I have always liked to mark the startling contrasts of light and shade.

I have always known what all the world now knows, that beneath the gayety of the French there burns a patriotic and consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a fine spirit of self-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of freedom.

In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files deep upon the Rue St.Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women and old men with their little all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings to take up the tribute required by Bismarck to rid the soil of the detested German.
They did it.

Alone they did it--the French people--the hard-working, frugal, loyal commonalty of France--without asking the loan of a sou from the world outside.
VI Writing of that last Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne, I find by recurring to the record that I said: "There is a deal more of good than bad in every Nation.

I take off my hat to the French.