propriety's sake, making its way to a place of worship appointed by the State, in which it respects the formulas of a creed to which it attaches no positive sense and listens to a sermon over the length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles,--in this great exhibition there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows whether to pronounce very sublime or very puerile. He inclines on the whole to pronounce it sublime, because it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these manoeuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous force and cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in consolidating the German people and making them available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the military punctuality which characterizes the English observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it is really the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his _entourage_ I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to church; the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England is irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the country. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such a considerable affair.)