It is useless to argue about success in literature with people too uneducated to read English. It is useless to affirm the greatness of English art, for that can be systematically denied. There is but one kind of greatness that need give England a thought or a care in reference to foreign countries, and that is her power of offence and defence by sea and land. The only unanswerable superiority is superiority in arms. Commercial and colonial greatness is but the filling of the sponge; a victorious enemy would squeeze it. If ever the day should unhappily come when an enemy clutches England by the throat as Germany held France in 1871, he will make her sign away the Colonies, and India too, and Malta, and Gibraltar, as France made “proud Austria” sign away Lombardy and Venice, and as France herself signed away Alsatia and Lorraine. Commercial prosperity, at such a time, is as vain as poetry and painting, or that insular music that French ears will not listen to. It is useless as a showman’s profits when his skull is cracking between the lion’s jaws. PART IX VARIETY CHAPTER I VARIETY IN BRITAIN [Sidenote: Europe one Town for Orientals.] European travellers in the more benighted parts of Asia, such, for example, as the interior of Arabia, have sometimes had to contend with a peculiar difficulty in making their nationality clear. The ignorant Orientals class all Europeans together as one nation. Mr. Palgrave even found, in his Eastern travels, that the people imagine all Europeans to be citizens of one town. “Europe they know to be Christian, but they conceive it to be one town, neither more nor less, within whose mural circuit its seven kings--for that is the precise number, count them how you please--are shut up in a species of royal cage to deliberate on mutual peace or war, alliance or treaty, though always by permission and under the orders of the Sultan of Constantinople.” These ideas, it may be supposed, could exist only in the most unenlightened regions of central Arabia, where the European traveller hardly ever penetrates. Not so. Mr. Palgrave tells us that this admirable geographical and political lesson was inculcated on him “not once, but twenty times or more, at Homs, Bagdad, Mosool, and even Damascus,” In central Arabia ignorance about foreigners went a little further, as might be expected from the ignorance of that part of the world. There he was often asked, with the utmost seriousness, “whether any Christians or other infidels yet existed in the world.” [Sidenote: English and French one People.] This is an extreme case, but we find in the writings of other travellers the statement of a natural difficulty in distinguishing English from French, for example. English and French are men of the same nation; they have the same character, the same habits, the same faults, and when one of the two peoples has committed some injustice, the other is held responsible for it. [Sidenote: No Variety across the Channel.]