fying to the philanthropic character and elevated aims of his useful life. In manner he was modest and unassuming; of kindly, affectionate nature and quiet, methodical habits; without great ambitions, but always eager to add to his mental resources; and above all filled with an overflowing love for his fellowman. Added to this, he was a man of Christian principle, at all times in earnest, and invariably truthful, honest and sincere. He was the youngest son of a family of ten, the children of a farmermechanic residing in New Britain, Connecticut, who, we are told, plied the are told, plied the shoemaker's hammer and awl during the winter months, and the hoe and sickle in summer. On the death of his father, in 1828, when Elihu was seventeen years old, the latter apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in New Britain and followed that occupation for a number of years. His schooling was, in the main, scant, and in consequence of his father's long illness, it was fitful. From his brother, Elijah, a graduate of Williams College, he made up for a while his educational losses by attending school, at the age of twenty-one. This he did for a term or two, during which he learned some mathematics, for which he had a natural taste, designing at this time to become a surveyor.

Before leaving the anvil for this term of study, he was, we learn, in the habit of practicing on problems of mental arithmetic, which he extemporized and solved while blowing the bellows. These mental exercises were afterwards renewed, and his quick mind enabled him to tackle more difficult problems, and to take advantage of what he called " corner moments to study Greek, Latin and French, though against the snatched moments for these studies he had often to do double duty at the forge. Later on, he conceived the idea of going for a while to New Haven, that he might pursue Greek in the classic atmosphere of Yale. Here he determinedly mastered a good deal of Homer's "Iliad, " with no other help than a Greek lexicon with Latin definitions. Having given the winter to Homer, and to the intermittent study of Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and even Hebrew, he returned to New Britain with a naturally quickened relish for the languages, ancient and modern, though under increasing necessity to provide for his daily bread. After an unsuc

cessful attempt to establish himself in business, he made his way on foot to Boston, thence to Worcester, where he resumed his work at the anvil, with happy interludes in mental acquisition, stimulated by access to the large and rare library of the Worcester Antiquarian Society.

Here we find the young linguist making rapid progress in his studies, and enormously enlarging the range of his philological attainments. The fame of the scholarly youth now begins to reach distant ears, for he has written a modest letter in the Celto-Briton tongue to the Royal Antiquarian Society of France, seeking counsel in his studies; and even Boston has heard of him, for the Governor of the State invites him to dinner and, on behalf of some generous friends of letters in the great city, offers him gratuitously the facilities of the University of Harvard. The latter offer he however declines, "prefering both for his health and other considerations," we are told, "to continue his studies in conection with manual labor. "

In 1841, the fame of "the learned blacksmith" had so far grown that we find Mr. Burritt taking to the lecture platform and editing a weekly paper in Worcester devoted to the advocacy of "peace, temperance, and self-cultivation. " He also at this time espoused the cause of slavery abolition, but his chief engrossment was the advocacy of universal brotherhood and the amicable settlement of international controversies through arbitration. In the furtherance of his Gospel of Peace, he founded at this time what he called "The Olive Leaf Mission," and paid a visit to Europe, where he lectured, founded Peace Leagues, and interviewed the English government on his pet subject of international penny postage. Much good, apparently, was accomplished by the "Olive Leaf Mission," since the issues of that anti-war organization were circulated broadcast, and translations appeared on the European continent in "more than forty different journals, from Copenhagen to Vienna, and from Madrid to Stockholm. " It moreover received the support of many influential writers, including British and American divines and statesmen. After spending three years abroad, part of the time engaged in visiting Ireland, then in the depths of its wretchedness, owing to the famine of

1846-47, he returned to his native home, where he was received with many gratifying evidences of public appreciation and good will.

The good work so earnestly set in motion by Mr. Burritt was actively taken up in Europe by many distinguished inculcators of the principles of peace, and, as a result of their advocacy, a great Peace Congress was held in London in 1851, which drew Mr. Burritt once more across the Atlantic to take part in the demonstration. The movement received no slight impulse from the simultaneous gathering of the nations in the British metropolis to inaugurate the first of the great international expositions held that year-the embodiment of an idea first suggested by Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria. The success of the Congress held in London, as well as of those held in the following years at Manchester and at Edinburgh, was most gratifying, and did much to repress the rising revolutionary tide, industrial and political. There was especial need for the calling of the second Peace Congress in 1852, since that was the year of the coup d'état in France, which aroused in England much of the old hereditary suspicion and prejudice towards the French nation and its usurping Emperor. Despite the efforts of these several Congresses to bring about the millennium and induce concord among the nations, two years later saw England, France and Italy espouse the cause of the Turk against the Muscovite in the war in the Crimea. Not many more years were to elapse ere Mr. Burritt saw on the vast theatre of his own land as prolonged and sanguinary a defiance of the Gospel of Peace.

These calamitous outbreaks of the warspirit must no doubt have been vexing to the soul of the pacific Elihu Burritt, though the suspension of his labors in Europe gave him the opportunity to turn his philanthropic eyes upon his own country, where for a time he preached the gospel of "Compensated Emancipation." His proposition was characteristic of him, and creditable to his humanity, viz. to dispose of the public lands throughout the United States and apply the proceeds to the purchase of the slaves. Just as the scheme was beginning to commend itself to the nation, unhappily the raid upon Harper's Ferry (some details of which are elsewhere

given in the present magazine) occurred, and closed the door against all overtures or proposals of the kind.

In 1863, Mr. Burritt once more turned his face towards England, this time to prosecute a long cherished project—a tour on foot throughout the United Kingdom. The results of two of these novel but interesting tours in Britain, Mr. Burritt published in the delightful volumes, which are no doubt well known to readers of SELF CULTURE. They are entitled "A Walk from London to John O'Groats," and "A Walk from London to Land's End and Back." In these entertaining volumes, their author not only indulges himself in giving expression to his keen appreciation of the beauty of Old England, but has the opportunity, of which he takes hearty advantage, to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the toiling masses that make up the congested centres of Britain's industrial seats, and of those more scattered millions that form the humble but sturdy peasantry of the nation.

A third volume of the series, issued in 1866, entitled "Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border Lands," deals with the various manufacturing towns and villages in the Birmingham district. This work Mr. Burritt compiled after his appointment, in the Spring of 1865, as Consular Agent for the United States at Birmingham, and it was undertaken mainly with the view to collect and communicate to the Department at Washington facts relating to the industrial pursuits and productions of the region of his Consulate. The work is specially valuable as an economic handbook, while its two predecessors have their chief interest in the more general, historical, topographical and social features of England and Scotland. In 1870, with the election of General Grant to the Presidency, Mr. Burritt was superseded in the Birmingham Consulate, and after a six weeks sojourn at Oxford, where he had the honor of the friendship of many distinguished men, Professor Max Müller among the number, he returned to his own land and once more to his native town in Connecticut, with leisure to pursue his interrupted linguistic studies and pass the evening of his days in works of charity. Here, some nine years later (March 6, 1879), he passed into the Beyond, leaving a fragrant memory behind him. G. M. A.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION *

T may be safely said that no event in the history of the world has been so momentous, or has brought with it consequences so immense, so farreaching, and so enduring as the French Revolution. Nor is it difficult to account for this. The place of France among the nations of Europe, the shocking misgovernment of the country during the old régime, the character of the people, and the influence of new points of view in regard to the nature and the rights of man, all combined to bring on the tremendous conflagration.

Progress and

As civilization advances Revolution and the sense of human dignity is developed, it is inevitable that the inhabitants of a country should insist on taking a part in its government, and an increasing part. And this may be accomplished by gradual progress or by revolution. In England the so-called revolutions were little more than restorations of the normal state of things, which had been disturbed by the folly or selfwill of the sovereign. In France the case was quite different. It was not merely that the feudal system gained a strength in France which it never had in England, but the French people never had enjoyed those free institutions which the English had brought with them from their German homes.

The Ancien

The story of the ancien Regime régime has been told with fullness and accuracy by de Tocque

* See the articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica on France, E. B., vol. ix, page 596; Marie Antoinette, vol. xv, page 540; Robespierre, vol. xx, page 601; Danton, vol. vi, page 815; Marat, vol. xv, page 526; Mirabeau, vol. xvi, page 493; Turgot, vol. xxiii, page 627; Lafayette, vol. xiv, page 201; Necker, vol. xvii, page 312; Philippe Egalité (Duke of Orleans), vol. xvii, page 853; Diderot, vol. vii, page 193; Voltaire, vol. xxiv, page 285; The Encyclopédie, vol. 8, page 197; and Rousseau, vol. xxi, page 23. Consult also Guizot's "History of France"; Thiers' "French Revolution"; Morse Stephen's "French Revolution"; Carlyle's "French Revolution"; De Tocqueville's "L'ancien régime et la revolution"; Taine's "L'ancien régime"; Mignet's "French Revolution"; and Mrs. Gardiner's "French Revolution," in the Epochs of History series.-ED.

ville and Taine, and only the slightest summary can be attempted here. France was constituted out of a number of Provinces originally either independent or loosely connected with the Empire. Gradually they became fiefs of the King of the French, and finally they were incorporated into the Kingdom by intermarriage, by conquest, and by common consent. Prominent among those who accomplished this work of unification were Louis XI., Francis I., Henry IV., and the great Cardinal Richelieu. By the age of Louis XIV. all power had been concentrated in the sovereign, yet the nobles and large landed proprietors retained rights of taxing and tithing, which were oppressive to the people and crushing to their industry. At the same time, as the nobles were now deprived of their powers of government, they collected round the court at Versailles, losing all interest in their estates and their tenants, except as the means of providing for their luxury and dissipation.

Misery of

the People

The condition of the poorer classes was wretched beyond our power of imagination. Arthur Young, who travelled in France the year before the Revolution, and has left the most interesting and valuable account of the state of the country, tells us: "There are no gentle transitions from ease to comfort, from comfort to wealth; you pass at once from beggary to profusion. The country deserted, or if a gentleman in it, you find him in some wretched hole, to save that money which is lavished with profusion in the luxuries of a capital." A poor woman in Champagne told him that "her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow and a poor little horse, yet he had 42 lbs. (a franchar) of wheat and three chickens to pay to one seigneur, and four franchars of oats, one chicken, and one shilling to pay another, besides very heavy tailles [poll tax] and other taxes. She had seven children.

This woman at no great distance might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent and her face so furrowed and hardened by labor, but she said she was only twenty-eight."

Disquiet

People in such a state were not far from insurrection. If the crops of one season failed, they were under the necessity of begging or stealing. There was no legal provision for the relief of the poor, and multitudes were kept alive chiefly by the convents and also by bishops and grand seigneurs. Such a state of things by itself need not have produced a revolution, but it is evident that the materials existed and waited only for the torch to be applied. An English traveller, twenty years before the actual outbreak, declared that he saw in France all the signs of an approaching revolution. And these were found not merely in the condition of the people, but in the state of public opinion, in the ideas which had gained currency in all classes of the community, promulgated by the free-thinkers of the eighteenth century.

Voltaire and the First among these were Encyclopedists Voltaire (1694-1778) and the Encyclopedists. Voltaire was not an atheist, but he was a "free-thinker' and a sceptic; and he was an advocate of religious liberty. He considered the Church of his own country and time to be the opponent of all true progress. his successors went further. Diderot (1713-1784), the founder of the "Encyclopédie," at first a Deist, became something like a Pantheist.

But

La Mettrie (1709-1751) and d'Holbach, the author of the "Système de la Nature" (1770), were materialists and atheists. But the whole tendency of the times was to have all such questions open and undecided. And the Church had no moral or spiritual power which could oppose effective resistence to the movement. Persecution, which was occasionally resorted to, only fanned the flame of revolution. And the political economists, in a different way, began to promulgate principles which undermined the selfish and shortsighted policy of the old régime. The first edition of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776, two years after Louis XVI. came to the throne. The economists were no less ardent advocates of liberty than the Voltaireans. Moreover, the "Social Contract" of Rousseau (1762) had carried everywhere his protest against the artificiality of society, and had declared that "man is born free, but everywhere is in chains."

Louis XVI

When Louis XVI. came to the throne of France,

it was becoming clear that some change must be made; and the young king did not seem unwilling to enter upon the path of reform. If his Queen, Marie Antoinette, an Austrian Princess, could have seconded him, and if the nobility of France could have seen that the time was come when important reforms had to be carried out, France might have entered upon a course of rational reform, and the Revolution in its most terrible form might have been averted. But those changes had to come — one way or another; and those who had profited by the scandalous abuses of the past were not in the least prepared to help them onward, so the river of progress was turned into the deluge of revolution. Louis himself, a man of good character and of excellent intentions, had neither the wisdom to understand the whole significance of the movement, nor the strength to carry through any purpose he might form. Mr. Carlyle says his greatest fault was that he was continually saying Yes and No, instead of Yes or No. Either might have done, he thinks, but both could not.

Turgot,

1774-1776

Louis XVI. was fortunate, or might have been fortunate, in his first Controller-General, Turgot, a man of integrity, ability, and experience, who took in hand to bring about the reforms obviously needed for the prosperity of the country, which was steadily decreasing in wealth and in population. The principal of them were the removal of restrictions on the internal trade of the country, especially in grain and wine, the abolition of forced labor, and the concession of liberty to the workman to exercise what trade he pleased. Several other reforms were projected by Turgot; but the nobles could not see the necessity for giving up their privileges, the Queen disliked Turgot, and the King was induced to dismiss him. There was no other man with the qualities of Turgot who could be found to take his place. It is a well-grounded opinion that he was the greatest statesman France had seen since Richelieu. The Austrian ambassador told the Queen's mother, Maria Theresa, the danger of the situation. Turgot, he said, was "of high repute for integrity," and "loved by the people; and it is

therefore a misfortune that his dismissal should be in part the Queen's work. Such use of her influence may one day bring upon her the just reproaches both of her husband and of the entire nation." A prophecy most sadly fulfilled.

1787. Brienne, 1787. Necker, 1788

Necker, 1776-1781. The dismissal of Turgot Calonne, 1783- was the failure of the King and aristocracy to deal with the crisis. Turgot was succeeded by Necker, a financier of ability and a man of character. The King most reluctantly gave his support to the American struggle for independence, and money had to be raised. Necker could not get along with the parliaments and resigned. He was succeeded by Calonne, and Brienne, but was recalled in 1788, to the great satisfaction of the whole country, not only because of his well-known financial ability, but because he was known to be opposed to the Court. For all this, he proved unequal to the occasion; but we need not anticipate.

The

Third Estate

If reforms cannot be carried out by the machinery already at work, the question arises What other machinery can be found? And men were busy answering this question. Among others the Abbé Sieyès contributed by a pamphlet on the subject, recommending the assembling of the States-General, and laying special emphasis upon the third estate; which should be everything, he thought; and which was nothing, as he knew. Surely, he argued, the people of France, outside the ranks of the nobility and the higher clergy, had some rights and some capacity for governing. There were about twenty millions of souls in France; and only a a million and a half of these belonged to the two privileged orders. Moreover, it was manifest that these classes were a hindrance to the prosperity of the nation. It was high time that the equality of all the people should be recognized.

maintained that the two orders together should have no more than the third. To this the King, on the advice of Necker, gave his consent. As to whether they should debate and vote together or apart, he left the question open. The StatesGeneral were opened by the King at Versailles on May 5, 1789, with nearly 1,200 deputies, the clergy sending 291, the nobility 270, and the third estate 557. It soon became manifest that the indecision of the King in regard to the method of procedure was most injurious. The nobles and clergy at first refused to enroll along with the members of the third estate. At last about 100 of the clergy did so; and they got to work under the name of the "National Assembly" (June 17, 1789). At last the clergy joined the commons (third estate); and Necker advised the King to yield and assemble the three orders together. But the King, as usual, was obstinate at the wrong time, and shut up the great hall of meeting. The deputies, fearing dissolution, adjourned to a neighboring tennis court, and there took a solemn oath (June 20) that they would not separate until they had established constitutional government on a solid basis. The National Assembly then became the Constituent Assembly, as being occupied with the drawing up of a new constitution.

Union of

the Orders

Every act of the King's was calculated to make matters worse. The tennis court, he said, was wanted, and the deputies met in the Church of St. Louis at Versailles (June 22). On the 23d of June they were summoned to a royal sitting, and were told to meet in separate orders. The address was received in silence, and when the King left he was followed by the nobles and superior clergy. The third estate and a large number of the parish priests remained in the hall, and sent a message to the King that they would leave only at the point of the bayonet.

The Duke of Orleans (known afterwards as Philippe Égalité) and forty-six of the nobles joined the commons; and the King then had to tell the rest of them to join the Assembly. The union of the orders was thus effected (June 27, 1789). Necker could do no more, and he resigned. He was ordered to leave the kingdom immediately (July 11).