M. Harmel made no attempt to preach to his people otherwise than by his example. But the employer being regarded, in the light of modern progress, as the natural enemy of the employee, this example had little effect. M. Léon Harmel tells a delightful story of his father's first success in inducing some of his workmen, with whom he had fallen incidentally into conversation on the subject, to go over to Reims in the early morning at the beginning of Lent, and confess to an excellent priest there who was one of his friends. He spake with the men separately, and said nothing to any one of them of his conversations with the others. Meeting one of his converts on his return, M. Harmel asked him about his experience. 'Ah, sir!' the man replied, 'it is all very well, but I shall never be caught there again!' 'And, pray, why not?' 'Why I thought I was the only man going to confess. I saw no one when I went into the confessional, and the good priest was very good, and I was glad I went. But when I came to commune in the church, there were three of my comrades! How I looked at them, and how they looked at me! It will be all over the factory to-night, and we four will have no peace for six months! No! I shall not do this again!'
The manufactory prospered. If the example of M. Harmel availed little against the public sentiment of the workpeople educated in utter indifference to all religion, in the way of inducing them to attend to their religious duties, his unvarying justice and benevolence, his readiness to succour and to advise them in all straits, and his unobtrusive devotion to his faith, at least exerted a wholesome effect upon their general conduct; and the factory of the Val-des-Bois earned a high reputation for its freedom from flagrant scandals and disorders. But this did not satisfy M. Harmel. After twenty years of single-handed and uphill work, he determined to seek help. On February 28, 1861, he established three Sisters of St.-Vincent de Paul in a small house which had been a wayside inn, and set about Christianising his people in earnest. There was no pomp or parade about the matter. The good Sisters were quite content to establish an asylum for the little children in what had been the stable of the inn, and to open their school in two little upper chambers. Two Jesuit Fathers came and devoted a month to a regular mission. Processions were organised and lectures given, some in the factory, others at the little inn. The novelty of the enterprise excited the attention of the people, and when a decided movement at last of interest in the mission made itself clearly felt, M. Harmel took advantage of it, with the help of the Sisters, to form Christian associations, first among the young girls, then among the young men, and then among the workmen themselves. The first young girl who gave an effectual impulse to the work, was a girl selected by the Sisters, with their usual sound instinct, because they found her capable of absolute devotion to a not by any means estimable mother, and to a decidedly reprehensible sister. She was a peasant-girl, brought up in a disorderly family, by no means choice or refined in her language; but the Sisters, for whom she conceived a great affection, saw that she was generous, fearless, and determined, and that was enough.
With the girls, with the young men, with the workmen, no sort of direct or indirect pressure was ever for a moment employed. The associations which they formed were managed by themselves, M. Harmel, the priest whom he finally brought to Val-des-Bois, and for whom he built a chapel, and the missionary brethren, giving advice and aid only when and as it was asked. One excellent workman, who had been in the factory for many years, and who was much esteemed by M. Harmel, was asked one day by the priest why he had never taken any interest in the religious associations. 'I do take an interest in them,' he replied, 'and they are doing a great deal of good. I don't feel moved to join them, but I do them a great service often. Many a time in the cabarets I hear a man say, "Oh, the papa Harmel is a good man, no doubt; they are right to call him there 'the good father.' He is all that, but nobody can get any work there unless he is a little saint!" Then I get up and say, "Don't talk like a fool! You see me; I have worked for 'the good father' thirty-five years. I have never done my religious duties, but nobody treats me the worse for that! That shuts them up!"'
One great obstacle, at the outset, to the success of these associations, out of which the 'Christian Corporations' were eventually to grow, was the hostility of the elder married women to the 'Enfans de Marie,' and the other societies of young girls. They objected that these societies broke up the Sunday balls, and when they were asked whether these Sunday balls did not lead to a good many scandals, they replied, 'Oh, young people must amuse themselves; we used to amuse ourselves!' They insisted too, that the girls would neglect their home duties to attend mass and the meetings of their new societies. One particularly recalcitrant dame made her husband's life a burden to him, because he not only encouraged his daughters in going to the Sisters, but actually went to mass himself. Finally, one day the poor man came to see the Sisters. He was evidently much exercised in his mind, and showing the Sisters a small sum of money he had, he said, 'I have saved this up to bring my old woman to a better mind, and I want you to help me.' They asked him how. 'Why, you see, all the trouble comes because she don't know you, and won't know you, and thinks everything wrong about you. Now if one of you will just take this money, and buy her a new Sunday gown, and take it to her as if it was a gift you wanted to make her, that will bring her all right, I know, and we shall have peace in the house!'
What Sister could resist such an appeal? The pious fraud was perpetrated, and the worthy dame gave way along the whole line!
This working population of Val-des-Bois, when M. Harmel began his work among them, it will be seen, was a fair type of the average working populations of France in those parts of France where the influence of Radicalism has been most potent, and the influence of the Church weakest. There is another factory in the same commune now. There are sixteen others within a radius of three French leagues, and the city of Reims, with its population of nearly a hundred thousand souls, is within half an hour of the place. All the disturbing currents of socialism, of agrarianism, of indifferentism play about and upon the place constantly. The Sunday ball is an institution still. The influence of the local authorities during the last ten years has been thrown against the Catholic associations, and therefore, from the nature of the case, in favour of dissipation, debauchery, and disorder.
To see his work prosper in a soil so unpropitious and amid such hostile circumstances might well have quickened the faith of a man much colder and more sceptical than M. Harmel.
In 1861, as I have said, not one workman could be found at Val-des-Bois who dared to go to mass. In 1867, at the request of forty of his workmen, M. Harmel assisted them in drawing up the statutes and arranging the programme of a Catholic Working-Men's Club. The initiative came from them. No pressure of any sort or kind was put upon them to take it. It was the free outcome of the influence exerted upon them by the example of the Harmel family and by the religious and charitable work which the Sisters and the priests had been doing at Val-des-Bois. Within a year the club doubled its membership. When the invasion came, in 1870, it was an established institution.
'M. Harmel planted his Christians at Val-des-Bois,' said to me one of the most interesting men I met at Reims, 'as our vine-growers in Champagne plant their vines. It is one of the mysteries of our viticulture that the grapes which yield our most delicate and 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 mediæval 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 which it was the object of the Radicals to establish by their law of March 1884 concerning "professional syndicates," in order to facilitate and promote "strikes," are only kept together and made to work by sheer terrorism? What is the sanction of the measures ordered by such syndicates excepting the fear in which every member goes of his fellow-members? Does not that take us a long way on towards savage life? Does not that tend directly to build up a subterranean machinery of despotism which will be at the service of the shrewdest head and the longest purse whenever any real and decisive issue arises between organised capital and organised labour?
'Look at the part which money played in our first unhappy revolution!