This deluded instinct of attachment to Great Britain, and this unnatural lack of sympathy for France have cost us dearly. The two sentiments have modified our national life, and have left a result different by not a little from what it would have been if influenced by other and more wholesome dispositions on our part. Our nationality has lost much force on both counts--on the score of our illogical attachment to Great Britain on the one hand, and of our unnatural indifference to France on the other. Under the one influence we have become _tolerant of subserviency_ as a national trait, and under the other we have become in a measure _incapable of enthusiasm_. The addition of British subserviency has been aggravated with the subtraction of French enthusiasm from our public and private life. All this had been better otherwise. All this--even after the lapse of a hundred and twenty-one years from the great summer of our Independence--ought still to be bettered with amendment. It is not needed, stiff as we have already become in our national instincts and methods, to go forward by going backwards. To approximate Great Britain is to go backwards. The English _people_ are among the greatest of the historic races, but the British _monarchy_, with its mediæval pretensions, its humbug of a throne and a crown, its subordinated ranks of society, its military and naval despotism, and its vast skein of _tentaculæ_ stretching to every valuable thing in the world,--is perhaps the one thing that modern civilization should most dread and put away from the field of its desires. On the other hand France is, in nearly all respects, admirable. Her mobility is life, and her warmth is a fructifying force. France gives forth more than she takes from the nations. Her republic is a splendid piece of political workmanship. Her spirit is patriotic. Her people, instead of straggling over the world like adventurers and pirates, remain in the borders of _La Patrie_, happy and vital in the possession of freedom. Her lilies still bloom in the depth of the valleys. Her vineyards are a covert under which if there be a peasantry it is not a peasantry forced down by oppression, but only the modest residue of the stronger life above and beyond. The free institutions of this beautiful land are the natural counterpart of our own; we should be all the better for warming ourselves not a little in the glow of the Gallic enthusiasm. _Vive la France!_ Le Siècle. The century passes as a broken dream That fades into the darkness ere the dawn! The hopes it cherished and its griefs are gone As spirit-shadows on Time's silent stream! The outcry and the anguish of it seem Like echoes on dusk hills--like lights upon The haunted borders of oblivion-- Pale will-o'-wisps of a disordered scheme.