THE DREAD OF RESPONSIBILITY.•

M. FAGG-EV.8 brilliant book is something like an indictment of the French people. All the same, the reader will not, we are sure, think it unpatriotic. It is easy for a critic of his country to declare that he wounds because he loves, but M. Faguet does not need this stale excuse for his severity. He reproaches his people, but he seta them in a good light. No one will read his work and like the French lees than

• The Dread of Rosyomibiiity. 13y butte Faguct. Translated by Emily James Putnam. London G. P. Putnam's Dom, the. net.]

before, and the reader—if just now there is one—who feels himself oat of sympathy with "our sweet ally France" will not read to the end without having in some measure lost his prejudice. Nevertheless, "this book is written to criticize, to mark the weak points of institutions political and moral in the attempt to suggest the idea and desire of improve- ment."

Very deep in the French character lies—so M. Fagnet tells us—a great fear of responsibility, the sad fruit of past despot- isms. The Frenchman is a daring thinker just as he is a daring fighter, but in ordinary civil life the bourgeois, at any rate, has developed a hatred of all adventure, and because of this loss is losing something of his energy. For instance, the great ambition of the French professional man is to find himself in receipt of a salary, if possible a salary from the State. "To live on the State by serving it nonchalantly and to despise everything else—that is his permanent state of mind." He does not want " to enter personally into what he is doing." His work is in no sense his life. "'My work does not concern me,' is the maxim he loves to utter and the thought he loves to cherish." He is conscientious, over-con- scientious, if possible. "A Frenchman is afraid of being responsible to himself." He is absolutely convinced that "a profession of complete repose" is the happiest profession. He would like his son to be a Government official, and that his daughter should marry one. He longs to spare his children risk and responsibility. He likes to know exactly how much money he will have each year, and to arrange his economies accordingly; he desires to pass his little patrimony on to his children, and to be able to tell them that he has never risked any loss.

Agriculture, industry, the Bar, and medicine remain nominally free professions, but there is a tendency to nationalize even these. "The State wants to annex the great industrial enterprises, and it is fast beginning to annex them." Even the doctors "dream of State employ," and all State salaried medical positions are eagerly sought for. Men will give up a large income not guaranteed by the State for a far smaller one which is guaranteed, influenced thereto by the passion for financial security. In the legal profession, as in all others, the fear of responsibility is growing and is endangering justice—so M. Faguet is convinced. The judge " is not a judge, he is a clerk." He must give hie verdict in accordance with the law, and he does not desire the freedom of action which he conceivably might, but certainly does not, take. Where the Government is concerned in a case the law counts, however, for little. Here the judge takes no responsibility; be throws it upon the Government. Against the judges M. Fagnet brings no railing accusation. "It is a very wise bench, very prudent, very learned, even very honest, from which every thought of responsi- bility has vanished; that is the whole trouble." In like manner the jury will accept no responsibility. "I had nothing to do with that execution," jurymen say to themselves. "I convicted, it is true, but I recommended to mercy; the Government could have exercised mercy; it didn't. It's not my fault." To the irresponsibility of judge and jury is now added, laments our author, the irresponsibility of the criminal. He is supposed to be mad, or half-mad, or less. He has perhaps but a third of his senses. Some French doctors will even count in smaller fractions, and declare his moral responsibility to be represented by one-eighth. Meanwhile he is wholly dangerous, but no one wants the responsibility of restraining him.

When M. Fagnet speaks of the French "family" we see with what ardour be loves France

"That the French family is one of the most beautiful things France can offer for the respect and even the admiration of the foreigner, and that the foreigner spontaneously admires and respects it in many cases, and in fact in every case where he does not judge it on the evidence of our superannuated novelists, I admit with all my heart, and I am very happy to admit it."

Even here, however, he laments the fear of responsibility, and in doing so be gives us a picture of French social life more interesting to the foreigner than the lecture which he reads to the bourgeois parentof to-day. A French marriage is still, as s rule, a matter of arrangement. Our author thinks France is perhaps the only country in which love comes after marriage. "I believe there are countries where love begets children, but In France the children beget love." If a French bourgeois

couple lately married "could observe themselves," their refleo- tions would, he tells us, be something like this :—

" We do not love eaoh other at all. Our marriage was a matter of arrangement, as it generally is in France, not at all of mutual knowledge, as it never is in France ; or else it was a marriage of inclination, as it sometimes is in France, but still not one of know- ledge ; and here WO are, without any love at all' And after the birth of the first child they would say What saves everything is the child: she loves him infinitely, I love him much. She satisfies me in relation to him: we don't quarrel very much since he came; I forgive her everything for his sake.'"

When their youth is over a French couple become deeply attached. " French married people love each other profoundly after the age of love is past." This is an assertion full of interest, a generalization which could perhaps be made with truth in no other country, a compensation indeed for the lack of a few years' romance. But how does it come about P Like this, IL Faguet says

"' We have brought them [the children] up with absolute devo- tion, with infinite pains and unremitting solicitude. She ie the beat mother in the world. I tell her so with emotion; she tells me tenderly that I am a very good father ; those moments are very sweet. Why, I believe we love each other!'" Have we this "absolute devotion" in England? In thousands of cases we must, of course, Bay "Yes." But generally speaking, if this devotion existed, could we make our children over to schools and instructors as we do? Our system may be the best. It does not produce the same passionate love of eons and daughters which the French system fosters; it does not produce the same relation of devoted friendship between elderly husbands and wives which M. Faguet describes. On the other hand, bourgeois England is redeemed from the materialism which besets it by the romance of its youth. We imagine as much happiness enters into ordinary life in the one country as in the other. Here it is more concentrated; there it is better spread.

But if the French man and woman adore their children, they do not desire many of them. "The nightmare of the French paterfamilias is having more than two children or even more than one. If be has more than two, he sees them in the future lees well-off than himself, and in a position to reproach him with the fact." Even his neighbours would be inclined to reproach him "There is in France—let us not deceive ourselves but come out with it—a disapprobation, a disesteem, yes, a sort of contempt for fathers of numerous children. They are considered to be bad fathers since they have robbed their first child of the advantage of being the only one, or their first two children of the advantage of being only two."

The result is a large admixture of aliens in the French urban population. "The children that France does not breed are replaced by those that Italy and Germany breed and send to us because there is no room with them." These aliens quickly become Frenchmen, and "very acceptable Frenchman from the point of view of intelligence and even of heart"; but according to M. Faguet they do not become patriots.

From social life M. Faguet turns to polities. In this region he suggests a good many reforms, but he wants no revolution. He is not exactly a democrat. He would like that the people, while he believes it cannot in one sense govern itself, should have a veto. Here is a picture of his ideal State—a State which should increase the sense of responsibility of every man and every body of men in the kingdom. He would like to see the work of government practically in the bands of a Senate—a body which he calls "aristocratic," but not an aristocracy of birth. "This upper chamber would represent everything in the nation that has cohesion, collective vitality and the sense of collective responsibility. And this upper chamber alone would perform the legislative function, having alone, in my judgment, the capacity to do so." Another chamber elected by universal suffrage would exist alongside of this reformed House of Lords, and would have a right of veto over the laws offered to its consideration. "For the people, being absolutely incapable of knowing what they want, but very capable of knowing what they suffer and what they do not want, should in consequence be represented by persons who do not make the laws but who have the right to reject laws they do not want."

No review of this very brilliant and entertaining book would be complete without an allusion to the rather pare- doxical °biter dicta scattered throughout its pages. The translator is greatly to be congratulated upon her success in

preserving the clear terseness of the original French, and also for preserving a humour which is not English humour, and therefore difficult to convey in the English language.