And affectionate in the extreme, she has always been to me.
So I have mystified you and disgusted you with my politics, and my friends in England have put me in the corner; just so....
The French nation is very peculiar.

We choose to boast ourselves of being different in England, but we have simply _les qualites de nos defauts_ after all.

The clash of speculative opinions is dreadful here, practical men catch at the ideal as if it were a loaf of bread, and they literally set about cutting out their Romeos 'into little stars,' as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

As for the socialists, I quite agree with you that various of them, yes, and some of their chief men, are full of pure and noble aspiration, the most virtuous of men and the most benevolent.

Still, they hold in their hands, in their clean hands, ideas that kill, ideas which defile, ideas which, if carried out, would be the worst and most crushing kind of despotism.