Our miner, who hit the difference so neatly between 'miners' and the 'friends of miners,' after a little chat on the doorway, asked us, very politely, to walk in and look at his home. It was very neatly and adequately furnished, with clocks in each of the ground-floor rooms, sundry framed mezzotints hanging on the walls, and a goodly show of neatly-kept crockery. The wife, looking older than her husband, but very probably his junior, cheerily pointed out to me the local improvement she had made by transferring the cooking-range from the front room, looking on the highway, to the back room looking into the garden. 'It is pleasanter, don't you think?' she said, 'to sit out of the kitchen; and then, with the kitchen at the back, one can always leave the door open. That is my idea!' We assured her wethought it an excellent idea and most creditable to her—a compliment which she received with modest satisfaction, saying, 'You know the wife must think of these things!' to which the husband good-naturedly assented, while the daughter, a well-grown good-looking girl of fourteen, looked up from her household duties, much interested in our visit. The husband, on his part, had contrived a convenient wine-cellar under the stairway. 'It will not hold much wine,'he said with a smile; 'but it is too large for all the wine I drink.' 'Ah!' said the wife archly, 'he likes cider much better!'
This miner was employed in the new Lagrange pit, and though I was much struck by the neatness of his person and apparel, I was more struck by the general absence of anything like the griminess which we commonly associate with mines and mining among his fellows, whom I found still at work around the pits. M. Guary told me that this is a characteristic trait of the Anzin miners. In the buildings attached to each pit there is a large hall, called the miner's hall, where the men meet when they go down to and come up from their underworld. There each man has a box, under lock and key, bearing his number, in which he puts away his ordinary clothes when he dons his mining suit; the company—I should mention here—provides every man when he enters the service with a mining outfit. And to this hall there is attached a lavatory for the use of the men. The hall is well warmed in winter, and, being always on an upper floor, is well aired and ventilated in summer. From this hall at the Lagrange pit we walked into an adjoining room, where we found the miners going down the shaft in a great metallic basket, while the coal came up. While we stood there, there came up a magnificent lump of coal, of a very brilliant and even lustrous surface, around which the admiring miners crowded. This is a new vein, and the coal found in it, M. Guary tells me, burns with an unusually clear and intense flame.
A miner with whom I talked a little had been to see the Exposition, and it was curious to perceive that he had been much more interested in the Anzin part of it than in anything else. He spoke indeed almost disrespectfully of the Eiffel Tower, and he was entirely convinced that the workmen at Anzin were much better off than the workmen at Paris, as to which I am not prepared to dispute his opinion. He had not seen the President, which did not appear to disturb him much; but he thought the beer at the Exposition 'very dear and very bad.' The engines, however, he frankly admired, though 'everybody can see that it is not possible to make better engines than are made at Anzin.'
One curious thing he told me of the young miners who are drafted away into the military service. 'When they come back,' he said, 'some of them at first try other trades, but all that are of any use sooner or later come back to the mine. It is of no use,' he said reflectively, 'for any man to try to be a miner if he is not trained as a boy.' This is exactly Jack Tar's notion as to sailors.
From the Lagrange pit we drove, still through pleasant woods and fresh green farming-lands, to Thiers, where the company has a large number of working-men's houses, together with a considerable church, a lay and a religious school, and other institutions.
There we paid a visit to a delightful little old lady, with a face, full of wrinkled sweetness and humour, which Denner might have painted. She insisted upon showing us all over her home, and a little miracle it was of thrift and neatness and order; from the spotlesslyclean little bedrooms with the high Flemish beds, the crucifix hanging over the bed, and prints—not always devout—on the walls, to the sitting-room with its shining mirror, highly polished tin and brass candlesticks and platters, and abundant china. She was a staunch Imperialist, and had portraits of the Emperor, with prints of Solferino and of Sedan. 'There it was that they betrayed him!' said the little old lady, with deep indignation in her voice. I had not the heart to ask her who these traitors were. The garrets I found filled with new-mown hay. 'It keeps there till we sell it,' she said, 'and then it smells so sweet!' which was undeniable. Behind her house (her son and his wife were both absent at their work) she showed us the garden, very trimly kept and gay with the old familiar flowers, and an arbour, in which she took especial pride, none of her neighbours possessing anything of the sort.
At Thiers I talked with an officer of the company who had served for some time in one of the great mines of Southern France. The differences in the habits and character of the mining populations there and here he found very great, and, on the whole, he evidently thought the Northern miners much superior, in most essential points, to their fellows at the South. Certainly, according to him, they are neater in their persons, more cool and sensible, less credulous, less addicted to politics, and much more thrifty. 'The women, when they are well-behaved and good managers,' he said, 'have more influence with the men in the North. In the South and in Auvergne, I have sometimes thought the worst women had more influence with the men than the best.'
He had an odd theory as to the effect of great altitudes on human character. 'In Auvergne and inSavoy,' he said, 'the higher up you go the more excitable and quarrelsome you find the people. Here in Flanders the people are placid, like the plains.' He called my attention, too, to the prevalence among the miners here at Anzin of a peculiar type of blonds with a sort of ruddy russet hair and beard, not quite the glowing Titianesque auburn, and yet by no means red. It is certainly a marked and peculiar tint, and may be seen faithfully reproduced in a large picture of the Anzin miners exhibited this year at Paris. I had supposed it to 'hark back' to the Scandinavians, who made themselves so much at home in all these fat and accessible regions after Charlemagne passed away.
'No,' said my philosophic engineer, 'it is due to the potash. These miners are so addicted to washing themselves and use such quantities of strong soap, that it has permanently affected their hair.' Upon which another engineer, also familiar with Auvergne, broke in: 'That's all very well; but I have seen many miners in Auvergne with the same tint of hair and beard, and you know that there they wash their faces, at the most, once a week!'
This last speaker was an exceedingly shrewd man and, as I found, a strong Conservative. He had been asked to stand as a candidate for mayor in his commune, but had declined, though his personal popularity made his election almost a matter of form. I asked him why. 'Let myself be elected to a political office by my workmen!' he said; 'how can a sensible man think of such a thing? Ask men to give you their votes, and what authority will be left to you? No, I think I know my business too well for that. They tried that sort of thing, you know, during the war, and a beautiful business they made of it! I suspect it was the Germans who suggested it!'
What I am told of the morals of the people here reminds me of the traditional reputation of certain sections of Pennsylvania settled by the Germans in the last century, and of the Dutch in Long Island. There is a good deal of drinking.Buvettesare forbidden within the limits of thecités ouvrières, but in the communes they are very numerous, averaging, I am assured, as many as twenty to every 1,200 inhabitants. To open abuvettenothing is needed but a police permission, and thebuvettesare kept, for the most part, by the wives of miners and other artisans, as a means of adding to the family income. Beer is very cheap, costing only two sous a litre. Wine and spirits are more costly, though a great deal of gin is made, and inexpensively made, in the country. There is much sociability among the people, and great practical liberality as to the conduct of young girls, the ancient practice known as 'bundling' in New England being still in vogue among these worthy Flemings. M. Baudrillart, who evidently inclines to a favourable judgment of these Northern populations, puts the truth on this point very considerately.
'Conspicuous historical examples,' he observes, 'prove to me that the flesh is weak in this province of Flanders. The severity of public opinion does not always make up for the laxity of the control exercised by principle. Unmarried mothers are numerous, and incidents of this sort are often regarded as simple errors of youth and inexperience, to be remedied by marriage. The marriage-tie when formed, however, is not less respected than among our rural populations in general, and cases of flagrant misconduct on the part of married women are rare.'
Offences against persons and property are not relatively numerous here. On the contrary, while the proportion of persons accused of crime is 12 to thehundred thousand, for all France, in this Department of the Nord it falls to 8⅓ to the hundred thousand, and this notwithstanding the numbers crowded into the great manufacturing towns of the department. In the Department of the Seine, which includes Paris, the proportion rises to 28 to the hundred thousand, and in the agricultural Department of the Eure, which is the champion criminal Department of France, to 30 to the hundred thousand. One might almost imagine that M. Zola must have gone to the Eure for his studies of French peasant-life.
Without being particularly devout, the people of this region, I am told, are fond of their religious observances, and much dislike the persecution of the Church and the laicisation of the schools.
At Thiers the church, which is a large one, fronting on an extensive Place Publique, was very handsomely decorated on Corpus Christi Sunday by the people of the commune. Flags and garlands were put up, too, all about the Place Publique. The Anzin Company are now building a large school for girls very near this church; and I visited, with M. Guary, one afternoon, the boys' school at Thiers. It is very well installed in a large building, with a playground and a gymnasium roofed in, but not walled. The teacher—a lay teacher, and a very quiet, sensible man—who lives in the school-building with his wife, told me he preferred to keep it thus, and the boys liked it better. They were at their lessons when I visited the school, and a very sturdy, comely lot of lads they were. Some of them wereen pénitence, having slighted their lessons, as the teacher slily intimated, by reason of the great Church festival. This I thought not unlikely, and he did not appear to regard it as an absolutely unpardonable offence, while the juvenile criminals themselves were evidently quitecheery in their minds. In a room near the gymnasium were racks filled with wooden guns. These the teachers pointed out with pride. They were a gift from the company to his battalion of boys, who delighted in their regular military drill. He thought them, after only eighteen months' training, one of the best boy-battalions in the department, and would have liked to take them to Paris to compete for the athletic prizes. But to take up even a picked company of ten would have cost 400 francs, which he thought, and I agreed with him, might be better spent in Thiers. 'And then,' he said with a smile, 'what a life I should have led in Paris, with those ten boys to look after!'
The Anzin Company used to spend 80,000 francs a year on keeping up its own schools. But it is so heavily taxed for the 'school palaces' which have been put up, and for the public schools, that it has materially reduced this outlay, though it still expends a large sum in various ways for the advantage of the children of its own workmen attending the public schools; and still keeps up certain religious schools, especially for the little children and the girls.
One of these schools for little children which I visited at St.-Waast, kept by the Sisters, was a model. The little creatures, ranged in categories according to their years, were pictures of health and good humour, as they sate in rows at their little desks, or marched about, singing in choruses. One exercise, through which a number of them, from six to eight years old, were conducted by two of the Sisters, might have been studied from a fresco by Fra Angelico representing the heavenly choirs, and gave the most intense delight evidently to the singing children as well as to the smiling and kindly Sisters. There is a large church, too, at St.-Waast and acité ouvrière.
The commune, I believe, formerly was a part of the wide domain of the famous Abbey of St.-Waast which grew up near Arras over the burial-place of St.-Vadasius, to whom after the victory of Clovis over the Germans at Tolbiac in 495 the duty was confided of teaching the Frankish king his Christian catechism. He had a tough pupil, but he taught him, so well that King Clovis conceived a great affection for him, and got St.-Rémi to make him bishop, first of Arras, and then of Cambrai.
At the time of the Revolution the great abbey near Arras, which bore his name, was one of the richest of the religious communities which, according to the very importantAvis aux députés des trois ordres de la province d'Artois, so thoroughly and instructively analysed by M. Baudrillart, held among them in 1789 two-thirds of the land of that province. M. Baudrillart's analysis of thisAvisshows conclusively that a judicious and systematic overhauling of these ecclesiastical properties was absolutely necessary; but it also shows conclusively that the people of Artois who desired this wished to see it done decently and in order. They had a strong love of their provincial independence. Even Maximilian Robespierre, who was then bestirring himself in public matters at Arras, addressed his first political publication, which he called a 'manifesto,' not to the people of Artois, but to 'the Artesian nation.' This from the future executioner of the French federalists is sufficiently edifying as to the great 'national' impulse to which we are asked by a certain school of political rhapsodists to attribute that outbreak of chaos in France called the 'great French Revolution.'
What the Tiers-Etat of the great and solidly constituted province of Artois really wanted before 1789 is clearly set forth in this remarkableAvis. They didnot want the 'Rights of Man,' or the downfall of tyrants, or any vague nonsense of that sort. They wanted a more fair and equitable system of taxation, and a better system of agriculture. They had some practical ideas, too, as to how these things could be got, for they knew that these things had been got in England. 'The Englishman of our times,' they said, 'gets an income of 48,000 pounds from a square mile of land, whereas the Artesian can hardly get 12,000 pounds from the same area. Yet the soil of Artois is in nowise inferior to that of England. The enormous difference can only be attributed to the encouragement and the distinctions which the English Government bestows upon agriculture, and to the better system of the English administration.'
This passage reads almost like an extract from the diary of Arthur Young, and it is noteworthy that Arthur Young at this same time, while he was commending in his diary the admirable quality of the deep, 'level, fertile plain of Flanders and Artois,' also expressed his opinion that 'nowhere in the world was human labour better rewarded than there.' Taken together, however, theAvisand the diary of Arthur Young prove that the leaders of the Tiers-Etat of Artois in 1787 were neither radicals nor revolutionists, but practical men, who wished to see the value of their property improved, and the natural advantages of their province more adequately developed. To this end they thought it necessary that the constitution of the Provincial Estates should be reformed. Thanks to a combination, as theAvisdeclares, of the municipalities of the towns with thenoblesseand the higher order of the clergy, thecurés—'that most interesting class of men who are alone in a position to make the needs of the people understood and to work for their relief—were entirely excluded from the Provincial Estates in 1669,as were also the farmers, who alone can supply the means of perfecting our agriculture.'
'Here,' said theAvis, 'is the true cause of the prostration of our rural interests.' They proposed to apply a remedy by recasting the representation in the Provincial Estates, and giving 'two deputies out of three to the rural population.'
This having been done, so that agriculture might get in Artois the voice which the author of theAvisbelieved it to have in England, they then proposed a reconstruction of the system of taxation. On this point they inclined to adopt, from the South of France, the system of paying the taxes not in money but in kind. The system of the tithes, too, needed a complete overhauling, not with the mere object of abolishing the tithes, but in order that the gross inequalities which theAvissets forth as existing, in regard to the impact of the tithes, both territorial and personal, might be done away with, and the support of religion put upon a sound basis. This led naturally to a demand for the release of great areas of valuable soil in Artois from the control of religious communities, like the Abbey of St.-Waast, not a few of which were no longer in a condition to put these possessions to the best uses, either for the Church or for the country. In Artois, as in French Flanders, the extent of these ecclesiastical domains which had once been an advantage to the people, is admitted to have become disadvantageous to French agriculture with the decline of the feudal aristocracy and the growth of the royal power. Short leases only were granted in general by the Church and the monasteries, and under these short leases the farmers hesitated to improve their holdings.
The authors of theAvisdesire that it may be made possible to obtain leases of even twenty-five years whichshould not be treated by the Treasury as an 'alienation' of the property leased. With such leases, they say, 'the farmer would not hesitate to lay out money upon his land, because he would feel sure of getting the benefit of the outlay. This,' they add, 'is one of the principal means which the English Government has employed in bringing agriculture to the state of perfection in which we now see it in that monarchy.'
As the greater part of thecahiersof grievances prepared by the Tiers-Etat of Artois for the States-General of 1789 have been lost, thisAvisis of great value, as setting before us the real objects of that order in Artois. Thecahiersof the Artesiannoblesseand the clergy for the States-General are all preserved, and in respect of the general objects to be aimed at in the States-General, thesecahiersgo much farther than theAvis. They seem to show that in Artois, as throughout the kingdom, thenoblesseand the clergy were much more enamoured of what are now called the 'principles of 1789' than were the body of the agricultural population.
Thenoblesseand the clergy of Artois wished to see the States-General called at regular intervals, like the English Parliament. They wished the Provincial Estates to be maintained and to be convened annually, and they wished a provincial administration to be established under a system which should give the Tiers-Etat a representation equal to that of both the other orders united, and in which decisions should be reached not by a vote of the orders collectively, but by the members of the whole body voting individually, so that a measure as to which all the members for the Tiers-Etat should be of one mind, might at any time be carried if they could secure the adhesion of even a small number of the members from either of the otherorders. Clearly it was not necessary, in the case of Artois, that the Tiers-Etat should be declared to be 'everything,' in order that justice might there be done to the wishes and the interests of the Tiers-Etat! And if not in the case of Artois, why in the case of any other French province?
TheAvisshows that in Artois before 1789 the representatives of the Tiers-Etat had confidence in the liberality and the common sense of thenoblesseand of the clergy, and that they were disposed to consider all the abuses there needing reformation in the spirit of practical compromise which had presided over and made possible the development of liberty and of progress in Holland and in England, but of which no traces are to be found in the chaotic history of the 'National Assembly' of 1789. The authors of theAvis, for example, point out, in dealing with the questions of the tithes and of the seignorial dues in Artois, that it is the unequal and irregular impact, above all, of those impositions to which most of the evils flowing from them must be imputed; the ill-feeling they engender between the farmer and his landlord or his pastor, the bad blood they breed between the different orders. If the charges of one sort and another upon one field of a farmer's holding amounted, as was sometimes the case, to one-fifth of the value of the crop, while upon other fields of his holding the charges amounted to no more than one-thirtieth of the value of the crop, the farmer not unnaturally gave his chief care to the fields which were least heavily encumbered, without much troubling himself as to their agricultural merits relatively to the other fields.
But while the authors of theAvisearnestly desired to see all this changed, and called for the most complete revision and re-organisation of the agriculturalsystem in Artois, they raised no philosophical clamour against privileges as privileges, and they had sense enough to see that no community could afford to bring about the abolition of the most obnoxious 'privileges' at the cost of any flagrant violations of the Rights of Property. 'Whatever may have been the origin of these rights,' say the authors of theAvis, 'their antiquity has made them property to be respected in the hands of those who possess it. To deprive these owners of these rights would be an injustice and an act of violence of which no citizen can possibly dream. The privileged orders must be asked to divest themselves of their privileges.'
Here is a recognition of 'vested interests' for which we may look in vain from the motley mob of the 'National Assembly' into which the States-General of 1789 so rapidly resolved, or—to speak more exactly—dissolved, themselves! With men of the Tiers-Etat, in a province like Artois, who could see things so plainly and state them so fairly before the convocation of the States-General, what became the French Revolution, plunging the whole realm into anarchy, might surely have been made a reasonable and orderly evolution of liberty. Such a document goes a good way in support of the contention that with ordinary firmness, consistency, and courage on the part of the luckless Louis XVI., the convocation of the States-General in 1789, instead of leading France, as it actually led her, through a quagmire of blood and rapine, into what George Sand felicitously called the 'merciless practical joke of the Consulate,' and the stern reality of the despotic First Empire, might easily have resulted in converting the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. into such a limited and constitutional monarchy as France really enjoyed under Louis XVIII. The pathway to the Inferno of theTerror was really paved with the good intentions of the king.
Beyond St.-Waast lies the considerable town of St.-Amand-aux-Eaux, to which General Dumouriez transferred himself, on the pretence of taking the waters there, while he was working out his plans for saving France by marching on Paris and upsetting the Assembly. The plans miscarried mainly through his own fault, but it is a curious vindication of the patriotism of Dumouriez in making them that, while he was explaining to the lunatics in Paris, in January 1793, the absurdity of attempting to overthrow the English power in India, and the German empire in Europe, before feeding and clothing their armies on the frontier, de Beurnonville, whom Dumouriez was destined to seize and arrest at St.-Amand, was himself writing from the headquarters at Sarrelouis to Cochon Lapparent at Paris that everything was going to the dogs, and that the Government was mad about chimeras. 'We think of nothing,' he said, 'but giving liberty to people who don't ask us to do it, and with all the will in the world to be free ourselves, we don't know how to be!'
St.-Amand now has a population of ten or twelve thousand souls. Part of the Anzin property lies within the communal limits, but the place is a busy place and has industries of its own. It is connected with Anzin and with Valenciennes by a steam tramway, and I went there with M. Guary one fine summer morning to see what is left of the once magnificent Benedictine monastery of the seventeenth century, which was the great feature of St.-Amand a hundred years ago. A picture preserved in the collection at Valenciennes gives a fair notion of the extent and magnificence of the abbey, the demolition of which has been going on from 1793 to this day. M. Guary remembers the stately ruins asmuch more extensive in his youth than they now are, and as the good people of St.-Amand have very recently allowed the local architect to put up, under the very shadow of the exquisitely beautiful belfry still standing, one of the most dismal and commonplace brick school-houses I have seen in France, it is to be presumed that a few more years will see everything pulled down, and replaced, perhaps, by a miniature reproduction in steel and iron of the Eiffel Tower.
Before the deviltries of 1789 began, the marketplace of St.-Amand must have been one of the most picturesque in Northern Europe. The market is still held there, and the place was full when we crossed it of peasant women and peasants, carts laden with vegetables, tables set out with all manner of utensils, with fruits, with knicknacks. All was bustle and animation. It was the old picture, save for the uncomely modifications of our modern costume. But of the splendid architectural frame in which that picture once was set, how little now is left!
Beside the lofty belfry, one of the most graceful seventeenth-century buildings now to be anywhere seen, a few arches of one of the cloisters and one of the great abbatial gatehouses converted into a town-hall! The Vandal Directory of Chauny dealt more rationally with Prémontré than the 'patriots' of St.-Amand with their superb abbey. Had they preserved it, their town would now have possessed not only an architectural monument of interest and importance, but ample space and the best possible 'installations' for all its public uses and offices.
Like all the Benedictine abbeys, St.-Amand was a home of letters and of arts. What remains of its noble library is to be found, as I have said, in the collection at Valenciennes. Of the treasury which the abbey contained in the way of sculpture, painting, brass and iron work, carving in wood, no such account can be given. Such of these as escaped destruction were looted, sold, and dispersed. There is a tradition, well or ill-founded, that some exceedingly fine sixteenth-century monuments executed by Guyot de Beaugrant, the sculptor of the matchless chimney-piece which, in the Chambre Échévinale at Bruges, commemorates the expulsion of the French under Francis I. from Flanders, were brought here and set up in the abbey. If so, no trace of them remains. In the gatehouse, of which the local authorities have taken possession, a few fine old books, relics of the abbatial library, are still kept, and the vaulted chapter-room on the upper floor, used now as a council chamber, contains four interestingdessus de portepainted here by Watteau. The subjects are scriptural, of course; but as, in spite of all her efforts, the obliging damsel who acted as our cicerone could not possibly manage the blinds and sashes of the lofty window in the octagonal room which they adorn, it was impossible to make out to what period of the artist's career they belong. Upon one of them—the 'Woman taken in Adultery'—we got light enough thrown to show that its colouring is admirable. It can hardly have been painted while Watteau was at work in Paris on his endless reproductions of the then popular St.-Nicholas, but must probably have been executed after his study of Rubens in the Luxembourg, and his failure to win the first prize at Rome had opened to him his true path to fame, and carried him into the French Academy of Fine Arts as 'the painter of festivals and of gallantry.'
The fine old church of St.-Amand has fared better than the abbey. It has been judiciously restored, and the third Napoleon made it an historical monument. Despite the Radicalism of the place, we found it throngedwith people of both sexes—the men, indeed, almost in a majority—attending a high mass. It was rather startling, as we emerged from this service on our way back to Anzin, to come upon a large cabaret which bore for its sign the words, in glaring gilt letters, 'Au Nouveau Bethléhem, Estaminet Barbès.' Whether this is the conventicle of a sect of believers in the revolutionary Barbès I could not learn. But it is just possible that the Barbès, whom it celebrates, may be the enterprising proprietor of the place, and that the sacred name he has given it is a relic of that familiar use of holy things which never scandalised the good people of the Middle Ages, particularly in Flanders and in France. Does not the best old inn in the comfortable town of Châlons-sur-Marne to this day bear the name of 'La Haute Mère de Dieu'?
I have already said that the miners of Anzin have been practically enjoying all the advantages of co-operation, while the 'true Republicans' of M. Doumer have been 'studying' and going to sleep over that 'beautiful and generous idea.' As a matter of fact, the 'Co-operative Society of the Anzin Miners,' now known in commerce as 'Léon Lemaire et Cie of Anzin,' was founded, I find, even before the Co-operative Association of the Glass-workers at St.-Gobain.
It was organised in 1865, two years before the passage of the Imperial law affecting co-operation.
M. Casimir Périer, a son of the Minister of Louis Philippe, and the father of the present Republican deputy of the same name, was then a director of the Anzin Company. He had seen what M. Doumer fantastically imagines to be the purely French and republican 'idea' of co-operation carried out in England, the 'beautiful and generous idea,' as even every French schoolboy ought to know, being of English and not of French origin.
M. Périer had been particularly struck by the great success of the Rochdale experiment—an experiment begun and carried out, as Mr. Holyoake has set forth at length, by weavers, who, being nearly at the end of their tether, and worn out with distress, had associated themselves into a company under the name of the 'Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale.' He looked thoroughly into the history of this experiment, and having convinced himself that the 'beautiful and generous' idea might bear as good fruit at Anzin as at Rochdale, he went to work in earnest, got the society organised, accepted the honorary chairmanship of it, and set it on its feet on February 21, 1865. M. Cochin took the same matter up at St.-Gobain, and in 1867 the Imperial law, about which M. Doumer and his 'true Republicans' have been cackling and dabbling for ten consecutive years, was enacted, and the co-operative associations became legally constituted bodies. The statutes which now govern the Anzin Association were adopted on December 8, 1867, and the Association was formally launched.
The authorities at first could not be made to understand that a co-operative association was not a mercantile speculation, and for some time the Anzin Association was compelled to pay a regular fee for a licence, or 'patent,' as it is called in France. This exaction, however, was long ago given up.
Under the original statutes the profits derived from the sale to the members of the Association, and to them only (a rule never departed from), of all the goods purchased by the Association, were to be divided into a hundred parts. Of these, seventy parts were to be distributed at the end of each year to the members, proportionally to the sales and deliveries made to each of them. Twenty parts were to be set aside for a reserve fund; and the remaining ten parts were to be used bythe governing committee chiefly in paying the salaries of the manager and employees of the Association.
Such was the success from the outset of the Anzin experiment that within six years, at a general meeting held on April 24, 1872, the Association adopted a resolution suspending the payment over into the reserve fund of the twenty parts of the profits set aside to be so paid, and ordering these twenty parts also to be paid over to the members semi-annually. The reserve fund had already reached proportions which made it unnecessary and even undesirable to increase it.
The Association was originally constituted for a term of twenty years, from December 10, 1867. At a general meeting held on March 27, 1887, its life was prolonged for another twenty years, or to December 10, 1907.
It might edify M. Doumer as to the nationality of the 'beautiful and generous' idea which his 'true Republicans' find it so difficult to 'study,' if he would take the trouble to visit this Anzin region. He would find the establishments of the Association currently known by the English name of 'stores.' I found one of them flourishing in every commune which I visited in the vicinity of Anzin; at St.-Waast, where the experiment was first made, at Denain, where during the past year it has been found necessary to establish two stores instead of one—at Anzin, at Fresnes, at Thiers, at Abscon, at Vieux-Condé! The Association, indeed, which began in 1865 with fifty-one members and a subscribed capital of 2,150 francs, now conducts no fewer than fifteen 'stores,' and now consists of no fewer than 3,118 families.
The capital of the Association, originally fixed at 30,000 francs, in 600 shares of fifty francs each, was increased by a vote of a general meeting in April 1882 to 250,000 francs. The 'firm-name' is now 'Lemaire and Company,' the present manager being M. Léon Lemaire,who can use this 'firm-name' only for the affairs of the Association. The manager (orgérant) is elected at a general meeting to serve for three years, but he is always re-eligible. His salary is fixed by the governing committee, and the amount of it is charged to the general expenses. The governing committee has power also to present the manager, if it thinks proper, with a certain sum each year taken from the ten parts of the profits which are set apart by the statutes of the Association to be used for such purposes by the Committee. All the persons employed by the Association in various capacities are taken, as far as is found compatible with the interests of the business, from among the families of the members. This is particularly the case with regard to the young girls, of whom forty-eight are now employed in the different drapery and mercery stores, and an excellent practice has been adopted of calling in a certain number of girls when there is a special pressure of business to serve for a short period, these girls being regularly registered, and thus constituting a sort of reserve corps, from which the permanent employees are taken as vacancies are made.
The operations of the Association cover all manner of commodities excepting butcher's meat, it having been found that there are insuperable difficulties in the way of dealing in butcher's meat over so wide an area. These difficulties do not exist in the case of what the French callcharcuterie. A central pork butchery has been established just outside theoctroiat Anzin, and the business done in that line now averages about 30,000 kilogrammes a year, the difference per kilogramme between the buying and the selling prices averaging about eighteen francs. It is the iron rule of the Association never to sell at a figure beyond the average ruling retail prices in the shops, it being quite clearthat if it should now and then be necessary, in order to cover the Association, to sell at prices equivalent with the shop prices, the members would still have a real advantage in the eventual distribution of the profits.
It is impossible to examine the statutes, and the rules adopted under them, without being struck by the precision, clearness, and efficiency of the methods prescribed to keep the accountability of all the different agents of the Association within easily definable limits, and to simplify, in the final adjustment, the necessarily complicated accounts of so many stores dealing with customers many of whom must, from the force of circumstances, be allowed a credit of a fortnight as cash. The proof of all such methods, of course, is the net result. In the case of the Co-operative Association of Anzin this proof is conclusive in favour both of the methods and of the men by whom they have for now more than twenty years been administered.
The operations of the Association for the first semester of its existence closed on February 22, 1866, with sales amounting to 71,020 fr. 10 c., and with the payment to the members of an 8 per cent. dividend, amounting in all to 8,228 francs. From that day to this, the semi-annual dividend has never fallen below eight per cent., excepting for the half-year ending August 22, 1868, when it was declared at 7½ per cent. By August 1872 it readied 12 per cent. and stood there for three semesters. It then fell to 10 per cent., and stood there from February 28, 1874, to August 28, 1878, when it rose to 11. By August 31, 1879, it rose to 12, and by February 29, 1884, to 13 per cent., at which figure it has stood ever since down to February 28, 1889, with two exceptions—August 31, 1884, when it rose to 14, and February 28, 1887, when it fell to 12¼.
The total amount of sales made to the membersbetween February 1866 and February 1889 was 38,864,999 francs; and the total amount of dividends paid to the members during that period has been 4,585,557 fr. 69 c., showing an average dividend during these twenty-three years of 11.80 per cent.
It appears to me that this is a very good account rendered of a very good stewardship, and involves, for the workmen interested, a number of useful practical lessons on the true relations of capital to labour, including the relations of their own capital to their own labour. There are now about 800 Co-operative Associations of Consumers in France; but the Anzin Association is by far the most important of them all. As the existing associations are estimated to consist on an average of 550 members each, we have 440,000 heads of families, and a total presumable population, therefore, of not far from 2,000,000, more or less successfully availing themselves of the co-operative principle in France. The net profits vary greatly in the returns of these associations, from 1 to 14 per cent. The Co-operative Coal Association of Roubaix shows a net profit of 21 per cent., and the Co-operative Bakery of the same busy and thriving city a profit of 23 per cent. But the Anzin Association not only covers more ground than any of the rest: it covers it in a more equably satisfactory fashion. During the past year, on an employed capital of 156,150 francs, it made sales amounting to 2,303,836 francs, with a gross profit of 450,497 fr. 61 c., and a net profit of 310,106 fr. 30 c. Each man had spent an average of 738 fr. 28 c., and received a net profit of 99 fr. 45 c. In other words, every holder of a 50 franc share paid for his share out of a single year's net profit, and pocketed 49 francs to boot!
As indicating the scale of comfort attained in their daily life by these miners and their families, it is ofinterest to glance over the schedule of the goods and commodities supplied by these co-operative stores, it being premised that the stores do not keep or sell what are regarded as 'articles of luxury,' so that in these schedules we have the present scale of the necessaries and comforts of ordinary life among the more industrious and thrifty of the French working-classes. That even in the seventeenth century the French artisans, and the more prosperous of the French peasants, lived much more comfortably than one would infer from the pictures usually painted even by such historians as Michelet, who, with all his theories and all his imagination, took more trouble than M. Thiers to keep within hailing distance of the facts, would seem to be shown by the inventories and the wills of artisans and peasants disinterred during the last quarter of a century from the local archives of Troyes and other important towns.
Here, in the Anzin district, to-day, we find these co-operative stores supplying to 3,000 families of the working-class 12,000 metrical quintals or bales of the finest quality of wheat flour, 3,000 of these going to the houses of the members, and 9,000 to the bakery of the Association, which turns out, on an average, 1,100 loaves, of 3 kilos each, per day. With this bread the members take from the stores annually 110,000 kilos of the best butter, 50,000 kilos of coffee, 37,000 kilos of chicory, 4,000 kilos of chocolate, 13,000 Marolles cheeses from the land of Brétigny—where Edward III. was scared by a tremendous thunderstorm, which made him 'think of the day of judgment,' into giving peace to France and liberty to her captive king—200,000 kilos of potatoes, 6,000 kilos of prunes d'Enté, 11,000 kilos of rice, 15,000 bottles of wine, 12,000 bottles of vinegar, 33,000 bottles of spirits of various sorts, 45,000 kilos of salt, 6,000 boxes of sardines, 100,000kilos of maize and corn, 34,000 kilos of bran, 90,000 kilos of sugar, 20,000 kilos of beans, 30,000 kilos of ham, sausages, and other products of the pork-butchery. That butcher's meat, which, for the reasons I have mentioned, the stores cannot supply, plays a large proportional part in the obviously good dietary of these families, may, I think, be inferred from the fact that the stores annually dispose of 10,000 pots of the best French mustard, and of 1,000 kilos of white pepper. Vegetables and fruits are supplied in abundance by the country, and in many cases by the allotments of the workmen themselves, while beer, as I have said, is everywhere abundant and cheap.
That the miners and working-people of Anzin are well lodged and well fed may be considered to be beyond a doubt. Let us now see what they do in the way of clothing themselves, and of furnishing their houses.
They buy from the stores annually 30,000 francs'-worth of kitchen and household utensils, which are both well made and cheap in all this part of France, 600 kilos of mattrass wool, 4,400 yards of sheeting, 500 wool and cotton blankets and bedspreads, 9,000 towels, 44,000 pairs of sabots, 10,000 pairs of shoes, 4,600 caps and hats, 2,200 pairs of stockings, 3,700 shirts and 6,000 mètres of shirting, 17,000 mètres ofpiqué, 2,000 undervests and 2,000 mètres of flannel, 6,000 handkerchiefs, 52,000 mètres of linen goods, 17,000 mètres of lustrines; 7,200 mètres of merinos, 7,000 mètres of muslins, 14,000 mètres ofIndiennes, 57,000 francs'-worth of mercers' wares, 24,000 mètres of calicoes, and, finally, 3,100 yards of velvet. When we remember that this is the annual outlay for keeping up the household wardrobe, not the original outlay in establishing it, it seems to me that the workpeople ofAnzin ought to be, and indeed one need only walk and drive about the region to see that they are, at least as well clothed as they are housed and fed.
Umbrellas even have come to be regarded as 'necessities' here, and the stores annually supply 1,300 of these useful but essentially fugitive articles. The men are clothed by their village tailors and bootmakers chiefly, so that the masculine wardrobe is represented in the accounts of the stores less extensively than the feminine. But the Anzin miners nevertheless annually invest in scarves and cravats to the number of more than 4,000. Each man on going into the employ of the company receives, as I have said, a complete mining outfit, the cost of which is not defrayed out of his wages. But the miners annually buy, on an average, 500 new mining-suits for themselves.
Tables, chairs, bedsteads, bureaux, well made and often handsome, are to be had in all these communes at very low prices; and I went into no house in any of them which did not seem to me well equipped in these particulars. Engravings, coloured and plain and lithographs, are to be found in them all, and though the people are obviously not much addicted to literature, I found in one miner's house at Thiers quite a collection of books, and most of them good, sensible, and instructive books, installed in an upper chamber, in which the housewife said, her 'man' liked to sit and read when it was too hot out of doors in the garden.
This good dame, by the way, was of the opinion that 'the house gives you the character of the wife,' and that 'the conduct of the husband depends upon the character of the wife.' Her own 'man' was evidently an excellent and orderly person, so I considered it a legitimate compliment to assure her that I entirely agreed with her.
I hope, for the future of France, that she may be right. For there seems to be a tendency here, as there certainly is in other parts of France, to insist on sending their girls to the religious schools, even when they allow their boys to attend the lay schools, where they are exposed to having the 'true Republican' deputies and functionaries of the time get up—as M. Doumer did the other day, at the opening of a new lay school in the Aisne—and propound the doctrine that 'morals have nothing to do with religion.'
The lay schools are attended, for example, in Anjou by 22,451 boys, and only 3,562 girls: while the free congreganist schools are attended by 25,360 girls, and only 5,232 boys.
Adding the number together, this gives us a total of 30,592 children in the religious, as against 26,013 in the anti-religious or irreligious schools of one province.
If my good housewife at Thiers is right as to the influence of the character of the women in France upon the conduct of the men, there is hope in these figures, which I am assured pretty fairly represent the state of things in Flanders as well as in Anjou, with the difference that the proportion of boys attending the religious schools is probably larger in Flanders than in Anjou. M. Doumer's doctrine that 'morals should be taught independently of religion' certainly did not commend itself to all his constituents. TheJournal de St.-Quentin, commenting upon it, plainly said, 'The verdicts of our assize courts show us every day the result of the atheistic instructions recommended by M. Doumer and the rest of the Masonic Brothers. The truth simply is that if some remedy be not soon found for the situation created by these people, who are as stupid as they are mischievous, in a few years we shall be obliged either to decuple the gendarmerie, or toallow every citizen to go about armed with a revolver, in order to protect himself against our much too liberally emancipated young scolos!'
Curiously enough this voice from St.-Quentin in France substantially echoes another voice from another St. Quentin in California—the seat of the State Penitentiary in that young and active and opulent American commonwealth. In California the plan of giving instruction in morality, independently of religion, has been tried much longer than in France, and certainly in circumstances much more favourable to its success. The result, as set forth in an Official Report of the resident director, cited by Mr. Montgomery, ex-assistant Attorney-General of the United States, in his treatise on 'The School Question,' is that, while the illiterate convicts in the California penitentiary, at the date of the report, numbered 112, against 985 who could read and write, 'among the younger convicts they could all read and write'.
I have already spoken of many of the advantages offered by the Anzin Company to its workmen and miners, as amounting really to a kind of participation in the profits of the company. This, I think, must be admitted to be clearly the case with regard to certain regulations affecting workmen's pensions, established here by the governing council of the company in December 1886.
These regulations are to affect workmen who contribute to what is known as the 'National Retiring Fund for Old Age.' This fund was established originally in 1850 under the presidency of Louis Napoleon. It was re-organised by a law passed in July 1886, and by a decree issued in December 1886. It is under the guarantee of the State, and is administered by a committee co-operating with the Ministry of Commerce. Its object is to enable working-men and others to secureannuities up to the amount of 1,200 francs a year, at or after the age of fifty, by the payment of small regular assessments on their wages. The smallest sums are received by the fund, which of course is managed on principles not unlike those of the great life insurance companies. A running account is kept with the treasury to meet the current expenses of the fund, but all the rest of the money received by it is invested in the French public funds, or in securities guaranteed by the State. No part of the compound interest received by the fund is deducted to meet the expenses of administration. It all goes to the account of the depositors, the current expenses being met by the Deposit Fund, which manages the Retiring Fund. If at any time before that fixed for his enjoyment of the retiring pension, the depositor should be made incapable of work by some illness or accident, he is at once put into possession, without awaiting the age fixed in the original agreement, of a pension or annuity proportioned to the amount of his actual payments and to his age at the time when the incapacity is medically and legally established.
Every year a certain amount is voted by the Chamber as a subvention to this fund, and out of this annual appropriation these 'premature pensions' may be increased by the committee in charge of the fund. This is a sort of practical State socialism beyond a doubt. But it is at least as respectable as the expenditure made in this year's budget of 6,500,000 francs, or about one fifth of the whole amount of the French naval pension list, on annuities of indemnification 'to the victims of thecoup d'étatof 1851,' thecoup d'étatof 1851 having been simply a collision between the Legislature of that year, trying to suppress the Executive, with the Executive trying to suppress the Legislature, with theresult that the Executive carried the day, and that the French people, by an overwhelming majority, approved the victory of the Executive.
Why the socialistic principles at the bottom of the National Retiring Fund for workmen should not be extended to others than working-men it is not easy to see. The French pension-list is now very heavy. It figures in this year's budget at nearly a hundred millions of francs, exclusive of the military and naval pensions, which amount to about one hundred and twenty-five millions more, and without counting thedébits de tabac, which are in fact a kind of pensions used freely by deputies and other functionaries of influence to reward services of all sorts. Of these about two hundred were given away in 1888, the list filling five pages of the huge reports of the Finance Ministry.
The National Retiring Fund for Old Age is managed by a high committee of sixteen, which must include two deputies, two state councillors, two presidents of mutual aid societies, and one manufacturer. Workmen who choose to avail themselves of the fund may break off and renew their payments into it as they like, and increase or diminish the amount of their annual deposits without affecting by any interruption the value of their previously acquired interest in the fund. Deposits may be made in the name of any person at or after the age of three years, so that a father may in this way, if he likes, form a small property for his children. The authorisation of the father, however, is not required to validate deposits made in the name or for the benefit of a child, unless these deposits are made by the children themselves, in which case they merely show the authority of their parents as guardians until they have attained the age of sixteen. Married women may make deposits independently of their husbands, but unlessthese deposits are gifts to them, they are held to be equally the property of the husband and wife where these are not legally separated. In case of the absence either of the husband or of the wife for more than a year, a justice of the peace may authorise the deposit of money to the exclusive benefit of the partner on the spot. Deposits of one franc are received from one person, but in no case can one person deposit more than one thousand francs a year. The capital deposited may be alienated to the fund or reserved. In the latter case the capital may be returned, but without interest, to the representatives of the depositor in case of death. Any reserved capital may be alienated for the purpose of increasing the income at a certain age, to be named by the depositor when he signs the alienation.
The pension incomes are guaranteed by the State. They become payable at any full year of age selected by the depositor between fifty and sixty-five years. After sixty-five the pension-income is paid to the depositor from and after the first quarter-day following the deposit. Up to 360 francs the pension-incomes are not liable to be seized for debt. If they accrue from a capital presented to the depositor the donor may have them declared unsellable to their full amount.
Funds deposited in the National Sayings Bank may be transferred in whole, or in part, to the National Retiring Fund for Old Age.
Under the conditions of this fund an annual alienated deposit of 10 francs, begun at the age of thirty years, will secure the depositor at fifty an annuity of 28 fr. 62 c., at fifty-five of 47 fr. 89 c., at sixty of 81 fr. 43 c., and at sixty-five of 145 fr. 97 c.
The regulations adopted by the Anzin Council in 1886 are intended to duplicate the results of this system of the National Retiring Fund for the benefit of anyworkman who chooses to make himself a depositor in the National Fund to the amount of 1½ per cent. of his annual wages.
Suppose, for example, a miner earning 1,500 francs a year chooses to deposit in the National Retiring Fund 22 fr. 50 c. a year. Upon verification of this the Anzin Company will pay into the same fund for him annually an equal sum. This would give the miner who began his deposit of 22 fr. 50 c. a year at the age of thirty, a pension-income at the age of fifty of 128 fr. 74 c., or just about the pension-income which he would draw at the age of sixty-five from the National Fund if he began a payment of 10 francs a year into that fund at the age of thirty-two. A miner who began his annual deposit of 22 fr. 50 c. in the National Fund at the age of twenty-one, taking advantage then of the regulations of the Anzin Council, would enjoy at fifty a pension-income of very nearly 250 francs a year.
Under the Anzin regulations, the two payments made by and for the workmen concerned are inscribed in an individual bank-book which becomes his property. The sums paid in by the company are alienated, and to the exclusive advantage of the workman, while he is left at liberty to alienate or reserve his own payments. If he is married, of course his personal payments are held to be made one-half for the benefit of his wife.
In the case of subterranean miners, the company will begin to carry out this system as soon as they enter its service, and without regard to their nationality. In the case of the surface workmen, they must be eighteen years of age, and must have been in the service of the company for at least three years without interruption. The reasons for the difference are obvious.
The payments of the company cease at fifty years,but the workman is not obliged to draw his pension-income then, as by continuing his personal payments he can put it off, thereby increasing it until he attains the age of 55, 60, or 65.
To meet the case of miners drawn into the army, the company, as long as the miner so drawn and returning to its service shall remain in its service, will pay in fractions, and within a period equal to that of his military service, into the National Fund for his benefit a sum equal to the percentage he would himself have paid into the National Fund upon his wages, calculating them as being the same during the period of his military service that they would have been had he remained there at work in the mine.
In the case of a workman who falls ill or is injured, the company, if he is a member of a mutual aid society, which will make his personal percentage payments for him, will pay itself an equal sum during his illness or incapacity for at least one calendar year. After that each case must be separately dealt with.
Furthermore, and in addition to these general conditions, the company will grant to workmen long in its service, who shall have made their regular payments to the National Retiring Fund under these regulations, when they give up work, supplementary pensions calculated at the rate of 3 francs a year for fifteen years of service for the miners, and of 1 fr. 50 c. a year for fifteen years for the surface workmen. These supplementary pensions are doubled for married workmen, so that they may amount to 90 francs a year for miners, and to 45 francs a year for surface workmen.
On the whole, I think the miners of Anzin knew what they were about when they stood aloof from the 'strike' in the Pas-de-Calais. To do this was to aid the 'strikers' themselves much more effectuallythan by joining in the strike. For surely the spectacle of such an orderly prosperity as exists at Anzin, the result of equitable relations maintained for years between Capital and Labour, is the strongest possible argument in support of the reasonable demands of Labour. But what are the reasonable demands of Labour?
It appeared from an inquiry made by the 'Society of Mineral Industries' after the great strike of 1883, that, out of ten coal-producing companies in the North of France which maintained Assistance Funds for the miners, the Anzin Company alone did this entirely at the expense of the company. The nine other companies reported a joint revenue of 821,133 francs in 1882 for these Assistance Funds, of which amount the workmen furnished 603,097 francs. The outlay for 1882 exceeded the revenues and amounted to 849,839 fr. 49 c. But, in addition to the 603,097 francs furnished by the workmen to these funds, the nine companies in question expended themselves, in pensions, medical service, school subventions, free fuel, hospitals and other contributions to the welfare of these 32,849 miners and workmen, no less than 2,942,694 fr. 91 c. So that while the workmen expended on an average 3 per cent. of their wages in maintaining Assistance Funds, these nine companies (excluding Anzin, where no demand was made on the workmen) expended for the benefit of the workmen and their families an amount equal to 9 per cent. of the wages paid by them, and to 24 per cent. of the interest and dividends paid to the stockholders. On the average the companies thus spent about 50 c. for every ton of coal extracted.
Could labour reasonably demand more than this of capital?
Under the leadership of deputies like MM. Basly andCamélinet, backed by the revolutionary press of Paris, the miners in another part of France, at Decazeville, went on 'strike' in January 1888. They began by brutally murdering M. Watrin, one of the best managers in the country. They kept the whole region idle and in terror for three months and a half. They inflicted great loss on the company and disturbed all the industries of France. They themselves lost 630,427 francs of wages. The company finally granted an increase of wages representing only 1½ per cent. of the wages sacrificed by the strike. The Municipal Council of Paris, which had fomented the strike, magnificently gave the miners 10,000 francs of money which did not belong to them. All the Radical press together subscribed 70,000 more. The Decazeville charities gave 2,231! And the next year all the miners testified that they had been quite content with the wages before the strike, and gave a banquet to the chief engineer!
Lille
Thanks to Louis XIV., French Flanders became politically French more than two centuries ago. But it still remains essentially Flemish. The land has a life and a language of its own, like Brittany or Alsace. The French Fleming is rarely as haughty in his assertion of his nationality as the French Breton; but when aMonsieur de Paris, or any other outer barbarian, comes upon a genuineFlamand flamingant, there is no more to be made of him than of aBreton bretonnant, standing calmly at bay in a furrow of his field, or of the bride of Peter Wilkins enveloped in her graundee.
Even in the great and busy cities of Lille and Roubaix, the Flemish tongue holds its own against the French with astonishing pertinacity. But if French Flanders is still more Flemish than French, the Flemings, I believe, are very good Frenchmen, just as I imagine the most enthusiastic Welshmen of Mr. Gladstone's beloved little principality, would be, after all, found, at a pinch, to be very good Englishmen.
Architecturally, their ancient Flemish capital, Lille, now the chief town of the great Department of the Nord, is decidedly more French than Flemish.
The seven sieges it has sustained have left it quite bare of great historic monuments, and during the past thirty years millions of francs have been spent upon its streets, squares, and boulevards, with the result ofgiving it the commonplace and comfortable look of a growing quarter of Paris. Its famous old walls have been improved off the face of the earth; and I am glad to say that few if any of the noisome cellars seem still to exist in which, when I first knew the place, not so very long ago, thousands of its industrious working people used to dwell like troglodytes.
Marlborough's cannon spared the fine seventeenth-century Spanish Lonja, and there are traces still to be discerned about the modernised mairie of the ancient palace of Jean Sans Peur and Charles the Fifth. But there is no Flemish building here comparable with the Hôtel de Ville and the Beffroi of Douai. Of old Flemish customs and traditions, however, there is no lack in Lille, and I came upon a curious proof of the vitality of its local patriotism. This was the regular publication, in the most widely circulated morning newspaper, of a series of carefully prepared articles on the archæology and antiquities, the legends and the archives of the old Flemish capital. One of the editors of this journal showed me in his office a collection of these articles, reprinted from the newspaper, and now filling some twenty volumes.
I spent my first midsummer morning at Lille in the Musée which has been installed in the Hôtel de Ville. The Wicar collection of drawings there, I need hardly say, is of itself a 'liberal education' in art. During his long residence at Rome in the Via del Vantaggio, the Chevalier Jean-Baptiste Wicar wasted neither his time nor his money. What treasures were then to be picked up by such a man—for Wicar died not long after the Revolution of July 1830! Where he found his Masaccios, Robert Browning told me that he knew; but where did he find that incomparable bust in wax which charms with all the mystic feminine grace andmore than all the feminine beauty of the Mona Lisa? Possibly M. Carolus Duran may be able to throw light upon this; for he was one of the earliest beneficiaries who profited by the fund which the Chevalier Wicar founded for the purpose, as he says in his will, of 'giving to young men, natives of Lille, who devote themselves to the fine arts, the means of sojourning at Rome for four years, under certain conditions.'
The Chevalier Wicar was a good Catholic, and he gave to his fund the title of the 'pious foundation of Wicar.'
I suppose that under the Third Republic this monstrous recognition of an unscientific emotion would have sufficed to vitiate the scheme, in which case France would have lost the artistic achievements of M. Carolus Duran.
The house in the Via del Vantaggio I believe still makes a part of the 'pious foundation,' and the municipality of Lille has very sensibly added a yearly sum of 800 francs to the 1,600 francs allotted under the will of the Chevalier Wicar to each beneficiary, together with a travelling outfit of 300 francs.
Coming back from the Musée to breakfast in my very comfortable hotel near thegare, I found there awaiting me M. Grimbert of Douai, who had most obligingly come over to show me what the friends of religion and of liberty are doing in Lille to prove that the religious sentiment is not 'dead' in this part of France, and that the Christians of French Flanders do not intend to let their children be 'laicised' into the likeness of M. Jules Ferry and M. Paul Bert, without an effort to prevent it.
The Department of the Nord has long been conspicuous in France for the number and the excellence of its educational institutions. The statistics collected by M. Baudrillart show that it stands side by side, in thisrespect, with the Department of the Seine. Of the 663 communes which make up the Department of the Nord, only three in 1881 were without a school. The department contains 1,680,784 inhabitants. Of these, considerably more than one-third, or 680,951, live in the 17 cantons and 129 communes of the arrondissement of Lille, which includes of course the city, and here we find 340 public schools, 1,038 classes for instruction, and 116 free educational establishments. Over against this organisation of education must be set a very notable development of intemperance. I do not infer this from the extraordinary amount of beer-drinking which goes on in the Nord, to the extent, according to M. Baudrillart, of 220 bottles a year to every man, woman, and child in the department, against 170 in the Ardennes and 153 in the Pas-de-Calais. For, after all, it may be doubted whether habitual drunkenness is much more common in beer-drinking than in wine-drinking countries; and there can be no question, I think, that it is much less common in countries in which wine is abundant and cheap, than in countries in which wine is an imported luxury. But the consumption of alcoholic liquors is apparently on the increase in this great department.
At the beginning of this century, long before Lille and Roubaix had begun to draw into their factories such great numbers of the rural population as now yearly throng into these prosperous cities, a prefect of the department, M. Dieudonné, declared that it was not an unusual thing to see workmen in Lille who worked only three days in the week and spent the other four in drinking corn brandy and Hollands gin. At that time the workpeople of the sister city of Roubaix had a much better reputation, while of the rural populations of French Flanders Dr. Villermé then affirmed, after a careful study of their habits, that nothing was to be seenamong them of the 'debauchery and the daily and disgusting drunkenness prevalent in the large towns.'
Persons familiar with the rural aspects of the Nord assure me that this can no longer be said with truth of the rural farm-labourers. It is, probably, more true of the farmers and of their families than it was fifty years ago, but it is, unfortunately, also less true than it then was of the rural labourers. The number of small cabarets has quadrupled during the last quarter of a century in the arrondissement of Douai alone, which contains 6 cantons, 66 communes, and 131,278 inhabitants, the majority of them occupied in agriculture; and, taking the whole department, it appears that the consumption of spirits represents an increase of 100 per cent. in the average consumption of pure alcohol in the last forty years. It rose from 2.52 litres, in 1849, for every man, woman, and child, to 4.65 litres, in 1869, and it is now estimated to reach 6 litres, which would represent an annual consumption of about 16 bottles of brandy at 42 degrees, for every man, woman, and child in the department. I did not happen to see any drunken women or children in the department, but M. Jules Simon, in his work,L'Ouvrière, gives an uncanny account of feminine drunkenness at Lille, where there are special cabarets, it seems, for women. I believe no special estaminets have yet been set up there for women addicted to tobacco, and, indeed, I do not know that the civilisation of French Flanders has yet reached the point of treating the question 'whether women ought to smoke' as a practical question, worthy the grave attention of savants and philosophers. Possibly, if England, like France, had enjoyed the advantage of sixteen changes in her form of government, and of three successful foreign invasions, during the past century, questions of this sort might now subtend no greateran arc in England than they now subtend in France. And it certainly ought to interest Englishmen to know that the example of England is freely cited in Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, and other centres of Flemish life and activity, to support the 'noble and military' amusement of cock-fighting, to which the good people of these regions are extraordinarily addicted. A law was passed against this practice under the presidency of Prince Louis Napoleon in 1850, and many attempts have since been made to suppress it—but with small success. A Republican prefect of the Nord, some years ago, actually wrote to the President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that he would not hesitate to 'enforce the provisions of the law against cock-fighting whenever the practice seemed to be likely to become too general!' I do not know that I ever stumbled on a more delightful recognition of the Eleventh Commandment of demagogism, 'vox populi vox Dei!' Naturally, with such encouragement as this, the sport of late years has been assuming, I am told, a recognised place among the amusements of the people. Fighting-cocks go into the arena as champions of the towns in which their owners dwell; and if the feathered Achilles of Roubaix does the feathered Hector of Tourcoing to death, the spectators not unfrequently take up the quarrel, divide into two camps, and have it out handsomely on the spot. These things I note because they tend to show how difficult it is to develop an ideal civilisation in a few years by the simple process of forbidding men to teach, or to believe in, the existence of a Divine Ruler of the Universe.
For the same reason, and without unduly dwelling upon it, I may here record the statement made to me by an editor of an influential journal in Lille, that in no city in France has the evil of juvenile prostitution takensuch root as here. When I expressed my surprise at this, the French law as to thedétournement de mineuresbeing at least as stringent as the English, he replied: 'How can you expect such a law to be enforced under this Government?' and he then went on to show me in an old file of his journal an account, now some years old, of the adventures of a deputy from Versailles in the Palais Royal at Paris. 'Our Republicans,' he said, 'are firm believers in the great principle of the solidarity of all the party with all the haps and mishaps of every member of the party.'