Part 11

Equal and good men assemble in their natural condition to think on the basis of their future State. Each endows the new community with all liberty and property, in order to receive back an equal share of the management and the possessions of the whole. But this whole is omnipotent. No laws bind its will, for its will is the source of all law. No king, no official, no superior rules over it; each individual is only empowered to act, so far and so long as he upholds the plenipotence of the sovereign mass. It is not the upper classes who command the people, but the people which require obedience from its officers and throws them away when they no longer please it. For individual liberty there is here no place; but owing to the equality of all, the free will of the masses joyously and harmoniously prevails.

For a season these doctrines only served to afford a welcome mental stimulant to the minds, if not of the nobility, of the cultivated and property-possessing classes. The higher, and soon the lower, bourgeoisie inflated themselves with these views. At this period they shared certain of the privileges of the nobles, filled numerous and prominent offices in the State, gave to the nation its largest number of famous thinkers and poets, promoted industry and commerce, and daily increased in wealth, while the nobles, by their extravagance, ruined themselves financially. The former were, therefore, full of the consciousness of their own dignity, and found the continued precedence claimed by the nobles to be unendurable. They believed with inward satisfaction in this doctrine of the equality of all men and the sovereignty of the whole. For, instead of the privileged, it seemed to them self-evident that owing to their culture they, the hitherto unprivileged, ought to stand out prominently among the people as leaders of that governing whole. Thus the state of freedom and equality would be the state of pure reason as well, and, therefore, the leading position could not fail to fall to them, the masters of reasonable discussion. Meanwhile the mass of the poor, wholly cut off from the sources of culture and the mental movements of their country, for long years knew nothing of this absolute governing power which, according to the new discoveries, inalienably belonged to it, and was so surprisingly soon to fall into its lap. The only change in their condition, and thus the only preparation for their future sovereignty, was an increase of outward distress and of inward confusion and embitterment; and then came the time when the small circle to which education and enjoyment were limited, and the State power they wielded, fell into internal demoralization, strife of factions, and financial embarrassments, till the very Crown itself was obliged to summon popular forces to war against the privileged. All the springs of State machinery refused to work, coffers were empty, authorities and classes at bitter internecine strife, the army unreliable and undisciplined. It was under circumstances like these that the mass of the people in towns and villages heard from their candidates, advocates, and demagogues, what in truth their rights were. In their ignorance and want, their rudeness and embitterment, they suddenly learnt that for them--as sovereign--limits, obligations, authority no longer existed, that the old corruption and slavish condition was to be thoroughly got rid of, and that then everything would belong to them. They listened with greedy ears, and rushed forward to trample under foot whatever sought to contest these rights of theirs.

The highest and noblest aims lured the century on, and animated the hearts of countless worthy men: liberty, well-being, and culture for all, no difference between man and man but that of talent and virtue, fraternity among all citizens in the State and all nations on the earth; these were the ideals that 1780 proclaimed to the world and the future, and therefore the French still love to speak of the deathless principles and fair days of this first epoch of the Revolution. All this, Thiers tells us, would have been admirably realized had not evil-hearted emigrants and foreign Powers by their malignant attacks, driven the most humane of all Revolutions into desperation, a fight for existence, and bloodshed. All would have gone well, says Louis Blanc, had not the wicked Thermidorians, on the occasion of Robespierre's fall, brought in a policy of vice and self-seeking instead of one of virtue and brotherly love. Probably, on the other side the Vosges, eighty men out of every hundred adopt one or other of these views, and so it is easily intelligible that the merciless facts by which Taine shatters these fair pictures should be received with repugnance and surprise by his countrymen. The contrast between such a reality and such an ideal is indeed enormous; fair days, or so much even as one fair day in the course of the Revolution, can no longer be spoken of; in the very hour when absolute monarchy collapsed, a wild, rude, and cruel anarchy covered the land, filling France with violence and crime of every kind for a decade, and lastly causing an unparalleled despotism to appear to the French people salvation and deliverance. The conclusion is unavoidable, either the ideal was good for nothing, and the Coblentz emigrants had right on their side against the nation, or the French people had set about their high task in a quite impracticable way, and their historical fame has this time to be limited to the motto, _In magnis voluisse sat est_. Neither of these alternatives will have a pleasing sound in the ears of a Liberal Frenchman.

But, pleasing or not, the facts are indisputable, and up to the present time each new investigation of authentic documents has only served to give them a wider range and a more assured basis. We have seen the end of the Ancien Regime. The nobles of the former State were unnerved by idleness, debilitated by enjoyment, degraded by immorality; never had the aristocracy of a great nation fallen and been brushed away from the soil of their country, making so feeble a resistance. The leaders of the movement followed a political teaching based on a most one-sided and therefore radically false conception of human nature, and had no idea of the real nature of their fellow-citizens, or of the principles and needs of genuine political life. Finally the masses were unmoved by any political thought whatever, but were darkly conscious of their own wretched state up to the present time, and their hatred of those who had, or were supposed to have, occasioned it, were credulous and impressionable, and penetrated with the rightfulness of their wildest passions and desires. With such materials as these it is possible indeed to blow up an old and half-useless house, but not to construct on its ruins a well-planned and lasting new one.

Thus Taine shows by details from documents contemporaneous with the events, how, even before the opening of the National Assembly, the condition of things was out of joint at a hundred points. Tumults and plunder, disobedience to authorities, and maltreatment of obnoxious persons, were the order of the day; public officials were spiritless, and dared not command the already murmuring troops to restore order. The first weeks of the Assembly brought hot discussions as to the union of the three orders, attempts at reactionary State measures, and the taking of the Bastille. Excitement grew from day to day; the suspense throughout the country was tremendous. With the Parisian catastrophes the whole Ancien Regime rocked and gave way from side to side; and not merely privileges and feudal rights, but all State authorities vanished at one blow, or at the first threat from an armed mob resigned their functions. The French nation had positively no government, no laws, no police, no taxation. In place of these they had journals, clubs, societies, popular songs, and Lynch law; security for person and property no longer existed; every one did according to his heart's desire till a stronger than he preferred the opposite and knocked him down. This state of anarchy actually went on thus till the culmination of the Reign of Terror; every now and then it quieted down here or there, to burst out the following day at some other point with redoubled fury. In the midst of the omnipresent turmoil and confusion, the King, a powerless prisoner, sat in the Tuileries. The only quarter which afforded a possibility of the restoration of the State was the National Assembly, which was sufficiently respected and popular both with the people and the National Guard, to have enforced obedience had it set about it the right way. But there were two reasons which forbade the adoption of that way. One was that the Assembly was deprived of free action by the ruling theory of the Rights of Man, Liberty and Equality. This included the rights of resistance against oppression, and accordingly every citizen might at any moment consider himself oppressed and authorized in resisting. It had been borne in upon these sovereign citizens that the will of the sovereign people stood higher than that of its representatives, and that the people was at any time capable of re-entering upon the direct exercise of its sovereignty. It is plain that under the influence of theories such as these any control over street-riots and local deeds of violence was a difficult, if not hopeless task. And, on the same ground, it was impracticable to attempt any control or regulation of press or clubs, which looked upon their boundless activity as the highest expression and most precious jewel of revolutionary liberty. As, according to theory, State officials were to be, not the lords, but the servants of the sovereign people, it became expedient that they should not be named by the Central Government, but chosen, and that only for a short time, by the citizens. In the same spirit the affairs of Government were entrusted not to individual officials, but to deliberating colleagues; while, as to the passing of laws, the principle of equality rendered impossible the formation of an Upper House, or any finally decisive action on the part of the King. Thus the Government remained powerless, legislation was hasty and uncertain, the lower classes unmanageable, and on very many occasions it was plain that club orators and journalists who knew how to flatter the demands of the masses bent both Government and National Assembly beneath their sway. More than once there arose indignation in the Assembly at so unworthy and dangerous a condition; but at each attempt to grapple with and remove it, the fear of a monarchical or aristocratic reaction fell upon it and paralyzed its action.

In order to control the anarchical wilfulness of demagogues and proletaires there was but one thing to be done, to strengthen the authority of the executive. This meant restoration of discipline in the army, and energetic organization of Government, extensive powers conferred on the police officials, sharp punishments, and swift justice. But how then? If power were thus conferred upon the Government to restrain proletaires and rioters, who could guarantee liberty and the National Assembly against the head of the reinforced Government, against the King, who had hitherto been by these chronic riots kept in defenceless subjection? This dilemma led to the revolutionary spirit invariably triumphing at the National Assembly. The present fear of the violence of the crowd attendant at the sittings combined with the apprehension of a future monarchical reaction. When, some years later, at the organization of the Republican Government, the weakness of authority was again felt, more than one orator freely declared the existing arrangements to be undoubtedly bad throughout, and to be amended as soon as possible; owned that this had, indeed, been perfectly known at the time of their creation in 1790, but that they were intentionally framed thus, in the interests of liberty, to prevent the King from exercising any power. Enough--the Constitutional Assembly did nothing to surround personal safety and political order with any inviolable defence; on the contrary, they did much to open the door wide to the passionate and arbitrary action of the masses. We may say that they thoughtlessly sowed the seeds of all the horrors of the Terror, and had the sad beginnings of that development before their eyes, without even an attempt to avert them. This is true, most especially in the economical department: the colossal transformation of the laws of property in France, which brought half the soil into new hands, and irresistibly threw the population at large into communistic paths, was out and out the work of the Constituent Assembly.

For more than twenty years I have, in my "History of the Revolution Period," established these circumstances from authentic documents, and thus given repeated offence to the French public. I may therefore be permitted to feel all the greater satisfaction at such a distinguished investigator as Taine, after drawing forth numberless documents from Parisian archives, coming to absolutely the same conclusion. All I have heard in the way of objection to his statements is utterly unimportant. As it is not possible to drive the facts he has proved from original documents out of existence, the observation is made that though his information may be true, it is one-sided; that while he never wearies of describing revolts and misdeeds, he does not sufficiently point out in how many places the Civil Guard bravely and loyally upheld civil order. Taine would be the last to dispute this fact; had it not been so there would have been no longer any France left in the nineteenth century. But he would venture to inquire whether praise be deserved by an Assembly which, as ruler of a great State, surrendered without resistance now the third of it, now the half, during three years, to a bloody anarchy; whether we can speak of "fair days" or "humane Revolution," when in this short period six horrible Jacqueries laid the land waste, when countless political murders remained unpunished, and military _emeutes_ and ecclesiastical brawls thrust the weapons of civil war into the hands of the masses. We are told of a pure and ideal inspiration then filling millions of liberty-loving and patriotic spirits; and well may we call that a fair time in which noble aims and infinite hopes set all pulses beating higher, and stimulate a whole people to youthful efforts, and fill it with fresh and energetic life. Yes, there were moments of golden dreams and illusions like these. Only they should have lasted longer. It is not through their feelings, speeches, wishes, but their deeds, that nations assume their historical position and receive their historical sentence. Taine writes the last, indeed, with an incisive pen, and often with glaring colours, but essentially he gives nothing but what follows by indissoluble sequence from the facts of the Revolution.

On certain points, indeed, one may notice a few omissions in his work, or raise a few objections, though they do not affect it as a whole. Space does not permit me to dwell on all particular instances; I must be satisfied with pointing out a few. While during the first months of the Revolution the agitation of the lower classes was identical in town and country, and the lawless violence of artisans and peasants pursued the same ends by the same means, one of the most prominent features of the later phase, the Terror, was the gradual introduction of a war of interest between the people of the capital and the villages. The more the power of the Mountain and the Parisian Commune increased, the more absolutely the booty of the Revolution fell to the share of the town proletaires, at the cost not only of the great landed proprietors, but the small farmers as well. Our first impression at the aspect of this rivalry is the selfishness and greed of the Parisian demagogues; but we may easily convince ourselves that these could never have attained to so extended an activity if existing circumstances had not offered the possibility of a class war. But for any disquisition on this subject, or allusion to the causes that, in the first years of the Revolution, prepared its way, we look through Taine's pages in vain. Again, in the representation of the Ancien Regime, his attention is pre-eminently turned to social relations connected with the land. Had he with an equally comprehensive and minute care studied the different strata, the interests and wants of the town population, the problem alluded to would have solved itself.

It is with admirable insight and incontrovertible reasoning that Taine shows the logical untenableness and practical mischief of the theory of equality, both in the writings of Rousseau and the action of the Constituent Assembly. He proves the contradiction between this equality and the very nature of man, and how, consequently, pure democracy rendered the development of political liberty unattainable. In perfect agreement with Tocqueville, he points to the absolute necessity, under the circumstances of the time, of aristocratic institutions, for the creation and preservation of a free State, and explains how deeply seated these are in the needs and claims of human nature. This portion of his work is indeed masterly; and the more widely extended the equalitarian superstition among the Liberal parties of our day, the more one could desire Taine's views to exercise a strong and wide-spread influence. But, on the other hand, it appears to me that by this very conception of political institutions, our author has been led to show himself something more than just in the sentence he passes on the representatives of this period, the nobles and prelates of 1789. This is one of the few incongruities already alluded to between the first and second volume. After reading of the luxury, artificiality, and idleness of aristocratic society in the former, and coming with the author to the conviction that terrible consequences must attend such a condition, one is surprised to find in the latter that these privileged ones were the best, the most discerning and patriotic portion of the nation, whose annihilation or exile brought about the same injurious results that the expulsion of the Huguenots had done. This contradiction is not cleared up by the fact that in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, and chiefly through the influence of Rousseau, a sentimental humanity had prevailed in high circles, that here, too, it was the fashion to speak of a return to an idyllic life of nature, of universal brotherly love, and of the relief of every form of distress. For these transformations remained, in point of fact, only fanciful phrases of the salons. When Louis XVI., Turgot, and Calonne, really desired to set about such philanthropic reforms in good earnest, it was, as we have already seen, these sentimental nobles themselves who hindered their effort, and by nullifying reform brought about the Revolution. When the catastrophe came, many of them had sufficient insight into the new position of affairs to make haste and repudiate those privileges which throughout the land had been already trampled under foot by an unchained people. The horrible persecution to which they were subjected, in utter disregard of all existing rights and all human feeling, with bloodthirsty cruelty and shameless greed, must ever insure for the victims the compassion and sympathy of every right-minded observer; and in order fully to justify revolutionary laws against emigrants, one would be driven to advance sophisms only, not arguments. But all this does not affect the question, whether, as Taine assumes, these persecuted ones did hold a distinguished place in the nation for political virtue, intellectual culture, and capacity for action. Neighbouring nations, so far as I know, without exception took at the time an entirely different view. Doubtless, there were among the emigrants many who won respect and regard in the regions whither their flight had led them. But the great majority, by their thoughtless arrogance, mutual bickerings, and shameless frivolity, left behind them a bad reputation; whereas a hundred years before the exiled Huguenots, by their unity, earnestness, and industry, won, wherever they went, the respect and gratitude of their new countrymen.

HEINRICH VON SYBEL.

WHAT IS THE ACTUAL CONDITION OF IRELAND?

Returning to settle in Ireland after an absence that began more than twenty years ago, I found two things strongly claiming my attention. One, was the very great advance in material well-being which my country appeared to have made. The other, was the fact that both Englishmen and Irishmen appeared resolutely to ignore this progress. Nearly all who write and speak about Ireland, either dwell upon her grievances or assume poverty as her normal condition. I know not of any who have attempted to record her returning prosperity. Yet there are few facts in modern history better worthy of notice than the advance in material wealth which has taken place in Ireland during the thirty years between 1846 and 1876.

The year 1879 marks the close of just one-third of a century from the great famine. The first thirty years of this period, 1846-76, were years of continual advance in well-being. From 1877 and down to the present year a reaction has been going on, which is largely connected with a general depression of trade all over the world. For reasons which will appear hereafter, I do not hold that this reaction is likely to be permanent.

It is true that at the beginning of that period the country was in the very lowest depths of poverty and depression. The starting-point therefore was a very backward one: and the wonder is that so much advance should have been made, considering not only the backwardness of the starting-point but the difficulties of the road.

I shall not attempt to depict the state of things which prevailed at the close of the great potato famine. The condition of the country is well known; the facts are in the recollection of many persons now living; and the evidence is within the reach of all inquirers. I may safely assume that Ireland then was among the very poorest of all the countries in Europe. What is her position now?

In discussing the social condition of any country, the population question naturally comes to the front. Is the population pressing unduly on the means of subsistence? then there is something wrong, and until this is set right progress is impossible. On the other hand, if the population is so sparse as to leave the resources of the country undeveloped, there is also something wrong, though in this case the evil is far less. The population, such as it is, may be prosperous and advancing, though it is not producing all it might.

The former was notoriously the state of things in Ireland before 1847.[21] In 1845 (the year immediately preceding the famine) the population was at the highest point it attained during the present century, and probably the highest it ever reached. It was estimated at 8,295,061. In 1847, the year when the famine was at its height, the numbers are given as 8,025,274. In 1875, just thirty years after the maximum, the numbers had fallen to 5,309,494. In 1877 they were estimated at 5,338,906, showing an increase over 1875 of 29,412.