A WORD ABOUT BRUGES.
FOR some reason the English tourists who are now swarming over Belgium have a habit of avoiding the ancient city of Bruges. There is a prejudice against the place as a wormeaten old town, with a pauper population, only one church worth seeing, and no particular pictures. Even the editor of Murray's Handbook, who hunts such places professionally, and is so rarely in error, remarks apologetically that the visitor may reasonably devote one day to a city still capable of containing the population of Liverpool, and crowded from end to end with architecture of the fifteenth century. He may be right if the Handbook is intended only for model sight-seers, but Bruges has merits of another kind which entitle it to more respectful handling. Its social condition is in some respects quite unique, and it is perhaps the place of all on the Continent best fitted for the residence of the English paterfamilias hunting the Continent for cheapness. In most really cheap places the colonist buries himself away from civilization, sacrifices society for the sake of his purse, and literature for that of his daughters' education. But Bruges, cheap in all but food as a Tyrolese village, is in the centre of a highly civilized community, placed amidst railways and telegraphs, book-stalls, reading-rooms, and social gatherings. It is, too, cheap in the points on which Englishmen seek cheapness, and not only on those they care nothing about. There is a class of our countrymen who have a funny notion that any country is cheap in which sour claret costs a franc and a half a bottle, and there is no income tax, and they throng accordingly to Brussels, where house-rent is as heavy as in London, and to French cities, where the cost of firing equals an English poor-rate, and the octroi is as oppressive as the assessed taxes. Itent is, we suppose, lower in Bruges than in any civilized city in the world. The vast old streets are filled with mansions whose solidity and space Port- land-place could only envy, and before which the new streets, and "places," and "lanes" of West London are toys of card- paper. The city, built for 300,000 people, holds only fifty thou- sand, and those fifty thousand are almost without means. Strange to say, however, it is not ruinous. Why or wherefore proprietors should persist in keeping up palatial houses which can never have worthy tenants, and which seem to a stranger's eye as if they must cost their rental in repairs, it might be difficult to explain, but so it is, and Bruges is repaired as thoroughly as if its population had only departed for a country festival. The beautiful old tracery outside the larger buildings is as sharp and as clear as if Bruges were still the factory of Europe ; the tall Spanish gables show no signs of decay; the Moorish courts and enclosed gardens are as trim and as bright as if a Dutch housewife had but just brought them into order. Even painting is not neglected; and though a house has not been built in Bruges for a hundred years, the strange streets, with their weary length undivided by side uents, look as if the houses were owned by a population of millionnaires. A really good square house—and we mean a house as good as anything in Cavendish-square, and better than anything in Russell-square—in perfect repair, costs less than 201. a year. Really fair houses can be obtained for 121., though, of course, with such a wealth of tenements, Bruges respectability con- siders a first-class house only just convenant. The social effect of this ratio of rent is not a little odd. Green-grocers live in houses like those of the best streets in Bloomsbury ; tobacconists have mansions with ten windows on the first-floor; wretched lace-dealers, poor below English ideas of poverty, dwell in great buildings with massive folding-doors, like those of a sulky English Peer, and opening into court-yards where one expects to see a fat porter in the chair. Taxes are proportionately low, there is no octroi, and though food is pretty uniform in price throughout Belgium, everything else is as low as the most savage competition, combined with the most extreme poverty, can secure. The retail dealers deal, for example, habitually in quantities a Jew in Houndsditch would refuse to sell, and in which the cost of wrapping-paper is an appreciable fraction of the price. Men-servants are fortunate if they can obtain a franc and a half a day, or 201. a year, without their food; and female servants ma.y be secured almost for their keep. The regular rate charged by efficient masters for in- struction is a franc an hour, or one eleventh of the London charge, and a conveyance—we do not call it a carriage—can be secured for tenpence an hour. Society is, except in a few old Bruges families, as accessible as anywhere on the Continent, and there are some twelve hundred English families in the place who have been attracted by the cheapness of education, and who, marvellous to relate, have not yet succeeded in perceptibly raising prices. The old city is full of city gardens such as our fathers loved, with fruitful soil and high sunny walls, and, as there is no smoke, as culturable as any pleasance in Kent. There is, it is true, no bustle, and very few signs of life; and the few old coaches left lumber over the clean but uneven old pavement as though the coachmen were driving slowly in search of the population they could never find ; but all municipal arrangements are in admirable order. It is, in fact, an entire and very extensive city, fitted only for ruined patricians, or for the invalids to whom quiet, air, space, and rest seem the first necessities of life.
Perhaps the greatest drawback to the place is the depth of its poverty—a poverty scarcely surpassed in Europe. No city even on the Continent was ever more utterly deserted by trade. There is literally no commerce in Bruges, no factories, no production, no means whatever of realizing wealth. It is worse than a Dorsetshire town. The few barges which toil lazily through the canals are laden
only with grain or green food, and a cart conveying merchandise would be a spectacle which would gather a crowd, were a crowd possible in Bruges. Half the lawn toil on patches of soil outside, or sit wearily endeavouring to earn the blackest of bread by un- remitting petty handicraft. The women make lace under con- ditions we recommend to the attention of the advocates for female labour. They are restrained by no protective laws, are employed on work strictly suited to women, have no male rivalry to dread, and are entirely supported in their work by public opinion. And yet a more utterly miserable mode of dying can hardly be conceived. The mass are paid by the piece, and whether working in the employer's house,
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as is usual, or at home, the hours oflabour demanded are from seven in the morning to eight at night. They have one hour and a half for meals, but for eleven and a half hours m every twenty-four they are compelled to sit working in one seat, without relief, with their eyes fastened on the infinitely minute design spread out over their lace cushions, and with both hands in full employ. This use of both hands is a great aggravation of their labour, as it contracts the chest, but the true mischief is to the eyes. Five years of black lace and seven of white blear the eyes irrecoverably, and drive them either back on coarser work or home to starve. The girls, nevertheless, begin at eighteen, and though space is almost without expense, and air diffi- cult to keep out, the employers crowd them into the lower rooms of great houses, huddling them together, till, but that the old builders had a notion of height which to modern architects seems prepos- terous, the cubic space of air conceded to growing girls would be less than that allowed to convicts in a badly regulated prison. And for all this the mass of them get less than a franc a day. Insuffi- ciently fed, without stockings, and half dressed, the poor girls sit on for years, till at five-and-twenty their eyes begin to "go," and they wear the sodden, half-stupified, and all hopeless look which is the at- tribute of the working population of Bruges. In winter, when their husbands and brothers are out of work, and firing must be had, their lot is as pitiable as that of any human beings in the world. There is no poor-law, the police will only give a few loaves, and but for the boundless charity which the Catholic Church makes a merit, and some of its followers a practice, hundreds would die, if not of hunger, yet of the diseases which follow want. It is this extraordinary commingling of opposing circumstances, this dwelling of the wretched in palaces, of lazy paupers in business houses, of men without trade by the side of deep canals, which gives Bruges the weird air which so much strikes all who reside in it more than Murray's appointed "one day." It looks like a city stricken by a pestilence, with the scarcely recovered relics of population wandering gloomily about ; but, for all that, it is, per- haps, the city where an English family seeking cheapness, yet anxious for civilization and self-respect, will find their usually contradictory requirements most readily combined.
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