I wish I could feel that this was a false estimate of the British public.  It would certainly be a false estimate of the French public.  The most splendid thing, I think, in connection with the French people is their freedom from flunkeyism.  The great wind of the Revolution blew that rubbish out of their souls for ever.  It gave them the sublime conception of citizenship as the basis of human relationship.  It destroyed all the social fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common inheritance of the possibilities of human life.  It liberated them from shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe.  They looked truth in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of the past.  They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as a nation have seen, that

    The rank is but the guinea stamp: 
      The man’s the gowd, for a’ that.

It is this fact which has made France the standard-bearer of human ideals.  It is this fact which puts her spiritually at the head of all the nations.

I am afraid it must be admitted that we are still in the flunkey stage.  We are still hypnotised by rank and social caste.  I saw a crowd running excitedly after a carriage near the Gaiety Theatre the other day, and found it was because Princess So-and-So was passing.  Our Press reeks with the disease, and loves to record this sort of thing:—­

THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT IN NEW YORK.

While strolling down Fifth Avenue the Duke of Connaught accidentally collided with a messenger boy carrying a parcel, whereupon he turned round and begged the boy’s pardon.

You see the idea behind such banalities.  It is that we are stricken with respectful admiration that people with titles should act like ordinary decent human beings.  It is an insult to them, and it ought to be an insult to the intelligence of the reader.  But the newspaper man knows his public as well as the cinema producer.  He knows we have the souls of flunkeys.  I am no better than the rest.  When I knew Mr. Kearley, the grocer, I looked on him as a man and an equal.  When he blossomed into Lord Devonport I felt that he had taken wings and flown beyond my humble circle.  I feel the flunkey strong in me.  I hate him, but I cannot kill him.

It is not the fact that inferior people get titles which should give us concern.  It is not even that they get them so often by secret gifts, by impudent touting, by base service.  These things are known, and they are no worse to-day than they have always been.  Every honours list makes us gape and smile.  If we see a really distinguished name in it we feel surprise and a certain sorrow.  What is he doing in that galley?  I confess I have never felt the same towards J.M.  Barrie since he allowed a tag to be stuck on to a great name.  What did he want with a tag that any tuft hunter in public life can get?  It is only littleness that can gain from titles.  Greatness is always dishonoured by them.  Fancy Sir Charles Dickens, or Lord Dickens, or Lord Darwin, or Lord Carlyle, or Lord Shakespeare, or John Milton masquerading as the Marquis of Oxfordshire.  Yes, Tennyson became a lord and was the smaller man for the fact.  Who does not recall Swinburne’s scornful comment: