What is a moral influence with them? High above religion is their sturdy passion for independence. It is this passion that enables them to scrape, and serve, and suffer privation with dignity and patience. However meagre their resources may be, they are content with their lot, provided the roof they sleep beneath is their own, the land they till their own, the goat, the pig, the poultry, theirs to do with what they will. This is no mean standard, and it works miracles in France. Would they were by nature and instinct kinder to their beasts! but this, too, is not a Catholic characteristic. I am assured that the Bretons and Provençals are the worst offenders. However, they do not sink so low in cruelty to animals as the purely Latin races, like the callous Spaniards and the Italians; and even in France the condition of animals is considerably ameliorated, though horses and donkeys are still often maltreated, and geese are killed in the cruelest fashion, their prolonged agonies, in peasant esteem, lending flavour to the cooked flesh. What should, however, be a source of perennial admiration is the extraordinary absence in this class of anything approaching snobbishness. The eternal simplicity and unpretentiousness of the race are my constant wonder and delight. You will see a man in blue blouse, his wife in spotless cap and coloured kerchief, the man in appearance and fashion of speech and manners a gentleman, the woman educated, with her _brevet supérieur_, not destitute of music or art, working and living like peasants because they are working their own land, and receiving on lines of perfect equality their humbler neighbours, without any thought of giving themselves the vulgar airs so common in my own land and in England. When they take their well-earned holiday at the seaside or among mountain waters, you will rarely find them seeking to pass for other than they are, or talking loudly of their advantages of fortune or station. Their natural dignity is such that they are content to abide by it and be judged accordingly. This class of the French race may be described as the least vulgar, the least boastful of the world. With these cleanly and self-respecting toilers there is no insane aping of the idler, no cheap imitation of the _bourgeoise_ in dress, no awful spectacle of girls with hideous feathers and hats the grossest assertion of ill-placed ambition. Finery of any kind is recognised as the advertisement of something worse than bad taste,—of the bonnet gone clean over the mill and morals gone after it. The peasant woman’s vanity is to dress as her mother dressed before her, her pride is to belong to her land and her people. And it is because of this wholesome vanity and this noble pride that France is France, and the land is such a pleasant one to travel over.