of the ancient society
which I have endeavoured to portray has disappeared. Brehat has passed
out of existence. I revisited it six years ago and should not have
known it again. Some genius in the capital of the department has
discovered that certain ancient usages of the island are not in
keeping with some article of the code, and a peaceable and well-to-do
population has been reduced to revolt and beggary. These islands and
coasts which were formerly such a good nursery for the navy are so no
longer. The railways and the steamers have been the ruin of them. And
like old Breton bards, to what a case they have been brought! I found
several of them a few years ago among the Bas-Bretons who came to eke
out a miserable existence at St. Malo. One of them, who was employed
in sweeping the streets, came to see me. He explained to me in
Breton--for he could not speak a word of French--his ideas as to the
decadence of all poetry and the inferiority of the new schools. He was
attached to the old style--the narrative ballad--and he began to sing
to me the one which he deemed the prettiest of them. The subject of
it was the death of Louis XVI. He burst into tears, and when he got to
Santerre's beating of the drums he could not continue. Rising proudly
to his feet, he said: "If the king could have spoken, the spectators
would have rallied to him." Poor dear man!

With all these instances before me the case of the wealthy M.A.,
seemed to me all the more singular. When I asked my mother to explain
it to me, she always evaded an answer and spoke vaguely of adventures
on the coast of Madagascar. Upon one occasion, I pressed her more
closely and asked her how it was that the coasting trade, at which no
one had ever made money, could have made a millionaire of him. "How
obstinate you are, Ernest," she replied. "I have often told you not
to ask me that! Z---- is the only person in our circle who has any
pretensions to polish; he is in a good position; he is rich and
respected; there is no need to ask him how he made his money." "Tell
me all the same." "Well if you must know, and as people cannot get
rich without soiling their fingers more or less, he was in the slave
trade."

A noble people, fit only to serve nobles, and in harmony of ideas with
them, is in our day at the very antipodes of sound political economy,
and is bound to die of starvation. Persons of delicate ideas, who
are hampered by honourable scruples of one kind and another