My next example is of less importance, because it is not spread abroad in a famous and permanent book; still, it shows a kind of falsehood that may be dictated by French malevolence. A Frenchman had been staying in England, and on his return to France he told any one who would listen to him that the English have a strange custom--the family bath. All the members of an English family, without regard to sex or age, bathe together every morning in a state of perfect nudity. [Sidenote: Cause of the Lie.] This, I think, is rather a representative specimen of a French lie. It is a pure invention, suggested by anger at the superior cleanliness of the English upper classes, and by a desire to make them pay for their cleanliness by a loss of reputation for decency. [Sidenote: French Mendacity Artless.] [Sidenote: English Falsehood Intellectually Superior.] [Sidenote: French Cabinets _laïc_.] By reckless invention on the one hand, and complete carelessness about verification on the other, the French have accumulated a mass of information about the English which is as valuable as the specimens here given. But there is no real interest in the study of artless French mendacity. It is but the inventiveness of children who say no matter what. It displays no intelligence. English falsehood is incomparably superior to it as an exercise of mental sharpness, and is always worth studying as an inexhaustible subject for the most watchful and interesting analysis. Nothing can surpass the ingenuity with which that marvellous patchwork of truth and its opposite is put together. The intelligent Englishman knows that truth is the most important ingredient in a well-concocted falsehood. The following example has remained in my memory, and is worth quoting for its concentration. In scarcely more than twenty words it contains three deceptive phantoms of truths, and conveys three false impressions. I found it in an English newspaper of repute, but am unable to give the date. This, however, is in some degree indicated by the passage itself. [Sidenote: An Example of English Falsehood.] “The present atheistical government of France, after expelling the religious orders, has now decreed that the crosses shall be removed from the cemeteries.” [Sidenote: Analysis of the Example given.] The adjective “atheistical” is here quietly substituted for the true one, which would be _laïc_. The French Government is not more atheistic than a board of railway directors. There are four antagonistic established religions in France, and the right to freedom of thought is recognised by law,[46] so that a French Government is necessarily non-theocratic and neutral. French cabinets no more profess atheism than they profess Judaism or Romanism; and since the establishment of the Third Republic they have never shown themselves more actively hostile to the idea of Deity than the Royal Society or any other purely secular institution in London. [Sidenote: The Religious Orders.]