Letters on England

Walk into the Royal Exchange in London and you find the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian settling their accounts together, giving the name of infidel to nobody but a bankrupt. Voltaire, freshly out of the Bastille and freshly exiled, looked at England the way a starving man looks at a laid table: the Quakers who would not remove their hats, mothers letting their children be inoculated against smallpox, a country where a mathematician was buried in Westminster Abbey with the honours of a king, and where a lord's younger brother went into trade without shame.