Such action always occurs in wars that take on a
national character. In such actions, instead of two crowds opposing each other, the men disperse, attack singly, run away when attacked by stronger forces, but again attack when opportunity offers.
Finding that I took an interest in the subject, he expressed a regret that the true nature and extent of his enterprise and its
national character and importance had never been understood, and a wish that I would undertake to give an account of it.
It is an essential part of every
national character to pique itself mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its wisdom from their very exaggeration.
Meanwhile one country takes its opinion of another from the apercus of a few brilliant but often irresponsible or prejudiced writers,--and really it is rather in what those writers leave out than in what they put in that one must seek the more reliable data of
national character.
These young ladies are Americans, and you know that it is the
national character to move fast.
THE incomprehensible submission of Scotchmen to the ecclesiastical tyranny of their Established Church has produced--not unnaturally, as I think--a very mistaken impression of the
national character in the popular mind.
Stability in government is essential to
national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.
The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of
national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
The French police may speak our language--but they are incapable of understanding our
national character and our national manners.
His features, keen and regular, with an aquiline nose, and piercing black eyes; his high and wrinkled forehead, and long grey hair and beard, would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which, during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a
national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable.
'I thought I was tolerably accomplished as a man of the world,' he continued, 'I flattered myself that I was pretty well versed in all those little arts and graces which distinguish men of the world from boors and peasants, and separate their character from those intensely vulgar sentiments which are called the
national character. Apart from any natural prepossession in my own favour, I believed I was.
He belongs to a country in whose
national character we have not absolute confidence.