11.] THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH PEASANT. 47

a song still popular in some districts declares -- is the sole tradition which he cherishes; while the ancien régime stands for the symbol of all that is inimical to him. His intellectual horizon is the narrowest conceivable. Of the common good he never so much as dreams. His life is spent in

incessant manual labour. The infinite sub-division of land, resulting from the Revolutionary Code, is an evil against which he finds no remedy, save in the limitation of the number of his children. As a rule, he restricts himself to two. But even with two children he finds it hard to keep out of the hands of the village usurer. His five or six acres constitute a provision for only one son. To avoid a partition of his pittance of land, he must raise money to buy off the other. Hence it frequently happens that he is in the hands of the village Shylock, the most demoralised and demoralising of tyrants. Doubtless, as a rule, the French peasant proprietor must be credited with the virtues of industry and frugality. Without them it would be impossible for him to live. But, on the other hand, he is given over to the spirit of utter selfishness, of complete indifference to all except the pettiest personal interests, of blind hatred and unreasoning fear of everything above his social and intellectual level, of abject meanness displayed by no other peasantry in Europe in the same degree. And in politics he is the facile prey of the charlatan who can best prey upon these passions. He is not

apprehensive that Radicalism, in its extremest form, will touch his petty piece of land. The fine schemes for relieving of their wealth the millowner, the manufacturer, and the other capitalists most open to the indictment, that they toil not neither do they spin, but live by the toiling and spinning of others, do not touch him. Nay, he dimly discerns that these measures would but carry forward for the benefit of other classes the same process of confiscation, whereby the nobles, the clergy, and the higher bourgeoisie were dispossessed for his benefit in the last century. Nothing is more utterly untrue than the allegation so commonly made in this country that the peasant proprietors of France are an impregnable barrier against Jacobinism. In political emergencies they are absolutely helpless. They have no principle of cohesion. They are a mere rabble, incapable, not only of meeting, but even of understanding, any great crisis in the affairs of their country. Shall we account as free these human automata, these voting animals, driven to the ballot-box as sheep to the slaughter, at one time by the Government official, at another by the professional demagogue?

Turn we now to the urban population of France. We have seen what Christianity did for the toiling masses by teaching the dignity of labour, while it emancipated the labourer. The Revolution unteaches that lesson. I have been greatly struck to observe how signally this is exemplified by the

11.]

THE FRENCH ARTISAN.

49

Parisian artisan, in many respects the foremost type to be found anywhere of the skilled workman. His whole being is penetrated by the anarchic teaching of Rousseau. He spends his time in a perpetual state of intoxication produced by the bad brandy of the Contrat Social. You cannot more deeply offend him than by addressing him as ouvrier, or by speaking to him of la classe ouvrière. He will tell you, surlily, that he is as good as another. And you will preach to deaf ears if you expound to him the wholesome doctrine of Mr. Mill: "Belief that any one man is as good as another is almost as detrimental to moral and intellectual excellence as any effect which most forms of government can produce." But salute him as citoyen, and you open a door to his heart at once. You transport him into a fantastic and impossible dreamland, wherein dwells what he calls justice. For he is firmly persuaded that he is a disinherited sovereign, wrongfully condemned to a dull, prosaic existence of toil. All his life he had been dazzled with visions of Socialistic and Communistic Utopias. And it is natural that he should burn to realise them. All his life political agitators have inflamed his worst passions: his greed, his envy, his hatred, until he has become, so to speak, possessed by them. But liberty is a moral good: its root in the elemental reason, in virtue of which a man is a law unto himself. It is incompatible with the sovereignty of the passions. The passions it is, I

E

say, not the rational faculties, of the masses congregated in French cities, that have been universally liberated. And assuredly, it is not to "the common good" that they are directed. The proof is before our eyes. Go on almost any Sunday evening to the Tivoli Wauxhall, or any other large place of meeting in Paris-it is the same in the other great towns of France and there you will find the workmen, in their thousands, listening greedily, to inflammatory attacks upon the primordial principles of social order; breathing out threatenings and slaughter against capitalists, public functionaries, priests; revelling in the wildest declamation, the most insensate rodomontade. The late M. Gambetta, whose angry utterances, at all events, had the ring of truth, described his constituents at Belleville, upon one occasion, as drunken slaves, (esclaves ivres). Slaves indeed! And drunken with the deadly wine of the anarchical doctrines which were his own stock-in-trade; "la politique de l'impossible, la théorie de la folie furieuse, le culte de l'audace aveugle." It is significant that the French artisan will very seldom give his vote to an employer of labour, however liberal and philanthropic; that he will never give it to a fellow operative, however trustworthy and intelligent. His favourite candidate is the professional demagogue, copious in phrases and gesticulations, who can most fluently repeat his pet shibboleths, and most seductively enlarge upon them, who promises

II.
•]

THE SOVEREIGNS OF FRANCE.

51

him "equality in fact," and "the completion of the work begun by the giants of 1792."

Of such demagogues the Chamber of Deputies is chiefly composed. The Revolution, so far from having liberated the powers of all Frenchmen, equally, for contributions to a common good, has produced among the best of them that political 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