places, and let in the rain. "C'est égal, (said the proprietor,) I have only to move my bed to another part. I can always find a dry corner to lie in." "But," observed the traveller, "I notice that your fences are in the same state, full of holes and makeshifts." "Qu'est ce que cela fait! (asked the host,) they do well enough to keep my cattle in and other people's out!" "Possibly, (replied the traveller,) but look at your neighbour, in what beautiful condition his hedges and divisions are kept." This was too much for the Frenchman: his native philosophy broke out at once. "Ah oui! le misérable!" he exclaimed in a tone of indescribable contempt; "that man toils from morning till night; is up before daylight, and working after dark; never goes to merry-makings; I would not be like him for worlds. I have enough: what need I more? Can a man eat with two spoons ?"

But apart from these extreme cases of content where content ought not to be, it is impossible to become acquainted with those instances of rational and well-founded satisfaction with a most moderate and limited present, of which continental life offers us so many examples, without feeling, or at least suspecting, that, as compared with our hurried and turmoiling existence, our neighbours have chosen the better part. Look at Norway, for example, which has attained, as nearly as possible, to that "stationary state" which most economists regard with dread, aversion, and a feeling akin to shame. There the inhabitants may be said to form one vast middle class; there is no great wealth, no absolute destitution; peasants and proprietors live on together, generation after generation, on the same land, and much in the same style as their forefathers; fuel and food, though simple, are both abundant; the men till the soil and fell the timber; the women manufacture at home the clothing they need ; each man's life, whether he be farmer, labourer, or artisan, is pretty much cut out for him by circumstances and custom; as he grows up, he steps into the vacant niche in the community which was waiting for him, (or if not vacant, he waits for it,) without any thought of exchanging it for a different one, or struggling out of it into one higher; there is much comfort but little luxury-much cheerfulness, perhaps too much conviviality; there is general equality and general content. It is easy to live there not easy, scarcely possible to grow rich; the country is peopled pretty nearly up to its resources, so that population can increase but slowly; as young men and maidens arrive at maturity, they fall in love, and are betrothed as elsewhere, but they do not marry till a "houseman" dies, or till, in some way or other, a vacancy is made for them; their sole desire and aim is, to enjoy their natural share of the goods of life, but not to increase

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that share beyond the usual rate; they are satisfied to equal, and do not aspire to surpass their father's lot. Thus their existence glides on from the cradle to the grave, broken by no tumultuous crises, embittered by no pressing anxieties, shortened by no fierce competition, goaded by no wild ambition, darkened by no dismal failures,-but happy in a continuous activity, moderate in its aim, and sure of its reward. They are stationary, but not stagnant. In Auvergne, we find a state of society almost precisely similar. There the peasants are nearly all proprietors, and often rich, for they spend little and cultivate well. The hoardings, when spent at all, are spent in land; every thing is made at home; sometimes literally nothing is bought except the drugs to dye their wool; they live simply but plentifully; and generation succeeds generation in the same industrious and monotonous content. Wars and revolutions pass over their country; but they scarcely hear of them, and never feel them. In Switzerland, too, especially in the Cantons of Berne and Zurich, we find much of the same primitive, unvarying, and enjoyable existence, though here the curse of "indebtedness," which seems inseparable from the law of equal succession, often sheds a perpetual gloom over the life of the peasant proprietor. But when he has escaped this evil, and has found the small estate which sufficed to his ancestors suffice for him also, and when his younger brothers have gone to foreign countries, to seek or make their fortunes, the Swiss farmer has always appeared to us to enjoy one of the happiest of human lots. Educated, industrious, pious, and patriotic, the citizen of a free state small enough for him to feel an appreciable unit among its inhabitants,-in a situation which nourishes no ambition that he may not readily gratify, and yet exempts him from those gloomy cares and forebodings as to the future, which wear away the lives and sadden the domestic circle of thousands among the Americans and English,-there is much in his existence which we may well envy, and not a little which, perhaps, we might emulate.

In Germany, especially in central and southern Germany, we find a numerous class in middle life-to which we have no analogon in England-who possess an assured but a moderate competence at which they are certain to arrive in time. They have not, as in England, when they have chosen their profession, and undergone their education, to plunge into the hot strife and race of competition, and take their chance of obtaining a maintenance or a prize by overcoming and distancing their rivals. If they have passed through the ordained curriculum and performed the required tasks, their future is provided for, and they have only to wait for its realization, which comes indeed a few years sooner or later, but about the advent of which they need to give them

selves no anxiety. As functionary, or surgeon, or lawyer, or master tradesman, their turn will come as soon as the niche they were destined to fill becomes vacant; for the government, by its complicated and vigilant arrangements, has taken care that no profession shall be overstocked, that there shall be no more aspirants than there are posts for them to fill. We are not now expressing any opinion as to the advisability of such a system of leading strings; we only call attention to one of its effects-which is the exemption of a large proportion of the middle and educated classes from harassing anxieties about their future or that of their children, and the consequent diffusion of a sort of quiet happiness and somewhat apathetic content of which here we have no conception. These men of scanty but of certain expectations enjoy the present in a respectable and often most worthy manner; they are educated, and have a moderate amount of intellectual and more of æsthetic taste; they love social pleasures, and have ample leisure for them; unless singularly gifted, they know they must remain in the humble sphere in which their route is traced for them; they have no grandeur to hope for, and no destitution to fear; ils ont de quoi vivre, as the expression is, and in order to be thoroughly happy need only to cut down their desires to the level of their means. Their life is a quietly flowing stream, somewhat languid, perhaps, with many bright flowers growing on its banks, which they have leisure both to admire and to cull; they do perhaps little for their generation, but they lead a not undignified, and assuredly not an unenjoyed or morose existence; they may cultivate all the amenities, and affections, and many even of the elegancies of the domestic circle, and if their minds are well trained and furnished, they may add to these the pleasures of calm and contemplative literary habits. Yet their income is of an amount which (after making full allowance for the different cost of living in the two countries) with us would be considered as utterly inadequate to furnish means for a happy or comfortable life, and to be content with which would be held to argue deplorable want of energy and enterprise.

In France, too, though long years of change and convulsion have diffused a longing discontent and restlessness through the urban population, which as yet is fever only and not energy,there still remain many in moderate and humble circumstances, professional men, commis, and subordinate employés, who, on a pittance which would be considered as grinding poverty in England, contrive not only to support life, but to embellish it and enjoy it. They make the best of what they have, instead of anxiously striving to increase it. They "cut their coat according to their cloth." They are not tormented by the desire to imitate or to equal those to whom fortune has been more

Contrast between Anglo-Saxon and Continental Life. 53

bountiful. They are contented to enjoy, while their analogues in England would be fretfully labouring to acquire. They are not as we are, for ever haunted by something in the distance to be obtained or to be escaped. They do not, like us, immolate the possessed present on the shrine of an uncertain future. They do not pull down their house to build their monument. They perform cheerfully and faithfully their humble and, perhaps, uninteresting functions, and devote the rest of their time to simple, social, unambitious enjoyments. There are others again who, finding themselves at their entrance into life in possession of a moderate competence-a small patrimonial inheritance-deliberately pause to decide on their career. On the one side lie the possibilities of wealth, the gauds of distinction, the gratification of commercial or political success, to be purchased by harassing and irritating strife, by carking cares, by severe and unremitting toil. On the other lie the charms of a life of unaspiring ease, of quiet nights and unanxious days, of the free enjoyment of the present hour-something of a butterfly existence, in short. Nine Yankees out of ten would choose the former; nine Frenchmen out of ten will prefer the latter. We do not here intend to pronounce which is right; but it is hard to persuade ourselves that all the wisdom-all the true estimate of the objects and the worth of life-lies with the man who decides for the thornier and rougher path.

Now let us cast a glance at the contrasted tone of English and American social existence: we may class them together, for the main difference is, that in America, our state of struggle is even more universal, and carried on under more favourable prospects of success. And we have a few who cling to the " even tenor" of existence as the preferable state: in our exaggerated and caricaturing descendants, scarcely any such are to be found. Now, we are no advocates for a life of inaction and repose. Activity is better than stagnation; exertion in pursuit of any object, is better than an existence with no object at all. We know well that out of dissatisfaction with our present condition, have arisen all our successful conquests of higher and more desirable conditions; that to the restless energy and aspiring temper of the Anglo-Saxon, may be traced a large proportion of the material progress, and not a little of the intellectual progress of the world; that civilisation, if it does not consist in perpetual advance, at least owes its origin and present perfection to perpetual endeavour. But we cannot permit ourselves to regard the struggle to be rich as worthy of admiration for itself. We cannot bring ourselves to regard the gallant and persevering which is devoted to getting on in life," as consecrated

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to a high aim. We cannot persuade ourselves at once, and without inquiry, as many do, to pronounce the life that enjoys, as ipso facto and per se, meaner than the life that toils. We mourn over energies wasted by misdirection, as much as over energies suffered to lie dormant and die out. The man who strives for a clear duty or a noble prize is beyond question a higher and worthier being than the man who glides through life in happy and innocent tranquillity; but we are by no means so sure that the man who, having a competence, spends years, and strength, and spirits, and temper, in striving for a fortune, has made a wiser or a better choice than the man who, having a competence, sits down thankfully and contentedly to enjoy it with his family and friends. To be able to make "the future and the distant predominate over the present," is unquestionably to have risen in the scale of thinking beings; but it by no means follows, that whatever is distant and future ought to predominate over what is present and at hand. We agree altogether in the tone of the following remarks from the pen of our first and most genial political economist:

"I cannot regard a stationary state of capital and wealth, with the unaffected aversion manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle States of America are a specimen of this stage of civilisation in very favourable circumstances; having apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of chartism, and they have no poverty; and all that these advantages seem as yet to have done for them (notwithstanding some incipient signs of a better tendency) is, that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters. This is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realizing. Most fitting indeed is it, that while riches are power, and to grow as rich as possible, the universal object of ambition, the path to its attainment should be open to all, without favour or partiality. But the best state for human nature, is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.