They are the only civilized grown-up people in the world. Even those who are ignorant or narrow have a mature attitude toward life, never a raw schoolboy attitude. They are logical in a world of insanity. For them not only do 2 plus 2 make 4, but 32 plus 32 make 64--not, as Blasco Ibañez said of the Russians, 4589. Their minds are orderly, swept and garnished, clear like their language, to hear which spoken by cultivated Frenchmen is an exquisite aesthetic pleasure, and to hear which falling precisely and crisply even from the lips of shopkeepers makes one sigh with relief at having come away from countries such as America or Italy, where common speech is a slovenly massacre, and where voices seem designed for the great open spaces. Their prose is the marvel of the centuries. Its quality never stales. The mere flavour of the words on a page of Montaigne or of Anatole France is delicious. And no one who has learned that their poetry is not something to be compared with English poetry, but something of a different kind, will ever deem it thin. Racine thin? Alfred de Vigny thin? Whatever thought they touch they clarify, and it is not true that they do not themselves originate and think creatively. It is only that to people who think muddily obscurity seems profound and simplicity superficial. They have a fine respect for the individual. Nowhere else is the individual quite so free as in France--free within very broad limits as to behaviour, almost totally free as to thought. The French are infinitely less subject to the tyranny of majority opinion than, for example, the Americans or the Germans. Their minds are not standardized. ‘Equality’ and ‘Fraternity’ may have gone by the board, abandoned as impracticable ideals, but ‘Liberty’ still means something true in France: liberty for the individual. They live soberly, disliking excess, spending less than they earn, saving for their children, whom they do not, like the Italians, treat as adorable playthings and cover with kisses and spoil, but educate sensibly as human beings. For them marriage is not a reckless juvenile adventure in romance, but a partnership full of grave responsibilities, of which the woman must bear her part, as well as the man his; with the result that perhaps nowhere else does marriage work so well, so fairly, as in France. And as with marriage, so with the whole of life. The French do not set for themselves Utopian ideals impossible of realization, the gulf between which and the actual facts of existence can but end in disillusioned despair, but reasonable ideals, difficult, indeed, of attainment, yet not beyond the conceivable reach of struggling mortals.