French & English

England and France are the richest countries in Europe, and, of the two, England is generally believed to be the richer. I believe the same, and yet am unable to give evidence of an entirely satisfactory character. Considering each country as a vast estate, composed of land and house property, we meet with our first difficulty in the uncertainty of the estimates. The French Government is at the present time (1888) employing its agents in a new and elaborate valuation. External trade is not a certain guide, as the two populations are differently situated, the French living much more on home produce than the English. The revenue is sometimes taken as an indication of national wealth, and it is so no doubt when nations are extremely unequal; for example, the vast difference between the revenues of France and of Greece is good evidence that France is the wealthier of the two countries. When, however, we make a financial comparison between two states as nearly equal as France and England, the revenue ceases to be a criterion. It is true that the French people pay more money into the national treasury than the English; but they may be doing it only to their own impoverishment. What we call “revenue” is not like a private income, it is a burden or a charge, proving only the power to bear the burden, and such a power may be but temporary. It is only the most foolish Frenchmen who are proud of the enormous taxation that afflicts the Republic as a consequence of monarchical errors and of its own.

The wealth, both of England and France, has been vastly increased by the prodigious creation of new things which has taken place in the present century. They are both of them very old countries, yet almost everything in them is new. A man of sixty, travelling about, is constantly seeing and using things that did not exist when he was born. The railways he travels upon, the hotels where he stays, the great industrial buildings, the shipping, are of his own time. The towns are either recent or in great part reconstructed. The industrial activity of the present age is so enormous that in the course of a single generation it has done more in public and private works than all the previous generations had left behind them. Then there is the industrial plant; both nations have increased their producing powers by multiplying tools of all kinds, from colossal steam-engines down to sewing-machines. England took the lead in this direction, but France has followed. In some things France has been the leader, notably in the construction of warships with defensive armour, and in the manufacture of breech-loading cannon. England set the example of huge industrial exhibitions, and here again, as in railways, France has been a successful imitator.

The industrial development of both countries has led to a state of things in which the producing power surpasses the actual wants. To keep the working populations in full employment it would be necessary to do over again all that has been done; but the works accomplished remain as impediments to future labour. Paris does not need to be reconstructed every twenty years; a network of railways has not to be made in every century. Thus industrialism produces both riches and poverty. First, it creates an army with appliances too elaborate and too efficient for any permanent need, and then it fails to pay its own soldiers. The present condition of England and France is discouraging, for the reason that it is the skilled workman who is so often without employment. The evil has attracted more public attention in England, but the roads of France are covered with miserable tramps and vagabonds, many of whom are well-trained “ouvriers sans travail.”

Success in industry is proved by the attainment of wealth, so that it becomes, in an industrial age, the evidence of something greater than itself. It is taken as the proof of ability, of the kind of talent most valued, and so it comes to pass that people of the most simple habits, who have really no need for riches, often desire to make a fortune as a proof of their own energy, and from a dread of being classed amongst the unsuccessful. This is one of the strongest reasons for money-getting when the genuine instinct of avarice is absent.

There is a most important difference between England and France in the necessity for wealth in certain positions, quite independently of the desire for money as a possession. The expression “a large income is a necessary of life” is an English expression, and is true in the country and classes in which it originated. What it means is not that the Englishman cares much for personal self-indulgence, but that if his income is not large he finds himself exposed to vexatious or humiliating consequences, unless his position is otherwise so insignificant as to escape attention. It is entirely understood that all titled persons in England ought to be rich, and not only all titled persons but all who belong to the upper classes. On inquiring into the causes of this belief we do not find them in the love of money for itself, as a miser loves it, but in the English passion for style and state, and in the contempt which is felt for those who cannot afford to maintain an expensive standard of living.

Wealth is not only more necessary in England than in France, it is also more valuable socially; it does more to elevate its possessor, to give him rank and station. In England the condition of things is, for the present, singularly agreeable to the rich man who is also ambitious. It is not like a country without an upper class, and it is not like a country with a closed and exclusive upper class. England has a brilliant and attractive upper class that the rich man may aspire to enter, and which receives him with encouraging cordiality. He has something to desire, which is at the same time well worth desiring and not beyond his reach. A true aristocracy would keep him at a distance; in a genuine democracy he could never become more than a wealthy citizen; in the present very peculiar condition of English society there is still an aristocracy for him to enter, and it receives him to be one of its own.

He has the advantage, also, of living in a country where the middle classes are proud of the wealth of the rich. They talk of the large incomes of the nobility with an interest that may be a survival of ancient feudal sentiments, a vassal’s pride in his liege lord. It is a pleasure to them to think that the Duke of Westminster can drive out with his guests from Eaton Hall in a procession of his own carriages. Even the freaks of the last Duke of Portland are not displeasing to them, because his mole-burrowing was done on such a costly scale. The vast estates of Sutherland and Breadalbane seem to give every Scotchman a superiority over the comparatively landless French noblesse. The British nature is so inclined to be happy in wealth that when the individual Briton has little of his own to rejoice in he generously takes pleasure in that of the nearest lord. This pleasure is the more pure for him that he is almost incapable of envy.[74]

The state of French feeling about riches is more difficult to define with perfect accuracy. It varies very much with different localities. In a trading town money is everything, being the sign of superiority in trade, and the biggest capitalist is the greatest man. In an aristocratic centre money without caste counts for very little, and the rich bourgeois keeps his place, retaining the most simple and unpretending manners. I should say that rank and wealth are much more separate, or at least separable, in France than in England. People are accustomed to see nobles of high rank with very moderate fortunes, and they are also accustomed to meet with rich bourgeois who do not aspire to aristocracy either for themselves or their descendants. Amongst the noblesse themselves money is regarded merely as a great convenience, and rank is respected still, and fully recognised, even in combination with very narrow means. This is the purely aristocratic as opposed to the plutocratic sentiment.

French equality does not bring together the noblesse and the bourgeoisie, as the noblesse is exclusive, except towards the false noblesse that has once got itself adopted.[75] But equality often produces a degree of familiarity, astonishing to an Englishman, between the rich bourgeoisie and the common people. This may be explained by the absence of the word “gentleman” and of that separation of classes, without the help of title, which the word “gentleman” implies. The rich bourgeois, in France, is nothing but a bourgeois; he has never thought “I am a gentleman,” and the difference between him and a common man is but a pecuniary difference.

Wealth has a dignity and almost a sanctity in England which seems to be connected with religious beliefs, and especially with the familiar knowledge of the Old Testament, almost an unknown book in France. In this respect the English hold a middle place between the French and the Jews. I certainly have myself known rich English people who believed that Divine Providence had appointed them, personally, to have authority over the poor, and that the poor owed them much deference for that reason. It is a kind of divine right, and it is even capable of a sort of scientific proof, for wealth is one of the natural forces, and, in the last analysis, an accumulation of solar energy given into the hand of a man.[76]

It is sometimes asserted, and perhaps still more generally believed, that the sentiment of the poor towards the rich is one of adoration in England and of hatred in France. The truth about English sentiment I have endeavoured, in a general way, to tell. The peculiar advantage of wealth in England is that it so soon confers caste—that the rich are so soon believed to have rank, even without parchments and the royal signature. They become “gentlefolks,” when in France they would be only “gros bourgeois.” The French sentiment about wealth varies generally between a kind of respect that is not at all servile, and unfeigned indifference. The English have a great difficulty in understanding this indifference. I find, for instance, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s article in the Nineteenth Century for February 1885, the statement about France that “wealth creates the most savage enmity there, because it is conceived as a means for gratifying appetites of the most selfish and vile kind.” There may, of course, be instances of such feeling amongst poor French anarchists and radicals. It exists even in England itself, and was expressed long ago with sufficient vigour by a poet of the people in fiery stanzas all ending with the refrain—

Those two lines express exactly the sentiment attributed by Mr. Arnold to the French; the last of them, especially, is a precise translation into poetic form of what Mr. Arnold says about “gratifying appetites of the most selfish and vile kind.”[77]

When I read very comprehensive statements I always adopt the rather prosaic method of looking back on my own experience, if I have any experience that can throw light upon the subject. In this case, having lived much in the country, both in England and France, and known poor and rich people in the numerical proportion that they bear to one another in real life, I may perhaps be accepted as a competent witness. My testimony is as follows.

When I was a young man in Lancashire the population of mill-hands was not in a state of “savage enmity” towards the rich, but its sentiments were not in the least deferential, and they were not friendly. We cannot call those sentiments friendly which express themselves in jibes and jeers. It is the simple truth that well-dressed ladies and gentlemen avoided meeting the hands when they came out of the factories to escape personal annoyance. They were not in bodily danger, but they were liable to be openly criticised by the lower classes, whose tongues were both sharp and merciless. The factory hands had unbounded natural impudence and a very aggressive disposition. Some of them had the gifts of wit, humour, and sarcasm, to which the Lancashire dialect is highly favourable; and it was their delight to exercise these gifts at the expense of any unfortunate gentleman or lady who fell in their way. A telling hit at the victim, whom nobody pitied, was hailed with shouts of satisfaction. A lady, who was a neighbour of ours in Lancashire, happened to be walking in a muddy street, so she lifted her skirts a little. This unluckily occurred near a group of factory girls, whose sharp eyes, of course, noticed the lady’s stockings, which were of some unbleached material. Thereupon one factory girl cried out, “Well, afore Oi’d don stockin’s na better weshed nur them theere!”[78] and there was a general explosion of laughter, before which the lady was glad to drop the curtain of her skirts. Nor was this critical disposition confined to the factory operatives. I happened one day to be wearing a new topcoat, and was passing near some houses in course of erection. One of the masons shouted out from his ladder something very coarse and ill-natured about my topcoat; so I stopped to reason with him and said, “Why cannot you let my topcoat alone? I came by it honestly; it is paid for.” “Paid for, is’t?” he answered, with a sneer of ineffable contempt. “It woddn’t ’a bin if th’ ad ’ad t’ addle th’ brass.”[79] So I went away defeated, amidst the jeers of the other workmen. I may perhaps trouble the reader with an anecdote about another mason, in which there is more real hostility to wealth and refinement. When I was a boy, an old Lancashire mason was making an alteration in a room that was to be my bedroom. This involved the blocking-up of an old window; and instead of building the wall of the full thickness, the mason contented himself with a thin wall, leaving a recess. “I shall be glad of this recess,” I said, “it will do to put the washing-stand in.” The mention of such a luxury irritated the man’s democratic sentiments, and he swore at the washing-stand and at me with many a bitter oath, although he was working for my uncle, who too kindly employed him.

Even when the Lancashire people did not intend to be uncivil, their manners often asserted a sense of equality that I have never met with from the corresponding class in France. I have often stayed in Lancashire with a friend, now no more, who was one of the richest men in his neighbourhood, and in Lancashire this means great wealth. As there was an old intimacy between us, we called each other by our Christian names; he was Henry, and I was Philip. This was natural in our case; but what seemed less explicable was that when we walked out together and met the wage-earning people in the neighbourhood, the men would keep their hands in their pockets, and sometimes, as a sort of special favour, cock their heads on one side by way of a bow, and say, “Well, ’Ennery!” in token of friendly recognition. Assuredly there was not, in such a salutation, any trace of “savage enmity” against wealth, but neither was there any special respect for it. Either because rich men were common in Lancashire, or because the people were extremely independent, wealth used to get but a very moderate amount of deference there.

I lived at one time close to Towneley Park, and remember that although we always called the then representative of that very wealthy and very ancient family Mr. Towneley, till he became colonel of the local militia regiment, after which we gave him his military title, the peasantry spoke of him either as “Tayunly” or as “Charles,” and his brother they called “John.” This was not hostile, and it was not insulting, but it cannot be considered deferential.

In France I am known by sight to many hundreds of people in the poorer classes, perhaps I may say to thousands, and they believe me (erroneously) to be what they call rich, because I live in the manner of a very small country gentleman. More than that, they all know that I am an Englishman, a difference of nationality that would not generally tend to repress any tendency to popular satire. The simple truth, however, is that I have never once been insulted, never once even jeered at, by these poor French people, because I had a good coat on my back. On the contrary, numbers of people, whose names I do not know, are in the habit of lifting their hats to me; and if I drive along the road on a market day, when the peasants are returning to their homes, I have to keep my right hand free to answer their salutations by lifting my own hat, according to the courteous French custom. One of my friends, a Frenchman, is really a rich man, and when we walk out together in the town where he is best known, he is constantly raising his hat. I find this practice to be much the same in other towns with well-to-do men who are local notables, and I know an important village where any one who looks like a gentleman will be saluted by every inhabitant he meets.

In the French rural districts the aristocracy are very well known individually, and esteemed or not according to their personal qualities. When they are just to their tenants and kind to the poor, these merits are fully acknowledged, and the great folks are regarded with respect and even affection. “C’est un bon Monsieur” the peasants will say of the squire, or, if they include his family, “Ce sont de braves gens, c’est du bon monde.” I know an honest French gentleman and his wife who are always ready with kindness and money when there is any case of real distress, and I do not believe that there is any country in the world where they would be more esteemed than they are in their own neighbourhood.

I have never known, in France, anything like the Lancashire familiarity in speaking of the rich. The greatest landowner is always either called by his title or at least gets the usual “Monsieur.” He is “Monsieur le Marquis” or “Monsieur de ——,” and often, with a mixture of local feeling and respect, he is “Notre Monsieur,” to distinguish him from other people’s Messieurs. I never in my life heard a French peasant call a country gentleman by his bare name, or by his Christian name only. I know all the tenants on an estate where the rents were raised in a manner that created the greatest dissatisfaction, but, whilst expressing this dissatisfaction in just and straightforward language, the tenants never infused any hatred into their talk, nor did they abandon the usual respectful form in speaking of the landlord. They said that he was hard with them, and that he was acting against his own interest, which he did not seem to understand, as it was impossible for a tenant to work the farms permanently on the new terms. This is the whole substance of what they said, the complete expression of their “savage enmity.”

At election times I never found that it was a ground of objection to a republican candidate that he was a rich man. There has been a sort of understanding amongst many reactionary rich people in France, of late years, to give as little employment as possible to the wage-earning classes, in order to punish them for voting in favour of republican candidates. The poor resent this attempt to starve them into political subservience, a feeling which is entirely distinct from hatred to the rich as a class. Rich men who continue to give employment are, from contrast, better liked than ever.

I cannot close this chapter without some reference to the wealth of the two nations from the military point of view, that we are all compelled to consider. To be rich is of no use in actual warfare unless we are also ready. The French had plenty of money in 1870, as they proved shortly afterwards by paying two hundred millions sterling to Germany, yet that money could not win the battles of Gravelotte and Sedan. At the same time the luxurious establishments of rich French people, the wines in their cellars, their collections of pictures, their beautiful books, their pretty carriages, all the pleasant things that are commonly associated with the idea of wealth, were of no more practical value than the embroidery on the mocassins of a Red Indian. The truth is unpleasant, but we have to face it, that wealth itself is valueless for warlike purposes unless it has been employed in time, and that it is not the richest nation, but the most prepared nation, that lives best through the day of trial.[80]