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enemies at a time; against the old French population of Canada, and the Republicans of the States, who know so well how to act for their own advantage. It is in order to favor and increase these emigrations that the British government has published and profusely distributed "Letters of certain indigent Persons who have emigrated to Canada." They contain the most seductive and brilliant picture of the happiness which attends future emigrants; they promise a land of Cocagne, whose rivers roll o'er sands of gold, with farmhouses already built, and swarms of young Canadian girls awaiting them with open arms. This little untruth, a common political hoax, is very pardonable. It is much better for the poor workmen of England, Scotland and Ireland, to clear, in the sweat of their brows, a wild domain on the great Canadian Lakes, than to rest famished or to become criminal in the streets of Glasgow, Birmingham or London.

Men have counted the victims of ancient conquerors; have they thought of those of modern industry, generations made meagre, intellects knotted and dulled, the canuts of Lyons, the crazy men of Birmingham. Since the year 1818, the weavers and hand-spinners of Scotland and Northern England petition incessantly for a means of gaining a living. Every year parliament treats them as Don Juan does M. Dimanche, puts them off until next year, and so the matter drops. Nevertheless, machine labor, gigantic rival of human toil, continues its progress, and crushes in its route all who resist. "Destroy the machines," cry some journals and pamphlets. "Favor emigration," say wiser politicians; it is the only remedy for exuberant population, for unemployed arms, for overstocked professions. Found colonies in good situations, fertile, peaceable; the money consecrated to that will be placed at heavy interest; the more your colonists are satisfied, the more will others be attracted; the more will you

lighten the burden of the metropolis. These advices are excellent. Colonies are admirable exutoires, useful to the metropolis even at the moment that they separate from it. Unfortunately, France has only been able to discover for others a proper territory for colonization without herself founding colonies.

We will not return to that sad old malady of our France which seems always destined to sow the seed of progress, but never to reap. England, on the contrary, is essentially a colonizing country. She must continue that work which created the United States, and carry it on with redoubled energy, activity and perseverance. She is notified of this necessity by facts hideously distinct.

There are three standing armies of paupers, Irish cotters, Sussex laborers, and Glasgow weavers; and these three form a mass of thirty thousand men, without any means of exist· ence, without knowing where to get daily bread. You see, say the parliamentary reports, troops of thirty or forty workmen, who go from one end of England to the other, looking for work, asking alms on the road, picked up by the police officers, and happy to get the black bread of the parish workhouse.

While the English political economists struggle against this population, the American of the United States, and the inhabitants of Canada demand loudly hands for the cultivation of the soil. "All the world," says a Canadian journal, "knows that population is wealth." Thus, for one country, that population is riches, which makes the poverty of another. And in these two axioms, placed in juxtaposition, one can see the future of Europe and America; here rivalries, unsatisfied ambitions in the midst of great industrial prosperity, the decline and the pressure of famished men, of which China

offers an example; there, continuous, rapid, onward, inevitable progress.

These emigrations, which should be favored by England and by France, augment and precipitate the progress of North America. It is not probable that the anglo-Canadian colonies, and the British possessions bordering on the United States, will long remain insensible to the near and contagious example of independence and self-government. When their cities shall have been built, their fields cleared, their forests thinned, their commercial relations established, they will separate, one by one, from the parent stock, and affiliate themselves to that formidable group of republics which borders the Atlantic, and is stretching towards the Pacific.

SECTION II.

POPULAR MOVEMENT IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND-EDUCATION

OF THE MASSES.

The despair of old Europe, fatigued by labors, exhausted by pleasure, enervated by desire, manifests itself especially in England, France, and Germany. The chartist movements which have recently alarmed Great Britain, are but the powerless, yet mad aspiration after necessary well-being; the roar of the popular lion agitated in his den. In France, it is more mingled with self-love, envy, and jealous hatred; with our neighbors, there is more hunger, thirst and sorrow. The insurrection of vanities is not less terrible than that of hunger. Here, and on the other side of the channel, the masses seek to employ their power. You cannot oppose the fact, nor strive against what exists. All good politics, worthy of the

name, takes situations as it finds them, and strives to direct them.

At present there is a difficult and fearful question in England. Would popular education have prevented these sorrows?

Popular education, its distribution, the control which it should exercise, and the choice of men to whom to confide it, occupies to-day the minds of Great Britain, or rather, all the thoughtful minds of Europe. It is not a simple question. It is allowed that the people must be enlightened; it is not agreed, either as to the degree of instruction, or the means of education, or the relative proportion of moral and religious teaching. The clergy declare that the intellectual direction of humanity belongs to them alone; the enemies of the clergy accuse them of wishing to revive fanaticism for their own profit. Some philosophers see with terror an immoral education going on in the people; others assert that moral light always accompanies intellectual, and that there can be no risk in enlightening men.

"Alas, you deceive yourselves," reply some clear-seeing men to these latter. "All the ambitions awakened by an equalized education would render a government impossible. Men crowd already to the professions called liberal, and which constitute the aristocracy of to-day. You will soon have twenty-five doctors to one patient, and sixty lawyers for a single suit. Prepare workmen to exercise mechanic arts, which are certainly as useful as the babble of tongue or pen. Keep them far from a literary education which will make them bad men of letters, indifferent artists, and painters of screens and Swiss watches."

To this the partisans of equality answer, that it is infamous to establish a hierarchy of education and instruction, that the University is a feudal institution, behind the age, opposed to

progress, and which ought to be destroyed. On the other hand, the clergy continue to fulfil their task; philanthropists print little volumes, and every year prizes are given for pretty treatises on popular morality, of which the people never read a line, but which profit two persons, the author and the printer.

We have spoken of France. England is exposed to greater dangers; forced to continue her colossal industry, her universal commerce, and her gigantic exportations. She assembles in several parts of her territory, thousands of men vowed to the manual labor made necessary by her industry. They are the servitors of the temple; poor souls, they are its sacrifices! Every time that a new invention advances the car, as the poets say, a thousand existences are crushed beneath the wheel of this Juggernaut. I do not say this to calumniate industry, but because, unfortunately I love truth, and will write it. In a season of calm, when there are no revolutions, no riots, no new machine to replace by a copper piston two hundred vigorous human arms; when all goes well for the workman, look at his life at Manchester, Birmingham, Leods, Liverpool, Sheffield, London or Edinburgh. He and his wife rise early, because they must arrive as early as the others. The workmen are so numerous and pressing that a little laziness would lose both place and bread. The wife confides to a paid, yet careless nurse, her little child, sallow, diminutive, thin or ricketty; one of those frightful children, found only at Lyons or Liverpool, and which will also, one day become a laborer. Then, the husband and wife go to their toil. No duties, no domestic pleasures, no motion of the intelligence, nothing which can awaken in these materialized creatures, the soul, the mind, the spark of divinity. In speaking of this horrid use of humanity, one must restrain one's self, and not give way to declamation. As living is dear in these great cities of in

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