will explain the English to you.

LADY (eagerly). Do. (With a lively air of anticipating an
intellectual treat, she sits down on the couch and composes
herself to listen to him. Secure of his audience, he at once
nerves himself for a performance. He considers a little before he
begins; so as to fix her attention by a moment of suspense. His
style is at first modelled on Talma's in Corneille's "Cinna;" but
it is somewhat lost in the darkness, and Talma presently gives
way to Napoleon, the voice coming through the gloom with
startling intensity.)

NAPOLEON. There are three sorts of people in the world, the low
people, the middle people, and the high people. The low people
and the high people are alike in one thing: they have no
scruples, no morality. The low are beneath morality, the high
above it. I am not afraid of either of them: for the low are
unscrupulous without knowledge, so that they make an idol of me;
whilst the high are unscrupulous without purpose, so that they go
down before my will. Look you: I shall go over all the mobs and
all the courts of Europe as a plough goes over a field. It is the
middle people who are dangerous: they have both knowledge and
purpose. But they, too, have their weak point. They are full of
scruples--chained hand and foot by their morality and
respectability.

LADY. Then you will beat the English; for all shopkeepers are
middle people.

NAPOLEON. No, because the English are a race apart. No Englishman