Recently, an engineer at Bordeaux wrote to me, that, on his inventing machinery for the easy transference of merchandise from ships to the quays, sturdy opposition was met with on the part of the stevedores of the port, who would have been the first to derive great advantage from it.
The medical faculty at Paris has not only anathematised tartar emetic, vaccine, ether, and the antiseptic method, but also the physicians who substituted the use of horses for the ancient employment of mules to expedite their visits to their patients.[74]
[74] Revue Scientifique, 1889.
Is it not in learned Germany that we find Anti-semitism in fashion? And has not Russia made it a law of the state?
In certain districts of Sicily is not the ancient method still preserved of embalming and of painting the bodies of the dead which was practised among the ancient Egyptians?
A recent law-suit tried at Turin has proved that not only the lower classes, but also numbers of persons belonging to the higher classes protect themselves by practices that distinctly recall those of the sorcerers of antiquity. All this would prove that philoneism is rather the exception than the rule.
It is objected to my position, that nations and peoples are such lovers of change that they have always emigrated. But before making this affirmation, we ought to study the causes which impel them to emigration.
Day by day the peasants see their wages decrease; yet even then they do not remove from the land that they love more than themselves, and to which they are more closely bound than they ever were by feudal laws. When epidemics produced by the bad quality of cereals, as pellagra and acrodynia, when mortal diseases and the most cruel famine destroy them by thousands, then only, and even then not always, do they come to a determination; while for many years they keep before them the remembrance of their native soil, of that country, which, like a true stepmother, gave them only diseases and sufferings.
I have listened to poor emigrants say to me: "We have only to die! The life that we lead is certain death; and it is for this reason alone that we have determined to emigrate."
As to the invasions of the barbarians, only ill-informed minds can believe that it was the effect of a sudden movement, of a caprice hurrying away masses almost without a reason. On the contrary, all now admit (as was really mentioned in Tacitus, Bk. II., Chap. 2, of the Annals) that it was a very slow movement, already begun three centuries before Christ, and of which that of the Cimbri, who came from Jutland, was an episode. The crossing of the Baltic was an easy enterprise. The inhabitants of the coast had a sufficient number of vessels, and from Carlsroon to the nearest ports of Russia and of Pomerania was only a distance of thirty-four leagues.