France Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I At the end of the nineteenth century there are two families of the human species of which the institutions and experiments, political and social, are of surpassing interest to students, statesmen, and philosophers. That the Anglo-Saxon race, in its marvellous expansion, should command their attention is not surprising, seeing how it has carried all over the globe the English language, imposing it, as well as versions of the mother constitution, on new communities of diverse origin, the largest and most mixed of which is not subject to the sceptre of England. But besides the societies peopling the British Empire and the American Commonwealth, there is a nation in the Old World which, though it has not expanded either in Europe or beyond the seas, is equally attractive to study. The frontiers of France are not wider than they were when the United States were British dependencies; its population has scarcely increased since our Australian colonies were constituted; its emigrants who go forth to distant lands with fixed intent to remain and to stock them with a French-speaking population are fewer than in the reign of Louis XV. Yet the people inhabiting this tract of the continent, their social economy, their ideas on government and the developmentof their institutions, are as full of living and philosophical interest as those of any community on the face of the earth. If this could be said of other nations of modern Europe the importance of France as a subject of social and political study would not be remarkable, for its high place is unchallenged among the great powers. But the interest inspired by each of the others is limited or special. Austro-Hungary is a collection of peoples heterogeneous in language and race; United Italy lives on the renown of the ages when ...