are equally admirable and equally necessary if we are ever to arrive at that indefinable and still distant state called civilisation. But to hear the Anglophobe in France (or, still worse, read him), and the Gallophobe in England talk of one another, it might be believed that these two great races stood farthest off from the goal we all aspire to reach instead of being both in their several ways nearest to it. I will be honest, and confess that the race of my predilection, France, is far the worse sinner of the two. To soothe her wounded vanity, and an imaginary hurt of honour skilfully exaggerated by the Press, she has descended to foolish misrepresentation of a neighbour with whom she had far better live on terms of amity. The Russian alliance turned her head, and for once she had not wit enough to see that she was being deliberately fooled for purposes not in the least connected with her own interests. Since that memorable date, she has gradually raised the tone of her hostility to England, till now her chief aspiration, if we are to believe the nonsensical Nationalist Press, is to avenge the old defeats of Crécy, Poictiers, and Agincourt. We will not speak of Waterloo. That victory is associated with Germany and Russia, and her intention is, for the moment, to pass as the very good friend of both. Left to herself, France would never have unearthed these ancient hostilities of the War of a Hundred Years, for she is in the main both sane and intelligent; but the Nationalists do not for nothing profess hostility to the Government, and they are ready for war, even if it but lead to the reversal of the ministry, and the removal of President Loubet. For they hate poor M. Loubet with ferocity; and I have seen in the eyes of some of my Nationalist friends, devout Catholics and Conservatives, that is, rabid partisans of the lost cause of the aristocracy, a gleam of joy when one night the late roars of the newspaper boys led us to fear that the President had been murdered. _On a assassiné Emile!_ they shouted, leaping to their feet, and flinging down their cards. If their lips did not simultaneously pronounce the words, “Thank God!” there was not present an expression of countenance, a tone of voice, that did not eloquently utter the unchristian thanksgiving at the thought but my own. And yet these people are all excellent citizens; possess many lovable qualities, are capable of kindness to friends, to the poor, to foreigners even. And so I am led, from intimate knowledge of the “Boxers” of France, to conclude that the “Boxers” of China may not be in themselves reprehensible creatures, but only wild and misguided “patriots.” Patriotism is accounted one of the noble virtues of mankind; and when we obey the dictates of patriotism who is to pronounce them criminal even when they prompt us to massacre all the foreigners at our gate, and torture all their partisans within those same gates?