There is not a country in Europe more favorable than France for the study of the genteel condition of mind. There you have it in its perfection in the class _qui n'a rien appris et rien oublié_, and in the numerous aspirants to social position who desire to mix themselves and become confounded with that class. It has been in the highest degree fashionable, since the establishment of the Republic, to be ignorant of the real course of events. In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, genteel people either really believed or universally professed to believe during the life-time of the Count de Chambord, that his restoration was not only probable but imminent. No belief could have been more destitute of foundation in fact; and if genteel people had not been compelled by gentility to shut their eyes against what was obvious to everybody else, they might have ascertained the truth with the utmost facility. The truth was simply this, that the country was going away further and further from divine right every day, and from every sort of real monarchy, or one-man government, and was becoming more and more attached to representative institutions and an elective system everywhere; and what made this truth glaringly evident was not only the steadily increasing number of republican elections, but the repeated return to power of the very ministers whom the party of divine right most bitterly execrated. The same class of genteel French people affected to believe that the end of the temporal power of the Papacy by the foundation of the Italian kingdom was but a temporary crisis, probably of short duration; though the process which had brought the Papacy to nothing as a temporal sovereignty had been slow, gradual, and natural,--the progressive enfeeblement of a theocracy unable to defend itself against its own subjects, and dependent on foreign soldiers for every hour of its artificial survival. Such is genteel ignorance in political matters. It is a polite shutting of the eyes against all facts and tendencies that are disagreeable to people of fashion. It is unpleasant to people of fashion to be told that the France of the future is more likely to be governed by men of business than by kings and cardinals; it is disagreeable to them to hear that the Pope is not to do what he likes with the Roman people; and so, to please them, we are to pretend that we do not understand the course of recent history, which is obvious to everybody who thinks. The course of events has always proved the blindness of the genteel world, its incapacity to understand the present and forecast the future; yet still it goes on in the old way, shutting its eyes resolutely against surrounding facts, and making predictions that are sure to be falsified by the event. Such a state of mind is unintelligent to the last degree, but then it is genteel; and there is always, in every country, a large class of persons who would rather be gentlemanly than wise.