Note 78 — Chapter IV · RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

In Switzerland the cantons of Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva are strikingly in advance of Lucerne, Valais, and the forest cantons; they are not only superior in matters of education, but in matters of industry, of commerce, and of wealth; and their artistic and literary activity is greater. “In the United States,” says De Tocqueville, “the majority of the Catholics are poor.” In Canada the larger order of business interests, manufacturing, commerce, the principal shops in the cities, are in the hands of Protestants. M. Audiganne, in his studies on the labouring population in France, remarks on the superiority of the Protestants in respect to industry, and his testimony is the less suspicious because he does not attribute that superiority to Protestantism. “The majority of the labourers in Nîmes, notably the silk-weavers, are Catholics, while the captains of industry and of commerce, the capitalists in a word, belong to the Reformed religion.” “When a family has split into two branches, one of which has clung to the faith of its fathers, while the other has become Protestant, one almost always remarks in the former a progressive financial embarrassment, and in the other an increasing wealth.” “At Mazamet, the Elbœuf of the south of France, all the captains of industry with one exception are Protestants, while the great majority of the labourers are Catholics. And Catholic working men are, as a class, much less well educated than Protestant working men.” Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes members of the Reformed church had taken the lead in all branches of labour, and the Catholics, who found themselves unable to maintain a competition with them, had the practice of a number of different industries in which the latter excelled forbidden them by a series of edicts beginning with the year 1662. After their expulsion from France the Huguenots carried into England, into Prussia, into Holland, their spirit of enterprise and of economy; and enriched the districts in which they settled. The Germans owe some portion of their progress to Huguenot exiles. Refugees from the Revocation introduced different industries into England, among others the silk industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye De l’avenir des peuples catholiques.)