XXIX. 1831. and in its room had been substituted the ephemeral changes CHAP. of the Asiatic governments, where everything depends on the vigour and capacity of the chief. But these effects were future: in the mean time the result of the triumph of democracy was a vast addition to the power of the Executive; and the Citizen King, strong in the support of the army, the National Guard, the burgher Liberals, and a portion of the liberal press, all of whom were retained in his service by the influence of the immense patronage which he enjoyed, was for the present at least beyond the reach of attack. 2. gers of the ment of xvii. §§ 128, But though the political revolution was over, and the throne of Louis Philippe, so far as external appearances Social danwent, firmly established, the interior of society was in a Governvery different state, and the seeds of evil were beginning France. to germinate which were destined in the end to overturn. it. The state of the working classes, especially in the great towns, which, as already shown,1 had rapidly deteri- 1 Ante, c. orated since, and in consequence of, the first Revolution, 134. had been brought to a perfect climax of horror by the effects of the second. The almost entire stoppage of purchases and expenditure in France, in consequence of the terrors which had seized all the affluent classes, combined with the corresponding reductions in the English market, from the effect of the simultaneous Reform agitation in that country, had reduced all who were engaged in the production of luxuries-that is, the immense majority of the working classes-to the last stages of destitution. It was hard to say whether the vine-growers of the Gironde, the silk-weavers of Lyons, the cotton-spinners of Rouen, the jewellers or the printers of Paris, were in the greatest distress. In Bordeaux there were twenty-two thousand workmen out of employment; in Paris the number exceeded sixty thousand. At Nismes the fancy silks had sunk to a third in price, and the wages of the workmen had undergone a similar diminution. Montpellier, which depended chiefly on the sale of wines, was XXIX. 1831. CHAP. in the utmost distress, and loudly complained of the recent rise in the octroi on that article; and in Lyons the suffering had become such, that the only question seemed to be when a half of the entire inhabitants were to expire of famine. From 4 to 6 francs a-day (3s. 4d. to 5s.), which they had been in the time of Charles X., the wages of skilled workmen had fallen successively to 40, 35, 25 sous; and at length, in October 1831, matters had come to such a pass, that the most industrious workman could only earn 18 sous (8d.) a-day by working eighteen hours; and even at those miserable wages, numbers were out of employment altogether. Nor was the condition of the masters more consoling, for even at these low rates of wages, such had been the fall of prices in the manufactured article, that they could not work at a profit; and numerous failures among the most considerable, both threw numbers iii. 18, 52. of workmen out of employment, and fearfully augmented the general consternation.1 1 L. Blanc, 3. picture of the working classes in France at The general condition of the working classes in France L. Blanc's at this period is thus set forth by the able Republican and Socialist historian; and his description, as a picture of their circumstances after two successful revolutions, dethis period. serves a place beside that which Gibbon has transcribed from the contemporary annalists of the condition of the Eternal City at the time of its capture by the Goths: "Never had society been abandoned to such disorders as those which now afflicted it under the direction of its official guides. There was an incessant strife of masters for the command of the market,-of workmen for the command of employment; of the masters against the workman for the fixing of his wages,-of the workman against the machine destined to destroy by superseding him; such was, under the name of free competition, the picture of the situation of France, viewed in an industrial aspect. What a picture of social disorder! The great capitalists gaining the victory in the strife, as the strong battalions in the field of battle, and the principle of laissez faire leading to XXIX. 1831. results as ruinous as the most odious monopolies; the CHAP. great manufacturers ruining the small, and the great merchants the lesser; usury by degrees gaining possession of the soil,-a modern feudality worse than the old; the landed property burdened by debt to above a thousand millions (£40,000,000); independent artisans giving place to those who are mere serfs; capital ingulfing itself with shameless avidity in the most perilous undertakings; all interests armed, the one against the other! The proprietor of vines at open war with the proprietor of woods; the raisers of sugar with the raisers of beetroot; the colonies, the seaport towns, with the manufacturers in the interior; the provinces of the north against the provinces of the south; Bordeaux against Paris; here markets overflowing to the despair of the capitalists, there workshops shut to the despair of the workmen; commerce turned into a struggle of legalised frauds and understood falsehood; the nation advancing to the reconstruction of feudality, by usury of a financial oligarchy, by credit; the discoveries of science turned only into instruments of oppression; the conquests of genius over nature into arms for the conflict; tyranny multiplied in some degree by the very magnitude of progress! 4. condition of "Turn to the working classes: is their condition more encouraging? The prolétaire servant of a master work- Miserable man seeking, on a crisis, his bread by beggary or revolt; the the working father of the workman going at sixty years of age to die classes, in an hospital; his daughter at sixteen prostituting herself to gain a livelihood; his son doomed to breathe from seven years of age the contaminated air of great workshops, to add to the earnings of the family; the bed of the workman, rendered improvident by misery, becoming horribly fruitful, and the prolétaires menacing the kingdom with an inundation of beggars! Such was the material condition of society. On the other hand, so far as their moral condition was concerned, no attachment to traditions; the spirit of inquiry, denying everything, XXIX. 1831. CHAP. and yet affirming nothing, and acknowledging no other religion but the love of gain. Marriage made a matter of speculation, an object of business, a sort of industrial speculation,-the cheapest way of providing a person to serve in a shop. As marriage, though contracted in that hideous fashion, was declared indissoluble by law, the want of divorce was in Paris and all the great towns almost always supplied by adultery. To the disorders which arose in families from the fragility of the nuptial tie, was joined the unseemly spectacle of the children disputing for the crumbs of the paternal inheritance with each other, or with their mother. 5. ness of the "In the working classes, the dissolution of families Wretched- proceeded from a different cause, but one still more painworking ful. Money among them was the main cause of prosticlasses, and tution. Marriage being among the prolétaires nothing sequent pro- but an increase of burdens, and libertinism an effort to fligacy. their con escape from suffering, poverty came in a manner to be linked to poverty; misery engendered concubinage, and concubinage infanticide. If the children were spared, it was only to be sent at the most tender age to manufactories, where the strength of the body was destroyed by premature and excessive labour, and the health of the mind destroyed by the contact of the sexes. There you see every morning at five, at the doors of the factories, a crowd of pale sickly children, with downcast eyes and livid cheeks, walking with bent backs, like old men. The social system, founded on competition, is to such a degree cruel and insensate, that it not only stifles the intelligence and depraves the disposition of the poor man's child, but it even withers up and extinguishes in them the principle of life. Hence it was that M. Charles Dupin said in the Chamber of Peers, that out of 10,000 young men conscribed in the ten chief manufacturing districts of France, 8980 were found to be infirm or deformed; iii. 90, 92.' while out of a similar number in the agricultural districts there were only 4029."1 1 L. Blanc, XXIX. 1831. 6. tion was not these evils, Doubtless it would be unjust to impute the whole of CHAP. this hideous picture to the Revolution. Many causes concurred to bring such a state of things about; and those who are familiar with the social state of our The Revoluprincipal manufacturing cities, will find some at least of the cause of these features, with which they are too familiar. The but it aggrafacts, too, brought out by the last census of Great Britain, vated them. that out of one hundred children born in Manchester and Liverpool only forty-nine and a half survive the age of five years, and that in London three-fifths of the persons above twenty years of age have been born elsewhere, lead to the conclusion that the physical consequences of such employment and accumulation of human beings are nearly as formidable with us as on the other side of the Channel. But still this striking picture of the state of France, after two successful revolutions, at least demonstrates that such social convulsions have no tendency to remove the greatest and most serious of social evils. And when it is recollected how large a portion of the darkest features in this picture is ascribed by the Republican historian to the desperate effects of the principle of competition pervading all classes, it is evident that they must very much have increased them; for the principle of revolution is to introduce absolute freedom of competition into every department of industry; and its inevitable effect, by diminishing the consumption of the rich, is to lessen the demand for labour, and increase the competition for employment. From whatever cause they arose, the social evils of * In Glasgow, it appears from the admirable statistical tables prepared by my esteemed friend Dr Strang, that in the years 1853-1854, which were two of uncommon prosperity, the deaths of children under five years of age were 7046 and 6679 respectively, the registered births only 7597 and 8735 in these years, showing a rate of mortality much more alarming than either Manchester or Liverpool. There is reason to believe, however, that the real births were 13,000; showing still the deaths under five years of age above 50 per cent of the whole. "Without a constant immigration from the country," says Dr Strang, "into the city, Glasgow, instead of continuing a city of progression, would be retrogressive in its population."-Social and Economic Statistics of Glasgow, 1855. By Dr STRANG. Pp. 7-18. |