exquisite
wines of Ay, all sparkle and sunshine, can only be made to yield those
wines when they are planted in our poorest and most chalky soil, and in
regions where the climate is so ungenial that the plants have to be set
as closely as possible together in the ground. We really huddle them
together, as we do sheep in the hurdles in winter, to keep one another
warm. This M. Harmel did with his converts. He taught his workmen to
associate more closely with one another, he brought their minds and
their hearts together, and let them act one upon another. He lived and
moved and had his own being among them like a father, and in this way
insensibly they came by degrees to regard each other as members of a
family. He has always felt, and his whole life has shown it, that the
"Declaration of the Rights of Man," whatever the motives of its authors
may have been, put the weak of this world at the mercy of the strong,
and set Capital free to deal with Labour as a mere matter of bargain
and sale. The dominant idea in his mind has always been, as it was in
the mind of his father before him--the "good father" of
Val-des-Bois--not how to get the most work out of his workmen, but how
best to do his own duty to his workmen, thinking that the best way to
get them, on their part, to do their duty to him. All this, you see, is
quite mediaeval and Christian, not in the least modern and scientific!
But has the modern and scientific way of looking at the relations of
capital and labour, so far, been what may be called a great success? Do
we seem to be in the way of organizing a solid modern society on the
principles of the "struggle for life" and of the "survival of the
fittest"? Certainly these principles are a logical outcome of the
"Declaration of the Rights of Man," and of such legislation as that
which in 1791 shattered to pieces at a blow the whole ancient and
Christian organization of industry in our unhappy land of France! As
certainly too, they are admirably fitted to secure either the complete
subjugation of labour by capital or the relapse of France and of Europe
into barbarism. Is not universal suffrage a natural and easy weapon of
capital in any "struggle for life" with labour? Is it not clear that, in
losing the notion of duty to his employer, the workman has necessarily
lost the idea also of duty to his fellow-workmen? "Every man for
himself" is the motto of modern democracy, and do we not see that the
syndicates of workmen w