All citizens were free

Within the city, there were now no slaves, no serfs, no abject and outlaw caste of any kind, except the Jews who formed a separate city of their own. All citizens were free: all without exception had rights of some kind. The churches, monasteries, hospitals, and schools existed, in original design, mainly for the poor, the wretched, and the diseased. Christ loved the weak and the suffering.

And the doors of His house stood ever open to the .weak, the suffering, the halt, the blind, and the lame. The church of the Middle Ages suffered little children to come unto Him. The poorest, the weakest, the most abject, were welcome there. The Priest, the Monk, the Nun taught, clothed, and nursed the children of the poor, and the suffering poor. The leper was tended in lazar-houses, even it might be by kings and princesses, with the devotion of Christian self-sacrifice. For the first time in history there were schools, hospitals, poor-houses, for the most lowly, compassion for the most miserable, and consolation in Heaven for those who had found earth a Hell city tours istanbul.

The old Greek and Roman religion

The old Greek and Roman religion of external cleanness was turned into a sin. The outward and visible sign of sanctity now was to be unclean. No one was clean: but’ the devout Christian was unutterably foul. The tone of the Middle Ages in the matter of dirt was a form of mental disease.

Cooped up in castles and walled cities, with narrow courts and sunless alleys, they would pass day and night in the same clothes, within the same airless, gloomy, windowless, and pestiferous chambers; they would go to bed without night clothes, and sleep under uncleansed sheepskins and frieze rugs; they would wear the same leather, fur, and woollen garments for a lifetime, and even for successive generations; they ate their meals without forks, and covered up the orts with rushes; they flung their refuse out of the window into the street or piled it up in the back-yard; the streets were narrow, unpaved, crooked lanes through which, under the very palace turrets, men and beasts tramped knee-deep in noisome mire.

This was at intervals varied with fetid rivulets and open cesspools; every church was crammed with rotting corpses and surrounded with graveyards, sodden with cadaveric liquids, and strewn with disinterred bones. Round these charnel houses and pestiferous churches were piled old decaying wooden houses, their sole air being these deadly exhalations, and their sole water supply being these polluted streams or wells dug in this reeking soil. Even in the palaces and castles of the rich the same bestial habits prevailed. Prisoners rotted in noisome dungeons under the banqueting hall; corpses were buried under the floor of the private chapel; scores of soldiers and attendants slept in gangs for months together in the same hall or guard-room where they ate and drank, played and fought.

It is one of those problems which still remain for .historians to solve — how the race ever survived the insanitary conditions of the Middle Ages, and still more how it was ever continued — what was the normal death-rate and the ‘ normal birth-rate of cities? The towns were no doubt maintained by immigration, and the rural labourer had the best chance of life, if he could manage to escape death by violence or famine.

The Medieval City

We turn to imagine some city of the Middle Ages. Here also would be as in an ancient city, a long circuit of walls, with gates and towers, a military and highly organised society, a complex religious system, intense civic pride and patriotism. And yet the differences are vast. The grand difference of all is that the city is no longer the State, except in some parts of Italy, and even there not in the early Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages, the city is not the State or the nation: it is only a stronghold, or fortified magazine in the barony, duchy, kingdom, or empire.

It is only a big and very complicated castle, with its defensive system exactly like any other castle, governed by a mayor, bailiff, or prior, and the burgher council, and not necessarily by a feudal lord. Except in Italy and a few free towns along the Mediterranean at particular periods, no city counted itself as wholly outside the jurisdiction of some overlord, king, or emperor.

Apart from its political and legal privileges, a mediaeval city was something like Windsor Castle or the Tower of London, on a large scale and with many subdivisions, governed by an elected corporation and not by a baron or viceroy. The ancient city, however much it had to fear war and opposition from its rival cities or states, could feel safe within its own territories from any attack on the part of its rural neighbours, subjects, or fellow-citizens. There it was mistress, or rather the city included the territory around it. No Athenian ever dreamed of being invaded by the inhabitants of Attica, or even of Boeotia. No Roman troubled himself about Latians or Etruscans other than the citizens of Latian or Tuscan cities. City life in the Middle Ages was a very different thing. Until a mediaeval city became very strong and had secured round itself an ample territory, it was always in difficulties with the lords of neighbouring fiefs and castles city tours istanbul.

Even in Italy, before the great cities had crushed the feudal-lords and had forced them to become citizens, the mediaeval cities had constantly to fight for their existence against chiefs whose castles lay within sight. The ancient city was a State — the collective centre of an organised territory, supreme within it, and owing no fealty to any other sovereign, temporal or spiritual, outside its own territory. The mediaeval city was only a privileged town within a fief or kingdom, having charters, rights, and fortifications of its own; but, both in religious and in political rank, bound in absolute duty to far distant and much more exalted superiors.

Defensive system vastly more elaborate

Partly as a consequence of its being in constant danger from its neighbours, it had a defensive system vastly more elaborate than that of ancient cities. Its outer walls were of enormous height, thickness, and complexity. They were flanked with gigantic towers, gates, posterns, and watch-towers; it had a broad moat round ‘it and a complicated series of drawbridges, stockades, barbicans, and outworks. We may see something of it in the old city of Carcassonne in the south of France, destroyed by St. Louis in 1262, in the walls of Rome round the Vatican, and in the old walls of Constantinople on the western side near the Gate of St. Romanus. From without the Mediaeval City looked like a vast castle. And the military discipline and precautions were entirely those of a castle.

In peace or war, it was a fortress first, and a dwelling- place afterwards. This vast apparatus of defence cramped the space and shut out light, air, and prospect. Few ancient cities would have looked from without like a fortress; for the walls were much lower and simpler, in the absence of any elaborate system of artillery. But the Mediaeval City with its far loftier walls, towers, gates, and successive defences looked more like a prison than a town, and indeed to a great extent it was a prison.

There could seldom have been much prospect from within it, except of its own walls and towers; there were few open spaces, usually there was one small market-place, no public gardens or walks; the city was encumbered with castles, monasteries, and castellated enclosures; and the bridges and quays were crowded with a confused pile of lofty wooden houses; and, as the walls necessarily ran along any sea or river frontage that the city had, it was impossible to get any general view of the town, or to look up or down the river for the closely-packed buildings on the bridges.

Mirabeau thunder in the National Assembly

At Cannes there is no post-house, carriage, horses, or mules, and he has to walk through nine miles of waste ! And so he at last gets back to Paris. There he hears Mirabeau thunder in the National Assembly; meets the King and Queen, La Fayette, Barnave, Sieyes, Condorcet, and the chiefs of the Revolution; and is taken to the Jacobin Club, of which he is duly installed as a member. And this wonderful book ends with a chapter of general reflections on the Revolution, which go more deeply down to the root of the matter, John Morley has said, than all that Burke, Paine, and Mackintosh piled up in so many eloquent periods.

The Revolution as a whole would carry us far afield. In these few pages we are dealing with the great transformation that it wrought in the condition of the peasant. It must not be forgotten that part of the wonderful difference between the peasant of the last century and the peasant of to-day, is due to the vast material advancement common to the civilised world. Railroads, steam factories, telegraphs, the enormous increase in population, in manufactures, commerce, and inventions were not products of the ‘ principles of ’89,’ nor of the Convention, nor of the Jacobin Club. All Europe has grown, America has grown almost miraculously, and France has grown with both.

Arthur Young’s journey

But the political lesson of Arthur Young’s journey is this: the poverty and the desolation which he saw in 1789 were directly due, as he so keenly felt, not to the country, not to the husbandmen, not to ignorance or to indolence in the people, not to mere neglect, weakness, or stupidity in the central government, but directly to bad laws, cruel privileges, and an oppressive system of tyranny. Arthur Young found an uncommonly rich soil, a glorious climate, a thrifty, ingenious, and laborious people, a strong central government that, in places and at times, could make magnificent roads, bridges, canals, ports; and when a Turgot, or a Liancourt, or a de Turbilly had a free hand, a country which could be made one of the richest on the earth. What Arthur Young saw, with the eye of true insight, was, that so soon as these evil laws and this atrocious system of land tenure were removed, France would be one of the finest countries in the world. And Arthur Young, as we see, was right private tours istanbul.

Another point is this: to Arthur Young, the Suffolk farmer of 1789, everything he sees in the peasantry and husbandry of France appears miserably inferior to the peasantry and husbandry of England. France is a country far worse cultivated than England, its agricultural produce miserably less; its life, animation, and means of communication ludicrously inferior to those of England; its farmers in penury, its labourers starving, its resources barbarous, compared with those of England. In an English village more meat, he learns, is eaten in a week, than in a French village in a year; the clothing, food, home, and intelligence of the English labourer are far above those of the French labourer. The country inns are infinitely better in England; there is ten times the circulation, the wealth, the comfort in an English rural district; the English labourer is a free man, the French labourer little more than a serf.

Traveller of 1889

Turn to our traveller of 1889. Berri, says Miss Betham- Edwards, has been transformed under a sound land system. It has indeed a poor soil; but, even in the ltriste Sologne,’ plantations, irrigation canals, and improved methods of agriculture are transforming this region. So rapid is the progress that George Sand, who died but the other day, would hardly recognise the country she has described so well. Here and there may be seen, now used as an outhouse, one of those bare, windowless cabins which shocked Arthur Young, and close at hand the ‘neat, airy, solid dwellings ’ the peasant owners have built for themselves.

Here Miss Betham-Edwards visited newly-made farms, with their spick-and-span buildings, the whole having the appearance of a little settlement in the Far West. The holdings vary from 6 to 30 acres, their owners possessing a capital of 5000 to 8000 and even 25,000 francs, the land well stocked and cultivated, the people well dressed, and signs of general content and well-being delightful to contemplate.

And as to metayage, ‘that miserable system which perpetuates poverty,’ Miss Betham-Edwards finds it now one of the chief factors of the agricultural progress of France, creating cordial relations between landlord and tenant. The secret of this curious conflict between two most competent observers is this: mitayage—the system under which the owner of the soil finds land, stock, and implements, the tiller of the farm finds manual labour, and all produce is equally shared — depends for its fair working upon just laws, equality before the law, absence of any privilege in the owner, and good understanding as between men who alike respect each other private tours istanbul.

Large tracts in France

With these, it is an excellent system of farming, very favourable to the labourer; without these, it may almost reduce him to serfdom. It may thus be one of the best, or one of the worst, of all systems of husbandry. As Arthur Young saw it under the ancient system of privileged orders, it was almost as bad as an Irish tenancy at will. Under the new system of post-revolutionary equality, it has given prosperity to large tracts in France.

From Autun in Burgundy, Arthur Young travelled across the Bourbonnais and the Nivernais, and he found the country ‘villainously cultivated’; when he sees such a country ‘in the hands of starving metayers, instead of fat farmers,’ he knows not how to pity the seigneurs. To-day, his editor finds ‘fat farmers’ innumerable, for metayage has greatly advanced the condition of the peasants. The country that lies between the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire is precisely that part of his journey which wrings from Arthur Young his furious invective against the great lords whom he wished he could make

‘to skip again.’ Now, the Gironde, the Charente, and La Vendde are thriving, rich districts, intersected with railways; ‘ and, owing to the indefatigable labours of peasant owners, hundreds of thousands of acres of waste land have been put under cultivation.’

Or turn to Brittany, which Arthur Young calls ‘a miserable province ’; ‘ husbandry not much further advanced than among the Hurons ’; ‘the people almost as wild as their country ’; ‘ mud houses, no windows ’; ‘ a hideous heap of wretchedness ’ — all through ‘ the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility.’ And this is the rich, thriving, laborious, and delightful Brittany which our tourists love, where Miss Betham-Edwards tells us of scientific farming, artificial manures, machinery, ‘the granary of Western France,’ market gardens, of fabulous value, and a great agricultural college, one of the most important in Europe.

Miss Betham Edwards

Maine and Anjou, through which the Loire flows below Tours, were deserts to Arthur Young. Every tourist knows that these provinces now look as rich and prosperous as any spot in Europe. Miss Betham-Edwards gives us an almost idyllic picture of an Angevin farm-house, with its supper, merriment, and dance; and tells of Angevin peasants building themselves villas with eight rooms, a flower garden, parlour, kitchen, offices, and four airy bedrooms. ‘The peasant wastes nothing and spends little; he possesses stores of homespun linen, home-made remedies, oil, vinegar, honey, cider, and wine of his own producing.’ ‘The poorest eat asparagus, green peas, and strawberries every day in season; and as everybody owns crops, nobody pilfers his neighbours’.’ Universal ownership gives absolute security to property, and pauperism is unknown.

As in Berri, as in the Limousin, Poitou, Anjou, and Brittany, so elsewhere throughout France, we find the same astounding contrast between the tale told by the traveller of 1789 and the traveller of 1889. Paris amazes Arthur Young by its dirtiness and discomfort, and the silence and stagnation of life the instant he passes out of its narrow crooked streets! To those accustomed to the animation and rapid movement of England, says he, it is not possible to describe ‘ the dulness and stupidity of France!’ To read these words in the year of the great Exhibition, 1889, with its 26,000,000 tickets bought by sight-seers! In Champagne he pronounces his famous diatribe against government. Now, we all know Champagne to be a thriving and wealthy country private tours istanbul.

Franche Comt

It was in Franche Comt that Arthur Young, being surrounded by an angry crowd, made his famous speech to them about French and English taxation, and explained the difference between a seigneur in France and in England. On which side would the difference lie, if he rose to make his speech in the Doubs to-day? Arthur Young crosses France from Alsace to Auvergne before he sees a field of clover; but in France to-day clover is as common as it is in England. Old Marseilles he thinks close, ill-built, and dirty; and ‘the port itself is a horse pond.’ He cannot find a conveyance between Marseilles and Nice. Such great cities in France, he says, have not the hundredth part of the means of communication common in much smaller places in England. He passes into the mountain region of Upper Savoy; and there he finds the people at their ease, and the land productive, in spite of the harsh climate and the barren soil. He asks the reason, and he learns that there are no seigneurs in Upper Savoy. In Lower Savoy he finds the people poor and miserable, for there stands a carcan, a seigneurial standard, with a chain and a heavy collar, an emblem of the slavery of the people.

At Lyons he meets the Rolands, though he failed to recognise the romantic genius that lay still hidden in the young and beautiful wife of the austere financier. At Lyons he is assured that ‘ the state of manufacture is melancholy to the last degree.’ And, as the quarter now known as Perrache did not yet exist, he finds the city itself badly situated. As he passes along the Riviera from Antibes to Nice, he is driven to walk, for want of a conveyance, and a woman carries his baggage on an ass.

English labourer

Can we say the same thing of 1889? Obviously not The contrast to-day is reversed. It is the English labourer who is worse housed, worse fed, clothed, taught; who has nothing of his own, who can never save; to whom the purchase of an acre of land is as much an impossibility as of a diamond necklace, and who may no more think to own a dairy than to own a race horse; who follows the plough for two shillings a day, and ends, when he drops, in the workhouse.

England has increased in these hundred years far more than France in population, in wealth, in commerce, in manufactures, in dominion, in resources, in general material prosperity — in all but in the condition of her rural labourer. In that she has gone back, perhaps positively; but relatively it is certain she has gone very far back. The English traveller in France to-day is amazed at the wealth, independence, and comfort of the French peasant. To Miss Betham-Edwards, who knows France well, it is a land of Goshen, flowing with milk and honey; the life of the peasant of Anjou, Brie, and La Vendee is one of idyllic prosperity ‘ delightful to behold.’ The land tenure of England in 1789 was, as Young told the mob in the Doubs, far in advance of that of France— as far as that of France of 1889 is in advance of that of England now. Our English great lords have not yet begun ‘to skip again.’ Land tenure in England to-day is essentially the same as it was in 1789. In France it has been wholly transformed by the Revolution private tours istanbul.

Arthur Young entirely recognises

There are in France now some eight million persons who own the soil, the great mass of whom are peasants. It is well known that the Revolution did not create this peasant land-ownership, but that in part it goes back to the earliest times of French history. Turgot, Necker, de Tocqueville, and a succession of historians have abundantly proved the fact. Arthur Young entirely recognises the truth, and tells us that one-third of the soil of France was already the property of the peasant. This estimate has been adopted by good French authorities; but Miss Betham-Edwards considers it an over-statement, and holds that the true proportion in 1789 was one-fourth.

In any case it is now much more than one-half. Not but that there is now in France a very great number also of large estates, and some that are immense when compared with the standard of England proper. It has indeed been estimated that positively, though not relatively, there are more great rural estates in France to-day than there are in England. The notion that the Revolution has extinguished great properties in France, is as utterly mistaken as the notion that the Revolution created the system of small properties. The important point is that since the Revolution every labourer has been able to acquire a portion of the soil; and a very large proportion of the adult population has already so done.

It is also likely that Young overrated the depth of the external discomfort that he saw. Under such a brutal system of fiscal and manorial oppression as was then rife, the farmer and the labourer carefully hide what wealth they may have, and deliberately assume the outer semblance of want, for fear of the tax-gatherer, the tithe proctor, and the landlord’s bailiff. That has been seen in Ireland for centuries and may be still seen to-day. So the French peasant was not always so poor as he chose to appear in Arthur Young’s eyes.

In Brittany to be miserable heaps of dirt

The poor people’s habitations he finds in Brittany to be ‘miserable heaps of dirt.’ There, as so often elsewhere in France, no glass window, scarcely any light; the women furrowed without age by labour. ‘One-third of what I have seen of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery.’ ‘Nothing but privileges and poverty.’ And every one remembers what these privileges were — ‘ these tortures of the peasantry ’ he calls them — of which in one sentence he enumerates twenty-eight.

And now, in 1889, turn to these same provinces, to the third generation in descent from these very peasants. ‘The desert that saddened Arthur Young’s eyes,’ writes Miss Betham-Edwards to-day, ‘may now be described as a land of Goshen, overflowing with milk and honey.’ ‘The land was well stocked and cultivated, the people were neatly and appropriately dressed, and the signs of general contentment and well-being delightful to contemplate.’ In one province, a million acres of waste land have been brought into cultivation. In five or six years, wrote the historian Mignet, ‘ the Revolution quadrupled the resources of civilisation private tours istanbul.’

Where Arthur Young saw the miserable peasant woman, Miss Betham-Edwards tells us that today the farmers’ daughters have for portions ‘several thousand pounds.’ What Arthur Young calls an ‘unimproved, poor, and ugly country,’ Miss Betham-Edwards now finds to be ‘one vast garden.’ In the landes, where the traveller saw nearly a hundred miles of continuous waste, 700,000 acres have been fertilised by canals, and a very small portion remains in the state in which he found it. ‘Maine and Anjou have the appearance of deserts,’ writes the traveller of 1789. ‘ Sunny, light-hearted, danceloving Anjou ’ appears to the traveller of 1889 a model of prosperity and happiness. Where he found the peasants living in caves underground, she finds neat homesteads costing more than 6000 francs to build. In Dauphine, where he finds, in 1789, mountains waste or in a great measure useless, she finds, in 1889, choice vineyards that sell at 25,000 francs per acre.

A hundred years

And what has done all this? The prophetic soul of Arthur Young can tell us, though a hundred years were needed to make his hopes a reality. His words have passed into a household phrase where the English tongue reaches: ‘The magic of property turns sand to gold.’ ‘The inhabitants of this village deserve encouragement for their industry,’ he writes of Sauve, ‘and if I was a French minister they should have it. They would soon turn all the deserts around them into gardens.’

‘ Give a man,’ he adds, in a phrase which is now a proverb, ‘the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years’ lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.’ What has made all this misery? he cries again and again; what has blighted this magnificent country, and crushed this noble people? Misgovernment, bad laws, cruel customs, wanton selfishness of the rich, the powerful, and the privileged. Nothing was ever said more true. Arthur Young’s good legislator came even sooner than he dared to hope, armed with a force more tremendous than he could conceive. It was a minister greater than any Turgot, or Necker, or Mirabeau; who served a sovereign more powerful than Louis or Napoleon. His sovereign was the Revolution; the minister was the new system. And the warm-hearted English gentleman lived to see his ‘great lords skip again’ somewhat too painfully. The storm has passed, the blood is washed out; but the ‘ red fool-fury, of the Seine ’ has made rural France the paradise of the peasant.

Let us take a typical bit of the country here and there and compare its state in 1789 and in 1889. From Paris and Orleans Arthur Young, in 1787, journeyed southward through Berri and the Limousin to Toulouse. His diary is one cry of pity. ‘ The fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery.’ ‘Heaven grant me patience while I see a country thus neglected, and forgive me the oaths I swear at the absence and ignorance of the possessors.’ ‘The husbandry poor and the people miserable.’ ‘The poor people who cultivate the soil here are mttayers, that is, men who hire the soil without ability to stock it—a miserable system that perpetuates poverty and excludes instruction.’

FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889

FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889.1

The year of centenaries has brought us no memento more significant than the timely reissue of Arthur Young’s Travels in France in 1787-89.2 Europe has seen in this century nothing more striking, and hardly any single thing more entirely blessed, than the transfiguration of rural France from its state under the ancient monarchy to its state under the new republic. By good luck an English traveller, with rare opportunities and almost a touch of genius, traversed every province just on the eve of the great crisis, and left to mankind a vivid picture of all he saw. ‘Vehement, plain-spoken Arthur Young,’ says Carlyle, who, in his lurid chapter on the ‘ General Overturn,’ has made household words out of several of Arthur’s historic sayings. ‘That wise and honest traveller,’ says John Morley, perhaps, with rather excessive praise, ‘with his luminous criticism of the most important side of the Revolution, worth a hundred times more than Burke, Paine, and Mackintosh all put together.’

And now a lady who has seen more of France than even Arthur Young, Miss Betham-Edwards, has given us an excellent edition of the famous Travels, so long practically Travels in France, by Arthur Young, during the years 1787, 1788, 1789, with an Introduction, Biographical Sketch, and Notes, by M. Betham- Edwards. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1889. Bohn’s Standard Library, N.s.; also France of To-day, a survey comparative and retrospective, by M. Betham- Edwards. London: Rivingtons. 2 vols. 1892-94 private tour istanbul.

Vignette picture of rural France

Inaccessible, with notes, illustrations, references, and a vignette picture of rural France in 1889 such as old Arthur himself might have limned, had he returned to earth and to France to see the great Exhibition. The contrast, as we look first on this picture and then on that, is the transition we find in a dream or a fairy tale. It is as though one rose from the dead. We see the sombre, haggard, crushed French peasant of Languedoc, Poitou, or Franche Comtd, that Lazarus whom the old system swathed in cerecloth and entombed, starting forth into life from his bonds, and returning to his home, to activity, and to freedom. It is the Revolution that has worked this miracle. This is the only work of the Revolution that is wholly blessed. Here, at any rate, it has destroyed almost nothing that was good, and has founded little that is evil. ‘The Revolution,’ says the editor of these Travels, ‘in a few years metamorphosed entire regions.’

What life, what heart, what ring there was in the racy sayings of the fine old boy ! Every one knows that sharp word wrung from him even while he was the guest of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld: ‘Whenever you stumble on a grand seigneur, you are sure to find his property a desert.’ The signs of the greatness of a. grand seigneur are ‘ wastes, deserts, fern, ling.’ ‘ Oh ! if I was the legislator of France for a day, I would make such great lords skip again.’ ‘ The crop of this country is princes of the blood; that is to say, hares, pheasants, deer, boars.’

Schoolboys in France can repeat the historic passage about the woman near Mars-la-Tour, aged twenty-eight, but so bent and furrowed and hardened by labour that she looked sixty or seventy, as she groaned out: ‘ Sir, the taxes and the dues are crushing us to death ! ’ No one, says he, can imagine what the French peasant woman has come to look under grinding poverty. He tells of ‘ some things that called themselves women, but in reality were walking dunghills’; ‘girls and women without shoes or stockings.’ ‘ The ploughmen at their work have neither sabots, nor feet to their stockings. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity.’ And then comes that scathing phrase which rings in the ears of Englishmen to-day: ‘ It reminds me of the misery of Ireland.’

The teaching of Nature’s law

‘The only party they acknowledged was the rule of good sense, and to keep firm to their purpose, to submit to the teaching of Nature’s law, and to offer up their lives for their country—holding that man is born not for himself, but for humanity in the sum.’ He who would understand what men mean by ‘the ideas of ’89’ should mark, learn, and inwardly digest those two small books of Condorcet, the Life of Turgot, 1787, and the Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795.

The annals of literature have no more pathetic incident than the history of this little book — this still unfinished vision of a brain prematurely cut off. In the midst of the struggle between Mountain and Gironde, Condorcet, who stood between both and who belonged to neither, he who had the enthusiasm of the Mountain without its ferocity, the virtues and culture of the Girondists without their pedantic formalism, was denounced and condemned to death, and dragged out a few weeks of life in a miserable concealment. There, with death hanging round him, he calmly compiled the first true sketch of human evolution. Amidst the chaos and bloodshed he reviews the history of mankind. Not a word of pain, doubt, bitterness, or reproach is wrung from him.

He sees nothing but visions of a happy and glorious future for the race, when war shall cease, and the barriers shall fall down between man and man, class and class, race and race, when man shall pursue a regenerate life in human brotherhood and confidence in truth. Industry there shall be the common lot, and the noblest privilege. But it shall be brightened to all by a common education, free, rational, and comprehensive, with a lightening of the burdens of labour by scientific appliances of life and increased opportunity for culture private tour istanbul.

Lyric chapter of the little sketch

‘ Our hopes,’ he writes, in that last lyric chapter of the little sketch, ‘our hopes as to the future of the human race may be summed up in these three points: the raising of all nations to a common level; the progress towards equality in each separate people; and, lastly, the practical amelioration of the lot of man.’ £ It is in the contemplation of such a future,’ he concludes, ‘that the philosopher may find a safe asylum in all troubles, and may live in that true paradise, to which his reason may look forward with confidence, and which his sympathy with humanity may invest with a rapture of the purest kind.’

The ink of these pages was hardly dry when the writer by death escaped the guillotine to which republicans con-demned him in the name of liberty. How many of us can repeat a hundred anecdotes of the guillotine, of its victims, and its professors, yet how few of us have seriously taken to heart the Sketch of Human Progress! The blood is dried up, but the book lives, and human progress continues on the lines there so prophetically traced. ‘ I have studied history long,’ says de Tocqueville, ‘yet I have never read of any revolution wherein there may be found men of patriotism so sincere, of such true devotion of self, of more entire grandeur of spirit.’

Official career of Turgot

To give the official career of Turgot would be a summary of the ideas of ’89. The suppression of the corvee, of the restrictions on industry, on the resources of locomotion, the restoration of agriculture, to reduce the finances to order, to diminish public debt, to establish local municipal life, to reorganise the chaotic administration, to remove the exemptions of the noble and ecclesiastical orders, to suppress the monastic orders, to equalise the taxation, to establish a scientific and uniform code of law, a scientific and uniform scale of weights and measures, to reform the feudal land law, to abolish the feudal gilds and antiquated corporations whose obsolete pretensions crushed industry, to recall the Protestants, to establish entire freedom of conscience, to guarantee complete liberty of thought; lastly, to establish a truly national system of education — such were the plans of Turgot which for two short years he struggled to accomplish with heroic tenacity and elevation of spirit.

Those two years, from 1774-1776, are at once the brightest and the saddest in the modern history of France. For almost the first time, and certainly for the last time, a great philosopher, who was also a great statesman, the last French statesman of the old order, held for a moment almost absolute power. It was a gigantic task, and a giant was called in to accomplish it. But against folly even the gods contend in vain. And before folly, combined with insatiable selfishness, lust, greed, and arrogance, the heroic Turgot fell. They refused him his bloodless, orderly, scientific Revolution; and the bloody, stormy, spasmodic Revolution began.

To recall Turgot is to recall Condorcet, the equal of Turgot as thinker, if inferior to Turgot as statesman. Around the mind and nature of Condorcet there lingers the halo of a special grace. Sprung from an old baronial family with bigoted prejudices of feudal right, the young noble, from his youth, broke through the opposition of his order to devote himself to a life of thought private tour istanbul.

The volcano covered with snow

Spotless in his life, calm, reserved, warm hearted and tender, ‘the volcano covered with snow ’ that flamed in his breast, had never betrayed him to an outburst of jealousy, vanity, illhumour, or extravagance. The courtly and polished aristocrat, without affectation and without hysterics, bore himself as one of the simplest of the people. The privileges of the old system, which were his birthright, filled him with a sense of unmixed abhorrence. His scepticism, vehement as it was, did not spring from intellectual pride or from turbulent vanity. He disbelieves in orthodoxy out of genuine thirst for truth, and denounces superstition out of no alloy of feeling save that of burning indignation at its evil works.

The Life of Turgot by Condorcet, 1787, might serve indeed as prologue to the memorable drama which opens in 1789. It was most fitting that the mighty movement should be heralded by the tale of the greatest statesman of the age of Louis xvi., told by one of its chief thinkers. And the fine lines of Lucan, which Condorcet placed as a motto on the title-page of his Life of Turgot, may serve as the device, not of Turgot alone, but of Condorcet himself, and indeed of the higher spirits of ’89 together —‘ Secta fuit servare modum, finemque tenere, Naturamque sequi, patrineque impendere vitam; Nec sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo.’