France and the Republic Part 8

Pichon, made a speech in which he openly avowed the object of laicising the schools to be the destruction of religion. 'Between you, the Catholics,' he exclaimed, 'and us, who are Republicans, there is a great abyss. The interests of the Church are incompatible with those of the Republican Government.' That the Republicans in the a.s.sembly should have applauded this declaration is rather astonis.h.i.+ng, since it was in substance an admission that the interests of the 'Republican Government'

are inconsistent with those of an admittedly immense majority of the French people. But they did applaud it, and not long before M. Pichon made the speech a solid Republican vote of 232 members had been recorded for the suppression of the French Emba.s.sy to the Vatican. Is it surprising that the Catholics of France should be asking themselves all over the country whether it is possible for them to accept the Republic without abjuring their religion?

The 'abyss' of which M. Pichon speaks has been dug, not by the Church, but by the theorists who have expelled the Sisters of Charity from the hospitals and the chaplains from the prisons of France, who refuse to the poor the right to pray in the almshouses, and who throw the crucifix out of school-houses which are maintained by the money of Catholic taxpayers. As between M. Pichon and M. Ferry and their fellow-conspirators on one side of this abyss, and the Marist Brethren and the little children of France on the other side of it, the history of the world hardly encourages the belief that it is the Marist Brethren and the little children who will finally be engulfed!

It is a notable proof of the hold which Catholic ideas have upon the people in this part of France, that notwithstanding a marked tendency to emigration among the peasantry of the Boulonnais and of Artois, the population has steadily increased through the excess of births over deaths. This is not true of France as a whole. On the contrary, while the deaths in France in 1888 were 837,857, against an annual average of 847,968 from 1884 to 1887, the births diminished from an annual average of 937,090 between 1881 and 1884 to 882,639 in 1888, leaving the small excess of 44,772 over the deaths. Of these only 33,458 were of French parentage! In Artois and the Boulonnais, the population is more dense than in any other part of France, excepting the metropolitan regions.

While France, as a whole, in 1881, gave an average of seventy inhabitants to the square kilometre, which is the precise proportion in Bavaria--the arrondiss.e.m.e.nt of Bethune in the coal-mining country of Artois (fed by an exceptional immigration from Belgium) gave 173 to the square kilometre, which exceeds the proportion in any division of the German Empire except Saxony, Lubeck, Bremen, and Hamburg.

The Department of the Pas-de-Calais, as a whole, gave 117 inhabitants to the square kilometre, which is the precise proportion in Saxe-Altenburg, and exceeds by five the proportion in the British Islands taken as a whole. In the arrondiss.e.m.e.nt of St.-Omer the rate of increase by natural growth some years ago outran that of the older sea-board States of the American Union.

This phenomenon cannot be explained by the improvidence of the Artesians, for they are admittedly remarkable, even in France, for their frugality and their forecasting habit of mind. A friend of mine, who lives near St.-Omer, is probably right when he attributes it to their strong domestic tastes and habits, and to the influence over them of their religion. He says they are 'fanatics of the family.' Certainly in the cottages the children seem to have things all their own way, almost as much as in America. 'The Artesian parents,' my friend tells me, 'make their children the objects of their lives.' In the rural regions there is not much immorality. Concubinage, which is by no means uncommon in the towns, is exceedingly uncommon in the country of Artois.

The agricultural Artesian wishes to be the recognised head of his house, hates to have things at loose ends, and habitually makes his wife a consulting partner in all his affairs. Even when he is not particularly devout he likes to be on good terms with, his curate, and has very positive ideas as to what is decent and becoming. 'In short,' said my friend, 'he is an ideal husbandman in every sense of that English word, for which we have no equivalent. The a.s.size records show that offences against public morality are almost wholly confined to the towns in Artois, and it is a notable fact that these particular offences are much more frequently committed by persons who can read and write than by the illiterate.'

My friend seemed to be startled when I told him that this 'notable fact'

appeared to me to be quite in accordance with the nature of things, as set forth in the sound old maxim cited by the Apostle, that 'evil communications corrupt good manners.' So long as thirty years ago, the American Census showed that in the six New England States, in which the proportion of illiterate native Americans to the native white population was 1 to 312, the proportion to the native white population of native white criminals was 1 to 1,084; whereas, in the six southern States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas, the proportion of native white illiterates being 1 to 12 of the native white population, the proportion of native white criminals to the native white population was only 1 to 6,670. Mr. Montgomery of California, a.s.sistant-Attorney-General of the United States in the Administration of President Cleveland, working on the lines of inquiry suggested by such facts as these, did not hesitate, two years ago, to a.s.sert that 'the boasted New England public school system, as now by law established throughout the length and breadth of the American Republic, is a poisonous fountain fraught with the seeds of human misery and moral death.' He cites the official statistics given by a New England professor, Mr. Royce, to prove that 'there is hardly a state or country in the civilised world, where atrocious and flagrant crimes are so common as in educated Ma.s.sachusetts,' and he shows that the alarming and unquestionable increase of crime in the United States cannot be attributed, as it too often is, to the 'foreign element in American society, the criminal rate of which has remained the same or even lessened, while the native criminals increased during 1860-1870, from 10,143 to 24,173.' During that decade the total population of the United States increased from 31,443,321 to 38,567,617. Deducting 2,466,752 for the increase by immigration, we have a general increase of 4,657,538 in the native American population, or of less than 15 per cent, against an increase of about 140 per cent. in the number of native white criminals!

It is no part of my present purpose to discuss Mr. Montgomery's contention. But it seems to me to deserve grave consideration in connection with the adventure to which the French Republican Government has committed itself, of suddenly subst.i.tuting for the religious and parental system of education in France, a French modification, in the interest of unbelief, of that American public school system which, as Mr. Montgomery maintains, rests upon the principle 'that the whole people must be educated to a certain degree at the public expense, irrespectively of any social distinctions.'

I have already said that St.-Omer appears to be in its politics decidedly Republican. An odd ill.u.s.tration of this I found in a hot local controversy waging there over the setting up of a statue in one of the public squares, to commemorate the courage and patriotism of a local heroine, Jacqueline Robins. This statue, which, as a work of art is not unworthy to be compared with the statue of Jeanne Hachette at Beauvais, was set up, with much ceremony, in 1884 (I believe the State paid for it), and stands upon a pedestal, with an inscription setting forth how Jacqueline Robins, in the year 1710, saved the besieged city of St.-Omer by going off herself with a train of boats down the Aa to Dunkirk, and bringing back the provisions and munitions of war necessary for the defence of the city.

As the city of St.-Omer was certainly not besieged in 1710, this inscription naturally excited the critical indignation of the local antiquaries, and on July 27, 1885, an exceedingly clear and conclusive report on the subject was laid before the Society of Antiquaries of Morinia, a body which has done good service to the cause of history in Northern France. From this report it plainly appears that St.-Omer was not besieged at all in 1710. Prince Eugene, who marched into Artois with the Duke of Marlborough in that year in pursuit of Villars, wished to attack St.-Omer after the fall of Douai and Bethune, but the States-General of Holland would not hear of it; and the gallant defence made of Aire-sur-la-Lys by the Marquis de Goesbriant kept the allies at bay so late in the year that no attempt upon St.-Omer could be made. The local chronicles rejoice over this escape, particularly, because they say the Duke of Marlborough had vowed special vengeance against the city, its authorities having refused to oblige him by getting out of the English Jesuits' College and sending him certain papers which the d.u.c.h.ess of Hamilton (the wife of the brilliant duke who was killed in Hyde Park by Lord Mohun and General Macartney) desired him to procure for her use in a law suit against 'Lord Bromley.'[2] St.-Omer, then, not having been besieged in 1710, why should a statue be set up in honour of an Audomaraise dame for delivering it? On this point the Report of the Society of Antiquaries throws a sufficient and interesting light. It seems that there really lived in St.-Omer in 1710 a certain dame Jacqueline Isabelle Robins, obviously a woman of mark and force, since she carried on a number of thriving industries, and among them the management, under a contract, of the boats between St.-Omer, Calais, and Dunkirk. Napoleon would have thought her much superior to Madame de Stael, for before she was forty years old she had married three husbands, and surrounded herself with six or seven flouris.h.i.+ng olive branches. She was constantly in the law courts fighting for her rights, not against private persons only, but against the 'mayor and echevins of the city of St.-Omer.' Though St.-Omer, as I have said, was not besieged by the allies, it was constantly occupied by the troops of his Most Christian Majesty, who gave the magistrates and the people almost as much trouble as if they had been enemies, and the records show that not long before the surrender of Aire-sur-la-Lys to the allies in November 1710, the Comte d'Estaing (an ancestor of the Admiral who did such good service to the American cause), under orders from Versailles succeeded in bringing to St.-Omer from Dunkirk a complete supply of powder and other munitions of war. It seems to be likely enough that in this operation the military authorities availed themselves of the services of dame Jacqueline and of her boats. As she was a masterful dame, and, burying her third husband, who was twelve years her junior, in 1720, lived on to depart at the age of seventy-five in 1732, a local legend evidently grew up about her personal share in the events of the great war of 1710. The first official historian of St.-Omer, a worthy priest Dom Devienne, writing in 1782, gave this legend form. As he transformed Jacqueline from a rich and prosperous woman of affairs into a 'woman of the dregs of the people,' calling her Jane, by the way, instead of Jacqueline, she became, after the Revolution, a popular heroine; her third husband, who appears to have been a young Squire de Boyaval and a das.h.i.+ng grey mousquetaire of King Louis, was metamorphosed into a brewer's apprentice (Jacqueline among her other possessions owned a brewery); and now, in the year 1889 we have the thrifty dame who helped the king's officers carry out the king's orders for the supplying of St.-Omer, immortalised in bronze as an Audomaraise Jeanne Hachette or Maid of Saragossa!

[2] This is a curious sidelight on English political history. 'Lord Bromley' was obviously Sir William Bromley, M.P., the bitter enemy of Marlborough, who earned the undying hatred of the d.u.c.h.ess by comparing her to Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III. In 1705 Harley prevented the election of Bromley as Speaker by re-publis.h.i.+ng an account of the 'Grand Toure' written by him, and foisting into it notes intended to show that Bromley was a 'Papist.' Bromley was again a candidate for the same office in 1710, and Marlborough evidently hoped to get from St.-Omer doc.u.mentary proof of the 'papistry' of his foe. The second d.u.c.h.ess of Hamilton came, I think, of a Catholic family, and may have thought she had a clue to these doc.u.ments. The intrigue, however, failed, and Bromley was elected Speaker without opposition in November, 1710.

Is not this worthy to stand on record with Sir Roger de Coverley's tale of the old coachman who had a monument in Westminster Abbey because he figured on the box of the coach in which Thomas Thynne of Longleat was barbarously murdered by Count Konigsmark?

The Republican Mayor of St.-Omer took sides on the question of Jacqueline Robins in 1885 with the Republican 'Professor of History in the Lyceum,' both of them being 'officers of the Academy,' against the Society of Antiquaries; and I dare say the matter may affect the Parliamentary elections in September, 1889!

CHAPTER III

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_

AIRE-SUR-LA-LYS

It is a local tradition at Aire-sur-la-Lys that, about half a century ago, the good people of this ancient and picturesque town (which, like St.-Omer, remained a part of the Spanish dominions when all the rest of the Artois became French by the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659) turned out with flags and music to welcome their mayor back from Paris, bringing the good news that the projected Northern railway should not pa.s.s through their territory, to disturb their settled trade.

This unique incident is often cited to show the tenacious conservatism of the Artesians. I believe, however, it only proves that the people of Aire, dwelling in a region which has been fought over from time immemorial, had a well-grounded objection to the exclusively military views with which Marshal Soult then desired that the Government of Louis Philippe should take up and carry out the projected enterprise.

At all events, Aire-sur-la-Lys now rejoices in a comfortable little railway station, which makes it an important point in the system of the Northern Railway of France.

There, on a lovely evening in June, I found the carriage of M. Labitte, one of the Councillors-General of the department, waiting to take me to his charming and hospitable home in the richly-cultivated agricultural commune of St.-Quentin.

It was on the eve of Pentecost when, as the German poet tells us, 'the woods and fields put off all sadness,' and a lovelier summer evening it would be hard to find even in England.

M. Labitte is a Conservative and a devout Catholic. As I have already mentioned, he was a candidate in the Pas-de-Calais in 1886 for the seat in the Chamber now held by M. Camesca.s.se, and received 74,554 votes against 86,356 for his opponent. In Aire he was beaten by only 22 votes out of a total of 3,536. His influence in the country here is, in a certain sense, hereditary, for he came of a family which in the last century gave many excellent ecclesiastics to the service of the Church, among a population then, as now, remarkable for its strong religious feeling. When the States-General were convened by Louis XVI. a century ago, the first date fixed for the elections in Artois had to be postponed, at the request of the Duc de Guines, because it interfered with Easter. The Artesians cared more for the Church than for the State.

Yet, in no part of France was the calling of the States-General more popular, and nowhere were more efforts made before 1789 than in Artois to improve the condition of the people and to secure a more just and liberal fiscal administration. The clergy were extraordinarily powerful in Artois, alike by reason of their property and of the religious disposition of the people; and it is a curious and interesting fact that under the const.i.tution of the Estates of Artois it was established (thanks to the union of the clergy with the Third Estate) that, while no votes of the n.o.bility and the clergy united should bind the Third Estate, any joint vote of the Third Estate with either of the other two orders should bind them all. Here, long before the much-bewritten date of 1789, we have the Church in Artois arraying itself on the side of the tax-paying people against the privileged cla.s.ses. Modern inquiries show, indeed, that this was the att.i.tude of the great body of the French clergy long before what is called the 'Revolution.' The majority of the representatives of the clergy in the States-General of 1789 did not wait for the theatrical demonstrations in the Tennis Court of Versailles, about which so much nonsense has been talked and written, to join the Third Estate in insisting upon a real reform of the public service. No French historian has ventured to make such a picture of the Catholic clergy of France under the Bourbons as Lord Macaulay thought himself authorised to paint of the Protestant clergy of England under the Stuarts. There were flagrant scandals among the higher orders of the Church in France, no doubt, as there were in England. The names of Dubois, of Lomenie de Brienne, of De Rohan are not a.s.sociated with the cardinal virtues. De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, driving Mdlle. Guimard to the opera in his coronetted and mitred coach, is not an edifying figure, nor is Louis de Grimaldi, Bishop of Mans, saying Ma.s.s in his red hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the old regime the same qualities of devout faith and Christian sympathy with the people with which they met and baffled their persecutors after the crash of the monarchy. The three representatives of the clergy who first struck hands with the Third Estate on June 13, 1789, were curates sent to Paris by a province more intensely Catholic than Artois. They were Poitevin priests from the region which we now know as La Vendee, and which only four years afterwards rose in arms to defend its altars and its homes against the intolerable despotism of the 'patriots' of Paris.

When Turgot was put in charge of that work of fiscal reform which might have spared France the horrors and the disasters of the Revolution, had Louis XVI. been capable of standing even by Turgot to the end, he carried on an extensive correspondence with curates in Artois as well as in the other provinces of France, as the best means of educating the people to an intelligent appreciation of his purposes and of his plans.

Condorcet, who treated the brutal murderers of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld with a complaisance which ent.i.tles him to the confidence of the most advanced anti-clerical philosophers of our own day, bears witness to the good intentions of Turgot's correspondents. He says, in his memoir of Turgot, printed at Philadelphia seven years before the Revolution of '89, that 'the curates, accustomed to preach sound morals, to appease the quarrels of the people, and to encourage peace and concord, were in a better position than any other men in France to prepare the minds of the people for the good work it was the intents of the ministers to do.'

What was true of the French curates a hundred years ago is true of them to-day, the duties prescribed to them by the Church being still precisely what they were when Condorcet bore this testimony to the good dispositions of men much more conscientious than himself. Then, too, as now, the curates were required to look carefully after the education of the children in their parishes. France is indebted, not to the Revolution, but to a great Protestant historian and statesman, Guizot, and to King Louis Philippe for the foundation of her system of public education. The revolutionists of 1789 left the country worse off in this matter than they found it. The royal ordinance of Louis XIV. in 1698, which required the establishment of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in every parish in which they were not then to be found, and fixed the salaries to be paid these masters and mistresses out of a public tax in every parish in which no foundations for their support existed, was distinctly a public-school law. This ordinance made it inc.u.mbent upon all parents and other persons who had charge of children to send them to the schools until they were fourteen years of age, and it also enjoined upon the curates the duty of 'watching with particular attention over the education of the children in their respective parishes.' The spirit in which the clergy of Artois, at least, discharged this duty appears in an ordinance of the Bishop of Arras issued in 1740, half a century before the Revolution of 1789, in which the bishop lays it down as a maxim that 'the greatest charity which can be shown the poor is to ensure them the means of obtaining an education.'

This, down to thirty years ago, was the principle of legislation in Virginia upon the public school question, the State not attempting to interfere with the authority of parents over their children in the matter of education, but making an appropriation for the instruction of the children of the poor. That mischievous wind-bag Laka.n.a.l lived in Mississippi and Louisiana during his exile in America, and it is possible that his influence may have had something to do with the early adoption by another southern State, Louisiana, of the general public school system. However that may be, Louisiana in 1850 spent upon her public schools three times as much money annually as any of the New England States, with the result that, out of a native white population of 186,577, she had in her prisons 240 native white criminals, or 1 in 777 of the whole number, being 'the largest proportion of criminals to population at that time to be found in America, if not in the world.'

Virginia, out of a native white population of 1,070,395 in 1860, had no more than 163 native white criminals in her prisons, or 1 in 6,566 of her native white population.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that but for the fidelity of the French clergy before 1789, in carrying out the work imposed upon them by the ordinance of Louis XIV., and commended in the ordinance of the Bishop of Arras in 1740, two of the most conspicuous actors in the grotesquely horrible drama of the French Revolution would have starved to death in the streets of Arras, or grown up there in vagabondage. The clergy of St.-Vaast in the diocese of Arras found, in 1768, two wretched urchins thrown upon the world by an unnatural father. One of these, Maximilian Isidore de Robespierre, was born in 1758; the other, Augustus Bai Joseph de Robespierre, in 1764. The good priests picked them up, cared for them, and put them in the way of getting a good education, which they turned to such purpose that both of them eventually came to the guillotine in the flower of their years, and amid the cordially contemptuous execrations of decent people all over the world. One of the most accomplished public men in Ma.s.sachusetts told me years ago, that he was stopped on his way to school one morning in 1794, by a friend of the family, who bade him run back at once and tell his father the news had come from Europe that 'the head of Robert Spear had been cut off.' 'Make haste,' said this gentleman, 'and your papa will give you a silver dollar, he will be so glad to hear it!'

It was rather instructive to think of the 'sea-green incorruptible' and his idiotic 'Feast of the Supreme Being' on that beautiful clay of Pentecost, in the charming rural commune of St.-Quentin, the peace and happiness of which was for a time so cruelly broken up by his atrocities and follies a hundred years ago. The fine old church, near by my host's residence, has been restored with great taste and good sense. It was crowded at early ma.s.s with the farmers and their families, many of the men wearing their blouses, but all well-to-do, for this region is one of the richest and best cultivated districts of Northern France. The service was celebrated with much simplicity, but with no lack of due ceremony; the singing was excellent; and the priest's homily, a brief and very good discourse on the spirit of Christian charity, was listened to with great attention.

The pretty custom prevails here, as in Normandy, of handing about in the congregation, at a certain point in the service, a basket of bread. Two gravely courteous old peasants presented the baskets in turn to all the people. The service over, the farmers stood and chatted together in groups in the churchyard and about the porch, and I heard much talk of the outlook for the crops, of the price of cattle, and of certain properties which had recently changed hands. Of politics next to nothing.

My host was for many years a notary at Aire. He has transferred this position now to the husband of his only daughter, and occupies himself mainly with his agricultural interests. The notary, who is a personage everywhere in France, is especially a personage in Artois. This has come about in part through the great changes which have taken place in the proprietors.h.i.+p of land in this province during the last three centuries.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, after the province was substantially united with France by Louis XIV., great numbers of small proprietors, who had done well enough under the Spanish rule, found themselves forced, by the pressure of taxation, to part with their land, and there was a marked increase in the great estates, not only of the clergy but of the laity. After the First Consul took the country in hand, and began to reorganise it socially, on the principle laid down by him so often and so energetically, in his dealings with his councillors, that 'true civil liberty in a State depends upon the absolute safety of property,' there began to grow up in Artois a great middle cla.s.s of landholders, corresponding in many conditions to the 'strong farmers' of Ireland. With the increase of this cla.s.s came a natural increase in the importance and influence of the notaries, already and through the Spanish traditions very considerable in this region. In many parts of the province the notary is recognised as an unofficial, but authoritative, social arbiter, to whom may be safely referred for settlement all sorts of disputes, including very often questions of property which would elsewhere be taken before the courts of law. It was pleasant to see that the relation thus established between M. Labitte and the people generally had not been affected by the political agitation of the last ten years. When I drove about the country with him, I observed that he was saluted everywhere in the friendliest fas.h.i.+on, and that, as he more than once told me, by persons politically quite hostile to his re-election as councillor-general.

After luncheon on Pentecost, a most interesting ceremony took place at St.-Quentin. A long procession made up of the inhabitants of the commune, the men wearing their best clothes, the young girls garlanded and dressed in white, set forth from the porch of the church, after a brief service there, and marched around the commune. It was the English beating of the bounds without the beating, and with the old religious rites. In the midst of the procession, which extended perhaps a quarter of a mile, the parish priest walked alone under an embroidered canopy borne up by young villagers. Acolytes, with lighted candles, moved on either side of the canopy. Before it was borne a white silk banner of the Virgin, and behind it a banner embroidered in gold. All the park and grounds of M. Labitte lying within the commune, and being thrown open to the people, a very beautiful altar of verdure and roses had been set up under a bower in the great garden behind the house, by the daughter of M. Labitte. Before this altar the procession paused, a brief service was performed there, and then the long line resumed its march, a chorus of some twenty male voices chanting, as it went, the Magnificat. Nothing could exceed the unaffected simplicity and seriousness of the people of both s.e.xes and of all ages. The day was one of those perfect days, which, as Mr. Lowell says, come to the world in June, if ever they come at all; and as the long line wound its way around the fields, green with the prospering crops, beneath the orchards and the groves, and between the fragrant hedgerows, the silvery chiming of the bells in the old church alternated with the far-off chanting of the choristers, and the fitful breeze brought us, from time to time, the grave deep voice of the priest reciting, as he moved, the ancient prayers of hope and of thanksgiving.

It was interesting to remember that under the first French attempt at a republic, this lovely rural spectacle would have been as impossible as it would be to-day under the rule of the Mahdi in the Soudan; and also, to reflect that France is governed to-day by men who dream of making it thus impossible once more.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_

AIRE-SUR-LA-LYS.

My host at St.-Quentin being a councillor-general, his term of office expires with the elections fixed to take place on July 28. There is no reason in the nature of things why councillors-general should be elected on the same lines with deputies and senators. On the contrary, it would seem to be very desirable that local rather than national considerations should govern the election of such functionaries. But it has been found difficult, even in England and Wales, to keep national party politics out of the election of the new county councillors, whose duties are modelled in some important respects upon those a.s.signed to the councillors-general in France; and it is evident that the French local elections in July will be largely determined by considerations affecting the national elections which must take place in September and October.

M. Labitte, who was elected a councillor-general by the Conservatives in this department six years ago, was defeated in 1886, as I have already said, in a by-election, held to fill a vacancy in the Chamber of Deputies. It is the wish of his party friends that he should offer himself as a candidate for re-election as a councillor-general on July 28; but he does not seem disposed to do this, preferring, I think, to keep himself quite free to do his very best to bring about a Conservative victory in the national elections in September, with the importance of which to the future of France he is deeply impressed.

Meanwhile, he is giving a personal account of his stewards.h.i.+p as a councillor-general to his const.i.tuents in a series of 'conferences.' One of these conferences he was good enough to invite me to attend.

It was held in a commune, distant some ten or twelve miles from St.-Quentin-par-Aire, and, as the custom of France is, it was held on a Sunday afternoon. M. Labitte's son-in-law drove out from Aire with his wife to dine and spend the evening with us. And about three o'clock M.

Labitte, his son-in-law, and myself set out for the conference. Our road lay through a level but richly cultivated and, in its way, very beautiful region. In the last century, Artois seems to have been a kind of Ireland. The climate was excessively damp, the lack of forests and the undeveloped coal-mines left the peasantry dependent upon turf and peat for fuel; the roads were few and bad. There were good crops of grain; but the Intendant Bignon, drawing up a report on the province at the close of the seventeenth century, for the Duke of Burgundy, tells us the wars had made an end of all the manufactures, including the long-famous tapestry-works of Arras. 'There were few fruit-trees, little hay, and little manure.' Here and there some linen was made; but the trade of the province was carried on almost exclusively in grain, hops, flax, and wool. Iron and copper utensils, and coal and slates came to Artois from Flanders, cod-fish and cheese from the Low Countries, b.u.t.ter and all kinds of manufactured goods from England. Yet the population steadily increased all through the eighteenth century, while it was falling off in the neighbouring provinces of France. The worthy intendant thought the people sadly wanting in 'intelligence, activity, and practical sense,' and seems indeed, like a Malthusian before Malthus, half-inclined to attribute the phenomena of increase and multiplication in Artois to these defects. It would surprise him, I fancy, to look on the people and the land of Artois to-day. The land has become one of the most fertile and prosperous regions of France; the people, unaffected to any appreciable extent by immigration, and unchanged alike in race and in religion, increase and multiply as of old. The well-tilled fields, the well-kept and beautiful roads, the neat, green hedgerows, the orchards bear witness on every side to the intelligence, the activity, the practical sense of the inhabitants.

M. Baudrillart in one of his invaluable treatises on the condition of France before the Revolution of 1789, gives us the main key of this great difference between the condition of agricultural Artois in the eighteenth century and its condition to-day. He cites a most curious appeal to the estates of Artois in behalf of the rural populations, from which it appears that the citizens of the chief towns had combined with the _n.o.blesse_ and the higher clergy to keep the village curates and the farmers out of the provincial a.s.semblies, and to throw the whole burden of taxation upon the agriculturists. 'The soil of Artois,' say the authors of this appeal, 'is quite as good as the soil of England; and yet the Artesian farmers can only get out of their labour on it one quarter as much as the English do.' It was the fiscal maladministration, they maintain, which checked the progress of agriculture and depressed the condition of the farmers; and it is interesting to observe that these rural reformers proposed to remedy the evils of which they complained, not by abolis.h.i.+ng all the privileges of the privileged cla.s.ses in a night, as did the headlong mob of the States-General at Paris in 1789, but by securing a fairer representation of the rural regions in the Provincial Estates, limiting the duration of the Provincial Parliaments to three years, and deciding that one-third of the seats should be vacated and refilled every year. This does not look as if the Artesians of the last century were particularly deficient either in intelligence or in practical sense.

On our way to the conference we saw several sugar factories, most of them now abandoned, though the beet crops of Artois are still very important; and my companions told me that the people here, with all their traditional conservatism, are very quick to abandon any industry which ceases to promise good returns, and to change their crops as the conditions of the market change. We saw but few chateaux. One of the most considerable, standing well in view from the road in the midst of an extensive park, and approached by a long avenue of well-grown trees, seemed to be shut up. The proprietor, the Count de----, I was told had not visited it for two years past, one of his gamekeepers having been murdered in a conflict with some poachers.

Under the existing laws in France, political conferences must be held within four walls. Trafalgar Square meetings would be as impossible in republican France as in monarchical Germany. As the commune in which M.

Labitte was to meet his const.i.tuents possesses no convenient hall, and the local authorities were not particularly eager to facilitate the conference, one of the local Conservatives, a well-to-do farmer, had taken it upon himself to provide, at his own expense, a proper place of meeting, by fitting up a fine large barn with seats, and putting up a simple rustic platform in one corner of it for the speaker. It struck me that this was a symptom of genuine interest in the politics of his region not likely to be shown in similar circ.u.mstances by many English or American farmers. He was a man of middle age, with the quiet, self-possessed carriage, general among his cla.s.s in all parts of France, and received us, in the large and neatly-furnished best room of his old-fas.h.i.+oned and very comfortable house, with frank and simple courtesy. On the walls hung a number of engravings and two or three small paintings. One of these represented the Duc d'Orleans, the father of the Comte de Paris, in the uniform of the celebrated corps of Cha.s.seurs which he organised and to which he gave his name. 'That picture,' said the farmer, 'was given to my father by the prince. He used to stop here often while he was at the camp of the Cha.s.seurs, and take his breakfast. I remember him perfectly, for I was then a well-grown lad, and he was always full of kindness and good spirits. Ah!

if he had lived! We should not be where we are to-day in France, with all these debts and all these dangers!'

The const.i.tuents of my host, all of them specially invited by letter to attend the conference, had already begun to a.s.semble when we arrived, but some of them had two or three miles to walk after service in their respective churches, and it was nearly six o'clock when the conference began. By that time the large farmyard and the rooms of the house were filled with a company of perhaps a hundred and fifty men, almost all of them farmers. Among them was only one landowner of the aristocratic cla.s.s, the Comte de----, who had walked over from his chateau about three miles off. He was a type of the old-fas.h.i.+oned French country gentleman, tall and sinewy, with finely cut features, simply, not to say carelessly, dressed, but with an unmistakable air of distinction, and a certain peremptory courtesy of manner which would infallibly have got him into trouble in the days when, near Baume-les-Dames, Arthur Young had to clear himself of the suspicion that he was a gentleman on pain of being promptly hanged from a lantern hook.

The seats in the barn once filled, some fifty auditors grouped themselves in the farmyard about the wide-open doors of the barn, and M.