Mirabeau thunder in the National Assembly

At Cannes there is no post-house, carriage, horses, or mules, and he has to walk through nine miles of waste ! And so he at last gets back to Paris. There he hears Mirabeau thunder in the National Assembly; meets the King and Queen, La Fayette, Barnave, Sieyes, Condorcet, and the chiefs of the Revolution; and is taken to the Jacobin Club, of which he is duly installed as a member. And this wonderful book ends with a chapter of general reflections on the Revolution, which go more deeply down to the root of the matter, John Morley has said, than all that Burke, Paine, and Mackintosh piled up in so many eloquent periods.

The Revolution as a whole would carry us far afield. In these few pages we are dealing with the great transformation that it wrought in the condition of the peasant. It must not be forgotten that part of the wonderful difference between the peasant of the last century and the peasant of to-day, is due to the vast material advancement common to the civilised world. Railroads, steam factories, telegraphs, the enormous increase in population, in manufactures, commerce, and inventions were not products of the ‘ principles of ’89,’ nor of the Convention, nor of the Jacobin Club. All Europe has grown, America has grown almost miraculously, and France has grown with both.

Arthur Young’s journey

But the political lesson of Arthur Young’s journey is this: the poverty and the desolation which he saw in 1789 were directly due, as he so keenly felt, not to the country, not to the husbandmen, not to ignorance or to indolence in the people, not to mere neglect, weakness, or stupidity in the central government, but directly to bad laws, cruel privileges, and an oppressive system of tyranny. Arthur Young found an uncommonly rich soil, a glorious climate, a thrifty, ingenious, and laborious people, a strong central government that, in places and at times, could make magnificent roads, bridges, canals, ports; and when a Turgot, or a Liancourt, or a de Turbilly had a free hand, a country which could be made one of the richest on the earth. What Arthur Young saw, with the eye of true insight, was, that so soon as these evil laws and this atrocious system of land tenure were removed, France would be one of the finest countries in the world. And Arthur Young, as we see, was right private tours istanbul.

Another point is this: to Arthur Young, the Suffolk farmer of 1789, everything he sees in the peasantry and husbandry of France appears miserably inferior to the peasantry and husbandry of England. France is a country far worse cultivated than England, its agricultural produce miserably less; its life, animation, and means of communication ludicrously inferior to those of England; its farmers in penury, its labourers starving, its resources barbarous, compared with those of England. In an English village more meat, he learns, is eaten in a week, than in a French village in a year; the clothing, food, home, and intelligence of the English labourer are far above those of the French labourer. The country inns are infinitely better in England; there is ten times the circulation, the wealth, the comfort in an English rural district; the English labourer is a free man, the French labourer little more than a serf.