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 alarmned 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 strivo 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, aud that thero 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. nover 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 colossa! 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 vigo rous 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 carly, 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 domestie 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

dustry, a child not yet grown becomes useful in proportion to his strength. They use his little arm as soon as it can move a wheel or lift a hammer. He has not one monient free for instruction or pleasure; all his minutes are occupied. The great thing is to live; one moment lost is a mouthful of bread lost. When all days and hours pass thus, what of Sunday and of Monday? Those who know man, and tho eternal laws of his organization, know that these unfortunato slaves require pleasure and violent distraction. They take it. The limbs fatigued with labor, or stiffened by a week without exercise, are distended and bathed in drunkenness and coarse joy. To the abominable torpor, the frightful lassitudes succeeds twenty-four or forty-eight hours of orgies. Then the man re-becomes a beast of burden, takes up again his weekly yoke, and so goes on till he dies,

You will acknowledge that none need education more than this man; but how to give it! what education to give him!

The workmen in manufactories are employed before they grow up. His physical force, as it grows, strangles the intellectual. He has no time to think; he knows or can do but two things, act and enjoy. The brute faculties develope themselves, without his possessing the happy instincts of conservative wisdom which Providence has given to the animals. Every day he does the same work in the same way. He acts like a lever; a pulley, a hammer; he loses his manhood; he is a bit of brass or of iron. Are theso observations a calumnious attack upon industry? No. Wo scck, completely disinterested, the truth, the reality, the facts, the evils, and the remedies. The father of political economy, Adam Smith, a really cloquent man, like all profound and sincere writers, foresaw these results; he declared that the livision of labor would produce necessarily and fatally, an poch where the cleverness and strength of every workman

would be concentrated in a very simple and purely material operation. No idea can germinate in the brain of a man who has cut a thread, turned a spindle, or unscrewed a nut two thousand times a day, for three hundred and fifty days a year. The composer in a printing office, obliged to reflect while he works, and to accomplish a variety of complicated and delicate operations, is nearly always a smart, intelligent fellow; "but," says Smith, "the greater portion of workmen in the factories have no occasion to exercise their intelligence. They lose the habit of thinking, and grow stupid and ignorant. Their mental torpor hinders them, not only from taking part in a reasonable conversation, but from understanding a tender or generous sentiment, and consequently, from forming a solid and equitable judgment on the duties of private life. How can such a man associate himself with the great interests of the country? The uniformity of his stationary life corrupts the courage of his soul, and even the activity of his body. He buys his partial dexterity at the price of all his intellec tual, social, and moral virtues. If the governments do not take some measures to correct the degradation, this will be the miserable condition to which it will reduce the poor workmen. of all civilized society, that is, the large majority of the popu lation.

The recent movements of the Chartists have proved that the great economist was right. Uneducated masses, worn out by toil and want, broke suddenly forth. At the voice of eertain leaders they seized upon spade and mattock, and descended like avalanches upon the peaceable cities. One was obliged to give battle to these Cyclops, and when they were beaten on one side, they were likely to rise up again on the other. They have immense physical force; they have no principle, no light nor bridle; they are habituated to every fatigue and privation; they want more bread, more leisure,