falo is of yesterday, Montreal dates from the 16th century. Everywhere the same contrast; here, forests cleared, fields cultivated, houses built, farms made the most of by the AngloAmericans; there, an infructuous solitude, where a few colonists vegetate in poverty, scattered wrecks of old French families, without the spirit of enterprise, without roads or markets, and separate from each other by considerable intervals." It is the same Christian and Teutonic genius of voluntary association, of sympathetic industry which, in Ireland, opposes the riches of the imported Scots to the poverty of the old Irish. Persuade a Norman, Picard, or Gascon peasant to deposite his weekly gains in a central bank! Tell that vigneron who distrusts the smith, that smith who loves not the doctor, that doctor who detests the curé, to form an association-they will do nothing of the kind. All community of interest is impossible, since each treasures up what he can gain, and is on his guard against his neighbor. Suppose besides that the University man is at war with the Churchman, the tax-gatherer with the instructor, and that the thundering voice of the journals reanimate incessantly these mutual hatreds; beneath the ashes which covers and smothers them; what harmony can come from such an accumulation of antagonisms. Listen to writers of statistics;-they tell us that in France a population of 35,000,000 produce only 520,000,000 bushels of corn of all sorts in a year; that they raise cattle in greatly inferior disproportion to the number of men; that with the finest ports and the most admirable sail, France is relatively poor. The moral main-spring ruined; the spirit of enterprise wanting, or working wrongly; the tavern taking the place of the church; present enjoyment absorbing the future; the spirit of family attacked; no local nor popular banks; a profound demoralization seizing upon the manufacturing towns;-all this comes not from the Present, but from the Past; and thus the loss of power, which for two centuries has not ceased to impoverish France, is sufficiently explained. What statistics could give a complete list of the capital wasted by our useless and unhappy wars, our false theories, our inactivity, our carelessness. Between 1803 and 1815 our strife with Europe cost 6,000 millions of francs and 1,000,000 men; we paid the allies 1500 other millions, and lost in products destroyed by two invasions as many more. In twelve years 9000 millions of francs. Go back to 1800 or to 1789 you will find a sum almost as great exhausted by the wars of the Revolution, and the destruction of industry. Therefore in spite of the progress of science and of light, the wound is very painful. "I have often," says the engineer Cordier, "traversed twenty square leagues without finding a canal, a route, a manufactory, or even a domaine. The whole country seemed a desert, or a place of exile abandoned to the unfortunates whose interests and necessities are equally ill-understood, and whose distress increases constantly because of the high price of transport, and the low price of products." "The unfortunate condition of the French working classes," says the British Consul Newman, in his report to the British Commissioner of the poor laws, "has no better proof, than the resolutions recently taken by the manufacturers and the Breton farmers, to employ none who would not leave in their hands a weekly sum for the support of their wives and children. They are generally quick, active people, who make good soldiers, but the moral culture is null; nearly all the small farmers come back from the fair half-drunk, and the week's money is spent by Monday." "It is known," says another report, "that the abuse of paternal power has enfeebled the population of the department du Nord. A father uses his child to gain a few more cen times. He sends him to school but leaves him there only until his feeble arms become of some use to his parents. And this child, worn out before he is grown up, curses, as you can imagine, a father who has shown him no pity." See then what the most active, ingenious, generous race of Europe has done with the fair land which God gave it. The race is not to be accused, but the Past. The tradition was erroneous. Despite the ameliorations of the last sixty years in material interests, it is plain that the old Celtic spirit is not yet vanquished, a spirit prompt in war, in art, yet mentally disorderly, incapable of self-government, and kindling the war which labor now wages against capital. In the United States, contrary traditions have produced contrary effects. On-going in its force, trusting itself, expecting nothing from one's equals, demanding nothing from government, succoring one's neighbor, and being succored by him; these form the secret: these are the English habits, which, under an aristocratic form have made the prosperity of Great Britain and which America now carries out to their fullest extent. Hence comes universal hope, general industry, ardent desire for the advancement of the race. Born of the Christian and Teutonic elements, these three forces abound in America: Charity, Good Sense, Activity. From the combination of these three forces, not one can be spared without injury to the organic play of such a state as the Union; love, intelligence, power. A proud and sympathetic tradition becomes self-government, resolves itself into the government of province by province, commune by commune, municipality by municipality, of each group by itself, of man by man. The true device of the United States is not " every man for himself," a motto of destruction, but "every man by himself and for all;" a motto of sympathy and creation. Nothing astonishes and scandalizes, I will not say an American, but a peasant of Norway, Denmark or Scotland, so much as to hear that there is in the old Roman countries a unit Power, which acts for everybody, supports the schools, pays the clergy, builds the bridges, sustains the theatres, sells tobacco and salt, erects hospitals, keeps whole armies of clerks to copy and endorse letters. The Teuton peasant is still more amazed when he learns that if the government were to withdraw its aid, everybody would revolt. He does not understand our two habitudes;-t -the rage of wishing to be governed, and that of biting the hand that governs us. SECTION III. GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC-FIRST AND SECOND ERA OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES. That tradition of liberty in unity, order in independence, has no need of laws to exist in America. The manufacturer is free to employ or dismiss his workmen, the workman to accept or refuse the price; the capitalist to do what he pleases with his money, the farmer and the merchant to capitalize their gains. The State and the law never interfere; moral law, the main-spring, is in the character of the people. There is no forced and theoretic association, but a sympathy of fact and habit, an Anglo-Saxon clubbing, perpetual, ineffaceable as their manners, which governs the whole country, and without which self-government would be a chimera: they unite everywhere mutually to aid one another. It is so thoroughly a memory of race, a Germanic tradition, dating from the epoch of the Rachinbourgs and of the Wittena gemot, that the Irish, so abundant in the States, have difficulty in getting on their habits of disorder and isolation often compromise the destinies of the Union. Even among the halfsavages, who, skin-clad and armed with an axe, go to clear the forest, this creative sentiment exists; they too associate to create, never to destroy. They constantly reproduce the phenomenon of voluntary association, which we find on a larger and more active scale in civilized cities, for instance, the Puritan city, Boston. In 1844, says Mr. Mackay, the English ship Britannia, carrying despatches, and bound to quit the port on the first of February, was caught in ice seven feet thick at the docks and two feet thick at its extremity seven miles out to sea. The vessels lying in the clear water were loaded from carts driven from the shore. So soon as this blockade became known, a bee was gathered as rapidly as if in the woods of Ohio or Tennessee. This opulent and literary city arose to deliver the British mail-boat. The workies, commanded by engineers, traced a canal in the ice seven miles long by two hundred feet wide; two furrows, seven inches deep, were drawn by a plough, ice blocks an hundred feet square, were sawn out and pushed toward the sea. This enormous and dangerous operation was performed in two days; but already new ice, two feet thick, had formed. The Bostonians came to see how the Britannia, now armed with an iron cuirass, would overcome this obstacle. She managed to break the ice, ånd advancing at the rate of seven miles an hour, issued triumphantly from the port, amid the hurrahs of twenty thousand Bostonians. Tents were erected on the shore, the élite were there in sleighs. A thick couch of snow covered the sun rose, and joyous shouts filled the air, as they ice; the |