She gapes and wonders every now and then, like an awkward peasant, at some other things--railway kings, electro-biology, and other trumperies; but nothing stirs her grand old heart down to its central deeps universally and long, except the Right.

She puts on her shawl very badly, and she is awkward enough in a concert-room, scarce knowing a Swedish nightingale from a jackdaw; but--blessings large and long upon her!--she knows how to teach her sons to sink like men amidst sharks and billows, without parade, without display, as if Duty were the most natural thing in the world; and she never mistakes long an actor for a hero, or a hero for an actor." [166] It is a grand thing, after all, this pervading spirit of Duty in a nation; and so long as it survives, no one need despair of its future.
But when it has departed, or become deadened, and been supplanted by thirst for pleasure, or selfish aggrandisement, or "glory"-- then woe to that nation, for its dissolution is near at hand! If there be one point on which intelligent observers are agreed more than another as to the cause of the late deplorable collapse of France as a nation, it was the utter absence of this feeling of duty, as well as of truthfulness, from the mind, not only of the men, but of the leaders of the French people.

The unprejudiced testimony of Baron Stoffel, French military attache at Berlin, before the war, is conclusive on this point.

In his private report to the Emperor, found at the Tuileries, which was written in August, 1869, about a year before the outbreak of the war, Baron Stoffel pointed out that the highly-educated and disciplined German people were pervaded by an ardent sense of duty, and did not think it beneath them to reverence sincerely what was noble and lofty; whereas, in all respects, France presented a melancholy contrast.

There the people, having sneered at everything, had lost the faculty of respecting anything, and virtue, family life, patriotism, honour, and religion, were represented to a frivolous generation as only fitting subjects for ridicule.