We are conceived sitting in hushed
wonder that a visitor from realms far above our experience should stoop
down to amuse us.
I wish I could feel that this was a false estimate of the British public.
It would certainly be a false estimate of the French public. The most
splendid thing, I think, in connection with the French people is their
freedom from flunkeyism. The great wind of the Revolution blew that rubbish
out of their souls for ever. It gave them the sublime conception of
citizenship as the basis of human relationship. It destroyed all the social
fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common
inheritance of the possibilities of human life. It liberated them from
shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe. They looked truth
in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of
the past. They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as a nation
have seen, that
The rank is but the guinea stamp:
The man's the gowd, for a' that.
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