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[Page 27]
showed a fierce pride and delight in their womenkind. France's selection of her representative type was based on the same good taste, born of predilection (based on instinct), and reason (based on experience) that designed her cathedrals. And so throughout the piece; with due and requisite allowance made for differences of character of the matter under consideration. However, no matter what it may have been that demanded her attention no pains were, by her, spared to make the result a success and in her eyes nothing was successful unless there were put into it the love of country which, with that country, they had inherited, together with its great traditions, customs, arts, and laws. This was their libation to their ancestors, their silent and practical thanks for their splendid heritage, which carried, inherent in it, an injunction to perpetuate the intentions of those who had passed it on to them. They had to turn their five talents of natural gifts into ten and this they did by adding to the value and not to the bulk of their legacy. "Quality not Quantity" has always been and still is the watchword of the French: that and an altogether admirable economy which never descends to meagreness but becomes an agent of refinement. This economy running throughout the French nature not only governs her material life but her thought and is exhibited in all her intellectual products; brevity and justness of word; precision and sparingness of brush stroke; cleanness and decision of chisel work. As the exemplar of this fine human virtue she has always stood out and if she were to suffer the least eclipse nothing could replace it, for no other nation has made national economy a cardinal virtue. But she will have to make an exception to this rule when it comes to the punishing of those who wickedly and senselessly rave to destroy it and every other ideal but those of which they madly imagine they alone have the monopoly. Let her, when that day comes, take a holiday and make the punishment fit the crime; tho' it is doubtful if she can accomplish that almost impossible feat.