And still to other nations--less successful in the economic struggle, less immovably confident in attainment--these people appear as “the Conquerors”: dominating the world with a certain serene confidence in the justice of their supremacy which is at once enviable and exasperating to the critic from outside. The Englishman abroad is inclined to gush a little at the fascination of the foreign freedom, especially at the charm and beauty of the South. He finds here manners, and an immemorial tradition of courtesy, and a less slavish devotion to material ends. But the South itself is under no such illusion. To these it is the English who are the people that have attained. Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, are all desirous of unravelling the secret and accepting the standard of the dominant race. Even the writers of literature, although they may mingle a delicate irony with their praise, yet are content to emphasise the deficiences of their own people; in the contrast presented to them by the immigrant English who settle in their coasts, and maintain their own life and manners unconscious of the life and manners of their neighbours. It is as a conquering race, secure, imperturbable, profoundly careless of opinion outside, that the astonished foreigner encounters the Englishman abroad. “I see them at work,” writes M. Marcel Prévost, from Biarritz, “and never perhaps have I better known and understood their Anglo-Saxon energy than here, on the French soil, in a French hotel, kept not by Germans or Swiss, but by the French of the Midi.” He applauds even while he criticises. He mingles his irony with admiration. He sees the Conquerors, not triumphant over the conquered, not consciously brutal to the conquered, but simply brushing them aside as irrelevant; never, indeed, seeing them at all. He sees, in fact, this English colony contemplating certain cities of France, not as a land with centuries of history beaten into its soil, but as a place where the amenities of climate enable them to transplant into a Southern air a portion of England. The French--even in the towns of the stranger, where the French colony is numerous, in London or in Barcelona, for example--never give the impression of a civic garrison engaged by the Mother Country. Whilst a few hundreds of English people in a French town, “obstinately speaking nothing but English, inhabiting only English lodgings, dressing only in the English fashion, practising their religion, their sports, and their games, with an easy ostentation, end by persuading us,” he ironically complains, “that we are the strangers--or at least the conquered nation.” It is this mingling of security and indifference that fills him with despair. In Biarritz, Pau, Dinard--he might have said in the whole _côte d’azur_ of the Riviera--“the English have conquered us,” he declares. _Excellent milieu pour étudier leurs procédés de conquête._