Brittany, however, really was in those days to a great extent fresh
ground, and the strangely secluded circumstances of its population
offered much tempting material to the book-making tourist. All this is
now at an end; not so much because the country has been the subject of
sundry good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of
life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by
the pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in
its merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a
dead level of uninteresting monotony so many varieties of character,
manners, and peculiarities. And thus "the individual withers, and the
world is more and more!" But _is_ the world more and more in any sense
that can be admitted to be desirable, in view of the eternity of that
same Individual?

As for the Bretons, the individual has withered to that extent that
he now wears trousers instead of breeches, while his world has become
more and more assimilated to that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, with
the result of losing all those really very notable and stiff and
sturdy virtues which differentiated the Breton peasant, when I first
knew him, while it would be difficult indeed to say what it has
gained. At all events the progress which can be stated is mainly to be
stated in negatives. The Breton, as I first knew him, believed in all
sorts of superstitious rubbish. He now believes in nothing at all.
He was disposed to honour and respect God, and his priest, and his
seigneur perhaps somewhat too indiscriminately. Now he neither honours
nor respects any earthly or heavenly thing. These at least were the
observations which a second, or rather third visit to the country a
few years ago suggested to me, mainly, it is true, as regards the
urban population. And without going into any of the deeper matters