Let us see, however, to what lengths M. Lemoinne is prepared to go. “If there was ever a people who have the sentiment of nationality, it is,” he says, “the English. They are impregnated, petrified with it; the thing is fatiguing and offensive. But in order to affirm and manifest this sentiment the English have no need to group themselves, to form themselves into a society. An Englishman is to himself England alone; he carries his nation in him, with him, on him; he does not require to be several. Everywhere he is at home: the atmosphere is his kingdom and the ambient air his property. Religion enters largely into this temperament. The Englishman carries not only his nation, but his religion with him; he scours the whole earth with his Bible for companion; the Frenchman, habitually catholic, requires a bell and a priest--he does not know how to converse directly with Heaven. From a social point of view, moreover, the English find France freer, more liberal, more open than their own country. English society, at home, is regulated like music-paper; it has a severe hierarchy, in which the most idiotic little lord stands before a man of genius without a title. Geographically, it is a very narrow space which separates England from France; but this space is a gulf. The two countries are in constant relationship; but they never arrive at any resemblance to each other. We have not the political liberty of the English, and they have not our social equality. An Englishman could not live with laws like those which, in France, regulate the right of speaking, the right of writing, the right of petitioning, the right of assembling, the right of going and coming; but a Frenchman would be stifled amidst those thousand conventional bonds which form English society. The influence of convention in England is such that it equals and even surpasses the tyranny of the political and administrative laws of the Continent. That is why the Englishman, after a stay of some time, and when the ice of his nature is a little melted, moves amongst foreigners as freely as he moves at home. No possible comparison can be made between the Frenchman in London and the Englishman in Paris; or at all events the comparison can only be an antithesis. The Frenchman who pays a visit to England will, so soon as presented, be welcomed with a boundless hospitality, provided his visit is only a flying one; but if he apparently wishes to take root, the soil refuses, and society shuts itself up and retires as though a descent were being made upon its territory. It must be confessed, moreover, that France is not usually represented in England by the cream or flower of her population; and for a simple reason, namely, that a Frenchman does not go to England for pleasure or from choice, and that he has no idea but that of returning as quickly as possible. But apart, even, from these particular circumstances, the mere pressure of the English social atmosphere suffices to asphyxiate a Frenchman.