Volume 59 / Part 2 — THE PEOPLE.[72]

THE PEOPLE.[72]

Mr Cobden, in the House of Commons, has given us a definition of the term which heads this article:—The People are the inhabitants of towns. "I beg to tell the honourable member for Limerick," said the arch-leaguer, a few evenings since, "and the noble lord, the member for Lynn, and the two hundred and forty members who sit behind him, that there are other parties to be consulted with regard to their proposition—that there are The People; I don't mean the country party, but the people living in the towns, and who will govern this country."

"What is the city," says Shakspeare, "but the People?"——"True, the people are the city."

Against Mr Cobden we pit Mr D'Israeli, who defines the people to be the country gentlemen. Against Shakspeare, we bring M. Michelet, who, in an affectionate dedication of his latest work to his fellow-labourer and friend, M. Edgar Quinet, modestly acquaints the said M. Edgar, that The People are neither more nor less than the author of the book and the gentlemen to whom it is inscribed:—

"Recevez-le donc, ce livre du Peuple, parce qu'il est vous, parce qu'il est moi. Par vos origines militaires, par la mienne, industrielle, nous représentons nous-mêmes, autant que d'autres peut-être, les deux faces modernes du Peuple, et son récent avénement."

There is, in truth an extensive amount of cant afloat just now, both here and elsewhere, on this subject of The People. It is the staple commodity of your newspaper-mongers, and the catchpenny song of the streets. Agitators feed upon it, politicians play upon it, our needy brethren of the quill pay outstanding debts with it. It is one of the few things that pay at all in an age of fearful competition, and one that always will pay whilst poor human nature holds the purse-strings. The wretched beggarman of Ireland famishes for a crust, yet he has his farthings to spare for the greedy hypocrite who flatters his vanity, and heaps laudations on his social importance. John Howard made four pilgrimages to Germany, five to Holland, three to France, two to Italy, with the simple object of mitigating the physical sufferings of his fellow creatures; he visited Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Turkey, with the same practical and praiseworthy purpose. He passed days in pest-houses and lazarettos, and finally laid down his life in the blessed work of charity at Cherson in the Crimea. Nous avons changé tout cela. Philanthropy is a luxurious creature now-a-days. She is passive rather than active; she does not work—she talks. Her disciples take no journeys, unless it be to Italy for their own pleasure; they sit at home in satin dressing-gowns, supported on velvet, feeding on turtle. They tell the labouring classes—whom they style the bone and sinew of the land—that though they talk prose, and lead prosaic lives, they are nevertheless first-rate poets, that though rough at the surface, they are the gentlest of creation "at the core;" that though dull, they are quick; though ugly, handsome; though stupid, vastly clever; though commoners in the last degree, yet nobles of God, and nature's grandees of the very first class. It is gratifying to believe all this, and the charge is only threepence a-week, or a shilling a-month. Open as we all are to flattery, who would not pay so trifling a sum for the pleasure of so sweet a dream? If you cannot relieve our sufferings, it is something to create an inordinate self-esteem. If you cannot afford us a shilling from your pockets, it is much that your goose-quill can convert us into birds of Paradise. The successful writers of the day are those who have nauseously fawned upon the million for the sale of their "sweet voices" and their halfpence.

There is not one of these popular authors who has had the manliness to suggest, supposing that he has the head to discover, a remedy for the evils which every honest mind perceives in the social condition of the humbler classes. The most they have done is to drag further into the light miseries which every one saw without their aid—to point out exultingly distinctions of rank, which have always been, and can never cease to be—to remove bonds of sympathy, that united for mutual benefit one class with another—and to widen as far as possible the breach that has arisen between the governed and the governing of this great empire. We do them injustice—they have accomplished more. In seasons of difficulty and trial, in those periods of convulsion and danger, to which all great societies are liable, and a large mercantile community like our own is especially subject, they have assuaged alarm and appeased hunger by writing books with a moral; such a moral as that upon which The Chimes was founded, and which the snarling author of Mrs Caudle's Lectures loves to inculcate: we mean the moral that teaches the loveliness of all that lies in the hovel, the hatefulness of all that dwells in the palace; the sublimity of vulgarity, and the ridiculousness of high birth; the innate virtues of ignorance and poverty, and the equally essential wickedness of wealth and rank. Such are the exertions of modern philanthropy! Such are the self-denying, humble, and glorious achievements of the successors of John Howard!

There are two classes of philanthropists very busy just now on this side the English Channel: viz., that composed of men who are particularly anxious that no laws whatever should be passed for the effectual punishment of the midnight assassin in Ireland; and that which stands up for the murderer in England, denying the right of the legislator to punish any man with death, and the expediency of the punishment, provided the right be conceded. Should society be restored to tranquillity, and crime be expurgated by the success of these gentlemen's endeavours, it is very clear that France will take the wrong track, by following the counsel of the belligerent M. Michelet, according to whose views, peace and order are to be obtained only by the proclamation of war, and the shedding of blood for the glory of his native country. "My only hope," says the valiant historian, "is in the flag." Every time, he tells us, that he sees the bayonets of the French army, his heart bounds within him. "Glorious army! pure swords! holy bayonets!" upon which the eyes of the world are fixed, and which will eventually save that world by—cutting the throats of all the enemies of France.

M. Michelet has obtained some celebrity in Europe: amongst the learned and the reading public by his histories; amongst the masses by that remarkable work styled Priests, Women, and Families, which met with many readers and elaborate notices in this country, and was reviewed in the pages of this Magazine as recently as August last. We paid our tribute of respect to an effort which, whatever might be its faults—and serious faults it had—was distinguished by a commanding eloquence, a manly energy, and an uncompromising zeal worthy of the cause which the historian had undertaken; viz., the restoration of woman to her spiritual and social rights—rights invaded by the stranger, trampled upon by priestcraft. We did not stay to inquire into the motives by which the indignant professor of the College of France had been actuated. It may have been, that, to avenge a slight inflicted upon him by the Jesuits, the learned teacher aimed a blow at the entire Roman Catholic Church; that having repudiated the sentiments of his early life—sentiments which attached him affectionately to the religion, poetry, and traditions of the middle ages—he burned with the new fire of a convert or an apostate, and sought to establish the sincerity of his conversion by deadly home-thrusts at the party he had forsaken. It was sufficient for us that a scholar and a Frenchman had manfully advanced to the rescue of his fellow-countrywomen; that he had detected the errors that lay at the heart of their social condition; that he had noted the hindrances that affected domestic purity and peace; and bravely undertook, if possible, to remove, at all events to expose and brand them.

There is great peril attending the career of any man who acquires the reputation of a reformer of abuses. It is easier to acquire that reputation than to sustain it. It is well when the necessity gives birth to the reformer; but it is ill when the reformer, in order to live, is forced to create the necessity. There was ease and grace, simplicity and truthfulness, honesty and ardour, in that defence of woman, to which the champion was urged by the conviction that he entertained of her wrongs. Few of these qualities remain in the work now before us—a work suggested by any thing rather than the crying evils of the community to which the author belongs; a work that may have been written for money—with the mere object of book-making—to bamboozle the million, to inspire it with cock-like crowing; certainly, with no hope of regenerating France, of removing one feather's weight from the load of calamity to which her people, in common with the people of all the nations of the earth, are mysteriously doomed.

We do not pretend to understand the motives which have carried M. Michelet to his task; neither can we distinctly discern the object which it is his purpose to reach. His book is divided into three parts, which are again subdivided into chapters. There is a great appearance of connexion, and indeed an affectation of logical cohesion in the structure, but there is really and essentially no union whatever of the several divisions. Part I. is styled, "Of Bondage and Hatred;" Part II., "Enfranchisement by Love—Nature;" and Part III., "Friendship." Each part is an essay, complete, so to speak, in itself, more or less distinct; intelligible at times, but as often vague, dark, and paradoxical; most satisfactory where it treats of simple, well-known facts—least successful where it deals in the crudest theories, which are not tedious only because they are ridiculous and amusing.

The spirit that pervades the entire book is that of intolerable conceit—individual and national. We can pardon the author of The History of France much, but we will never forgive in him a vice that has ceased to be supportable in the most ignorant of his countrymen. It is impossible to conceive a philosopher and scholar so irritated and perverted by thin-skinned vanity as M. Michelet appears throughout this volume; and indeed we cannot do his intellect the injustice of supposing him to believe the jargon that has fallen from his pen. The heart, we fear, rather than the intellect, is at fault, when he who has the ear of the people approaches it with accents that inflame its lowest passions, rather than correct and guide, and bring to usefulness and good, its best and noblest instincts.

Every thing is perfect in France; nothing is perfect elsewhere. This is the theme of the song which M. Michelet circulates throughout the empire. The people are nevertheless wretched, in poverty, and in bondage; they are doomed to evil government; their social state is one of tyranny and cruel persecution. An historian, sprung from the people, has deemed it his duty to proclaim these facts, and to write a book which shall go far to remove the evils he complains of; yet, at the outset of the work, he announces, to our astonishment, that France is beyond all other lands the favoured land of heaven, the mistress of the world, the paragon of countries. We turn back a page, and ask—Was it for this that the student stepped from his retirement, or was it to prove facts the very opposite to these? If France be indeed so pre-eminently good and great, why write so many pages to prove that she lies in bondage? If the literature of France be perfect, her army pure, her people great, her religion the only true revelation of God's purposes and will, wherefore complain and cry aloud, and seek to remedy a condition already so enviable, to elevate a character already so super-eminent? Is it that France is too self-loving to hear of her faults even from her own offspring, or that she will not take her wholesome medicine without the gilding that removes its flavour, and hides its ugliness? Is she a child, and must the teacher flatter her as a child; coax, pacify, and bribe her as a child, in order to work her reformation and secure her happiness?

Let us for awhile follow the author of The People, as he traces bondage and hatred throughout the social scheme of France, and gather from him, as well as we may, the remedies he has for their destruction; so shall we do him greater justice, and obtain, if they be within grasp, the intention and the object of his undertaking.

"If we would know," says M. Michelet, "the inmost thought, the passion of the French Peasant, it is very easy. Walk any Sunday into the country, and follow him. Look! he is yonder before us! It is two o'clock; his wife is at vespers, and he is in his Sunday's clothes. I warrant you he is going to see his mistress!" His mistress! Yes; but tropically. The peasant's mistress is his Land; he loves it with intensest delight, with procreative love. Happy for France that it is so; for let it once cease, and the land is barren from that instant. She brings forth because she is loved. "La terre le veut ainsi, pour produire; autrement, elle ne donnerait rien, cette pauvre terre de France, sans bestiaux presque et sans engrais." By Love, the reader will understand needful care and culture, but he will err in the interpretation. It is something far more poetical and French. The peasant having arrived face to face with his mistress, "folds his arms, stops, looks serious and thoughtful; he looks a long, long time, and seems to forget himself; at last, if he fancies himself overlooked, if he perceives any body passing, he moves slowly away; after a few steps, he stops, turns round, and casts upon his land one last profound and melancholy look: but to the keen-sighted, that look is full of passion, full of heart, full of devotion. If that be not love, (!) by what token shall we know it in this world? It is love—do not laugh." It were indeed very easy to laugh, but, thus intreated, we forbear, and proceed. To love is to covet possession. To have a bit of land, means "you shall not be a mercenary, to be hired to-day and turned off to-morrow. You shall not be a serf for your daily bread. You shall be free!" To acquire that land, the peasant will consent to any thing, even to lose sight of it. To obtain it he will sell his life, and go to meet death in Africa. The peasant is very aspiring; he has been a soldier; he believes in impossibilities. The acquisition of land is for him a combat; "he goes to it as he would to the charge, and will not retreat. It is his battle of Austerlitz; he will win it; it will be a desperate struggle, he knows, but he has seen plenty of these under his old commander;" and accordingly this brave and warlike peasant borrows money of a usurer at seven, eight, or ten per cent, to purchase a piece of earth that shall bring him in two. "Heroic man—are you surprised, if, meeting him on that land which devours him, you find him so gloomy?" Certainly not. "If you meet him," says M. Michelet—heroic and sublime as he is—"do not ask him your road; if he answers, he may perhaps induce you to turn your back on the place you are going to." It is the way with atrabilious heroes. What is to be done? "We must take serious measures for defending the nobility;" that is to say—the peasantry who are in the hands of the usurers. Alter the laws. This "vast and profound," but very much involved "legion of peasant-soldier proprietors," are the People: the people are France. France is a principle, "a great political principle. It must be defended at any cost. As a principle, she must live. Live for the salvation of the world (!!) In the midst of his difficulties, the peasant learns to envy the town workman. He sees him on Sunday walking about like a gentleman, and thinks he is as free as a bird; he believes that a man who carries his trade with him, not caring a straw for the seasons, is a lord of the creation: he remembers his own liabilities to the usurer—and, lo! we have arrived at bondage and hatred, No. 1.

But the Workman, after all, is not so well off as he looks in his Sunday's best. Work fluctuates, and at times there is a want of work altogether: moreover, there are wicked cabarets and cafés, that play havoc with his four or five francs per diem. And, above all, there is that tremendous rival, with lungs of iron that know no rest, and never cease, whom men call Machinery, and who laughs the skill and strength of man to scorn. "It is humiliating," says the historian, "to behold, in presence of machinery, man fallen so low. The head is giddy, and the heart oppressed, when, for the first time, we visit those fairy halls, where iron and copper of a dazzling polish seem moving of themselves, and to have both thought and will, whilst pale and feeble man is the humble servant of those giants of steel." No reverie, no musing is allowed in the temples of Machinery. The Lollards, those mystic weavers of the middle ages, received their name, because, whilst working, they lulled, or hummed in an under tone some nursery rhyme that cheered then in their labour: for it is wisely said by our author, who can speak like a prophet and a sage when he will—shame to him when he speaks otherwise!—that "in the manual labours subject to our impulse, our inmost thought becomes identified with the work, puts it in its proper place; and the inert instrument, to which we impart the movement, far from being an obstacle to the spiritual movement, becomes its aid and companion. The rhythm of the shuttle, pushed forth and pulled back at equal periods, associated itself (in the case of the Lollards) with the rhythm of the heart; in the evening, it often happened, that, together with the cloth, a hymn, a lamentation, was woven to the self-same numbers." No human heart beats harmoniously with the thunder of machinery, whose abode is the real hell of ennui. "It seems, during those long hours, as if another heart, common to all, had taken its place—a metallic, indifferent, pitiless heart." Pitiless, indeed, if it degrade the human creature to the level of the brute. "The manufactory is a world of iron, a kingdom of necessity and fatality. The only living thing there is the severity of the foreman; there they often punish, but never reward. There man feels himself so little man, that as soon as ever he comes out, he must greedily seek the most intense excitement of the human faculties, that which concentrates the sentiment of boundless liberty in the short moment of a delicious dream. This excitement is intoxication, especially the intoxication of love." The workman becomes vicious; but extreme physical dependency, the claims of instinctive life, which once more revert to dependency, moral impotency, and the void of mind, are the causes of his vices. Talk of the bondage of the peasant! What is his slavery to that of the workman! He was at least a happy child. He lived in the air and played. He was at liberty, whilst his body and his strength were forming: the chains did not gall him till his wrist was hard: he was not called upon to suffer, before his spirit was sufficient to cope with life. Yes, there is positive bondage here.

And the Artisan? Is he at liberty? As an apprentice-boy, he is already in bondage. "Whatever annoys or irritates his master or his master's wife, falls very often upon his shoulders. A bankruptcy happens, the apprentice is beaten: the master comes home drunk, the apprentice is beaten: the work is slack or pressing, he is beaten all the same." Apprenticeship over, the artisan marries—has a wife, family; expense, misery! His children grow up, and the mother (we are in France, and M. Michelet speaks) is ambitious. Drawing will be serviceable, says the mother, to her boy in his business. She pinches herself for a few sous for crayons and paper, and a miserable artist is made of one who would have proved a good workman. Or an inspired artist, the child of labour, is left an orphan and a beggar in the midst of his aspirations and struggles towards distinction: to subsist, he must desert art, and become a workman like his father. "All his life he will curse his fate; he will work here, but his soul will be elsewhere." If he weds, and has a family—that family will become less and less loved. "A man embittered in such a struggle, and wholly intent on personal progress, considers every thing else of little value. He weans himself even from his native land imputing to it the injustice of fate." And so there is imprisonment and hatred also here.

Look at the Manufacturer. The manufacturers of France have, generally speaking, all been workmen. Six hundred thousand have become manufacturers or tradesmen since the peace. "Those brave men, who, returning from war, wheeled suddenly to the right-about towards Industry, charged as for an onset, and without difficulty carried every position." But they brought to commerce more of the violence of military life than the sentiment of honour, and treated unmercifully two classes of individuals, viz. the workman and the consumer. Towards the latter they behaved as the female shopkeepers ransomed the Cossacks in 1815. They sold at false weight, false die, false measure. With respect to the former, they applied to industry the great imperial principle—sacrifice men to abridge warfare. Men were pressed in town and country, and the conscripts of labour were placed at the pace of the machine, and required to be, like it—indefatigable. The successors of these men, the present manufacturers, pay the penalty of their fathers' misdeeds. Their reputation is gone in the market—they cannot get on. "Most of them would be heartily glad to retire if they could; but they are engaged, they must go on—march! march!" Such men are not likely to be tender-hearted. They are unfeeling to their workmen, for the money-lender is unfeeling to them. To live, the manufacturer must borrow. To get back his interest he has recourse to the workmen, for the consumer is on his guard. The former present themselves in crowds, and are obtained at any price. But a glut in the market compels the manufacturer to sell at a loss; the lowness of wages, which is death to the workman, is no longer profitable to the master, and the consumer alone gains by it. May not bondage and hatred be discerned in the present condition of the French manufacturer?

We come to the Tradesman. "The tradesman is the tyrant of the manufacturer. He pays him back all the annoyance and vexations of the purchaser." The purchaser of to-day wishes to buy for nothing: he requires two things, a showy article and the lowest price. The tradesman must deceive or perish. His life is made up of two warfares—one of cheating and cunning against the purchaser; the other of vexations and unreasonableness against the manufacturer. We have said that no one can talk more wisely than the author of The People when he is so disposed. The picture of the tradesman is drawn with a masterly hand. The original may be found here as well as in France, and is, in truth, the creation of the unwholesome time in which we live rather than of any particular city or state.

"The repugnance for industry exhibited by the noble republics of antiquity, and the haughty barons in the middle ages, is doubtless unreasonable, if by industry we understand those complicated fabrics which require science and art, or a grand wholesale trade, which requires such a variety of knowledge, information, and combination. But this repugnance is truly reasonable when it relates to the ordinary usages of commerce, the miserable necessity in which the tradesman finds himself of lying, cheating, and adulterating.

"I do not hesitate to affirm, that, for a man of honour, the position of the most dependent working man is free in comparison with this. A serf in body, he is free in soul. To enslave his soul on the contrary and his tongue, to be obliged, from morning till night, to disguise his thoughts, this is the lowest state of slavery.

"It is singular that it is precisely for honour that he lies every day, viz. to honour his affairs. Dishonour for him is not falsehood, but bankruptcy. Rather than fail, commercial honour will urge him on to the point at which fraud is equivalent to robbery, adulteration to poisoning; a gentle poisoning, I know, with small doses, which kill only in the long run.

"The manufacturer, and even the artisan, have two things which, in spite of work, render their lot better than that of the tradesman—

"First.—The tradesman does not create; he has not the important happiness—worthy of a man—to produce something—to see his work growing under his hand, assuming a form, becoming harmonious, responding to its framer by its progress, and thus consoling his ennui and his trouble.

"Secondly.—Another awful disadvantage, in my opinion, is, the tradesman is obliged to please. The workman gives his time, the manufacturer his merchandise, for so much money: that is a simple contract which is not humiliating, neither has occasion to flatter. They are not obliged, often with a lacerated heart and tearful eyes, to be amiable and gay on a sudden, like the lady behind the counter. The tradesman, though uneasy, and tormented to death about a bill that falls due to-morrow, must smile, and give himself up by a cruel effort to the prating of some young fashionable lady, who makes him unfold a hundred pieces, chats for two hours, and, after all, departs without a purchase. He must please, and so must his wife. He has staked in trade, not only his wealth, his person, and his life, but often his family."

We need not ask, is bondage here? or stay to inquire whether the condition of the tradesman thus described is likelier to engender love or hatred towards mankind.

The Official, too, is enslaved. A vast proportion of men on the Continent are officials. Great efforts and great sacrifices are undergone to make the hope of the humble house a government servant. And in France what does this mean? It means to serve a hard master, and to receive ill wages for the service, to be subject to instant dismissal at the will of an arbitrary overseer, to pass a life of changes, journeys, and sudden transportations. A baker's boy at Paris earns more than two custom-house officers, more than a lieutenant of infantry, more than many a magistrate, more than the majority of professions; he earns as much as six parish schoolmasters.

"Shame! infamy! The nation that pays the least to those that instruct the people (let us blush to confess it) is France. I speak of the France of these days. On the contrary, the true France, that of the Revolution, declared that teaching was a holy office, that the schoolmaster was equal to the priest. I do not conceal it; of all the miseries of the present day, there is not one that grieves me more. The most deserving, the most miserable, the most neglected man in France is the schoolmaster. The state, which does not even know what are its true instruments and its strength, that does not suspect that its most powerful moral lever is this class of men—the state, I say, abandons him to the enemy of the state—bondage; heavy bondage! I find it among the high and the low in every degree, crushing the most worthy, the most humble, the most deserving!"

The Rich Man and the Bourgeois do not escape the curse that attaches to every other class: they too are in bondage. The ancient bourgeoisie was characterized by security, the present has no such characteristic. It lives in timidity and fear. It has risen from the Revolution, aspires to nobility, feels none, and is jealous of the advancing masses. The ancient bourgeois was consistent. "He admired himself in his privileges, wanted to extend them, and looked upwards. Our man looks downwards: he sees the crowd ascending behind him, even as he ascended; he does not like it to mount; he retreats, and holds fast to the side of power. Does he avow to himself his retrograde tendency? Seldom, for his part is adverse to it; he remains almost always in this contradictory position—a liberal in principle, an egotist in practice, wanting, yet not willing. If there remain any thing French within him, he quiets it by the reading of some innocently growling, or pacifically warlike newspaper."

The rich man of to-day was poor yesterday. He was the very artisan, the soldier, the peasant, whom he now avoids. He has the false notion, that people gain only by taking from others. He will not let his companions of yesterday ascend the ladder by which he has mounted, lest in the ascent he should lose something. He does not know that "every flood of rising people brings with it a flood of new wealth." He shuts himself up in his class, in his little circle of habits, closes the door, and carefully guards—a nonentity. To maintain his position, the rich man withdraws from the people—is insulated—and, therefore, in bondage.

Here let us stop. What is it that we have seen? The peasant in fetters, the workman oppressed, the artisan crippled, the manufacturers embarrassed, the tradesman corrupted, the official in misery, the rich man exiled—all in bondage, all hating one another, and all constituting the life and marrow of the great and civilized country, to whose deplorable condition M. Michelet especially invites our attention. Deplorable, said we? Oh, far from it! The calamity that would crush any other nation, has a far different effect upon France. Bondage and hatred may exist, misery may eat like a canker-worm at the heart of the empire; but France, great, glorious, military, and beautiful, is consumed only to rise phœnix-like, fairer and younger, from her ashes. The French peasant may be in fetters, but he is also the nobleman of the world—the only nobleman remaining, "whilst Europe has continued plebeian." (!) "It is said the Revolution has suppressed the nobility, but it is just the reverse; it has made thirty-four millions of nobles. When an emigrant was boasting of the glory or his ancestors, a peasant, who had been successful in the field, replied, 'I am an ancestor.'" "The strongest foundation that any nation has had since the Roman empire, is found in the peasantry of France." "It is by that that France is formidable to the world, and at the same time ready to aid it; it is this that the world looks upon with fear and hope. What, in fact, is it? The army of the future on the day the barbarians appear." If such is the picture of a peasantry in bondage, what must we expect from a peasantry at liberty? The workmen, as we have seen, are vicious enough, yet they are the most sociable and gentlest creatures in the universe. Nothing moves them to violence; if you starve them, they will wait; if you kill them, they are resigned; they are the least fortunate, but the most charitable; they know not what hatred is; the more you persecute, the more they love you. If in our haste we called these men degraded, we recall our words, for M. Michelet says that they stand amongst the highest "in the estimation of God." We told you just now, always upon the authority of our author, what rascals the French manufacturers were; and how the unfeeling masters of to-day are paying the penalty of their fathers' frauds and evil practices. We hinted, too, at the symptoms of decay already visible in their condition. But we did not tell you that France manufactures, in a spirit of self-denial that cannot be too strongly commended, for the whole world, who come to her, "buy her patterns, which they go and copy, ill or well, at home. Many an Englishman has declared, in an inquiry, that he has a house in Paris to have patterns. A few pieces purchased at Paris, Lyons, or in Alsatia, and afterwards copied abroad, are sufficient for the English and German counterfeiter to inundate the world. It is like the book-trade. France writes and Belgium sells." It was stated that the official is cruelly paid for his labour, and M. Michelet further hints, that peculation is but too often the grievous consequence. In England this would be fatal to a man's self-respect, and subject him to bondage in more ways than one. But, across the Channel, Providence miraculously interposes, and even rescues the official in the hour of difficulty, for the honour and glory of la belle France. "Yes, at the moment of fainting, the culprit stops short without knowing why——because he feels upon his face the invisible spirit of the heroes of our wars, the breath of the old flag!!"

It is really very difficult to go on satisfactorily with such a writer as this. If there be truth in the picture which he draws of his country's misery, there must be falsehood in the language with which he paints her pre-eminence, and battles for her unapproachable perfection. If she be perfect, the vital sores that have been presented to us exist not in her, but only in the imagination of the enthusiastic and deluded writer. Upon one page it is written that the situation of France is so serious, that there is no longer room for hesitation. France is "hourly declining, engulfed like an Atalantis." Five minutes afterwards, "the idea of our ruin is absurd, ridiculous. For who has a literature? Who still sways the mind of Europe? We, weak as we are. Who has an army? We alone." What is the conclusion which any unprejudiced reader would draw from the painful details which M. Michelet has deemed it his paramount duty to bring before the notice of mankind, and especially to the consciences of the French nation itself? Simply this—that France, disabled and diseased, is weak, and feebler than many other nations of the world. The conclusion of M. Michelet is the very opposite one. "Let France be united for an instant, she is strong as the world. England and Russia, two feeble bloated giants, impose an illusion on Europe. Great empires, weak people!" So it is throughout. M. Michelet leaves far behind him the butcher, who would not suffer any man to call his dog an ugly name but himself. You must not only utter no syllable of condemnation against his glorious country, but you must be prepared to regard the abuse of the author as so much panegyric.

The means of enfranchisement suggested by the poetic historian are as fanciful as the bondage itself appears to be. Freedom for every class is to be gained by LOVE. Love for the native country: in other words, Frenchmen of every class are to believe that there never existed, that there never will exist, a country so great as their own; and then, as if by a charm, all their troubles will cease, their sorrow will be turned into joy—their imprisonment to liberty, such as mankind have never yet witnessed, such as no children of the great human family are capable of enjoying, but the darlings and favourites of God—beloved France. In the nursery, we do not correct the young by flattery and cajolery. The surgeon does not hesitate to cut to the marrow, if the safety of the patient depend upon the bold employment of the knife; but neither monitor nor doctor in France may approach the faults and corruptions of her people without doing homage to the one, and viciously tampering with the other. What but insult is the following balderdash offered to a great people as a remedy for physical suffering—cruelty—oppression—want?

"Say not, I beseech you, that it is nothing at all to be born in the country surrounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the ocean. Take the poorest man, starving in rags, him whom you suppose to be occupied solely with material wants. He will tell you it is an inheritance of itself to participate in this immense glory, this unique legend, which constitutes the talk of the world. He well knows that if he were to go to the most remote desert of the globe, under the equator or the poles, he would find Napoleon, our armies, our grand history, to shelter and protect him; that the children would come to him, that the old men would hold their peace, and entreat him to speak, and that to hear him only mention those names, they would kiss the hem of his garment."

Yes—the thing has come to pass in Africa, at Tahiti, on the coast of Madagascar, whence the savages repulsed, with vindictive hatred, their French invaders, and refused even to correspond with them save through the medium of another nation. The feelings with which the natives of the Marquesas regard at the present moment the embroidered gentry, who, "protected by their grand history," and headed by that valiant fighting man, Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars, took unwarrantable possession of their shores, are of course faithfully described in the above nonsensical outburst; and are not, as every body knows, those of fear and utter detestation for a crew of wicked mountebanks and gold-laced ruffians. Of course the children come to Du Petit Thouars, and the old men hold their peace, and kiss the hem of his regimentals; and that's the very reason why the said Du Petit points the fatal tubes of his heavy, double-banked frigates and corvettes at the fragile bamboo sheds that lie timidly and harmlessly in a grove of cocoa-nuts.

"For our part, whatever happens to us, poor or rich, happy or unhappy, while on this side of the grave, we will ever thank God for having given us this great France for our native land; and that not only on account of the many glorious deeds she has performed, but because in her we find especially at once the representative of the liberties of the world, and the country that links all others together by sympathetic ties—the initiation to universal love. This last feature is so strong in France, that she has often forgotten herself(!!) We must at present remind her of herself, and beseech her to love all the nations less than herself.

"Doubtless, every great nation represents an idea important to the human race. But, gracious heaven! how much more true is this of France! Suppose for a moment that she were eclipsed, at an end, the sympathetic bond of the world would be loosened, dissolved, and probably destroyed. Love, that constitutes the life of the world, would be wounded in its most vital part. The earth would enter into the frozen age, where other worlds close at hand have already landed."

We have never wittingly done injustice either to France or her people; but we confess we had no notion of the claims of both upon our regard and applause, until they were prominently put before us by her somewhat Quixotic historian.

In the first place, if you would heap up all the blood, the gold, the efforts of every kind, that each nation has expended for disinterested matters that were to be profitable only to the world, France would have a pyramid that would reach to heaven; "and yours, oh nations! all of you put together—oh yours! the pile of your sacrifices would reach up to the knee of an infant!"

And then God enlightens it more than any other nation, for she sees in the darkest night, when others can no longer distinguish. "During that dreadful darkness which often prevailed in the middle ages, and since, nobody perceived the sky. France alone saw it."

Rome is nowhere but in France. Rome held the pontificate of the dark ages—the royalty of the obscure; and France has been the pontiff of the ages of light.

Every other history is mutilated. France's is alone complete. Take the history of Italy, the last centuries are wanting; take the history of Germany or of England, the first are missing; take that of France, with it you know the world. Christianity has promised, France has performed. "The Christian had the faith that a God-made man would make a people of brothers, and would, sooner or later, unite the world in one and the same heart. This has not yet been verified, but it will be verified in us." The great and universal legend of France is the only complete one; other nations have only special legends which the world has not accepted. The natural legend of France, on the contrary, "is an immense, uninterrupted stream of light, a true milky way, upon which the world has ever its eyes fixed." An American once said, that for every man the first country is his native land, and the second is France. This surely was praise sufficient. But M. Michelet is very greedy of praise. "How many," says he, "like better to live here than in their own country! As soon as ever they can break for a moment the thread that binds them, they come, poor birds of passage, to settle, take refuge, and enjoy here at least a moment's vital heat. They tacitly avow that this is the universal country." Beau Brummel certainly avowed it; but then he, "poor bird of passage," flew in a night from his own nest, to settle, take refuge, and enjoy a moment's vital peace in France, away from duns and creditors. Many, in similar circumstances, would unquestionably prefer Paris to London, provided they could break the thread which attaches them to their domestic responsibilities. France is the infant Solomon sitting in judgment. Who, but she, has preserved the tradition of the law? She has given her soul to the world, and the world is living on it now; but, strange condition! "what she has left is what she has given away. Come, listen to me well, and learn, oh nations! what without us you would never have learned:—the more one gives, the more one keeps. Her spirit may slumber within her, but it is always entire, and ever on the point of waking in its might."

Now all this must be taught to the infant as soon as it can lisp, and he will, no doubt, perfectly understand and appreciate it. The regeneration of France (which is already so perfect, and is, besides, the great exemplar of mankind) depends upon the child's proper appreciation of his birthplace. If he will believe all that has been said, he is far on the road, but by no means at the end of his journey. As soon as he is breeched, his mother must become his instructor, and increase the dose by some such foolish proceeding as the following:—

"Let her take him on St John's Day, when the earth performs her annual miracle, when every herb is in flower, when the plant seems to grow while you behold it; let her take him into the garden, embrace him, and say to him tenderly, 'You love me, you know only me. Well, listen! I am not all. You have another mother. All of us, men, women, children, animals, plants, and whatever has life, we have all a tender mother, who is ever feeding us, invisible, but present. Love her, my dear child; let us embrace her with all our hearts.'

"Let there be nothing more. No metaphysics that destroy the impression. Let him brood over that sublime and tender mystery, which his whole life will not suffice to clear up. That is a day he will never forget. Throughout all the trials of life and the intricacies of science, amid all his passions and stormy nights, the gentle sun of St John's Day will ever illumine the deepest recesses of his heart with the immortal blossom of the purest, best love."

The little gentleman, however, is not done with yet. The dose is not yet strong enough, although quite as strong as his mother, gentle creature, could mix it. The early jacket is discarded in favour of the swallow-tailed coat, and the youth passes into the hands of his father:—

"His father takes him—'tis a great public festival—immense crowds in Paris—he leads him from Notre Dame to the Louvre, the Tuileries, the triumphal arch. From some roof or terrace, he shows him the people, the army passing, the bayonets clashing and glittering, and the tricolored flag. In the moments of expectation especially, before the fête, by the fantastic reflections of the illumination, in that awful silence which suddenly takes place in that dark ocean of people, he stoops towards him and says, 'There, my son, look, there is France—there is your native country! All this is like one man, one soul, one heart. They would all die for one; and each man ought also to live and die for all. Those men passing yonder, who are armed, and now departing, are going away to fight for us. They leave here their father, their aged mother, who will want them. You will do the same; you will never forget that your mother is France.'"

The education is very nearly completed. The father suffers the swallow-tail to wear out, the incipient mustache to take root, and then he leads his second and better self to the mountain-side. This time he does not stoop over him, for the youth is erect, and is as big a man as his father. "Climb that mountain, my son," says the venerable gentleman, "provided it be high enough; look to the four winds, you will see nothing but enemies."

And so, by a very roundabout process, we reach the heart of the mystery. M. Michelet loves fighting—remembers Waterloo—is game—is eager for another round, and in his heart believes one Frenchman to be equal to at least half a dozen Englishmen. He burns for one more trial of strength—a last decisive tussle; and he writes a philosophical work to prove the physical bout essential to the dignity, the grandeur, and the redemption of his country. Every time, we repeat the words, that he looks upon a bayonet, his heart bounds within him, and his only hope, teacher and professor of the College of France though he be, rests in trumpets, drums, swords, the epaulette, the sabredash, and the tricolor.

We have surely wasted ink enough upon this theme. In common with ourselves, the reader will regard with due commiseration, a manifestation of wicked folly, which will do no harm only because it comes in an age not ripe for bloodshed, or happily too humanized for unprovoked, gratuitous warfare; and because the French people themselves, under a politic king and a peace-seeking ministry, have learned a little to regard the blessings of undisturbed domestic quietness. We quit the main subject of M. Michelet's book, to draw attention to a few insulated passages worthy of the better days of the author, and certainly out of place in the present volume. It were not possible for M. Michelet to write four hundred pages that should not, here and there, give evidence of his great genius—his general common sense, and his touching sympathy for the suffering and the oppressed. There are passages in the work under consideration that have universal interest, and claim universal attention; his appeals on behalf of children and women, the most neglected and oppressed of the community, let them be found where they may, in England or in France, in Europe or in Asia, are instinct with truthfulness and honest vigour; his vindication of the mission of the child, philosophical and just, is beaming with the light that burns so steadily and clearly in the poems of our own Wordsworth, which have especial reference to the holy character of the "Father of the Man."

It is in one of the insulated passages of which we speak, that M. Michelet bitterly and very sensibly complains of the exclusive regard which modern romance writers have shown for the prisons and kennels, the monsters and thieves of civilized societies; of the disposition every where exhibited to descend rather than ascend for the choice of a subject, or the selection of a hero. We have felt the inconvenience of the same sickly taste in this country, and can understand the complainings over productions similar to that of The Mysteries of Paris, whilst we remember our own inferior and not less baneful Dick Turpins and Jack Sheppards. Hurtful to the morals of a nation, these productions are equally unjust to the national character. We have drawn our estimate of the present literature of France from what we have seen and heard of her least healthy writers. As well might the novels of Mr Ainsworth, or the miserable burlesques of Mr Albert Smith, be accepted as the representatives of the Romance and Drama of the modern English school. It is not one of the least crimes of which these unwholesome writers are guilty, that they present to their own countrymen, and to the world at large, only foul exceptions, hideously exaggerated, which they would have us believe are faithful pictures of the mass; and in their eager endeavours to interest and excite the unthinking many, rouse the disgust and alarm of all well-constituted and thoughtful minds. The perilous consequences of popular literature in France are finely pointed out by M. Michelet. The timid take fright, when the people are represented as monsters in the books which are greedily devoured, and intensely applauded by the majority of their readers. "What!" cry the citizens, "are the people so constituted? Then, let us increase our police, arm ourselves, shut our doors, and bolt them." And all the alarm has been occasioned by a conceited, and it may be clever, coxcomb, who, descending from his drawing-room, has asked the first passenger in the street where-abouts the People lived. He met with a fool, who directed him to the galleys, the prisons, and the stews.

"One day," writes M. Michelet, "there came a man to the famous Themistocles, and proposed to him an art of memory. He answered bitterly, 'Give me rather the art of forgetfulness.' May God give me this art, to forget from this moment all your monsters, your fantastic creations, those shocking exceptions with which you perplex my subject! You go about, spyglass in hand; you hunt in the gutters, and find there some dirty filthy object, and bring it to us, exclaiming—'Triumph! we have found the people!'

"To interest us in them, they show them to us forcing doors and picking locks. To these picturesque descriptions they add those profound theories, by which the People, if we listen to them, justify themselves in their own eyes for this crusade against property. Truly, it is a great misery, in addition to so many others, for them to have these imprudent friends. These theories and these acts are by no means of the people. The mass is, doubtless, neither pure nor irreproachable; but still, if you want to characterise it by the idea which prevails in the immense majority, you will find it occupied in founding by toil, economy, and the most respectable means, the immense work which constitutes the strength of this country, the participation of all classes in property."

We believe it sincerely and heartily. The great writers of all ages have believed it. Your low-minded scribblers have never doubted it; but it is far easier to depict the limited class, with its violence and felony, its startling incidents and painful murders—far less difficult to give picturesque effect to its nauseous jargon and offensive situations, than it is to work the simple portraiture of a whole community, who have nothing to offer to the artist but the delicate and unobtrusive material, such as Goldsmith could weave into a fabric whose colour and texture shall endure and enchant for all time.

"I feel," continues M. Michelet, with great tenderness—"I feel I am alone, and I should be sad indeed if I had not with me my faith and hope. I see myself weak, both by nature and my previous works, in presence of this mighty subject, as at the foot of a gigantic monument, that I must move all alone. Alas! how disfigured it is to-day; how loaded with foreign accumulations, moss, and mouldiness; spoilt by the rain and mud, and by the injuries it has received from passengers! The painter, the man of art for art, comes and looks at it; what pleases him is precisely that moss. But I would pluck it off. Painter, now passing by! This is not a plaything of art—this is our altar!"

"To know the life of the people, their toils and sufferings," he continues, "I have but to interrogate my own memory." He has himself sprung from the labouring population. Before he wrote books, he composed them in the literal sense of that term. He arranged letters before he grouped ideas; the sadness of the workshop, and the wearisomeness of long hours, are things known to his experience. The short narrative of his early struggles forms another beautiful passage in this singular and very unequal production. The great lesson which he brought with him from his season of difficulty and affliction, is one that authorizes him to approach the people as a teacher and a friend, and ought to have inspired him with nobler aims than he puts forth to-day. He has seen the disorders of destitution, the vices of misery; but he has seldom found them extinguishing original goodness of heart, or interfering with the noble sentiments that adorn the lowest as well as the highest of mankind. There is nothing new, he tells us, in this observation. At the time of the cholera in France, every body beheld one class eager to adopt the orphan children. What class was that? The Poor.

Whilst in poverty himself, his soul was kept free from envy by noting the unremitting devotedness, the indefatigable sacrifices of hard-working families—a devotedness, he assures us, not even exhausted in the immolation of one life, but often continued from one to another for several generations.

The two families from which he descended were originally peasants. These families being very large, many of his father's and mother's brothers and sisters would not marry, in order that they might the better contribute to the education of some of the boys, whom they sent to college. This was a sacrifice of which he was early made aware, and which he never forgot. His grandfather, a music-master of Laon, came to Paris with his little savings after the Reign of Terror, where his son, the author's father, was employed at the Imprimerie des Assignats. His little wealth was made over to the same son, and all was invested in a printing-office. To facilitate the arrangement, a brother and a sister of the eldest son would not marry, but the latter espoused a sober damsel of Ardennes. M. Michelet, the child of this industrious pair, was born in the year 1798 in the choir of a church of nuns, then occupied by the printing-office. "Occupied, I say, but not profaned; for what is the Press in modern times but the holy ark?"

The printing-office, prosperous at first, fed by the debates of the assemblies and the news of the armies, was overthrown in 1800 by the general suppression of the newspapers. The printer was allowed to publish only an ecclesiastical journal; and even this sanction was withdrawn in favour of a priest whom Napoleon thought safe, but was mistaken. The family of M. Michelet was ruined. They had but one resource; it was to print for their creditors a few works belonging to the printer. They had no longer any journeymen; they did the work themselves. The father, who was occupied with his employment abroad, could render no assistance, but the mother, though sick, turned binder, cut and folded. The child—the future historian—was the compositor; the grandfather, very old and feeble, betook himself to the hard work of the press, and printed with his palsied hands.

The young compositor, at twelve years of age, knew four words of Latin which he had picked up from an old bookseller, who had been a village teacher, and doted on grammar. The scene of the lad's labors—his workshop—was a cellar. For company he had occasionally his grandfather who came to see them, and always, without interruption, an industrious spider, that worked at the compositor's side, and even more assiduously than he. There were severe privations to undergo, but there was also much compensation.

"I had the kindness of my parents, and their faith in my future prospects, a faith which is truly inexplicable, when I reflect how backward I was. Save the binding duties of my work, I enjoyed extreme independence, which I never abused. I was apprenticed, but without being in contact with coarse-minded people, whose brutality, perhaps, would have crushed the precious blossom of liberty within me. In the morning, before work, I went to my old grammarian, who gave me a task of five or six lines. I have retained thus much; that the quantity of work has much less to do with it than is supposed; children can imbibe but a very little every day; like a vase with a narrow neck, pour little or pour much, you will never get a great deal in at a time."

We have said that in his struggles the aspiring boy knew nothing of envy. It is to-day his solemn belief that man would never know envy of himself, he must be taught it. The year 1813 arrived, and the home of the historian, as well as France herself—it was the time of Moscow—looked very cheerless. The penury of the family was extreme. It was proposed to get the compositor a situation in the Imperial printing-office. The parents, more fond than reasonable, refused the offer, and strong in the belief that the child would yet save the household, obtained an entrance for him in the college of Charlemagne. The tale is told. From that hour he rose. His studies ended soon and well. In the year 1821 he procured, by competition, a professorship in a college. In 1827, two works, which appeared at the same time—Vico and Précis d'Histoire Moderne—gained him a professorship in the Ecole Normale.

"I grew up like grass between two paving-stones; but this grass has retained its sap as much as that of the Alps. My very solitude in Paris, my free study, and my free teaching, (ever free and every where the same,) have raised without altering me. They who rise almost always lose by it; because they become changed, they become mongrels, bastards; they lose the originality of their own class without gaining that of another. The difficulty is not to rise, but in rising to remain one's self."

There is also another difficulty; one which, judging from the volume before us, M. Michelet has yet to overcome: we mean the difficulty—after education, and after achieving the heights to which honourable ambition aspires—of forgetting the terrible and bitter punishment of early penury and trouble; of cherishing no longer the anger and hatred that were borne against the world, whilst the struggler looked upon it as a world in arms against him. The author of The People tells us, that in his saddest hours he knew no envy towards mankind; but he acknowledges also, that in his sufferings, he deemed all rich men, all men, bad; that he pined into a misanthropic humour, and, in the most deserted quarters of Paris, sought the most deserted streets. "I conceived an excessive antipathy against the human species." The writer, to use his own expression, "is raised, but not altered." The antipathy, somewhat chastened by prosperity, is not removed. It takes a bodily form in the volume that teaches France to regard the earth as her enemy, and calls upon her to vindicate her pre-eminence and glory in the field of battle and of blood.