commercial treaty, which was execrated as a fatal stroke to French manufactures; 24,000,000 of consumers were to be involved in the miseries of war, for the sake of half a million of producers."

Young returned by Rouen to Dieppe with his faithful and surefooted blind friend, who had carried him in safety about 1,500 miles, and which he did not choose to sell in France, where he could have had a large price for her, though she was neither handsome nor of a good breed.* "This shall be her last labour; some ploughing, however, on my farm, she will perform for me, I daresay, cheerfully."

His third journey was, in 1789, to the east of France. Paris, which he reached in July, was in a ferment with the meeting of the States-General.

He describes, with great enthusiasm, the grand sight-"the representatives of 25,000,000 of people after the evils of two hundred years of arbitrary power, rising to the blessings of a freer constitution; it is one which calls forth every latent spark, every emotion of a liberal bosom." He heard speeches from the Abbé Sièyes and Mirabeau (who spoke without notes), "an undoubted orator." Later, however, he says, "The Tiers État have declared themselves the National Assembly, to the exclusion of the other orders and of the King himself. They have assumed all the authority in the kingdom, and converted themselves into the long Parliament of Charles I., not to be dissolved without their own consent"; and complains of the want of knowledge of "the first principles of government, the talk of ideal and visionary rights of nature." One proposal was that the army should be in the hands of the provinces.

In the large hall at Versailles, holding 2,000 people, the utter want of order shocked him. "Once to-day there were a hundred members on their legs at the same moment, and the spectators were allowed to applaud. They will not take any example by the English Constitution, which they say is not free enough.' "The Commons have decreed the illegality of all taxes, but have granted them for the Session. They will then deliberate as to the misery of the people."

"The reports of the intentions of the Court, who, they say, are bent on utterly extirpating the French nation, except the party of the Queen, are perfectly incredible for their gross absurdity, but nothing was so glaringly ridiculous but that the mob swallowed it." He was astonished, however, at the supineness and even stupidity of the Court, and at the want of energy or political knowledge among the upper classes.

He dined several times with the Master of the Wardrobe to

* He is very uncomplimentary to French horses, as to their stock of all kinds.

Louis XVI., the Duc de Liancourt, a very enlightened man, in his apartments at Versailles, meeting Volney the traveller, and some of the deputies, twenty or thirty of whom he entertained twice a week. "There is a great change since I was here last year; many of the guests were dressed en polisson, without powder in their hair, and some in boots-not above four or five were neatly dressed." He was much struck by the diminution of the influence of the sex, as he called it. "A short time ago the women in France governed everything, and the men in this kingdom were puppets." He did not, however, linger long, but bought a sort of gig at Paris, with one horse, with which he set forth to complete his survey of the eastern part of the kingdom. He found the country in the greatest disorder; the peasants had risen everywhere. At Dijon, he says, "The state of this province is terrible; three out of five châteaux have been plundered, and the possessors happy to escape with their lives. These violences have been committed by the peasants only, not by brigands, as was first said." "There is not a paper to be had in the provinces," he writes from Besançon; "they do not know whether their deputies are in the Bastille, instead of the Bastille having been razed, and the mob plunder, burn, and destroy in complete ignorance; yet every day, in the States-General, they puff themselves off as the first nation in Europe, the greatest in the universe."

The utter stagnation of thought all over the country, as compared to Paris and two or three great towns, is the same now as then, as described in all French descriptions of the vie de province, "Coming from Paris," he says, "where I passed some time amidst the fire, energy, and animation of a great revolution, where I enjoyed the resources of liberal and instructive conversation, with the amusements of the first theatres in the world, the change to inns (and those French inns) the ignorance of everybody concerning events then passing, which so intimately concerned them, the detestable circumstance of having no newspapers, although the press is freer than in England," he finds beyond measure dreary. This fact about the press is not much known.

At Dijon, he says, "In this inn there is a seigneur, who, with his wife and family--one an infant a few months oldescaped from their flaming château, half naked, in the night. All their property is lost except the land. The family was valued and esteemed by their neighbours, with many virtues, and no oppressions to provoke the enmity of the people." "The regeneration

of fire and sword, plunder and bloodshed, is fearful."

At Besançon there was not a newspaper to be had in the whole town, though he went on inquiring from coffee-house to coffeehouse. "Here, again," he says, "there is not the least restraint

on the press, but the universal circulation of intelligence in England, which transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm from one end of the kingdom to the other, has no existence in France. Many châteaux near here have been burnt, others plundered, the seigneurs hunted down like wild beasts, their wives and daughters ravished, their papers and titles burnt, and all their property destroyed. These abominations are not inflicted on marked persons, odious for their former conduct, but in an indiscriminating, blind rage, for the love of plunder. Galley-slaves, and villains of all kinds, have instigated the peasants to commit all sorts of outrages." Again and again he was taken up as a spy, the same silly suspicions prevailing as during the Franco-German war. Generally he was suspected as an emissary of the Queen! "How industriously," he says, "must the attacks upon this poor woman have been spread." One day he stepped the size of a piece of land planted with mulberries, and was seized, as evidently sent by the Queen, "intending to double the taxes on land." The same story was repeated near Clermont. Once he had mounted the cockade of the Tiers État, but it had been blown away, and the peasants surrounded him, crying out that he must be a seigneur, and therefore ought to be hung. He escaped with difficulty. The whole country was in the greatest agitation.

At Strasbourg he found the mob breaking the windows of the Hotel de Ville; finding that the soldiers would not interfere, they beat the doors down with iron crows, and entered like a torrent, with a universal shout, when a shower of tables, chairs, sofas,books, papers, pictures, rained from all the windows of the building, 70 or 80 feet long, succeeded by bannisters, tiles, &c. He clambered on to the roof of a row of low stalls opposite, and for two hours beheld the scene. "Once I saw a fine lad of about fourteen crushed to death by something, as he was handing plunder to a woman, I suppose his mother, from the horror in her countenance. All the archives were destroyed, which will be the ruin of many families."

He then passes on to Alsace and it is strange at the present moment to read the account he gives of the strong German feeling he found there. "After crossing a hill range covered with oak timber, we entered a level plain, where the land is very productive; it is inhabited by a people totally distinct from the French, with manners, language, ideas, prejudices and habits all different; not one person in a hundred has a word of French; the rooms are warmed by stoves, &c." He is indignant at "the conquest or seizure of the country by Louis XIV. The injustice and ambition of such conduct strikes me more forcibly on the spot than it had ever done by reading, so much more powerful are things than words-Alsace is Germany." The popular cry now reverses this,

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and says Alsace is France, so entirely has the German tradition been eliminated. Query, Would the present French feeling die as quickly?

Young has been lately found fault with for saying that he believed peasant properties comprised a third of France. The exact number before the Revolution is impossible now to ascertain, but how great it must have been in every district which he examined and visited so conscientiously, is shown by his report on "the universal practice of dividing land between the children, and the wretched agriculture incident on it." "These little farms are thus multiplied to such a degree that a family depends for support on a plot that cannot possibly yield it. The children are riveted to a place from which they ought to emigrate, and have a flattering interest in a piece of land which tempts them to remain when other and better interests call them elsewhere." The change in this respect since the Revolution is small indeed.

In another place he says, "The small properties of the peasants are found everywhere, in every part of the kingdom, to a degree we have no idea of in England; the minute division of the small farms amongst all the children makes them in general poor and miserable. In Lorraine and Champagne, they are quite wretched. I have more than once seen divisions to such an excess that a single fruit-tree standing in about 10 perches of land has constituted the farm." [Champagne has not much improved since that time; we once saw there a woman driving a plough drawn by a donkey and a little cow.] "The husbandry of these little properties is as bad as can well be conceived; the industry is conspicuous, the labour severe and incessant, yet a failure in the crops produces frightful suffering."

There are two districts mentioned by Young as exceptions to the prevailing poverty and bad husbandry, and these continue at this moment to be among the most prosperous in France. One of them, Normandy, "where the pastures," he says, "are excellent, though the arable was as ill-treated as elsewhere." The farms at the present time, are still not so much sub-divided as elsewhere, the cattle are larger and better, it commands the markets both of Paris and England, and there is much prosperity among the farmers. Trente bêtes à cornes are sometimes found on a farm, we are told with pride. The other is Bearn, in the Pyrenees, where he describes properties as "from 40 to 80 acres in size, and therefore not incapable of good husbandry. The enclosures are excellent and well kept; the neatness, ease and happiness charmed me." In a report of the same country for the Le Play Society, the peasants are described as still possessing tolerably large farms; sub-division is avoided by a systematic emigration of the superfluous hands and mouths to

South America; many of them returning to their old homes with money in their pockets. There is none of the dislike of leaving the clocher which is so great in France generally, that, as is told in Round My House, "a girl is supposed to have lost her character if she takes a place even in another department."

The peasant proprietor is essentially an unprogressive being, the limits of his tiny plots now as of old, constitute his whole world. The magnificent array of the triumphs of mechanical science, the increase in social civilization, which Mr. Gladstone chronicles with such pomp, in his paper dated Jan. 1, the railroads, steamboats, electric telegraphs, the improvement in lighting, warming, in communications of all kinds, in manufactures, the cheapening of food and clothing, have done so much for England during the past hundred years, that Mr. Giffin puts the rise of the working classes here at about 50 per cent. They work fewer hours for higher wages, while the necessaries of life have been cheapened to them at about 30 per cent.

France has had the same advantages as England in all these respects, yet they seem to pass over the heads of the French peasant without doing him any good. He has not benefited by cheap corn from America, because he insists upon eating his own, produced at a high rate off his own plot. He is rooted to the village where he was born, and does not use the railroads, while Protection prevents his receiving any of the cheaper products from abroad; his idea being to make and grow everything at home, and, says Lafargue, he wears hardly any manufactured articles; which Arthur Young declares to be the worst thing for a country. He reads nothing, and writes hardly at all, so the cheapening of postage and the abolition of taxes on knowledge do not benefit him. The use of machines for diminishing the cost of production, is entirely outside his ideal of life. He has got rid of the Gabelle (the salt tax), the Taille, and the Corvée, but the taxes under the Republic are now as great as of old, and there is that worse tax of all on life and labour, the conscription, of such terror to the rural population. The stagnation of thought and knowledge of all kinds, in a population of peasant proprietors, is evident in all countries alike. "To consume all that they produce is, at this moment, pretty nearly the condition of France," says Mr. Jenkins; "it has almost ceased to be an exporting country"; and adds that "the consumption of manufactures by the peasants is, as in Young's time, almost nothing."

It seems to have been supposed that the prosperity of the petites propriétés could be proved by a glowing account of the wellbeing of the French farmer-owners of from seventy to eighty acres, lately published in the Fortnightly. De Foville, the great patron