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stitutions abounded. Cynical historians laugh at the eagerness of the nation, during the months that followed the deposition of the king, to have a constitution; and, so far as they believed or hoped that a constitution would remedy all ills, their faith was assuredy not according to knowledge. It shows, however, the fundamental and seemingly ineradicable respect for authority which their history has engendered in the French, that even in this, their most chaotic hour, they craved for order and its symbols.

Condorcet, along with Tom Paine, Sieyès, and others, was a mem ber of the first committee for framing a constitution. They laboured assiduously from September to February, 1793, when the project was laid upon the table, prefaced by an elaborate dissertation of Condorcet's composition.1 The time was inauspicious. The animosities between the Girondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious and deadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate and terror, Condorcet-at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproaches against their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating the Mountain by declaring of Robespierre that he had neither an idea in his head nor a feeling in his heart-still pertinaciously kept crying out for the acceptance of his Constitution. It was of no avail. The Revolution of the Second of June came, and swept the Girondins out of the Chamber. Condorcet was not among them, but his political days were numbered. "What did you do all that time?" somebody once asked of a member of the Convention, during the period which was now beginning and which lasted until Thermidor of 1794. "I lived," was the reply. Condorcet was of another temper. He cared as little for his life as Danton or SaintJust cared for theirs. Instead of cowering down among the men of the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood the Mountain to the face.

Hérault de Sechelles, at the head of another committee, brought in a new Constitution which was finally adopted and decreed (June 24, 1793). Of this, Sieyès said privately, that it was "a bad table of contents." Condorcet denounced it publicly, and with a courage hardly excelled he declared in so many words that the arrest of the Girondins had destroyed the integrity of the national representation. The project itself he handled with a severity that inflicted the keenest smarts on the self-love of its designers. A few days later, the Capucin Chabot-one of those weak and excitable natures that in ordinary times divert men by the intensity, multiplicity, and brevity of their enthusiasms, but to whom the fiercer air of such an event as the Revolution is a veritable poison-rose, and in the name of the Committee of General Security called the attention of the Chamber to what he styled a sequel of the conspiracy of the Girondist Brissot. This was no more nor less than Condorcet's document criticising the (1) Euvres xii. 333.

new Constitution. "This man," said Chabot, "has sought to raise the department of the Aisne against you, imagining that, because he has happened to sit by the side of some savans of the Academy, it is his duty to give laws to the French Republic." So a decree was passed putting Condorcet under arrest. His name was included in the list of those who were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the Third of October for conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic; he was condemned in his absence, and declared to be hors la loi.

IV.

This, then, was the calamitous close of his aspirations from boyhood upwards to be permitted to partake in doing something for the commonweal. He had still the work to perform by which posterity will best remember his name, though only a few months intervened between his flight and his most cruel end. When the decree against him was enacted, he fled. Friends found a refuge for him in the house of a Madame Vernet, a widow in moderate circumstances, who let lodgings to students, and one of those noble and beneficent characters that show us how high humanity can reach. "Is he an honest and virtuous man ?" she asked; "in that case let him come, and lose not a moment. Even while we talk he may be seized." The same night Condorcet entrusted his life to her keeping, and for nine months remained in hiding under her roof. When he heard of the execution of the Girondists condemned on the same day with himself, he perceived the risk to which he was subjecting his protector, and made his mind to flee. "I am out of the law," he said, "and if I am discovered you will be dragged to the same death." "The Convention," Madame Vernet answered, with something of the heroism of more notable women of that time, "may put you out of the law; it has not the power to put you out of humanity. You stay." This was no speech of the theatre. The whole household kept the most vigorous watch over the prisoner thus generously detained, and for many months Madame Vernet's humane firmness was successful in preventing his escape. This time, his soul grievously burdened by anxiety as to the fate of his wife and child, by a restless eagerness not to compromise his benefactress, a bloody death staring him every moment in the face, Condorcet spent in the composition, without the aid of a single book, of his memorable work on the progress of the human mind. Among the many wonders of an epoch of portents, this feat of intellectual abstraction is not the least amazing.

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When his task was accomplished, Condorcet felt with more keenness than ever the deadly peril in which his presence placed Madame Vernet. He was aware that to leave her house was to seek death, but he did not fear. He drew up a paper of directions to be one

(1) Extrait du Moniteur. Euvres, xii. 677.

His

day given to his little daughter, when she should be of years to understand and follow them. They are written with minute care, and though tender and solicitous, with perfect composure. daughter is above all things to banish from her mind every revengeful sentiment against her father's enemies; to distrust her filial sensibility, and to make this sacrifice for her father's own sake. This done, he marched down-stairs, and having by an artful stratagem thrown Madame Vernet off her guard, went out at ten o'clock in the morning imperfectly disguised into the street. This was the Fifth of April, 1794. By three in the afternoon, exhausted by fatigue which his strict confinement for nine months made excessive, he reached the house of a friend in the country, and prayed for a night's shelter. His presence excited less pity than alarm. They gave him refreshment, and he borrowed a little pocket copy of Horace, with which he went forth into the loneliness of the night. He promised himself shelter amid the stone-quarries of Clamart. What he suffered during this night, the whole day of the Sixth of April, the night, and again the next day, there is no one to tell.

The door of the house in the Rue Servandoni was left on the latch night and day for a whole week. But Madame Vernet's generous hope was in vain; while she still hoped and watched, the end had come. On the evening of the Seventh, Condorcet, with one of his legs torn or broken, his garments in rags, with visage gaunt and hungerstricken, entered an inn in the hamlet of Clamart, and called for an omelette. Asked how many eggs he would have in it, the famishing man answered a dozen. Carpenters, for such he had given himself to be, do not have a dozen eggs in their omelettes. Suspicion was aroused, his hands were not the hands of a workman, and he had no papers to show, but only the pocket Horace. The villagers seized him and hastened to drag him, bound hand and foot, to Bourgla-Reine, then called for a season Bourg-l'Egalité. On the road he fainted, and they set him on a horse offered by a pitying wayfarer. The prison reached, Condorcet, starving, bleeding, way-worn, was flung into his cell. On the morrow, when the gaolers came to seek him, they found him stretched upon the ground, dead and stark. So he perished-of hunger and weariness, say some; of poison ever carried by him in a ring, say others. So, to the last revolving supreme cares, this high spirit was overtaken by annihilation. His memory is left to us, the fruit of his ideas, and the impression of his character. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and perpetual recollection.

(To be concluded in February.)

EDITOR,

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND LAND.

VARIOUS as have been the schemes recently offered to public notice for the settlement of the Irish land question, one feature is noticeable as more or less prominently characterising them all-a profound distrust of Political Economy. Just in proportion as a plan gives promise of being effective, does the author feel it necessary to assume an attitude, if not of hostility, then of apology, towards this science. It is either sneered at as unpractical and perverse, or its authority is respectfully put aside as of no account in a country so exceptionally situated as Ireland. This state of opinion is perfectly intelligible. In its earlier applications to practical affairs Political Economy found itself inevitably in collision with numerous regulative codes, partly the remnants of feudalism, partly the products of the commercial doctrines of a later age, but all founded on the principle of substituting for individual discretion the control of those in power. It thus came naturally to be identified with the opposite principle; and was known to the general public mainly as a scientific development of the doctrine of laissez-faire. The Free-trade controversy of course gave great prominence to this side of the system, and of late the idea that all Political Economy is summed up in laissez-faire has been much fostered by the utterances of some public men and writers, who have acquired a certain reputation as political economists, chiefly, it would seem, through the pertinacity with which they have enforced this formula, insisting on its sufficiency, not merely in the domain of material interest, but over the whole range of human life. If laissezfaire is to be taken as the sum and substance of economic teaching, it follows evidently enough that intervention by the State to determine the relative status of those holding interests in the soil, involves an economic heresy of the deepest dye; and it is not strange, therefore, that those who accept or defer to this idea of the science should, in attempting to deal with the Irish problem, evince some susceptibility in reference to Political Economy. In effect, it is very evident that two courses only are open to economists of this hue. Either they must hold by their maxims, and, doing so, remit the solution of the Irish difficulty to civil war and the arbitrament of armed force; or, accepting the plea of Ireland's exceptional condition, they must be content to put aside their science for the nonce, and legislate as if it were not. The latter is the course that fortunately has for the most part been taken. Economic laws, so it seems now to be agreed upon by thinkers of this school, do not act except where circumstances are favourable, and have no business in a country so unfortunately

situated as Ireland. This is one view of the relation of Political Economy to such questions as that presented by the present state of Ireland. In my opinion, it is a radically false, and practically a most mischievous view; one, therefore, against which, alike in the interest of the peace of Ireland and for the credit of economic science, I am anxious with all my energy to protest. I deny that economic doctrine is summed up in laissez-faire; I contend that it has positive resources, and is efficacious to build up as well as to pull down. Sustained by some of the greatest names-I will say by every name of the first rank in Political Economy, from Turgot and Adam Smith to Mill—I hold that the land of a country presents conditions which separate it economically from the great mass of the other objects of wealth-conditions which, if they do not absolutely and under all circumstances impose upon the State the obligation of controlling private enterprise in dealing with land, at least explain why this control is in certain stages of social progress indispensable, and why in fact it has been constantly put in force wherever public opinion or custom has not been strong enough to do without it. And not merely does economic science, as expounded by its ablest teachers, dispose of à priori objections to a policy of intervention with regard to land, it even furnishes principles fitted to inform and guide such a policy in a positive sense. Far from being the irreconcilable foe, it is the natural ally of those who engage in this course, at once justifying the principle of their undertaking, and lending itself as a minister to the elaboration of the constructive design.

As regards the main ground on which the distinction between land and other forms of wealth depends, little more needs be done than unfold the argument contained in a few weighty sentences in which Mr. Mill has summed up the case :-"Movable property can be produced in indefinite quantity, and he who disposes as he likes of anything which, it can fairly be argued, would not have existed but for him, does no wrong to any one. It is otherwise with regard to land, a thing which no man made, which exists in limited quantity, which was the original inheritance of all mankind, and which, whoever appropriates, keeps others out of its possession. Such appropriation, when there is not enough left for all, is, at the first aspect, an usurpation on the rights of other people." Where wealth is provided by human industry, its having value is the indispensable condition to its existence-to its existence at least in greater. quantity than suffices for the producer's own requirements; and the most obvious means of rendering this condition efficacious as a stimulus to industry is to recognise in the producer a right of property in the thing he has produced. This, I take it, is, economically speaking, the foundation on which private property rests, and is, if I mistake not, the most solid and important of all the reasons.

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