Contrast between Englishmen and Frenchmen.

9

for women the characteristic of the Celt.* The latter is intemperate in love; the former is intemperate in wine. The fancy of the one is sensuous; that of the other ideal. Lastly, the religious element presents diverse manifestations in the two races; in the Celt there is a latent tendency towards polytheism, while the Teuton displays a decided preference for monotheistic views;-Romanism retains an almost unshaken hold over the former; Protestantism has achieved its victories exclusively among the latter.

Now, these distinctions are not fancies of our own, derived from a glance at France, Germany, and England, under their present phases; they are taken on the authority of a philosopher, whose conclusions are the result of long study, and of the widest range of observation. The general accuracy of the delineation will be generally acknowledged, and can scarcely fail to impress us with the improbability that institutions which are indigenous among one of these great divisions of humanity should flourish and survive when they are transplanted into the other. Self-government, and the forms and appliances of political freedom, are plants of native growth in England and America; they are only delicate and valuable exotics in France. These national discrepancies manifest themselves in public life in a thousand daily forms. The Englishman is practical, business-like, and averse to change; his imagination, though powerful, is not easily excited; his views and aims are positive, unideal, and distinct. The Frenchman is ambitious, restless, and excitable-aspiring after the perfect; passionné pour l'inconnu; prone to "la récherche de l'absolu," constantly, as Lamartine says, wrecking his chance or his possession of the good "par l'impatience du mieux." The Englishman, in his political movements, knows exactly what he wants; his object is definite, and is generally even the recovery of something that has been lost, the abolition of some excrescence or abuse, the recurrence to some venerated precedent. The Frenchman is commonly aroused by the vague desire of something new, something vast, something magnificent; he prefers to fly to evils that he knows not of, rather than to bear those with which he is familiar. His golden age beckons to him out of the untried and unrealized future; ours is placed almost as baselessly, but far less dangerously, in the historic past. The Frenchman is given to scientific definitions and theories in politics; the Englishman turns on all such things a lazy and contemptuous glance. The former draws up formal declarations of the rights of man, but has an imperfect understanding of

* Dr. Kombst remarks, as a constant fact, the existence of Foundling Hospitals among Celtic nations, and their absence among those of Teutonic origin.

his own, and is apt to overlook those of others; the latter never descants on his rights, but exercises them daily as a matter of course, and defends them stoutly when attacked. The one is confident in his own opinion, though he be almost alone in his adhesion to it; the other has always a secret misgiving that he is wrong when he does not agree with the majority. All these are so many criteria of the possession of that "political instinct," that native aptitude for administrative business, the defect of which in the French people has hitherto rendered all their attempts at a working constitution so abortive.

Next, as to RELIGION,-the absence of which as a pervading element is a deplorable feature of the national character of France. The decay of her religious spirit dates from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. That fatal measure, while it banished Protestantism, struck Romanism with impotence and a paralytic languor. "The Gallican Church,* no doubt, looked upon this Revocation as a signal triumph. But what was the consequence? Where shall we look after this period for her Fénélons and her Pascals? where for those bright monuments of piety and learning which were the glory of her better days? As for piety, she perceived that she had no occasion for it, when there was no longer any lustre of Christian holiness surrounding her; nor for learning, when there were no longer any opponents to confute or any controversies to maintain. She felt herself at liberty to become as ignorant, as secular, as irreligious as she pleased; and amidst the silence and darkness she had created around her she drew the curtains and retired to rest." To the forced and gloomy bigotry which marked the declining years of Louis Quatorze succeeded the terrible reaction of the Regency and the following reigns. Amid the orgies of weary and satiated profligacy arose first a spirit of scoffing, then of savage, vindictive, and aggressive scepticism. The whole intellect of that acute and brilliant people ranged itself on the side of irreligion; and nothing was left to oppose to the wits, the philosophers, and the encyclopedists, save cold prosings which it was a weariness to listen to, frauds and fictions which it would have been imbecility to credit, pretensions which the growing enlightenment of the age laughed to scorn, and the few rags of traditional reverence which the indolent, luxurious, and profligate lives of the clergy were fast tearing away. The unbelief of the higher ranks spread rapidly to those below them: some were unbelievers from conviction, some from fashion, some from a low and deplorable ambition to ape their superiors. "Bien que je ne suis qu'un pauvre coiffeur (said a hair-dresser to his employer one day in

*Robert Hall.-Review of "Zeal without Innovation."

Absence of Deep Faith in France.

11

1788) je n'ai plus de croyance qu'un autre." But worse than this, all that was warm or generous in human sympathies, all that was hopeful or promising for human progress, all that was true and genuine in native feeling, was found on the side of the philosophers. Religion ranged itself on the side of ignorance and despotism. Scepticism fought the battle of justice, of science, of political and civil freedom. The philosophers had truth and right on their side in nearly everything but their assaults on Christianity; and the Christianity then presented to the nation was scarcely recognisable as such. The result of these unnatural and unhappy combinations has been that religion has been indissolubly associated in the mind of the French with puerile conceits, with intellectual nonsense, with political oppression; while infidelity wears in their eyes the cap of liberty, the robes of wisdom, the civic crown of patriotic service.

Even the shocking license into which Atheism wandered under the Republic produced nothing more genuine or deep than the reaction towards decency under Napoleon. The nation remained at heart either wholly indifferent or actively irreligious; and such, in spite of growing exceptions, it continues to this day, by the confession of those even among its own people who know it best. The two reigns of the Restoration, and that of Louis Philippe, rather aggravated than mitigated the evil. The effect of this national deficiency in the religious element, is to augment to a gigantic height the difficulty of building up either society or government in France. Its noxious operation can scarcely be overrated. The foundation-rock is gone; the very basis is a shifting quicksand. The habitual reverence for a Supreme Being, whose will is law, and whose laws are above assault, question, or resistance; the sense of control and the duty of obedience which flow from this first great conviction, lie at the bottom of all community and all rule; without these it is difficult to see how the constructive task can even be commenced.

The absence of a fundamental and pervading religious faith has shewn itself in France in two special consequences, either of which would suffice to make the work set before them not merely Herculean, but nearly hopeless. The first is this:-France prides herself upon being a land in which pure reason is the only authority extant. She has no prejudices to lie at the root of her philosophy, no doctrine settled and universally adopted, and laid by as an everlasting possession,-a κтημa és de in the sacred archives of the nation. She has no axioms which it would be insanity or sacrilege to question. Everything is matter for speculation, for doubt, for discussion. The very opinions which, with all other people, have long since passed into the category of first principles, are with her still themes for the wit of the saloon and the

paradoxical declamation of the schoolboy. The simplest and clearest rules of duty, the most established maxims of political and moral action, the assumptions, or the proved premises which lie at the root of all social arrangements, dogmatic facts the most ancient and widely recognised, have in France every morning to be considered and discussed anew. Every belief and opinion, without exception, is daily remanded into the arena of question and of conflict. Topics the most frivolous and the most sacred, truths the most obvious and the most recondite, doctrines the clearest and the most mystical, are perpetually summoned afresh before the judgment-seat of logic, till none can by any possibility obtain a firm and undisputed hold upon the mind. The fact is not wonderful, though its consequences are enormously pernicious. It is the inherited misfortune of a generation which has grown up in the vortex of a political and moral whirlpool, where nothing was stable, nothing permanent; where it was impossible to point to a system, an institution, or a creed, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus; where one philosophy after another chased its predecessor from the stage; where one form of government was scarcely seated on the throne before its successor drove it into exile; where, in a word, there was not a school, a doctrine, or a dynasty, of which men of mature age (to use the fine and pathetic language of Grattan) had not "rocked the cradle and followed the hearse,"-not an institution extant and surviving of which nearly every one alive could not remember the time when it was not. The result of all this has been that an entirely different class of subjects from those ordinarily agitated in settled countries has come up. Instead of discussing whether a monarch should govern or only reign, they are discussing whether the lowest and most ignorant orders of the mob should not have the actual sovereignty in their hands. Instead of considering modifications in the laws of landed inheritance, they are disputing whether the very institution of property be not in itself a robbery. Instead of differing on details of the law of marriage and divorce, they are bringing into question the subject of family ties, and the relation between the sexes in its entirety. Their struggles are not on behalf of religious liberty, nor for this Church, nor for that sect, but for or against those fundamental ideas which are common to all creeds alike. It is not such or such a political innovation, such or such a social or hierarchical reform which form the subject of habitual controversy; it is the religious, political, and moral groundwork of society that is at stake and in dispute.

We are here at once led to the recognition of that great fact which explains, better than any divergence of historic antecedents, or any dissimilarity of national character, the startling

English and French Revolutionists.

13

contrast between the failure of the French Revolution, and the success of that great English movement of the seventeenth century which corresponds to it. M. Guizot, with his accustomed sagacity, has in his last work placed his finger upon this distinction, though he abstains from following out a contrast so painful and unfavourable to his countrymen. The French Revolution followed on a sceptical and philosophic movement of men's minds. The English Revolution followed on a period of deep religious excitement. The English revolutionists were even more attached to their religious faith than to their political opinions. They fought for liberty of conscience even more fiercely than for civil rights. "Ce fut la fortune de l'Angleterre au xviie siècle, que l'esprit de foi religieuse et l'esprit de liberté politique y régnaient ensemble. Toutes les grandes passions de la nature humaine se déployèrent ainsi sans qu'elle brisât tous ses freins." The English political reformers were pious Christians, whose faith was an earnest, stimulating, exalting, strengthening reality; the French political reformers, on the other hand, were atheists, brought up in the school of the Encyclopedists to despise and deride all that other men held sacred, whose passions, interests, and prejudices, therefore, found no internal impediment to their overflow. The Puritans unquestionably were bold reformers of religious matters as well as of political ones; they indeed attacked and overthrew the established creed, while maintaining intact the common principles of the Christian faith; but in the midst of their successes-in the chaos of ruins both of temples and palaces which, like Samson, they heaped round them-there was something left always standing which all sects reverenced and spared. They still, as M. Guizot beautifully says, recognised and bowed down before a law which they had not made. It was this law which they had not made-this boundary wall not built with hands-which was wanting to the French reformers: to them everything was human; on no side did they meet an obstacle, acknowledged as divine, which commanded them to stop in their career of conquest and destruction. The consequence was, that in the one case the bouleversement reached only the secondary and derivative,—in the other, it embraced the primitive, fundamental, and indispensable institutions of social life.

The second special operation of French irreligion on society may be thus explained :-The thirst after happiness is natural to the human heart, and inseparable from its healthy action. After this happiness we all strive, though with every imaginable difference as to the intensity of our desire, and the conception of our aim, as to the scene in which we locate it, and the means we employ to arrive at it. The cultivated, the virtuous, and the wise, place their happiness in the gratification of the affections,