"I don't know what to say, my dear."

"Why, surely, James, you are not thinking for a moment of letting
him go?"

"Well, I don't know. Yes, I am certainly thinking of it, though I
haven't at all made up my mind. There are advantages and disadvantages."

"Oh, but it is such a long way, and to live among those French people,
who have been doing such dreadful things, attacking the Bastille,
and, as I have heard you say, passing all sorts of revolutionary
laws, and holding their king and queen almost as prisoners in
Paris!"

"Well, they won't eat him, my dear. The French Assembly, or the
National Assembly, or whatever it ought to be called, has certainly
been passing laws limiting the power of the king and abolishing
many of the rights and privileges of the nobility and clergy; but
you must remember that the condition of the vast body of the French
nation has been terrible. We have long conquered our liberties,
and, indeed, never even in the height of the feudal system were the
mass of the English people more enslaved as have been the peasants
of France.

"We must not be surprised, therefore, if in their newly-recovered
freedom they push matters to an excess at first; but all this will
right itself, and no doubt a constitutional form of government,
somewhat similar to our own, will be established. But all this is
no reason against Harry's going out there. You don't suppose that