The accusation against the French that they are a nation of gormandisers is to be understood with the reserves that I have now indicated, but I must add, in justice, that France is a country of plain living as well as of rich and elaborate living. The peasants, a very numerous class, live with extreme sobriety and simplicity; the soldiers, also a numerous class, live just sufficiently and no more; the priests live simply as a rule, though they are said to enjoy a good dinner when invited to a château, the only pleasure they have. Then you find large classes in which simple living is a matter of necessity, such as the members of religious houses and young people in educational establishments. [Sidenote: Good Living a Restraint on Population.] Nevertheless, I believe it is true that the love of good living in the middle and upper classes amounts to a serious evil, and actually operates as a restraint on population since it would be as cheap to feed a large family in a very plain way as to feed a small one on luxuries. My opinion is that luxury in food and dress are the two great parents of evil in France. * * * * * [Sidenote: England a Country of Extremes.] [Sidenote: Ardent Spirits in England.] [Sidenote: Abstinence and Moderation.] [Sidenote: English and French Moderation compared.] In drinking, England is a country of extremes. It has the misfortune of not being a wine-producing country, with the usual consequence that the consumption of ardent spirits is very great, and drunkenness of the most dangerous and most brutal kind very common. On the other hand, this horror has produced a reaction going as far in the other extreme, so that there are far more water-drinkers in England than in France. What is called “moderation” is also much more moderate in England. I lunch with an Englishman in London, and observe that he takes perhaps a single glass of claret and nothing after it; a Frenchman equally moderate would take half a bottle, with coffee and cognac afterwards. The same Englishman will never drink in a public-house from January to December; the Frenchman sees no harm in visiting his café every day. [Sidenote: Female Drinking in the two Countries.] Vulgar French people delight in accusing English ladies of dipsomania. Some of them drink, I have known several instances, and I have known instances of the same infirmity in France, but I am quite convinced that Englishwomen in the middle and upper classes are usually more abstemious than French. Comparing people equally sober, equally removed from all suspicion of drunkenness, a bottle of claret would last the English lady a week and the French lady a day. It is true that the English lady might take a glass of port after dinner, but that answers to the Frenchwoman’s occasional _liqueur_. [Sidenote: The Present and the Past.] [Sidenote: A French Traveller in England.] [Sidenote: His Inventions.]