national awakening; at least in the hearts of the middle classes, who were educated better than the nobles, less apart from European civilization, already imbued with French ideas, and who were deeply saddened by the misfortunes of their country, which they compared to the wonderful success of the French Revolution against the allied kings. Some nobles were animated with the same sentiments.

Such was Thadeus Kosciuszko. Born in 1757, in the district of Novogrodek (Lithuania), he had entered in 1764 the cadet school founded by Czartoryski. This son of a country gentleman received, one after another, two cruel lessons of social equality: his father was assassinated by some exasperated peasants; while he himself, having fallen in love with the daughter of a nobleman of high rank, found himself scornfully refused.

In America, where Washington appointed him colonel, and where he distinguished himself at Saratoga, Kosciuszko learned what real liberty was, and completed the knowledge he had first sought in our philosophers. During the last war, he was the only Polish general who had been victorious. After the second partition of Poland he became a Russian subject, but refused to serve in the Russian army. He passed into Saxony, and thence to Paris on a mission. Already the Legislative Assembly had named him a French citizen.

THE

BENEFITS TO GERMANY FROM FRENCH INVASIONS

From Germany under Napoleon, 1804-1811)

HE Germans complain of the harm we have done them in the wars, almost always defensive, which our kings carried on against the ambition of Austria. Who could calculate the harm done to us by their princes, when in 1791 they turned France from her task of reorganization; when they stirred up hatred between our working classes and our nobility, between the Assembly and Royalty; when they caused the Revolution to end in the Terror? Afterwards, even if the Emperor, the King of Prussia, and the Ecclesiastic Electors did declare war, the people called and welcomed us. After a glorious defensive war, we were able to wage the most humane, the most beneficial of propagating wars. Even under Napoleon I., French

intervention in Germany was essentially different from German invasion of France: the former brought with it the elements of progress. Thus it may be said that in all times, and under every form of government, we have done more good than harm to the Germans; and a Prussian empire, founded on a so-called right of revenge of Germany against us, is based on injustice and falsehood.

It is strange that Germany should accept from Prussia, along with new laws, its opinions ready-made. What magic spell has its new masters used to make Germany forget history? Before the Revolution there was no trace of hatred between France and Germany; and that is why the wars of the Revolution were none of them a war of races. All western Germany accepted French influence willingly. Our language was written and spoken there, our literary traditions and our fashions were followed with even too much docility. Frenchmen were enticed to dwell there; but not always chosen with sufficient discernment, so that adventurers by whom the Germans were duped gave a sorry idea of our nation. On the other hand, the feeling of hostility against England dates very far back. It is that nation which, from the first, made us understand what a foreigner was, and by trampling on France revealed her to herself.

Large German States owe their prosperity to French political and religious refugees. Nor was the influx less from Germany into France. Princes came as pilgrims to the shrine of Versailles to admire and worship the kingliest King; to Paris, where they found the greatest number of men of genius and of sharpers, the wittiest ladies, and the lightest women. There came those who wished to serve in the army; like Maurice of Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, and the Count of Löwendal, the victor of Berg-op-Zoom. The Rhenish provinces were but a continuation of France beyond the frontier; their sons fought. under French colors: war and hate were not between the peoples, they were the business of the governments. Men were cosmopolitan, citizens of the world, rather than French, German, or Prussian.

The Revolution of 1803 in Germany was relatively as radical as the French Revolution. The German people looked on it with indifference, neither rejoicing nor grieving at the fall of its past; because there was a great difference between the two revolutions. The sacrifices exacted from the privileged classes

of France had served to found the unity of a great people, had brought liberty into the State and equality among the citizens. In Germany no such advantages had been obtained. The French had despoiled themselves for the grandeur of their country; in Germany for some great or petty sovereign, often more a princeling than a prince.

It was not as an enemy but as an Emperor that Napoleon was received. Princes and people crowded to see the small lankhaired man, so unlike the legendary Charlemagne, whose sallow complexion, sinister unfathomable glance, and Roman features, reminded them of the pagan Cæsar who had first crossed the mighty river.

I'

CIVIL LIFE IN FRANCE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES

From the History of French Civilization'

F JUSTICE was cruel, the police of Paris were feeble. The multiplicity of jurisdictions among which Paris was divided, and the right of sanctuary allowed to nearly all the churches and abbeys, permitted criminals to elude pursuit.

Paris, although Philip Augustus had paved some streets and filled up the filthy holes which infected his palace, was still horribly dirty.

The narrow streets, with the houses overhanging in successive corbelings so that the upper stories touched, were incumbered with stalls, sign-boards, and goods exposed for sale. Swine, geese, and cattle wandered through them. There the butchers slaughtered their beasts at night; there was no light except that of the moon when it shone. The police were not responsible for anything after sunset. When once the curfew had rung, the honest bourgeois went to his home and shut himself in securely. The watch-that is, the prevost's archers-were too few to control the dangerous classes. To thrash the watch was a student's sport: naturally, ill-doers feared it little.

Sometimes a watchman like Gautier Rallard found an ingenious means of never entering into a fight with the robbers: he made his rounds preceded by music. The night watchman who went through the streets in a coat embellished with tears and death's-heads,— armed with a lantern and a bell, announcing

the hours, and calling the sleepers to "pray for the dead," scarcely interfered with the cutpurses and the pillagers of shops.

The robbers, assassins, beggars, vagabonds, were organized in corporations just like the honest folk. They had their regular chiefs, their rules of apprenticeship, their trials for the mastery, their places of reunion. In Paris they formed a State apart,the Kingdom of Argot,- where was spoken the "langue vert," and across the boundaries of which the archers of the watch did not venture. Their elected chief was the great Coësre or King of Thune, who was drawn in a cart by dogs. He held his court his Court of Miracles- sometimes in the cul-de-sac Saint Sauveur, sometimes in the rue des Frams-Bourgeois, or near the Convent of the Filles-Dieu, or in the streets of Grande and Petite Truanderie. He had in each province, like the king, his bailiff,-called the cagou. Sometimes he summoned a sort of States-General in the Pré aux Gueux (Beggars' Field) near Notre Dame d'Auray. His immense people, including all the beggars, blacklegs, and vagabonds of France, were divided into numerous classes. All paid a tribute to the King of Thune, and rendered him homage.

Another powerful monarch was the King of Egypt, sovereign of the Gipsies. In 1427 the advance guard of these mysterious Asiatics had appeared in Paris; a duke, a count, ten knights, followed by a hundred men, women, and children. These people, known as Bohemians, Saracens, Egyptians, Tsiganes, were soon swarming on the roads and at the gates of the towns, as showmen of bears and apes, as tinkers, counterfeiters, fortune-tellers,

From these swarming crowds the army of crime was recruited. From time to time justice cast in her net, and exposed her capture in the pillory of the Halles or on the gibbet of Montfauçon; but the mass was not thereby diminished. If the prevost hung some scamp in broad day, the King of Thune in turn hung in broad night some rash bourgeois or too inquisitive sergeant.

As in India there were pariahs, despised even by the slave, and whose contact was pollution, so in France there were outcast races. These were called marrons in Auvergne; cagots or cagoux in the Pyrenees; gaffots, caffots, capots, in Béarn and Navarre; cagueux, cacuas, cacoux, in Bretagne; gahets, gaffets, in Guyenne. Whence came they, and who were they? Were they, as was said, descendants of the Mussulmans left in France by Abderrahman, or of the Spaniards who were driven from their homes by the

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Arabs, or of converted heretics, or of ancient lepers? No one knew, not even those who persecuted them. The only sure thing is, that they were treated like veritable lepers, forbidden to frequent churches, taverns, public festivals; forced in Bretagne and Béarn to wear a red costume, and not permitted to go barefoot on the roads or to carry arms. Marriage or any contact with them was refused. They lived in isolated villages hidden in the country, or in obscure valleys; intermarrying, hated by all and hating all the world.

Although ancient slavery had disappeared from our soil through transformation into serfdom, there was a tendency to reconstitute it in Europe at the expense of the infidels taken in war. The Italian republics trafficked in their captives. In the twelfth century they were sold at fairs in Champagne, and Saracen slaves were bequeathed in a will to the bishop of Béziers. In the thirteenth century, slaves were traded in Provence. The new slavery was then in force in Roussillon,-which was not French territory,- but royal France spurned it. Then was established the maxim by virtue of which every slave who touched French soil became free. In 1402 and in 1406 the municipality of Toulouse applied this to the profit of fugitive slaves from Perpignan.

In the Middle Ages, the duty of charity toward the poor was generally discharged. The pouch full of money which hung at the belts of nobles and bourgeois, men and women, was called an alms-purse; a chaplain was an almoner. Kings, nobles, and ladies were often surrounded, as they walked, by the poor whom they maintained. King Robert allowed them to enter so freely into his palace, to go under his table, to sit on the floor beside him, almost between his legs, that on a certain day one of them cut a gold acorn from his clothing. Not only did alms-givers aid the poor with money, food, and clothing; but seeing in them. the image of suffering Christ, they gloried in sometimes serving them at table, and in washing their feet upon Holy Thursday. The religious orders, founded for the relief of the poor, consecrated to them at least a part of their revenues. In certain convents there were cells reserved for the poor; in nearly all, distributions of soup and bread were made at the door of the monastery.

Nevertheless, this charity of the Middle Ages was unintelligent enough. The kings would have done better to aid their people