Excerpt from The Growth of the French Nation IN more than one age of the past, the French nation has been the leading nation of the world, whether one means by that the most powerful of the nations or the leader of the world in the arts of civilization. If it seems to us improbable that France should ever again occupy the commanding position which has sometimes been hers in the past, the fact does not diminish the interest with which we must regard her history. To the American people especially, occupying the continent which she so nearly made her own, and influenced, as we have been, in peculiar ways by her history, the story of the French people can hardly be of inferior interest to that of our own mother country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.