All said and believed that in a week there
would be war, and on both sides everything was so ordered that there
might be. There was still hope that common sense might get the better of
warlike madness in the French Government; but this much was clear, there
was going to be a sudden downfall of everything.
Between Dover and Calais the waves beat over the ship. From Dover, the
train went at a speed of sixty miles an hour, and made one think him a
great man who invented the locomotive, as great as Aristotle and Plato
together. It seemed to me that John Stuart Mill was that kind of man. He
opened, not roads, but railroads; his books were like iron rails,
unadorned, but useful, leading to their goal. And what will there was in
the English locomotive that drew our train,--like the driving instinct
of England's character!
Two things struck me on my journey across, a type of mechanical
Protestant religiosity which was new to me, and the knowledge of the two
languages along the coasts. A pleasant English doctor with whom I got
into conversation sat reading steadily in a little Gospel of St. John
that he carried with him, yawning as he read. The seamen on the ship and
the coast dwellers both in England and France spoke English and French
with about equal ease. It is probably the same in all border countries,
but it occurred to me that what came about here quite naturally will in
time be a possibility all over the world, namely, the mastery of a
second and common language, in addition to a people's own.
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