Since this essay appeared in 1890, Miss Betham-Edwards has published her own most valuable and interesting survey, her France of To-day, 2 vols., 1892-94. This book is the result of her exhaustive study of French agriculture, over twenty-five years. It forms the pendant to Arthur Young, and as being a study exactly one hundred years later, over the same ground and embodying an even more extensive knowledge of France than that of the old traveller, it becomes a work of rare value to the student of history and of politics. Miss Betham-Edwards is also the well-known author of several other books of travel in France; and her readers rejoice to learn that her life-long labours have received most honourable recognition from the Government of France as well as that of England.
Fluctnat nec mergitur should be the motto not of Paris but of France. The indomitable endurance of her race has enabled her to surmount crushing disasters, .losses, and disappointments under which another race would have sunk. She bears with ease a national debt the annual charge of which is more than double that of wealthy England, and a taxation nearly double that of England, with almost the same population — a permanent taxation (exceeding 100 francs per head) greater than has ever before been borne by any people. She loses over one war, a sum not much short of the whole national debt of England, and she writes off, without a murmur, a loss of 1,200,000,000 francs, thrown into the Panama Canal. If France is thus strong, the backbone of her strength is found in the marvellous industry and thrift of her peasantry. And if her peasantry are industrious and thrifty, it is because the Revolution of '89 has secured to them a position more free and independent than that presented by any monarchical country on the continent of Europe city tour istanbul.
THE CITY: ANCIENT — MEDIAEVAL — MODERN — IDEAL
The life that men live in the City gives the type and measure of their civilisation. The word civilisation means the manner of life of the civilised part of the community of the city-men, not of the country-men, who are called rustics, and once were called pagans, or the heathens of the villages. Hence, inasmuch as a city is a highly organised and concentrated type of the general life of an epoch or people, if we compare the various types of the city, we are able to measure the strength and weakness of different kinds of civilisation.
How enormous is the range over which city-life extends, from the first cave-men and dug-out wigwams in prehistoric ages to the complex arrangements and appliances of modern Paris (which we may take as the type of the highly organised modern city of Europe). How vast is the interval between one kind of town-life and another kind ! — say comparing Bagdad with Chicago, or Naples with Staleybridge.
The differences in the humblest forms of rural life are far less apparent, whether we deal with different epochs or different races. The ploughman and the shepherd to-day on the Cotswolds, or the Cheviots, certainly the tenants of mud-cabins in Connemara or Skye, do not, in external modes of material life, differ so greatly from their predecessors in the days of the Crusades or even of the Heptarchy; and a herdsman of Anatolia, of La Mancha, or of Kerry, eats, sleeps, and works in very similar ways. But how vast is the interval between the habits and conditions of the Londoners who built the Lake-village of Llyndyn, or the Parisii who staked out the island of Loukhteith, and the modern Londoner and the modern Parisian !
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