In the attempt to analyse the secret of this supremacy, he fixes attention especially upon three points. First, the English are at home abroad. When we go to foreign lands, says M. Prévost, it is the stranger who interests us, his manners and habits, his peculiarities, the ways in which he differs from us. When the Englishman goes abroad, the customs of the country, the opinion of the people amongst whom he lives, count for nothing. He comes to Biarritz to live his life, the traditional English life, made up of bounteous feeding, of violent physical exercise, of clubs, and of bridge. He describes the types which he found at the Hotel Victoria, all entirely complacent, all self-sufficient, all just blandly tolerant of the occasional presence of the native inhabitant in this frontier post of Empire. “Yes; all those people are entirely at home there. It is I who am the stranger, the profane, since I look upon them with curiosity, since I wish to learn something from them.” This accusation is an old one: accepted since the famous definition of the Continent in the verdict of the British tourist, as “ruins, inhabited by imbeciles”: since the refusal of the English lady to speak French in Paris, because, as she protested, “it only encourages them.” Here at least, amid much that has changed, the type is unchangeable. The conquering race cannot understand the conquered. No conquering race ever has understood the conquered: except when, understanding, its Imperial rule has begun its decline. If the English in India, it has been said, commenced to understand India, the episode of English rule in India would be nearing its close. The second “instrument of invasion,” this acute observer finds in a “Discipline of Life, unanimously accepted.” Their plan of conquest is traced in advance. They stamp their life upon the life of the invaded cities: demanding, and in consequence readily obtaining, those things which they judge indispensable to the discipline of their existence. These include especially _l’installation hygiénique_ and _l’installation sportive_. At Biarritz to-day, the villas which are not entirely sanitary do not let. This is a more effective pressure than any bye-law of a local authority. They create--through their demands--hot air and vapour baths, certain conditions of ventilation, electric light, _le seul qui ne “mange pas d’oxygène” disent-ils_. They insist also upon their sports: golf, tennis, polo, hunting, shooting. They even patronise automobilism, whilst declaring, says M. Prévost slyly, “that it is not a true sport; they accuse it of not being an English sport.” To this they join their religion, or at least the outward manifestation of their religion. (One thinks of English “chaplains abroad.”) Given also to this an imperious complacency of costume, and all the materials are offered to provide the Anglican colony abroad with the impression of _un corps d’occupation ayant son uniforme, ses titres, ses chefs.