Putting aside the aristocracies of both countries, which may live as healthily as they please, let us examine the state of the middle classes and the common people. The middle classes in both take insufficient out-door exercise, their occupations are too confining and too sedentary, they stiffen prematurely, and after that are fit for nothing but formal walks. Their physical life is lower than that of the aristocracy and lower than that of the agricultural population. The two greatest blessings in our time for the English of the middle class have been velocipedes and volunteering. France has one advantage over England in the numbers of the peasant class, which leads a healthy and active life, though its activity is of a slow and plodding kind. The factory population, proportionally much larger in England, is more unfavourably situated. It undergoes wasting fatigue in bad over-heated air, but it does not get real exercise; consequently, whilst the aristocracy keeps up its strength, the factory population deteriorates.
Comparison of the two Races.
A comparison of English and French physical qualities leads to the following conclusions. The English are by nature incomparably the finer and handsomer race of the two; but their industrial system, and the increasing concentration in large towns, are rapidly diminishing their collective superiority, though it still remains strikingly visible in the upper classes. The French are generally of small stature,[5] so that a man of middle height in England is a tall man in France, and French soldiers in their summer fatigue blouses look to an Englishman like boys. Still, though the ordinary Frenchman is short, he is often muscular and capable of bearing great fatigue, as a good pony will. His shortness is mainly in the legs, yet he strides vigorously in marching.
The Physical Future of the English and French Races.
One cannot look to the physical future of either race without the gravest anxiety. Unless some means be found for arresting the decline caused by industrialism and the rapid using-up of life in large cities, it will ruin both races in course of time. Already the French physicians recognise a new type, sharp and sarcastic mentally, with visible physical inferiority, the special product of Paris. The general spread of a certain education is indisposing the French for that rural peasant life which was their source of national health, and the population of England is crowding into the large towns. There are two grounds of hope, and only two. The first is the modern scientific spirit, with its louder and louder warnings against the neglect of the body; the second is the extension of military training, of which I shall have more to say in another chapter.
CHAPTER II
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION
England and France have been governed, since the Renaissance, by the same ideas about intellectual education, though there have been certain differences in the application of these ideas.
Latin and Greek.
Latin in France.
Educators in both countries have persistently maintained the incomparable superiority of Latin and Greek over modern languages, not only for their linguistic merits, but also on the ground that the literature enshrined in them was infinitely superior to any modern literature whatever. French education insisted chiefly upon Latin. Frenchmen take “learning” to be equivalent to Latin. They call a man instruit when he has learned Latin, although he may have a very limited acquaintance with Greek, and they say that one a fait des études incomplètes when he has not taken his bachelor’s degree, which implies that bachelors have made des études complètes though they know Greek very imperfectly.