On the subject of religion and government enough has been said already in this volume. I think it is clear that on these important points England has been the more successful nation of the two. The Gallican Church was a failure, it has had to give way to Ultramontanism; the Anglican Church has been a great success, it has not only preserved, it has intensified its national character. It is true that Anglicanism is surrounded by Dissent; but Romanism is only suited to a part of the French people, and lives in opposition to its guiding secular principles. England has also enjoyed a more complete political success than France. Her system of government has not, as yet, excluded or alienated any class. Patricians and plebeians sit in the same Cabinet, speak from the same platforms, appeal to the same public in the same ways, and that whether they are Conservative or Radical. In England a popular leader may be associated with great nobles and received by the Sovereign; in France he would not be recognised by the smallest aristocrat. No Frenchman with any pretensions to aristocracy would be seen on the same platform with a French Gladstone. The French “Conservatives” have not the faintest hope of forming a Cabinet so long as the Republic lasts. To them the Republican power is like a foreign occupation, and their only hope is to plot against it and enfeeble it; for them it is not a national, but only a party government. All that can be said of the internal success of France, from the political point of view, is that since the overthrow of the Paris Commune she has maintained both liberty and order. No previous French Government has ever maintained _both_. The Republic has done this, but without being able to effect any reconciliation between parties which live in a state of latent civil war. The English system of government is accepted by the whole nation; it is national; whereas the French system is accepted by a part of the nation, and is national only in the sense of having the majority on its side. [Sidenote: Wealth.] The subject of wealth has been treated in another chapter. It is not wealth that is wanting. Both nations are enormously rich, France having the advantage of a more even distribution, England the advantage, if it is one, of possessing a greater number of prodigiously rich men. [Sidenote: Taxation.] [Sidenote: Difference between English and French Finances.]