Even in this section of the country, where the workman in the towns and the labourer in the country, instead of being as in the North the sovereigns of the country, are slaves, there is more plenty, more physical comfort among the labouring class than is found amongst us. The coloured population, therefore, increases in numbers faster than our rural population. Not that our peasant gives birth to fewer children than the blacks of Virginia and Carolina; but death, led by the hand of want, is active in keeping down the excessive multiplication of arms that would soon become formidable competitors of the fathers, and in closing forever mouths that would cry for bread which their parents could not supply. The attention of the benevolent in Europe has long been directed towards the reduction of the public expenditures, and a more equal distribution of the burden of taxation, as a means of improving the condition of the poor; but all these plans, supposing them to succeed according to the views of the projectors, would merely amount to taking a few coppers less from the pockets of the poorer class. Whilst a system of measures concerted in such a manner as to diffuse among them a love of order and habits of regularity and industry, to enlarge the field of labour, and to render its terms more favourable to them, would have the effect to fill those pockets. The relief of one class of the community by merely shifting its burden to the back of another, has a revolutionary character which ill agrees with the notions of a generation that is weary of revolutions, or with the nature of a government established for the very purpose of staying the revolutionary flood; on the contrary, all that develops the resources of industry is in harmony with the present leaning of all minds. Labour is an admirable instrument of concord, for all interests gain by the prosperity of industry. This is the pure and true source of all wealth, public and private. Labour alone creates; and it is it alone that can relieve the wants of the needy, without impoverishing him who has enough, or even reducing the luxury of the opulent; that can give wealth to some, competency to others, and to all the fowl in the pot, which, since the revolt of Luther, has been the great social problem in the material order of things.
The admirable prosperity of the United States is the fruit of labour, much more than of any reform in taxation. The soil has not the luxuriant fertility of the tropical regions; roasted larks fly into nobody's mouth; but the American is a model of industry. This country is not a second edition of the Greek and Roman republics; it is a gigantic commercial house, which owns its wheat-fields in the Northwest, its cotton, rice and tobacco plantations in the South, which maintains its sugar works, its establishments for salting provisions, and some good beginnings of manufactures, which has its harbours in the Northeast thronged with fine ships, well built and better manned, by means of which it undertakes to carry for the world, and to speculate on the wants of all nations. Every American has a passion for work, and the means of gratifying it. If he wishes to cultivate the ground, he finds waste land enough for his farm in the Northwest or the Southwest. If he chooses to be a mechanic, that he may finally become a manufacturer, he has no difficulty in getting credit; he finds unemployed waterfalls all along the rivers, of which he takes possession, and on which he sets up his wheels. If he has a taste for commerce, he puts himself into the hands of a merchant, who after some years of apprenticeship and trial, sends him to take charge of his business in the interior, or to the Antilles, or South America, or Liverpool, or Havre, or Canton. He may labour without apprehension, and produce without stint; having no rent to pay, his flour, his salt provisions, fear no competition in the markets of South America and the sugar islands. As for cotton, the United States alone almost supply the world, and he cannot plant enough. The career open to the Americans, as active, bold, and intelligent merchants, is unlimited, and is entered with admirable spirit and success; they beat their rivals, even the English, on every field. If the American devotes himself to some branch of domestic industry, here he finds ample room for activity, for the home consumption is indefinite; every body here enjoys himself, or at least spends. Every one produces much, because all consume much; each consumes freely, because he gains freely, has no fears for the morrow neither for himself nor his children, or at least takes no thought for it.
The most efficient measures of the public administration for the amelioration of the condition of the people in France, would be such as would tend to increase the industrial qualities of the mass, and to furnish them with the means of putting these qualities in action; such are, a system of industrial education; the establishment of institutions of credit, which should place within the reach of all, the instruments of industry, or, in other words, capital, which is now inaccessible not only to the operative and the labourer, but to a great proportion of the bourgeoisie; the execution of a complete system of routes of communication, from village roads to railroads, for manufactures and commerce are impracticable where facilities of transportation do not exist; the modification of many laws and customs, judicial and administrative, that now embarrass industry, without being of the least advantage in any point of view.
I dare hardly speak of popular education, where I now am. The people in the Southern States, are slaves. The maxim here is that they need no instruction; to instil into them a sentiment of fear is the only moral nature suitable to their condition. They have, therefore, no other education than that of their own hands, and that, of course, must be limited, because their intellectual and moral nature is in fetters. In the Northern States, the labouring classes are whites, and there the law makes a liberal provision for popular instruction. Almost every where in the North, all the children go to the primary schools. Elementary education is there of a more practical character than with us; it is our primary instruction, with the omission of the ideal, and the addition of some instruction in commercial and economical affairs; but there is no practical industrial education here except by apprenticeship. There are no mechanical or agricultural seminaries. It is not thought necessary here to shut up the young in such institutions to inspire them with a taste for commerce, agriculture, or the mechanical arts; they suck it in with their mother's milk; they breathe the air of industry under the paternal roof, in the places of public resort, in the public meetings, every where, at all times, and in every act of life. When an American wishes to learn a trade, he goes into the workshop, the counting-house, the manufactory, as an apprentice. By seeing others act, he learns how to act himself; he becomes an artisan, a manufacturer, a merchant; all the faculties of his firm and watchful mind, all the energies of his ambitious spirit are centred in his workshop or warehouse. He directs all his powers to making himself master of his business, to learn the lessons of others' experience, and he succeeds of course, as every one does who obeys the voice of his destiny. I do not pretend that the Americans are right in not having recourse to a theoretical preparation for a particular branch of business, for which we have instituted such costly establishments. I only record the fact, with the observation that they get on very well without it. Our national character has little disposition for business; we work from necessity and not from choice. Our ideas have little of a commercial or mechanical turn. To make a Frenchman a skilful husbandman, an able merchant, a dexterous mechanic, a long and painful training is necessary; he must change his natural bent, and metamorphose all his thoughts and habits; in a word, with us a special professional education must precede apprenticeship. The American learns by example merely; we must learn by general principles; we stand more in need of them, and we have a greater aptitude for mastering them, than they.
Before passing to the institutions best suited to develop industry, I would observe that a political system which should be particularly calculated to create and sustain them, cannot be taxed with materialism. Industry influences the moral nature of man; the material prosperity of a people has an important bearing on the public liberties. Men cannot practically enjoy the rights secured to them by law, when they are manacled and fettered by poverty; the English and their children in America call competency, independence. The Anglo-Americans have reached wealth through their political liberty; other nations, and we, I think, are of the number, must arrive at political franchises by the progress of national wealth. I now come to the consideration of a credit system.
Suppose, on one side, the land-holder who has granaries bursting with corn, his stable filled with cattle, his storehouse crowded with barrels of whiskey and salt meat; then, the merchant with his warehouses full of cloth, and the grocer, well supplied with tea, coffee, and sugar; and on the other, the labourer, the mason, the carpenter, the smith, all skilled in their trade and wanting work to supply them with daily food. A canal or a railroad is projected; the country has capital enough to construct it, since it contains the arms to execute the works, and the necessaries for subsisting the labourers. The construction of the work is indispensable in order to enable the workman to turn his muscles to account, and gain his daily bread, and to give the merchant a market for his goods. Now in this case, amongst us, there is no other medium of communication between the labourer and the holder of articles of consumption, than the engineer, a man of science but not of capital, and the citizens of the towns which are interested in the scheme; these last have a competence and no more, and they have no means of raising, on their lands or their houses, the ready money which must serve as a medium of exchange between the wares of the merchant, the produce of the cultivator, and the labour of the operative. Amongst us, therefore, the most useful projects remain on paper. In this country, by the side of the engineer and the citizen, you have one or more banks, in which all, labourers, landholders, and traders, put confidence, often, indeed, much more than is deserved. The bank guaranties to the cultivator and the trader payment for their produce and merchandise, and to the labourer, his wages; for this end, it offers the share-holder of the projected enterprise, in exchange for his personal engagement renewable at a certain date, and often on the pledge of the very canal or railroad shares, a paper-money, which the labourer receives in payment of his wages, and with which he procures the necessary supplies from the producer or the trader. Thus every judicious and practicable project is at once carried out into execution.
In order to arrive at the same result amongst us, it would be necessary, in the first place, that we should possess somewhat more of that genius for business which is the characteristic of the American, and, in the next, that the banks should be able to accept with confidence the engagements of the share-holder of the work; the latter requisite, could not be obtained as in the United States, because amongst us, except in the manufacturing towns, the bourgeois in general does not engage in business; he is a proprietor living on his income and not increasing it. The American bourgeois, on the contrary, is actively engaged in business, and is constantly employed in increasing his means; and besides, the banks have more hold on his real property, than they could have in France.
Finally, it would be necessary that the public, proprietors and labourers, traders as well as landholders, should have full confidence in the bills issued by the bank, which is impossible in a country where all paper-money suggests the idea of assignats. Even if the people had not that disastrous experiment before their eyes, it would be difficult to teach them to look upon a scrap of paper, although redeemable at sight with coin, as equivalent to the metals. A metallic currency, has, in our notions, a superiority to any other representative of value, which to an American or an Englishman is quite incomprehensible; to our peasants, it is the object of a mysterious feeling, a real worship; and, in this respect we are all of us more or less peasants. The Americans, on the other hand, have a firm faith in paper; and it is not a blind faith, for if we have had our assignats, they have had their continental money, and they need not go far back in their history to find a record of the failure of the banks in a body. Their confidence is founded in reason, their courage is a matter of reflexion Last winter, for example, it was known to the public that certain banks in New York had on hand only five dollars in specie for one hundred paper-dollars in circulation, and even less. In France this would have been the signal of a general panic, and the bill-holders would have thrown themselves in crowds upon the bank to exchange their paper for coin. The bank, thus stormed, would have stopped payment; fifty or seventy bills in a hundred, would have become mere rags in the hands of the holders, and what would be more fatal, the banks, which lean upon each other, and hold each other's notes to a large amount, would have failed one after another, as those of the Federal District did last April. Each bank failure would have been followed by numerous individual failures, which would have involved other banks in their fall, and the country would have been ruined. The Americans in this fearful crisis, did not quail; they stood firm, like veterans under the fire of a battery or encountering a cloud of Arabs at the foot of the pyramids with bayonets crossed and serried files. None of the New York banks stopped payment, and scarcely six or seven small banks failed through the country.
Let us not deceive ourselves; it will be a long time before we shall be in a condition, in France, to enjoy such a system of credit as exists in the United States or England; in this respect we are yet in a state of barbarism, from which we cannot pass to a more perfect condition of things, except by a complete revolution in our commercial habits and ideas, and even to a certain degree of our national manners.