The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-01-19

literature of France is literature of license,
and because her moral atmosphere is murky,
that she excites absolute loathing in many
English homes which have taken the noble
side in all the great contests of recent years,
such as the fight to liberate the American
slaves, and the contest to free Ireland from
the iniquity of the alien Church establish
ment. The tremendous punishment of
France excites such fierce Joy as might have
fired the spirit of the Hebrews when they
heard that the priests of Baal had been ut
terly destroyed, and the Cauaanitish women
and children smitten with the edge of the
sword. The hatred is so absorbing as to
blind the eye to the lines of political recti
tude. The INSCRIPTIONS intrigues of Bis
marck; that barrack-room piety of the King,
which thanks God for victories, and cuts
Providence in season of defeat; the barbaric
spirit of the squireen caste which is permitted
to rule the best instructed people in the
world; the detestable military spirit which
threatens to make Prussia the pest of Europe;
the sanguinarY evangel of professors who
would set Europe in flame to make good
their own chronological dogma, that Germany
is gifted with divine right to rule everybody
who speaks German patois; the abo ninsble
wickedness which has punished the firing of
stray shots by setting fire to whole villages
and sending innocent women and children
adrift on the world-all this display of a dull
brutality and blind fury which history will
execrate and God will Judge, wrings from
many of the best Englishmen the comment
of silence or of conformation.
Those literary apostles to the Gentiles who
have sat at the feet of the French Gamalel
will sneer at q preference for Germany which
is built solely on the idea that the domestic
life Of the Fatherland is purer than that Of
France. They will dismiss such preference
with contemptuous sneer at the highly
organized irrationality of the British Philis-
tine. And we certainly offer no apology for
the apathy with which section of the liberal
party sees the most caste-bound and essen
TALLY un-liberal of all Courts preparing to
transfer a million and half of people from
the rule of France to that of Germany and
treating the protests of those people as con-
temptuously as if Alsace and Lorraine were
inhabited by a race Of cattle. That many of
the persons who were on the
side of the North during the Ame-
rican war should now be singing
halleluiahs over the aggressive policy of Bis
marck, shows the liberal instinc even of
many liberals to be only skin-deep, aud their
moral sense to be at the mercy of their preju-
dices. And equally unjust we also grant, is
the accusation of wholesale immortality which
is flung at the French people. The peasautry
of France, who form the bulk of the nation,
compare favorably as respects morality of
act and tone with the peasantry of typically
''moral" countries like home-loving, Presby-
terian, and pious Scotland. The idea that
France is represented by Paris, and that
French novels are a true index of French
life, is on a par, in point of accuracy, with
the belief that the United States are
faithfully represented by New
York Hence signal injustice is
done to the cause of liberalism and to
the morality of France by the good people
whom we have in view, when they shut their
eyes to the criminal folly of annexing Alsace
and Lorraine, and to the wickedness of burn
ing villages full of innocent women and chill
dren, because a Theophile Gautier can be
bred by France, and because the moral at
mosphere of France is less pure than that of
Germany. But such protest against the
good people does not satisfy the professional
despisers of the British Philstine. They ex-
claim that the morality which can condemn
the Gautiers must be the morality of Church
wardenism, and must be az far beneath the
dignity of philosophical discussion as the po-
litical creed of an average Tory squire, or
the theology of an average clergyman.
Nevertheless, the British Philistine is guided
in this instance by sure instinct, which
enables him to detect, in a confused way,
truths thousand times deeper than the phi
losopby of the light brigade of thinkers"
that half know Hegel and wholly know
OuIndS. Iuey sec JuhI Whatever Is De5I duu
most enduring in modern civilization does
rest on purity of life. They see that the
nation which displays puro family life, and
generates pure tone of thought, is lowered
with elements of lastingness for which we
look i'll vain amid the most splendidly gifted
of those peoples that have accepted the Athe-
nian edition of the moral law, They see
that the nation which finds its guidance in
that abbreviated code of duty is on the high
road to death. And if these are the
couDses of Philistinism, as they are contemp-
tuously characterized by some poetical rheto-
ricians whose popularity of mind enables
them to exhaust the possibilities of shallow
ness, it is time for all of us to seek in Philis-
tinism a school. If, on the one hand, the
German war has led many good people to
forget the principles of liberalism, and utter
unduly sweeping judgments on the morality
of the French people; on the other hand, it
! has brought into healthy prominence the de-
testation with which the best part of the
English people regard vice, however gilded
| it may be by fashion, or however gloriied by
/ intellect and art.