11.]

THE SOVEREIGNS OF FRANCE.

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indifference which is the worst curse that can fall upon a nation. It has issued in the uncontrolled domination of those who, at the best, must be described as the most mediocre of mediocrities. Consider the five hundred and eighty-four sovereigns of France, as they sit grouped in their parties; listen to the vapid sophisms, the gross personal insults, the vulgar gibes, which resound as their sterile debates proceed and "quack outbellows quack." Lives there the man who will affirm that their vocal and other powers are liberated for contributions to a common good? Nay, that the thought of a common good so much as enters their minds? that they are possessed by any other thought than the triumph of their faction— that is, of themselves? "The only roots of the Revolution," said Camille Desmoulins, its enfant terrible, "are in individual self-love." M. de Tocqueville told Mr. Senior, in 1858, that seventy years of Revolution had destroyed public spirit in France that only the most selfish vanity and covetousness remained. The only effective power left is that supplied by popular passions-passions de la cervelle and passions de l'estomac - and supremacy belongs to the agitator who knows how most effectually to manipulate them. M. Renan, surveying his country now with calm, philosophic eye, describes it as "l'affreux marécage où glapissent et croupissent, pêle mêle, toutes les inepties, toutes les grossièretés, toutes les impuretés." The

Revolution has endowed every adult French male with an infinitesimal fraction of political authority, represented by the right to deposit a voting paper in the electoral urn. But how far has it conferred upon him a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something which he does or enjoys in common with others? If the progress of society, the advance of freedom in a nation, is to be measured by the increasing development and exercise, on the whole, of individual powers of contributing to social good, what progress has society, what advance has freedom made in France during a century of Revolution?

So much in general. And if we descend to particulars, and survey the constituent elements of human liberty, so slowly and laboriously evolved during two thousand years, there is not one of them to which the Revolution, dominant in France, is not avowedly hostile,* which it has not largely abridged, and which it does not threaten to annihilate. Personal liberty? The whole system of French criminal law, which is the branch of law most nearly affecting the masses, is based upon an odiously tyrannical presumption of guilt. The employés of the Government enjoy, in respect of their official

"Ce sont les ennemis de la révolution qui plaident le plus chaudement en faveur de la liberté politique," said Napoleon in 1802. Thibaudeau, Le Consulat, vol. iii. p. 39.

11.]

A TICKET-OF-LEAVE-MAN'S LIBERTY.

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In

acts, immunity from the ordinary tribunals. every walk of life, the State, unchecked by those provincial and municipal liberties which are the great clogs upon arbitrary power, weighs down the individual. The idea, so dear to doctrinaire legislators among ourselves, is realised. The nation, to use a phrase of one of its greatest living writers, is "un peuple d'administrés," destitute of that social hierarchy which, as Mirabeau's keen eyes discerned, is the best barrier against tyranny. The dead level of enforced equality is broken only by an aristocracy of officials, fortuitously intruded into and removable from the several Departments. The "man and the citizen" is nominally sovereign. The only liberty he really enjoys is the liberty of a ticket-of-leave man under perpetual surveillance. Freedom is, in fact, the prerogative not of the individual, but of the State; that is to say, of the professional politicians-usually political adventurers of the lowest type-who control and prey upon the State. The picture painted by Landor, in a few pungent words, is realised: "Society trodden down, and forked together, in one and the same rotten mass, with rank weeds covering the top, and sucking out the juices."

Pass to another element of individual freedom, the right to dispose of one's own property, which is, in fact, realised liberty. The Revolution has shown plainly enough how hostile it is to this right. Its publicists regard property as a mere privilege,

E

which the State may, at pleasure, hold to ransom. Hence the monstrously heavy succession duties, which periodically ruin wealth and prevent its accumulation. Hence the tyrannical restriction of testamentary power, whereby France has been covered with "a multitude of small perpetual entails," while at the same time, a deadly wound has been inflicted upon the spirit of the family, that sacred institution which, next to religion and in common with religion, is the source of all virtue, of all prosperity, of all true patriotism. But, indeed, of the prerogatives of the father, the Revolution makes small account. What more monstrous invasion of them is conceivable than the arrogation by the State of a monopoly of primary education, in contemptuous disregard of a man's inviolable right and sacred duty to bring up his children as his conscience dictates? * What heavier blow could be given to individuality-that essential element of liberty-than to cast all the youth of a country into one common mould? It must be owned that the Revolution here follows out consistently its main principle. Destroy all other inequalities,

Five-and-twenty years ago, one of the most thoughtful and sincere Liberals France has ever known, the late M. Laboulaye, wrote: "S'emparer des générations nouvelles pour façonner leur esprit au gré de la mode, ou des passions du jour, c'est dépouiller l'homme du premier et du plus saint de ses droits."-Le Parti Libéral, p. 67.

11.]

INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY.

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and intellectual inequality remains. Eradicate it wholly you cannot. But the best way to minimise it is by a uniform system of compulsory State education, like the French. And what a system! A system rooted and grounded in Atheism, and avowedly designed to produce a nation of Atheists. But the subject of the Revolution and Religion requires a chapter to itself.