One Frenchman in every five is a government employee. Nowhere else does there exist so limp, obstructive and deadening a bureaucracy. In the long run, I find something cheap in their love of thrilling phrase, of effect, of dramatic climax, because to it they sacrifice truth. There was something cheap in Victor Hugo, who could write of Napoleon: ‘This man had become too great. He inconvenienced God.’ There was something cheap in Napoleon himself. There is a strain of cheapness in Anatole France. And, at all times, all of them, all Frenchmen, talk about France. Englishmen do not perpetually talk about England, nor Americans about America, but Frenchmen are for ever talking about France. ‘_La France qui marche à la tête de la civilisation ... la France qui a fait tant de sacrifices ... la France! la France!_’ It is unendurable. * * * * * I do not like to think in either of these two ways about the French; there is too much passion, too much prejudice, in both estimates. I would like to think of them as I have no difficulty in thinking of the English or the Italians ... as individuals, good and bad, very mixed. But I cannot, no matter how many individual Frenchman I meet; for they will not let me. The truth, I say to myself, should lie somewhere about half-way between; but, instead, I swing helplessly from one of these two exasperating estimates to the other and back again, until, in a pet, I give up for a time thinking about the French at all. Obnoxiously overdressed as nationality is to-day, one cannot simply dismiss it, deny its existence or even, I suppose, its importance. The things that men do and think and feel are the same everywhere, but in each of certain circles made up of language, climate and, in some slight degree, race, the angle of approach to these things is, roughly, unified and somewhat different from that in the other circles. That a man is a man is far more significant than that he is a Swede or an Englishman; still, in saying that he is a Swede or an Englishman you _have_ said something significant about him, you have suggested certain probable variations (though even then you must be very careful; a Swedish poet is, in most ways, likely to resemble an English poet more closely than he resembles a Swedish butcher). It is difficult and quite fruitless to determine whether in the past these differences of nationality have been more beneficial than harmful or _vice versa_. They have been the cause of infinite bloodshed and misery, but we are also the richer for inheriting, say, both Dutch painting and Spanish painting. Presumably they are still of some value. No great poet could write in Esperanto, and German music is composed in German idiom.