The Press.
London, England, 1856-08-02 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

families can therefore no longer subsist exclusively by the
land." Necker said a few years later that there were in
France an immensity of small rural properties.
1 have met with the following expressions in a secret
report made to one of the provincial intendants a few years
before the revolution :—" Inheritances are divided in an
equal and alarming manner, and, as every one wishes to
have something of everything and everywhere, the plots of
land are infinitely divided and perpetually subdivided."
Might not this sentence have been written in our days?
I have myself taken infinite pains to reconstruct, as it
were, the survey of landed property as it existed in France
before the revolution, and I have in some cases effected
my object. In pursuance of the law of 1790, which estab-
lished the land tax, each parish had to frame a return of
the landed properties then existing within its boundaries.
These returns have for the most part disappeared ; never-
thelesq, I have found them in a few villages, and, by com-
paring them with the rllls of the present holders, I have
found that, in these villages, the number of landed pro-
prietors at that time amounted to one half, frequently to
two thirds, of their present number, a fact which is the
more remarkable if it be remembered that the total popu-
lation of France has augmented by more than one fourth
since that period.

Already;as at the present time, the love of the peasant
for property in land was intense, and all the passions
which the possession of the soil has engendered in his
nature were already inflamed. " Land is always sold
above its value," said an excellent contemporary observer,
" which arises from the passion of all the inhabitants to
become owners of the soil. All the savings of the lower
orders which elsewhere are placed out at private interest,
or in the public securities, are intended in France for the
purchase of land."
Amongst the novelties which Arthur Young observed in
France, when he visited that country for the first time,
none struck him more than the great division of the soil
among the peasantry. He averred that half the soil of
France belonged to them in fee. " I had no idea," he
often says, "of such a state of things ;" and it is true
that such a state of things existed at that time nowhere
but in France, or in the immediate neighbourhood of
France.

But the political status of the peasant had not
risen with his social status. The natural
rights and privileges of property did not
accompany its possession. We cannot state
in detail all the vexations to which the
peasant landholder was subjected, but they
can be comprehended by the eloquent sum-
mary of the author :

Picture to yourself a French peasant of the eighteenth
century, or, I might rather say, the peasant now before your
eyes, for the man is the same ; his cond:tion is altered,
but not his character. Take him as he is described in the
documents I have quoted—so passionately enamoured of
the soil, that he will spend all his savings to purchase it,
and to purchase it at any price. To complete this par•
chase he must first pay a tax, not to the Government, but
to other landowners of the neighbourhood, as unconnected
as himself with the administration of public affairs, and
hardly more influential than he is. He possesses it at last;
his heart is buried in it with the seed he sows. This
little nook of ground, which is his own in this vast uni-
verse, fills him with pride and independence. But again
these neighbours call him from his furrow, and compel
him to come to work for them without wages. He tries
to defend his young crops from their game; again they
prevent him. As he crosses the river they wait for his
passage to levy a toll. He finds them at the market,
where they sell him the right of selling his own produce ;
and when, on his return home, he wants to use the re•
mainder of his wheat for his own sustenance•—of that
wheat which was planted by his hands, and has grown
under his eyes—he cannot touch it till he has ground it
at the mill and baked it at the bakehouse of these same
men. A portion of the income of his little property is
paid away in quitrents to them also, and these dues can
neither be extinguished nor redeemed.
_ _

Whatever he does, these troublesome neighbours are
everywhere on his path, to disturb his happiness, to in-
terfere with his labour, to consume his profits ; and when
these are dismissed, others in the black garb of the
Church present themselves to carry of the clearest profit
of his harvest. Picture to yourself the condition, the
wants, the character, the passions of this man, and com-
pute, if you are able, the stores of hatred and of envy
which are accumulated in his heart.

The aristocracy had for a long course of years
become poorer and more feeble, but retained
all their privileges ; the peasantry had become
wealthier and stronger, but groaned under all
their burdens. The ruin of the aristocracy
resulted from their living on the privileges
which had formerly been attached to pro-
perty, but had gradually been dissevered
from it :

The middle classes, with which they had been so relnc•
taut to mingle, grew in wealth and in intelligence beside
them, without them, and against them; they had rejected
the middle classes as associates and as fellow•citizens ; but
they were about to find in those classes their rivals, soon
to be their enemies, at length their masters. A superior
power had relieved them from the care of directing, of
protecting, of assisting their vassals ; but as that power
had left them in the full enjoyment of their pecuniary
rights and their honorary privileges, they conceived that
nothing was lost to them. As they still marched first, they
still thought they were leading; and, indeed, they had still
about them men whom, in the language of the law, they
named their subjects—others were called their vassals,
their tenants, their farmers. But, in reality, none fol.,

SATURDAY,

lowed them; they were alone, and when those very classes
rose against them flight was their only resource.

The author shows how different was the course
of affairs in England. An aristocracy becomes
stronger as it forfeits privileges which sepa-
rate it from the commonalty, or as it volun-
tarily incurs burdens from which the com-
monalty is exempt. In this view the tax on
successions, recently established in this coup,
try, though introduced in an ungracious spirit,
may be considered a truly conservative mea-
sure.

Another potent cause of the revolution was
the spirit of caste which prevailed among the
orders of French society. These orders were
so essentially distinct that they refused to
mingle. They might be shaken together, yet
still the oil rose to the surface of the water.
They would not blend, and when the bonds
of power were removed they warred against
each other with inextinguishable hatred.

Yet these and other elements of convulsion
might long have existed without outbreak but
for the administrative tutelage to which
France had been brought. This administra-
tive subjection gave all power into the hands
of the capital, and made the country the
ready instrument of the despotism which
gained the ascendancy in Paris. The destruc-
tion of political liberty by this administrative
centralisation, and the separation of classes,
are enumerated by the author as the two great
causes of almost all the disorders which led to
the dissolution of old society in France.

On the evils of centralisation the views of
M. de Tocqueville are identical with the views
of M. de Montalembert. This centralisation,
which has been the ruin of all rational liberty
in France, is shown by M. de Tocqueville to be
anterior to the revolution, and to be one prin-
cipal source of its excesses, and of the failure
which since has constantly befallen every
attempt to found a really constitutional sys-
tem. The economists of the revolution re.
joiced that the great instrument of adminis-
trative despotism was ready formed to their
hand :

That peculiar form of tyranny which is called Demo-
cratic Despotism, and which was utterly unknown to the
Middle Ages, was already familiar to these writers. No
gradations in society, no distinctions of classes, no fixed
ranks—a people composed of individuals nearly alike and
entirely equal—this confused mass being recognised as the
only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the
faculties which could enable it either to direct or even to
superintend its own government. Above this mass a
single delegate, charged to do everything in its name with-
out consulting it. To control this delegate, public opinion,
deprived of its organs; to arrest him, revolutions, but no
laws. In principle a subordinate agent ; in fact, a master.
As nothing was as yet to be found about them which
came up to this ideal, they sought it in the depths of
Asia. affirm, without exaggeration, that there is not
one of these writers who has not, in some of his produc-
tions, passed an emphatic eulogy on China. That, at
least, is always to be found in their books ; and, as China
is still very imperfectly known, there is no trash they
have not written about that empire. That wretched and
barbarous Government, which a handful of Europeans
can overpower when they please, appeared to them the
most perfect model to be copied by all the nations of the
earth. China was to them what England, and subse•
quently the United States, became for all Frenchmen.
They expressed their emotion and enchantment at the
aspect of a country, whose sovereign, absolute but unpre-
judiced, drives a furrow once a year with his own hands
in honour of the useful arts ; where all public employ-
ments are obtained by competitive examinations, and
which has a system of philosophy for its religion and
men of letters for its aristocracy.
The whole of this chapter (the XVth) is preg-
nant with instruction.

The elements of the revolution being ready,
Louis XVI. himself contributed the spark
which caused them to explode :

During the whole course of his reign Lone XIV. did
nothing but talk of reforms to be accomplished. There
are few institutions of which he did not foreshadow the
approaching ruin, before the revolution came to effect it.
After removing from the statute• book some of the worst
of these institutions he very soon replaced them ; it
seemed as if he wanted only to loosen their roots, leaving
to others the task of striking them down. By some of
the reforms which he effected himself, ancient and
venerable customs were suddenly changed without sufli-
cient preparation, and established rights were occasionally
violated. These reforms prepared the way for the revo-
lution, not so much by overthrowing the obstacles in its
way, as by showing the people how to set about making
it. The evil was increased by the very purity and dis-
interestedness of the intentions which actuated the King
and his Ministers; for no example is more dangerous than
that of violence exerted for a good purpose by honest and
well-meaning men.

Every word in the next extract should be well
weighed

AUGUST 2, 1856.

During the reigns which followed that of Louis XIV.,
the Administration clay by day instilled into the people in
a manner still more practical and comprehensible the :ton-
tempt in which private property was to be held. When
during the latter half of the eighteenth century the taste
for public works, especially for roads, began to prevail, the
iovernment did not scruple to seize all the land needed
for its undertakings, and to pull down the houses which
stood in the way.
Let the Robert Lowes of our day have their
swing in the Legislature, and who can tell how
soon they would inoculate the nation with
revolutionary ideas? The property of indi-
viduals would not long survive the property of
c.wporations, as the same arguments would
stand for the seizure of the former as the
I.tter.
- - -

There are many passages in this profound
and eloquent volume which show that M. de
Tocqueville is extremely dissatisfied with the
existing French system, and that he has not
the slightest confidence in its stability. But
what next? Who can tell, when the solution
of the question must depend on the will of
the vivid, ardent, susceptible people, described
by I. de Tocqueville in brilliant colours to-
wards the close of his noble work?—
Was there ever any nation on the face of the earth so
full of contrasts and so extreme in all its actions ; more
swayed by sensations, less by principles ; led therefore
always to do either worse or better than was expected of it,
sometimes below the common level of humanity, some-
times greatly above it ;—a people so unalterable in its
leading instincts, that its likeness may still he recognised
in descriptions written two or three thousand years ago,
but at the same time so mutable in its daily thoughts and
in its tastes as to become a spectacle and an amazement to
itself, and to be as much surprised as the rest of the world
at the sight of what it has done :—a people beyond all
others the child of home and the slave of habit, when left
to itself, but when once torn against its will from the
native hearth and from its daily pursuits, ready to go to
the end of the word and to dare all things; indocile by
temperament, yet accepting the arbitrary and even the vio-
lent rule of a sovereign more readily than the free and
regular government of the chief citizen; to-day the de-
clared enemy of all obedience, to-morrow serving with a
sort of passion which the nations best adapted for servi-
tude cannot attain : guided by a thread as long as no one
resists, ungovernable when the example of resistance has
once been given : always deceiving its masters, who fear it
either too little or too much : never so free that it is hope-
h-ss to enslave it, or so enslaved that it may not break the
joke again ; apt for all things, but excelling only in war ;
adoring chance, force, success, splendour and noise, more
than true glory; more capable of heroism than of virtue,
of genius than of good sense, ready to conceive immense
designs rather than to consummate great undertakings;
the most brilliant and the most dangerous of the nations
of Europe and that best fitted to become by turns an object
of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of
indifference !

Such a nation could alone give birth to a revolution so
sudden, so radical, so impetuous in its course, and yet so
full of reactions, of contradictory incidents and of contrary
examples. Without the reasons I have related the French
wonld never have made the revolution ; hut it must he
confessed that all these reasons united would not have
sufficed to account for such a revolution anywhere else
but in France.

The Dramatic Works of James Sheridan
Knowles. Two Vols. London : Routledge.

THIRTY-SIX years ago, ere our last great school
of tragic actors was wholly extinct, and when
the mass of playgoers were still those whose
taste had been formed in the days of Siddons
and Kemble, and their gifted predecessors—
when among our theatrical critics were still
numbered some of the leading men of letters
of the day, Hunt, Hazlitt, and Lamb—the town
was suddenly excited by a report that the
Elizabethan drama was revived in the new
tragedy of Virginias. What it was that created
this general enthusiasm both among the public
and the critics it is not easy, at this distance
of time, when the play can no longer be effec-
tively put upon the stage, satisfactorily to
determine. But there are certain broad
characteristics in all Mr. Knowles's dramas
which will serve to explain to some extent
why the best of them still retain possession of
the stage, though scarcely ever mentioned
outside the walls of a theatre. The author
was himself an actor, and seized with pro-
fessional skill upon all those points of a story
which he krew would tell upon the boards.
Thus the action in his plays never flags—in-
cident succeeds incident with a rapidity which
is always agreeable to an audience, though
abrupt and unreal to the reader. The plot
is never left to develop itself, as in dramatists
of a higher order, through incidents of greater
and lesser interest, and recurring periods of
apparent stagnation. There is, we might say,