modern times. Such thinkers and moralists as Ampère and Montalembert, and Lanfrey, and those of their kind, talked of the "Lower Empire," and "Byzantium," but it was far beyond that; it was a perpetual Ronde d'Enfer as in Offenbach's Orphée, the outcome whereof may be traced in the monstrous correctional and criminal trials of the time. Still, the public opinion of England, alone in Europe, persisted in taking it all for granted, and refused to see that the mortal injury done was to regard it as "French." It was essentially, radically, the absolute reverse of anything French, and the French people themselves stigmatized it as the direct issue of cosmopolitanism, and of the moral inundation of France by the worst out-pourings of foreign countries. Thus far, then, the "classes." In the "masses" were sown the seeds of "Internationalism," to which I will revert later in more detail. But while cosmopolitism was turning the heads of the so-called higher ranks of society, and international theories were taking possession of the lower ones, a distinct social stratum was being formed, slowly, silently, unconsciously, of which probably no other country has any knowledge. It grew up unnoted, and ripened unobserved; and when, in September 1870, the painted bridge of the Second Empire fell in, disclosing to view the rent made in the earth by "February," the formation was laid bare whence were to spring all the elements of the Third Republic. These are the couches sociales of which spoke Gambetta in 1872. It is useless attempting to ignore them. They are not the Messieurs du Pavé of which Prince Bismarck spoke in 1871: they are the lower middle class; they have roots in the soil, therefore responsibilities; they lie at the source of whatsoever is hardest to describe; they vastly outnumber all other classes in the country, and they are "classes"; on them now rests all power, though of their practical omnipotence they are as yet but dimly aware; from them has issued both the good and the evil that have become manifest since the war: the quiet, law-abiding elections of 1876, and the colossal absurdities of the Parisian Town Council; the stupid efforts to exclude foreign industry, and the determined civilian resistance to military despotism, or military claptrap, that took the uninitiated so by surprise a few months ago. All this is the direct result of the action of universal suffrage in France, and the creation by it of les nouvelles couches sociales pointed out by Gambetta. They are overwhelming in numbers; they have the “power”; they are, of their very essence, opposed to all adventure, and least of all inspired by any vaingloriousness, least of all inflated by any notions of the "natural right of France to dictate her will to Europe." It is of these "classes" the foreigner can know nothing, for they have never held power till now, and do not even now know that they hold sovereign sway. III. But as to the grande bourgeoisie of former days, to whom France owes as much as to her once chivalrous and affirmative noblesse what of them? Nothing. Where are they? Nowhere. They are superseded. : In the introduction to his remarkable work on La Bourgeoisie Française, just published,* M. Bardoux says: "There has been in the political world but one bourgeoisie, possessed of traditions, of perseverance in its principles and plans, and of a following capable of carrying them out: this was the bourgeoisie of France." M. Bardoux is not wrong. For many reasons this class may be said to stand alone in history, keeping its level and doing its work. But let us follow M. Bardoux a little farther, and quote another phrase: ". . . The qualities and defects," he adds, "of this great bourgeois class ought to be seriously studied, before Democracy, acting through Universal Suffrage, has swept them away, and definitively seized all power in the State. These higher 'middle' classes had a double ambition: they aimed at the constitution of a society that should be both political and civil. As far as the last of the two is concerned, they succeeded happily and completely." M. Bardoux, a Frenchman, and one who has exercised official functions, confirms the rule that has to be adopted in any attempt to judge the France of the present day, and lends it his whole authority. But the new offspring of pure Democracy is, in most respects, opposed to the Bourgeois it replaces, and perhaps less hostile to the very highest class of society. It has few of the defects of its predecessors and many more sterling qualities; it is, in general, superior to it in morality, immeasurably superior in numbers, and, such as it is, it deserves to be studied with fairness and impartiality, for it constitutes the future of the country -perhaps its best chance of salvation. No Englishman can take in the characteristics of these people, for they have, intellectually and morally, nothing in common; their horizons are totally different, and let what will be their virtues, public or private -putting these even on the highest conceivable level-they can never see things from the same point of view. To begin with, the very term "public life" stops all identity of * La Bourgeoisie Française, by M. Bardoux, ex-Minister of Public Instruction, 8vo. Paris: Calman Lévy. 1887. 1 vol. appreciation at once; for the Frenchman of the "lower middle' class no more conceives what the Englishman calls public life than he conceives what are in England the attributes of a public school. In former days-days of stronger Government and completer unity of opinion-the patriotic oneness of the nation was called forth by the idea of glory-of glory won in strife: it was rarely based upon the more prosaic notion of the common weal. As long as the "classes" (meaning then the highest) ruled supreme, the national unity asserted itself oftenest in war. Men fought together valiantly at the behest of those who commanded; but the standing shoulder to shoulder in perfect trust, and under a purely civic impulse, was not a fact of which French history furnishes many examples. It is this condition of things that the action of universal suffrage is every day modifying in France. These vast numbers, on whom manhood suffrage has conferred the political rights they are beginning to understand, are deficient neither in wisdom nor in a sense of duty, of public duty even, for between public duty and public life there is this difference, that the first is a law, the second an enjoyment; and whereas, these classes will obey the one, the satisfaction of the other has never yet been revealed to them. It is evident to whomsoever has studied this section of the population (responsible as it has now been made) that the defence of France may be well committed to its care, and to that of the army drawn from its numbers. Any unjust aggression would meet with souniversal and manful a resistance as would probably prove invincible. But the individuals composing this lower middle class are to a man realistic beyond compare; they may be said to have absolutely no ideals. They are as separate from the bourgeois and upper classes (which are rapidly tending to amalgamate) as they are from the "masses," and that, by the opposite effects of the same cause-work. The grand bourgeois, through the medium of acquired wealth, enjoys the same privileges as the very highest order. He pays others to work for him, whereas, though the citizen of the lower middle class still works, he works only for himself. The "masses" work for him, receiving a wage from whomsoever can pay them. The fact of toil severs the higher class from the two others, though one is independent by his labour, and the other is salaried by a stranger, and the effect of the salary inflicted (this is the present sense attached to it) severs the "masses from all the rest. Broadly stated, these are the chief distinctions that now divide the French nation; but there is one broader yet than any that predominates over all. Granted that the humbler classes (yet still "classes") in France have in the past been very much like what they are in the present day-that their essential qualities, their temperament, their inmost nature, have nearly always been the same (which I incline to believe might be made clear), the tremendous difference remains to be recognized-that they were then subservient. Never in any country in Europe have the majority of the so-called "people" been so little taken into account by the ruling powers as in France up to 1848. They literally were not, but were disposed of wholesale by their masters. It is they who are masters now. These unidealistic, slow, narrow-minded, plodding, and honest citizens of the lower middle class have in their hands entirely what is termed Political Power. They constitute the "governing classes." There is nothing elevated about them, nothing adventurous, nothing aspiring or inspired. They are irreclaimably humdrum, but they are safe. It is a curious problem, and well worth the closest examination. IV. There are many reasons why Englishmen cannot see anything from the same point of view as do the individuals who are now the real source of all government in France, but two reasons have always seemed to me paramount: these nouvelles couches sociales are not, of their nature, or by instinct, political, neither have they the slightest familiarity with the past. They take no interest in their own historical annals, have in history no passionate likes or dislikes, and derive no pleasure from politics in the present. While they are possessed of a fair faculty of judgment, of sterling good sense, and of remarkable uprightness of mind, they are wholly devoid of culture, and almost invariably to be noted for their peculiar want of high animal spirits. Take some provincial town of from 2,000 to 15,000 souls, and pass in review the raw material of the Electorate. You will find petty tradesmen, small village doctors, employés, school teachers, very small rentiers, and retired attorneys, but the tradesmen are the large majority, and amongst them the chemist and druggist is, in six or seven cases out of ten, the leading man. These petits commerçants are in their shops from eight in the morning till ten at night, and at their work from often the earliest hour of dawn. Their wives and daughters help in the "business," whatever it may be; their sons are brought up with a view to some small government function in the future. Enter into the "modes of life" of these families (a thing next to impossible for a stranger), and the severe monotony of it all will amaze you. There is no room here for "politics," in the sense implied amongst English people by the word. The range of thought is purely local, but within that range the quality of the thought set in motion is undeniably healthy. Of course, in most constituencies there are other elements (generally outsiders); there are the stump orators, the travelled engineers, the flashy speculators, the charlatans, who, according to the particular current of opinion, or of circumstance, are elected and sent to occupy a seat in the Chambers as representatives of a locality, of whose genuine requirements they know little or nothing, and to whose mere intérêts de clocher they are, therefore, all the more mischievously devoted. Naturally, after such convulsions as "'48," and the war of ""70," the land was flooded by adventurers of every sort and kind, and every intrigant and every madman had a chance, but this was temporary; the noisy notorieties of this description are being weakened in influence every day, and the force that is daily becoming visible (rather than " asserting itself") is that of the toilsome, independent, narrow-minded civilian I have alluded to. These are the classes to fall back upon. These classes have "everything" to lose "by war," and do not perceive that there would be any gain to them in the fact of " France being able, by natural right, to dictate her will to Europe." These unattractive, unimaginative classes do sincerely love their country; they do wish for a respectable, prosperous, steady-going, strong, and free France, but they have no notion of how they could themselves help to constitute it; for, as I have stated, there is no instinct of politics in them. How should there be? Where should it come from? When you have picked out the quincaillier or the pharmacien of some little town, and made a deputy of him, or joining him to others exactly like him, have watched them elect their representative who runs a fair risk of becoming a Minister, where is the political instinct to come from, that, on a sudden emergency, is to stand a Parliamentary Assembly, or an "Executive," in good stead? With every desire to admit, as fully as the Ayrshire ploughman himself, that the Man's the man for a' that; still, the "man's" surroundings, his atmosphere, his milieu as M. Taine calls it, count for a vast deal in making him what he is. Imagine Palmerston born in a village apothecary's shop, with none of the appliances of a brighter, more boisterous life, no horse even! Where will be his "jauntiness," his "devil-maycarishness," and that exuberance of life which was more than half the secret of his control over other men? The gains a man achieves with years do not give him the same qualities that the years behind him endow him with from his cradle. Ask any English boy of gentle race if he can remember the time when he did not breathe the atmosphere of politics? It may even have |