[71] As a system of recruiting party adherents, it has the great advantage of catching rather rich and influential people, especially landowners. Very poor families would gain nothing by the “de,” and, in fact, they drop it when it is theirs by right. [72] This is stated simply as a fact and not in depreciation. There is not a more respectable class in France than the peasantry. [73] He also takes precedence of the bishop. An intimate friend of mine was appointed to a prefecture. On his arrival the archbishop sent to say that he would receive him at his palace. This was an attempt to put the prefect in an inferior position, so he answered that it was not further from the palace to the prefecture than from the prefecture to the palace. The archbishop then came. [74] George du Maurier attributes this happiness in the wealth of others to what he calls “The British Passion for inequality,” illustrated by him in _Punch_. An Englishman is walking with a Frenchman in Hyde Park, and gives utterance to that passion in these words:-- “_Sturdy Briton._ It’s all very well to turn up your nose at your _own_ beggarly Counts and Barons, Mossoo! But you can’t find fault with _our_ nobility! Take a man like our Dook o’ Bayswater, now! Why, he could buy up your Foreign Dukes and Princes by the dozen! and as for you and me, he’d look upon us as so much dirt beneath his feet! Now, that’s something _like_ a nobleman, that is! That’s a kind o’ nobleman that I, as an Englishman, feel as I’ve got some right to be _proud_ of!” [75] The want of money, in these days, very frequently induces a French nobleman to marry an heiress in the middle classes. This is the most powerful cause of infractions of French exclusiveness. [76] The essential difference between the scientific and the religious views is that the one sees a special Providential commission, where the other only perceives an undesigned accumulation of natural force. [77] There is more English poetry of the same order, for example the following, also quoted from Mr. Gerald Massey-- “Oh! this world might be lighted With Eden’s first smile-- Angel-haunted--unblighted, With Freedom for Toil: But they wring out our blood For their banquet of gold! They annul laws of God, Soul and body are sold! Hark now! hall and palace, Ring out, dome and rafter! Ay, laugh on, ye callous! In Hell there’ll be laughter.” [78] “Well, before _I’d_ put on stockings no better washed than those!” [79] “Paid for, is it? It would not have been if thou hadst had to earn the money.” [80] Just before returning the proof-sheet of this chapter I heard one French peasant describing his landlord to another in these terms:--