are exceptions, of course, yet even the exceptions suffer from the benumbing influence of their surroundings, and usually stop short of any noteworthy attainment. I may repeat in this place a remark made to me by an observant Frenchman. He said, “In our country the men who cultivate themselves with effect are more frequently retired tradesmen than men born to independence. The retired tradesman has habits of industry which he applies to any pursuit that he takes up, and the want of these habits is fatal to the aristocrat.” Another Frenchman, himself a man of culture, coincided, quite independently, with Matthew Arnold’s well-known description of another aristocracy. “It is a strange result of the wealth and intelligence of the modern world,” he said, “to give the upper classes the pursuits of the savage without the necessity which is his excuse for them. Our country gentlemen are not our intellectual leaders, they live a sort of perfected barbaric life. They are barbarians armed with the complicated appliances of civilisation. Their greatest glory is to have killed a large number of big wild boars, and they exhibit the heads as trophies. Another savage characteristic is that they despise trade and commerce, and consider all professions beneath them except that of the warrior. Their ideas of government by the simple authority of a despotic chief are also those of primitive man; they have not patience to endure the delays and the complicated action of parliamentary institutions. In a word, the liberty that wealth gives in the modern world means for them the liberty of the primæval instincts.” PART II PATRIOTISM CHAPTER I PATRIOTIC TENDERNESS [Sidenote: Tenderness has increased in France and diminished in England.] The tender feeling of patriotism, as distinguished from the proud, is more general in France than in England, and it has increased in France during the last twenty years, whilst it has diminished in England in the course of a generation, or during the transition from one generation to another. [Sidenote: Causes of the Difference.] This difference and these changes are due to causes that may easily be seen in operation. We may be able to fix upon some of them, and whilst we are so occupied the reader is especially requested to bear in mind that the tenderness of patriotism is not the whole of patriotism, and that the Englishman who has little tenderness may be as patriotic in other ways as the Frenchman who has more. [Sidenote: Local.] Tender patriotism in all cases attaches itself to the soil; it is an affection for the soil, and at first an affection for particular localities, generally with recognisable characteristics. One of the first effects of it is to produce a feeling of foreignness with regard to other parts of the same nation, so that by its particularism it may seem almost anti-patriotic. [Sidenote: The Princess of Thule]