But when we reach the subject connected with agriculture, we shall make a very curious discovery. Whereas in most countries the population during the last hundred years has been attracted to the cities, fully sixty per cent. of all Frenchmen continue to live in the country. The traditional methods of working the fields are gradually making way before the improved methods of modern science, and when the French peasant shall have ceased to till his soil as his great-great-grandfather did in the days of Charlemagne and Clovis, France will be entirely self-supporting.
What helps to keep the peasant on the land is the fact that as a rule he is his own proprietor. His form may not be much of a farm but it is his own. In England and in east Prussia, two parts of the Old World where there is a great deal of agriculture, the farms often belong to some vague and distant landlord. But the French Revolution did away with the landlord, whether noble or cleric, and divided his property among the small peasantry. That was often very hard on the former proprietors. But their ancestors had acquired those possessions by right of eminent plunder, so what was the difference? And it has proved of tremendous advantage to the country at large. For it gives more than half of the people a direct interest in the welfare of the whole nation. Like everything else, that state of affairs probably has its disadvantages. It may account for the exaggerated feeling of nationalism among the French. It may explain the provincialism which makes every Frenchman stick to the people of his own village even when he moves to Paris, so that Paris is full of little hotels catering for certain groups of regional travellers. It also explains his utter unwillingness to migrate to other parts of the world, but then again, why should anyone move to another country when he is perfectly happy at home?
Next to agriculture, the cultivation of the wine-grape keeps vast numbers of Frenchmen attached to the soil. The entire valley of the Garonne is devoted to the culture of the vine. The city of Bordeaux near the mouth of the Garonne and just north of those vast silty plains called the Landes, where the shepherds walk on stilts and the sheep can remain out of doors all the year long, is the centre for the export of this wine, as Cette, on the Mediterranean, is the harbour for the famous wines of the piping hot valley of the Rhône. The wines from Burgundy—the so-called Cote d’Or—are gathered together in Dijon, while those of the Champagne are assembled (and multiplied and divided) in the ancient French coronation city of Rheims.
When grain and wine fail to support the population, industry helps out. The French monarchs were something more than, haughty imbeciles who oppressed their subjects and wasted useless millions on the pretty ladies of Versailles. They made their Courts the centre of fashion and civilized living towards which all the world flocked to learn agreeable manners and to be taught the difference between eating and dining. As a result, even to-day, a century and a half after the last of the ancient rulers was thrown into the quick-lime of a Paris potter’s-field, with his head between his feet, Paris dictates to the feminine part of the world what to wear and how to wear it. The industries which provide Europe and America with those indispensable luxuries which most people prefer to the sheer necessities, are centred in and around the lie de France and they give employment to millions of women and girls. The endless flower fields of the Riviera are the original source whence flows most of our expensive perfumery.
Then came the discovery of coal and iron in the soil of France, and Picardy and Artois grew drab and ugly with those vast dump-heaps of cinders and slag which played such a great part during the battle of Mons, where the English tried to stop the Germans in their march upon Paris. Lorraine became the centre of the iron industry. The central plateau made steel. When the war was over the French hastened to annex Alsace, which provided them with more steel and which, during the last fifty years of German domination, had gone in heavily for textiles. As a result of this recent development, one-quarter of the French people are to-day engaged in industries, and they can proudly boast that their industrial cities are fully as hideous, as unattractive and as inhuman in their outer aspect as those of England or America,
Chapter XII
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BELGIUM, A COUNTRY CREATED BY SCRAPS OF PAPER
The modern kingdom of the Belgians consists of three parts: the plain of Flanders along the shores of the North Sea, the low plateau between Flanders and the uplands of the east, rich in iron and coal, and the Ardennes upland of the east, through which the Meuse flows in pleasant curves, bound for the marshes of the Low Countries a short distance further towards the north.
The iron and coal deposits centring around the cities of Liége, Charleroi, and Mons (the Great War had a strange habit of bringing the names of coal and iron cities to the front pages of our newspapers) are so plentiful that probably Belgium will be able to provide the world with those two necessities of modern life for long to come although the mines become increasingly difficult to work.
But this country, blessed with what the Germans so often call the ‘heavy industry,’ has curiously enough no good modern harbours of its own. The coast along the Channel, shallow and protected by a most complicated arrangement of sandbanks and shallow places, has no ports worthy of the name. The Belgians have dug artificial harbours in Ostend and Zeebrugge and Nieuwport, but Antwerp, her most important harbour, lies forty miles distant from the North Sea, and the river Scheldt for the last thirty miles of its course runs through Dutch territory, a slightly absurd arrangement and one which might be called ‘unnatural’ from a geographic point of view but unavoidable in a world ruled by scraps of paper signed by delegates to solemn international conferences. As however Belgium is a country that was the direct outcome of a number of such conferences, we ought to know something about the historical antecedents that faced their Excellencies whenever they settled comfortably round their green tables to decide the fate of the world.
The Gallia Belgica of the Romans was inhabited by Celtic and Germanic tribes, warlike people who retained many of their ancient customs while adopting some of the outer trappings of Roman civilization. Rome kept on thrusting northward from the wooded hills of the Ardennes across the table-lands of what is now called Belgium till she reached the almost impassable marshes that were to form the kingdom of the Netherlands. After the break up of the Roman Empire these provinces were for a time included in the dominions of Charlemagne, the great, golden-bearded Emperor of the Franks. His grandson, Charles the Bald, the same who allowed the Norse seafarers to peg out a claim in Normandy, entered into an agreement with his brothers Lothair and Ludwig, at Verdun in 843, by which the former Gallia Belgica became a part of Lothair’s inheritance. After remaining more or less under German suzerainty for three centuries it began to split up into little duchies and principalities and bishoprics, each more or less independent, all jealous of their neighbours, all rather frightened of France. The soil was rich, though the coalfields of the western marshes hadn’t yet been opened up; the people were industrious; the various rulers had the good sense—not too common in those days—to encourage merchants and foster trade.
Out of those lands John the Good of France carved the dukedom of Burgundy, with which he invested his favourite son, Philip, in 1363, a year before his own death as a prisoner of war in London. Philip, who had won his nickname of ‘the Bold’ at the battle of Poitiers, married Margaret of Flanders, who, as her dowry, brought him a great slice of Flemish territory, well garnished with flourishing cities. So bit by bit the duchy of Burgundy grew, until it covered practically all the ground included in Holland and Belgium to-day—and a bit over. Those were golden days for the weavers of Ghent and Bruges, Malines and Mons. You can still see—where the Great War has spared what five centuries hadn’t wiped out—the noble halls built by the trade-guilds, and the beautiful belfries raised by wealthy burghers to the glory of God. You can see in many picture galleries old Flemish paintings showing those men in their habit as they lived, shrewd, sturdy, broad-built, with their angular white-coifed wives; you can see the Dukes who ruled over them, long-nosed, l
oose-lipped Philip, grandson of the Bold, who may or may not have deserved to be called ‘the Good,’ and his red-haired, square-shouldered son and successor, Duke Charles, who certainly did deserve to go down to history as ‘the Bold.’ But poor Charles pitted his bluff wits against one of the cleverest and most cunning monarchs that ever sat on the throne of France, Louis XI, and their long-drawn-out quarrel, waged chiefly over certain towns on the river Somme which had been pledged to one party by the other, ended with Charles’s death at the battle of Nancy in 1477. Louis XI was not unnaturally anxious to dispose of the hand of the dead Duke’s daughter Mary, but instead of the French prince, for whom he designed her, she elected to wed a Habsburg, Maximilian of Austria. From him their descendants inherited the famous jutting Habsburg underlip; from her, a considerable part of what is now Belgium and Holland. Those portions of the dukedom of Burgundy which lay nearest to the French frontier and had formed the original French gift reverted before long to the French Crown, but Flanders and the Netherlands passed to Mary’s grandson, the Emperor Charles V.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Low Countries—by which we mean Flanders and the Netherlands—flourished exceedingly. Medieval ships had a comparatively small draught, and many towns now far from the reach of mercantile vessels were centres of sea-borne commerce. Then the currents gradually shifted in the North Sea, and the harbours of Bruges and Ghent got silted up, and the face of the land slowly changed until it became that picturesque and placid holiday haunt we see to-day, a land of white-washed farms and grey cathedrals and quiet streets where artists plant their easels and grass grows between the cobblestones, and human nature aided the shifting sea-currents in bringing this about: for the trade-guilds were unwise. They challenged the power of the last Burgundian Dukes, who avenged themselves all too well upon their rebellious subjects.
The Reformation did the rest. For Flanders after a short and very sharp upheaval in favour of the Lutheran doctrines remained faithful to the Mother Church, And when their northern neighbours gained their independence, Holland hastened to close the last remaining port of their old rival, and with Antwerp cut off from the rest of Europe, the whole of Belgium went into a prolonged period of hibernation, out of which she did not arise until the needs of James Watt’s hungry machines drew the world’s attention to her immense riches in natural materials.
FROM MAN TO MOLE
Then foreign capital hastened to the valley of the Meuse, where there are rich deposits of coal, and in less than twenty years Belgium had become one of the leading industrial nations of Europe. It was then that the Walloon or French-speaking part of the country (everything west of Brussels) came fully into its own, for although it contained only 42% of the total population it soon became by far the richest part of the whole country.
EUROPE: THE CONTINENT OF COASTS, ISLANDS, AND RIVERS
THE GREAT ASIATIC-EUROPEAN PLAIN
COAL IN THE MAKING
To make matters still a little more complicated the Congress of Vienna of 1815, which was supposed to settle the peace of the world for all time (a sort of Versailles of a century ago), had seen fit to make Belgium and Holland into a single kingdom, so as to have a powerful northern balance against the French.
The end of this strange political marriage came in 1830 when the Belgians rose against the Dutch, and the French (as was to be expected) rushed to their assistance. The Great Nations (a little late as usual) interfered. A prince of the house of Coburg, uncle of Queen Victoria (Uncle Leopold was a very serious gentleman who exercised a very profound influence upon his dear little niece), was made King of the Belgians. He had just refused a similar offer from the Greeks and never had any reason to regret his choice. For the new kingdom proved to be a success. The mouth of the Scheldt remained in Dutch hands, but Antwerp became once more one of the most important harbours of western Europe.
The Great European Powers had officially proclaimed Belgium a ‘neutral power.’ But King Leopold (the son of the founder of the dynasty) was much too shrewd to have any confidence in such paper keep-off-the-grass signs. He worked hard to make his country something more than a third-rate little nation, existing merely by the grace of its richer neighbours. When a certain gentleman by the name of Henry Stanley returned from the heart of Africa, Leopold prevailed upon him to come to Brussels and out of this interview grew the International Association of the Congo, which in course of time was to make Belgium one of the largest colonial Powers of the modern world.
To-day the main problem before Belgium, with its magnificent geographic situation right in the heart of the most prosperous part of northern Europe, is no longer an economic one. It is a racial one. The Flemish majority is rapidly catching up with the French minority in the matter of general education and scientific and cultural development. It is clamouring for a share in the administration of the country from which it has been kept separated ever since the founding of the independent kingdom. It insists upon absolute equality for both languages.
But I had better leave this subject. It puzzles me, and I fail to see why it should. The Flemings and the Walloons have a common racial origin and share almost twenty centuries of common history. Yet they live like cats and dogs. In the next chapter we shall meet the Swiss, who in various parts of their country speak four different languages, German, French, Italian, and Romansh (a strange Roman tongue surviving among the mountains of the Engadine), and they get along with each other without any real basic friction. There must be a reason for this difference, but I for one am willing to confess that it surpasses my understanding.
Chapter XIII
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LUXEMBURG, THE HISTORICAL CURIOSITY
But ere I talk of Switzerland I ought to mention a curious little independent principality, the name of which would hardly be known if it had not played quite an important rôle during the first days of the World War. Luxemburg (the lützel or ‘little’ burg) counts over one quarter of a million inhabitants, whose ancestors lived in this neighbourhood when it was still part of the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. It was however of considerable importance during the Middle Ages on account of the strength of the capital, which was supposed to be one of the impregnable fortresses of the world.
That fact and the jealousy between France and Prussia as to who should own it made the Congress of Vienna of 1815 give the tiny country status as a Grand Duchy of which the kings of the Netherlands should be the personal rulers to compensate them for the loss of their ancestral territories in Germany, and include it in the Germanic Confederation.
Twice during the nineteenth century the small duchy almost caused a war between Germany and France. In order to prevent further difficulties of that sort, the fortifications were finally dismantled, and Luxemburg was officially declared to be neutral territory—like Belgium.
When the war broke out, the Germans violated this neutrality, basing their decision to do so upon the geographical necessity of invading France by way of the flat plains of the north-east without trying the hopeless expedient of forcing the steep tea-cup barriers of the east. (See France.) Luxemburg remained in German hands until 1918. Even now the small duchy is not actually out of danger, for the soil contains a considerable amount of iron ore. But for the present the trade of the duchy is protected by an agreement with Belgium.
Chapter XIV
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SWITZERLAND, THE COUNTRY OF HIGH MOUNTAINS, EXCELLENT SCHOOLS, AND A UNIFIED PEOPLE WHO SPEAK FOUR DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
The Swiss are apt to call their country the Helvetian Confederation, and a rather dowdy lady, called Helvetia, is apt to appear upon the coins and stamps of the twenty-two independent little republics whose representatives gather together at the capital city of Bern to discuss the affairs of the common fatherland.
Since the World War, when the greater part of the country (70% of the people speak German, 20% speak French, 6% speak Italian, and 1% speak Romansh) was more or less on the side of the Germans (although maintaining a most sc
rupulous neutrality), the image of a slightly idealized young hero by the name of William Tell has somewhat tended to replace Helvetia who, I am sorry to say, was beginning to look more and more like Britannia as she was depicted by the painters and sculptors of Regency England. This conflict of coin and stamp images (they are not restricted to Switzerland; almost any country has one of these queer problems) clearly shows the dual nature of the Swiss Republic. To the outside world, all this is of very little importance. Switzerland, to those of us who are not of Swiss origin, is merely the country of picturesque mountain-ranges, and it is of these that I shall speak in the present chapter.
The Alps, which stretch from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, are little longer than Great Britain and contain about the same amount of territory. Sixteen thousand square miles of this land belong to Switzerland (Denmark is just about as large), and of these 16,000 square miles 12,000 are productive in some way because they are covered with forests or vineyards or small bits of pasture. Four thousand square miles are either covered by the water of the big lakes or form part of some picturesque precipice; and 700 square miles are covered by glaciers. As a result, Switzerland has only 250 inhabitants per square mile, while Belgium has 655, and Germany 347. But Norway has only 22 per square mile, and Sweden has 35, and the idea therefore that Switzerland is merely a sort of gigantic mountain, resort, inhabited exclusively by hotel-keepers and their guests, is slightly erroneous. For Switzerland, aside from its dairy products, has turned the wide northern plateau between the Alps and the Jura into one of the most prosperous industrial countries of Europe, and it has been able to do so with the help of only a few raw materials. It has of course a superabundance of water-power, and furthermore it enjoys a very favourable position right in the heart of Europe, which makes it possible for the finished products of the Helvetian Confederation to slide quietly but continuously into at least a dozen surrounding countries.
The Home of Mankind Page 13