an additional compensation in the order, sobriety, and diligence of his workmen on the one hand, the home market of a prosperous population on the other. It is not too much to assert that manufactures could not have made the stride they have done in the last fifteen years either in Germany or in France without the aid of their land systems, and the consequently increasing home market for the productions of the power-loom, and the industries to which it gives activity in turn.

Now that the war-cloud seems to have dispersed, the capitalist of the Ruhr Basin sees but one other cloud in the horizon-in the attitude which labour is beginning to assume, and the power of organisation over all Germany, of which already it displays no doubtful indications, although the trade-union is a very recent growth. That a fundamental change in the relations between labour and capital throughout Europe is approaching seems beyond doubt; but whatever the issue, it will not on the Continent be the issue at the same time of a conflict between an insignificant number of persons with immense property and an overwhelming number with none; a conflict, it should be observed, which becomes all the more decisive in favour of numbers, when the only weapon employed is Universal Suffrage.

265

A VISIT TO LA CREUSE, 1868.*

It has often been said of late years that Paris no longer is France; that, looking to the show on all sides of mere imperial splendour and power, the influx of strangers from all parts of the world, and the obscurity of the social and intellectual elements of which it once was the focus, it may be the capital of the empire, the metropolis of the world; but the capital of the French nation, the centre of national genius and life, the representative city, it is not. There is, on the other hand, however, a sense in which Paris is now France, in a greater degree than ever before. The town has grown, while the country has shrunk in the composition of France, and the town (especially the chief town) is now made up of elements gathered from the farthest parts of the country. Instead, therefore, of saying that Paris is not France, it is better to say that not only France but Paris itself must now be studied in the remotest departments, to understand the changes which have taken place in both under the empire. A true political picture of the capital, with its new palaces and boulevards, and the enormous increase in its numbers, would exhibit La Creuse in the background, with its

6

* Reprinted from Fraser's Magazine,' February 1869.

desert hills, its mean hamlets, and its vanishing peasantry. The most primitive and isolated of all the departments -the very name of which is not found in Murray or Bradshaw it has much to tell of the general state of the great kingdom of which it seems so insignificant a part, of that transformation of a rural into an urban population, which is one of the most portentous revolutions of the age, and of the means by which, and the cost at which the modern splendour of the metropolis has been created. Those too who care to see what still remains soundest in France, in the heart of its people and in the character of its institutions, side by side with sad proofs of the change which has passed over both in the last twenty years, will find their account in a visit to La Creuse. They will find themselves, as it were, in a border land between old and new France, recalling with a new meaning the name of La Marche, which it bore as a province.* Without a railway until the other day, ill-provided with roads, and its narrow valleys blocked up as it were in culsde-sac by the peculiar formation of its mountains and hills, it has remained in many respects unchanged since the middle age. The Revolution itself passed it by almost untouched: it is to this day so secluded from the world that all the inhabitants of a village will turn out to gaze at a stranger; yet its male population is the Referring to the ancient name of La Marche and the peaceful character of its peasantry in all past time, so unusual with Borderers, M. de Lavergne says, in the brief sketch of La Creuse contained in his 'Économie rurale de la France: '—'Quoique rappelant les borders d'Écosse, on n'y recueille aucune des traditions belliqueuses qui se rattachent d'ordinaire à ces frontières entre la plaine et la montagne qu'on appelle des marches.'

*

most migratory in France; the greater part of its grown men are rather Parisians than peasants of their native hamlets, spending three-fourths of the year in the capital of whose newest quarters they are the builders in the most literal sense-and passing only the winter months in the rural commune, in which official tables of population enumerate them.

The passenger by the new railway forming the base of a triangle, of which the apex is Paris, and St. Sulpice Laurière on the line to Limoges, and Montluçon on that to Vichy, are the other extremities, crosses the whole breadth of La Creuse between the departments of La Haute-Vienne and L'Allier; but he might perhaps gather from that cursory view a very erroneous impression of the character of a region, the barrenest parts of which are concealed by the cuttings of the line, while bright chestnut groves and deep woods of oak and beech seen under a summer or autumn sun give to much of the landscape a rich and smiling appearance. Even from the railway, however, glimpses of the real desolation and wildness may be caught. One may see, for example, from the carriage a woman tending cattle or sheep, knitting at the same time a stocking or a waistcoat, while under her arm is the signal for the train at once shepherdess, manufacturer, and railway official. Tracts of land again may be discovered here and there in a complete state of nature, owned for the most part by village communities on that primitive system of common property, of which Maine seems not to have looked for examples so near the centre of

western civilisation.* Along the whole line, too, towns are conspicuous by their absence. Gueret itself, the capital of the department, is hardly more than a village to an Englishman's eye, inferior in both architecture and numbers to not a few English villages: indeed, with the solitary exception of Aubusson, which has but 6,000 inhabitants, yet is the seat of a manufacture of tapestry of ancient celebrity, the towns' of La Creuse are all villages, the villages' hamlets, often of no more than four or five cottages. To see however in a few hours the real nakedness of the land, the magnificent scenery it nevertheless possesses, and an oasis in the desert deserving on more than one account particular notice, the traveller would do well to leave the railway from Paris at St. Sulpice Laurière (where it joins the line which traverses La Creuse), and make an excursion to the village of St. Goussaud, perched on the summit of a mountain, from which the eye may sweep far beyond the limits of the department to the dark Puy-de-Dôme frowning over Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne.

Looking down on La Creuse itself, the eye ranges not over one great hollow-as a name taken from the river, which has hollowed a channel through its mountains of granite, might seem to denote-but over innumerable hollows and heights, with here and there amidst forests and mountain heath, a grey patch which marks the thatched roofs of a poor hamlet, and the presence of human life. Descending from St. Goussaud, a drive of six or seven miles brings to the foot of the ancient 'Ancient Law,' chap. viii.: The Early History of Property.

*