no people so ill-represented by its press as the French. Any one who should read for a year the “Times,” the “Daily News,” the “Standard,” and “Punch,” to say nothing of the weekly reviews, would be able, at the end of that time, to pronounce a fairly accurate judgment upon English politics and English habits of thought. Can it be supposed that, after a twelvemonth’s patient study of the “Journal des Débats,” the “République Française,” the “Figaro,” and the “Vie Parisienne,” the inquiring stranger would be in an equally favorable position as regards our neighbors across the water? English novels, again, may be said to mirror English life faithfully, upon the whole, but if a man should base his estimate of French society upon a study of the best French novelists he would arrive at a conclusion almost grotesquely unlike the truth.