*

on the visible standard of faith and duty set before it. Take away the Bible and the activity of the Christian ministry from the people of this island, and what would they become? Yet that is to some extent the condition in which a large proportion of the people of France find themselves. The defects of such a society are precisely those which might be anticipated in a community in which the religious sanction of moral law has lost its power. A recent theological writer who has investigated with acuteness the causes of the corruption and decay of the Roman people under the Emperors, sums them up in one expressive phrase the separation of religion and morality. There was religion in Rome, but it was the religion of paganism : there was morality, but it was the morality of philosophers. The two great elements of social law were disunited. Something of the same kind may perhaps be traced in France, and the condition of the country presents obvious and striking resemblances to that with which we are familiar in the pages of Roman historians and Roman satirists.

We have now cursorily noticed the most important of the ancient institutions of France, swept away by the Revolution. Let us proceed to consider what the Revolution has substituted for them. It has conferred upon the people equal civil and political rights extending to universal suffrage, and these are occasionally exercised directly and in the last resort, so as virtually to supersede the representative system. It has established a system of administration, in all departments of government, which derives its strength from the central authority and not from the people. It maintains a large permanent army raised by conscription. It applies to the upper classes a system of education of which the Ecole Polytechnique is the type; and it methodises in a high degree all the other steps of distinction and advancement in life. It encourages small landed property, and discourages large estates, by the operation of the Civil Code in subdividing property. The Civil Code, which is the true root and fertile parent of the democratic social condition of France, limits the testamentary power, and virtually divides a man's property between his offspring in his lifetime, by the indefeasible recognition of their share in it; it renders almost impossible the accumulation of wealth in a family for several generations; it proscribes, prohibits, and defeats all trusts, settlements, entails, and limitations of real and personal property; and it favours the two prevailing passions of the people-the passion for equality and the passion for the acqui

*Irons' Bampton Lectures for 1870, p. 8.

sition of land. Under the operation of these causes and motives, the soil of France is greatly subdivided. Four or five millions of citizens and their families live by the cultivation of their own parcel of land and in the enjoyment of the political rights connected with it. They form a numerical majority in the State, and as they present an extraordinary degree of uniformity of taste, habit, and opinion throughout France, the probability is that without concert they will all act in the same manner. It was thus that, hating the Republic in 1848, they made Louis Napoleon their candidate, and ratified the coup d'état of 1851 by their votes. On broad principles of republican equality and universal suffrage, the peasantry are and ought to be the masters of France; and as they are vehemently opposed to the revolutionary doctrines of the great towns, the rural vote is, of the two, the basis of legality and order. That, however, is all that we can venture to say for it. It has been frequently contended that a peasant proprietary is the best guarantee against wars and revolutions that they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by such convulsionsand that France ought therefore of all countries to be the most exempt from them. Even so acute an observer as Lord Palmerston remarked, during a visit to France he made just before the Revolution of July 1830, that there were too many 'millions of owners of land and funds in France to let it be 'possible that anything should happen endangering the safety of one property or the other.' A natural inference, but one totally confuted by experience. There is no question that the millions of French proprietors of land and rentes detest revolution and dread war. It is equally true that they are nominally invested with supreme power in the State by their votes. Yet they can neither avert revolution nor resist war, nor even, as it seems, oppose a bold front to them when they occur. By all accounts this hapless peasant-this unit of French societythis individual of small possessions and absolute rights, might be a very happy and inoffensive member of society, if the world were always undisturbed; but throw him into perilous and critical circumstances, and he is as chaff before the wind. And this brings us nearer to the causes which appear to us to have contributed to this marvellous collapse of a great people. The action of democratic laws and habits seems to have pulverised and disintegrated the French nation--to have destroyed at once both the strength and cohesion of its elements-and to have given birth to a race of beings too small to deal with great emergencies, and too much divided to combine to meet them.

To render this novel state of things more intelligible to the

English reader, let us contrast it with the institutions familiar to ourselves. Everything in England is organised to give permanence and perpetuity to the relations of life and property. Property is held by one man under innumerable limitations for the benefit of others not only in the present generation, but in generations to come. Few men dispose absolutely of what they possess, unless it be self-acquired. All the relations of life are based on the principle of interdependence—all classes, ranks, and individuals are bound each to each by mutual duties. The land is worked by a combination of the labouring man, the farmer, and the landlord. Each of them is indispensable to the other. The labourer draws his wages independent of the variations of prices and seasons; the farmer is enabled to farm 300 acres with his capital, which would not purchase thirty acres of his own; the landlord is the chief capitalist, who in the long run bears the main risk of the adventure. He has his duties to his tenants, duties to his family, duties to the public. The public funds, and all sorts of securities, are held to an immense amount in trust under family settlements, by which the immediate interest and power of the individual are checked and circumscribed by the interests and rights of others. This mutual dependence, which exists with reference to property and its uses, runs through every branch of English social life: it is the basis of our credit: it is the secret of our enormous power of association: it is the breath of public life, for it begets a sense of duty to others on the one hand, and a sense of reliance on others on the other hand.

All this is reversed by the laws, manners, and social institutions of modern France. The Code Civil prohibits all the varied forms of limitation of the right of property. It recognises but one form of property which gives the absolute disposal of it. No man holds anything subject to the claims of another; no man has reversionary or other claims over the possessions of another. One consequence of this state of things is, that although the upper classes of France and America are less rich than those of England, they spend what they have more freely; they have in fact more to spend, because their capital, as well as the income derived from it, is at their own disposal. Just as we see in England that newly-enriched persons spend their money more freely than old territorial families. In the lower classes, the desire to obtain a certain possession is increased by the sense of absolute property in it. But the owner of a small parcel of land becomes selfish and self-contained in proportion to this sense of individual power. The land suffices to maintain and employ himself and his family.

If he keep clear of the neighbouring money-lender, he is sole master of it. He owes nothing to the landlord; he asks nothing of the labourer.* His wants, his desires, and his sympathies are bounded within its limits. No doubt some advantage from this state of society is to be found in the self-reliance and independence it confers. But this advantage must be set off against the indifference it begets to the wants and claims of others. It engenders, therefore, a high degree of selfishness, accompanied by dislike and distrust of everything that interferes with it, and an indifference to more enlarged interests. To give a striking example of the effect of this state of society. The Code Civil, as is well known, compels a man to divide his land and other property equally amongst his children. The French peasant regards the extreme partition of his possessions as an evil only to be avoided by limiting the number of his descendants. He therefore restricts himself to two children. The most imperious of human passions is kept in check by this consideration. The interests of morality suffer; and the numerical strength of the population is stopped in its natural growth by a sordid view of personal interest. The effects of this check to the rural population are sufficiently obvious, and have been pointed out by us on a former occasion. Even the physical growth of the race is stunted by it. It can be arithmetically demonstrated that the conscription drains off the whole natural increase of the country, and the rural population of France is therefore almost stationary. The population of the towns tends, on the contrary, rapidly to increase by the immigration of a certain class of persons from the rural districts. But this class consists of those who, not being holders of land, and not choosing to accept the condition of agricultural labourers, are driven away by their own families

* In the villages of Auvergne where the soil is entirely divided between small proprietors, working on their own land, the last remaining landlords or large holders have been compelled to sell their estates because they find no labourers to cultivate them. With the exception of a few smiths, carpenters, and masons, who are useful to themselves, the peasant proprietors will not allow persons not of their own class to dwell in their villages: the superfluous population, for whom there is no land, are driven away to seek employment in towns.

† In Paris alone this immigration is calculated at three or four hundred thousand men in the last twenty years. Their fate has been singularly unfortunate, for after having laboured with their hands to rebuild the capital of France with unexampled splendour, it has devolved on them to defend it, and probably a considerable number of them will be found to have perished in the siege of Paris.

and by the custom of the country to seek employment in towns. They are therefore the most discontented portion of the nation. They readily adopt the loose habits and the loose social theories current amongst French ouvriers: they form what is termed the prolétariat of France, and having no stake in the country and no interest in maintaining its institutions, they readily become the turbulent partisans of republican, and even revolutionary, principles. It is amongst this class alone that the republic has any hold; by the mass of the people it is not only not desired, but dreaded and abhorred. Yet these are sufficiently numerous and powerful in the towns to overthrow many an established authority, and to make the establishment of a stable and free government a task of great difficulty. The democracy of the provinces is conservative. The democracy of the towns is destructive. But these opposite results arise from the same cause -an intensely selfish interest.

This selfishness of the small proprietor has been described by the best writers as individualism. Individual property, individual independence, individual gain, is the basis of democratic institutions. Let anyone observe an assembly of French peasants on a market day. All equal, all alike, all sharing one class of interests and passions, intolerant to excess of any superiority of intelligence, wealth, or power, they resemble the atoms of which a floating mass may be composed. In ordinary times their lives are industrious and contented. But they are wholly unprepared to meet an emergency: they are governed by no public spirit or sympathy with public objects.* Beyond their own narrow field of vision, they see and acknowledge nothing but the power of the Government. Such a people is trained to live under an absolute authority; and accordingly, if their opinion is asked on the subject, it is in favour of absolute authority that their votes are given. Should that absolute authority fail in the discharge of the public duties devolved upon it, there is nothing to protect such a people from anarchy or subjugation. The life of man is so short and the powers of a single generation so limited, that it is only by adding

* To cite another illustration from Auvergne. The communal or parish roads in France are made by the commune, which levies so many days' statute labour on its own members for the purpose. In Auvergne the communal roads are detestable, sometimes hardly exist. The reason given is that no man will consent to tax himself for a benefit he would share with his neighbours. The roads made by the State and the Department are, of course, excellent, but they are not in the control of the peasantry.