IT is not for the sake of alliteration that I bring the Bakers and Builders of the metropolis into juxtaposition. I want to compare the real grievances of the one class with the unfounded complaints and unjust demands of the other. I wish to state clearly, concisely, and without exaggeration, the hard and cruel case of a class of men truly overworked and under-paid; and to excite on their behalf that sympathy of which the other class seem to me so utterly unworthy. The journeymen bakers will, I trust, gain something by the comparison; I shall not be sorry if the journeymen builders are losers in like proportion. The journeymen builders, working in the open air, or employed in spacious and airy workshops, affirm that their strength is overtaxed by ten hours of a labour lightened in many instances by conditions of their own imposing. The journeymen bakers, toiling through the night, and for from eighteen to twenty, or even twenty-one, hours out of the twenty-four, with irregular intervals of rest, and only three, four, or five hours of continuous sleep in bed; working, and often sleeping, underground, in damp and offensive basements of second and third class houses, amid heat and dust and suffocating gusts of sulphurous gas from the oven's mouth, with heavy weights to lift and carry, these men ask of us, as a precious boon, to be allowed to work twelve hours a day only; and I cannot bring myself to think that their most reasonable request will be refused. In presence of their just claims to relief, into what utter insignificance do not the de mands of our building operatives sink? I am ashamed to mention them in the same breath. These dastards of the hod and trowel turn faint at the thought of ten hours' labour, and are not ashamed to parade their effeminacy before honest working men of every calling under the sun, whose health and strength give the lie to their assertions. Ten hours a day! Why, what real worker is there in any profession, trade, or walk in life, who would not be too happy to compound for only ten hours' work per diem? What parson, what doctor, what lawyer whose professional lot is cast in this great Babylon, would not rejoice to have his working hours reduced to ten? How many of our tradesmen, shopmen, or foremen are able to get through their day's work in the same time? If this pretence of inability to work ten hours a day rested on any sound foundation, Englishmen would have cause to tremble lest the strength and stamina which have so often conquered our foes by land and sea should be found unequal in the coming wars. But the journeymen bakers are living illustrations of the natural strength of English frames and English constitutions. They suffer fearfully, but they wonderfully survive their prolonged and unwholesome toils. That they do suffer in health and strength is something more than mere assertion. It is no mere inference from the history of their miserable lives. They have been carefully compared with other classes of men, by a physician accustomed to sanitary inquiries, and these, in few words, are the results of the comparison. 1859.] A Case of real Hardship. Of one hundred silk-printers, eighteen stated that they were subject to complaints of one sort or another; of one hundred scavengers similarly questioned, nineteen made complaints; of one hundred bricklayers' labourers, twenty-five; of one hundred carpenters, twentysix; of one hundred brickmakers, thirty-six; but of one hundred bakers no less than seventy were subject to diseases more or less severe. The results of similar inquiries directed to ascertain the existence of severe diseases among different classes of working men proved confirmatory of these statements; for while ten scavengers in a hundred, eleven bricklayers' labourers, and twelve silk-printers had had severe attacks of illness, forty-eight per cent., or very nearly half of the bakers, had suffered in the same way. But a still more striking illustration of the baneful effects of nightwork and over-work, under peculiarly unfavourable circumstances, on the health of the poor journeymen bakers, arises out of a comparison of the baker with the compositor. Out of a hundred compositors selected as being employed in the smallest, closest, and hottest rooms, one-fourth were found subject to severe diseases of the chest; but the fraction in the case of the bakers, taken as they came to hand, without selection, amounted to four-fifths. The consumptive cases among the bakers were found to bear to the same cases among the compositors the proportion of thirtyone to twelve. It is needless to add that the journeymen bakers are very short-lived. The journeymen bakers, therefore, are more than twice as liable to attacks of illness as the most sickly class with whom they have been compared; more than twice as liable also to severe diseases; more than three times as subject to chest complaints, as the least favourably circumstanced among the unhealthy class of compositors; and nearly three times as subject to consumption as they are. Now mark the result of this excessive liability to diseases, and especially to long and lingering VOL. LX. NO. CCCLVIII. 481 maladies. The trade is choked and clogged with sickly men, who, as soon as they are convalescent, offer their services for inferior wages, in competition with their healthier fellow-workmen; so that instead of receiving, like the skilled and unskilled men in the building trades, 5s. 6d. or 3s. 4d. a-day for ten hours' healthy open-air work, they would deem themselves too fortunate if they could command three-fourths of those sums for nearly twice the number of hours of most unwholesome in-door labour. Here, then, we have a real and substantial grievance. Here is a set of men overworked, underpaid, sickly, and short-lived, truly deserving of the sympathy and compassion of the public, renewing a peaceful agitation which nearly proved successful ten years ago, and endeavouring to compass their righteous objects by perfectly legitimate means. Contrast their real griev ances with the false pretences of the operatives in the building trade, claiming nine hours' labour for ten hours' wages; tyrannizing over fellow-workmen and employers alike by standing combinations; reducing the honest, able, and willing workman to the mean level of the dishonest, idle, and incapable; organizing a cruel and tyrannical system of espionage; threatening personal violence; imposing arbitrary fines; branding honest and independent acts with opprobrious epithets; refusing, with affected disgust, to give either a verbal or written promise to conduct themselves with common honesty in their dealings with their employers: in a word, establishing in the heart of a free country the same despicable tyranny which shocks and revolts us when we see it clothed in purple and fine linen seated on the tottering throne of France. This tyranny in fustian is not a whit more tolerable, and it is even less defensible. Let us then enter our earnest protest against it. But that our protest may have its due force and value, let us, on the other hand, sympathize warmly and to good purpose with the wholesome and legitimate agitation of those who have real grievances, and who suffer so much by the bad habits I I of a trade that admits of such easy and safe reform. Those bad habits are, it is believed, to be traced to very trifling causes. It is confidently alleged by bakers themselves that the system of nightwork has been brought about by a demand, not for hot rolls, but for hot loaves of bread early in the morning; that this demand originates mainly with the workingclasses, and especially with that great classe dangereuse which, while it has money or credit, denies itself no unwholesome luxury, and cares as little for the poor journeyman baker, whom it robs of his night's rest, as for the rich man, whom it cheats or plunders. Verily a small and mean cause is in this case the parent of a very great and disastrous effect, involving the health and strength, the comfort and the morals, of some twelve thousand working men and their families. Would that this case stood alone. But alas! it is only the sample of a class of gigantic evils which, springing originally from the weak impulses of individuals, gain force by addition and co-operation, and react with equal force and most fatal effect on other individuals still more numerous, who present an aggregate of misery seemingly out of all proportion to the petty motives and personal insignificance of the original offenders. One word more. The public has now before it two agitations, in the issue of which they cannot but feel interested. If they condemn the one for its tyrannical injustice, the best way to give value to their protest is to recognise by word and deed the claims to kind consideration and effective aid of the other. While they coldly repel the building operatives with one hand, let them warmly welcome the poor journeymen bakers with the other. PORT ROYAL AND THE PORT ROYALISTS.* HOW few of the hundreds of 'Anglais' who find their way to Versailles during the season, and tire themselves amidst its gloriespictorial, historical, and picturesque know that there is, within an easy drive, a spot of not less passionate, and far more solemn interest, where they may spend a day of calm and delicious repose when fatigued with the more splendid novelties of sightseeing that await the Parisian visitor. In a wide-stretching valley about eight miles on the road to Chevreuse lie the remains of the once-famous Monastery of Port Royal des Champs. The road is not a particularly interesting one; yet it has its points of attraction. As Versailles, with its dreary regularity of streets, and oppressively idle military air, is left behind, and the open country penetrated, the level and dusty plains are exchanged for a more varied and picturesque route. At a turn the road takes a descent, and brings into view a scene of pretty rural freshness, with copsewood rising above, and a stream half-covered gliding away in front; then as the hill on the opposite side is ascended, and the long even line of road once more gained, an antique mouldering village, with the most quaint little church, helps to break the monotony of the journey. What a peaceful dulness seemed to brood over that village! the very grey lichen-marked stones in the old church seemed to sleep in the lazy sunshine; and the straggling vines, with their pale leaves drooping over the cottage-doors, favoured the general impression of weariness. At length, when the eye was beginning to tire in search of some further variety, we reached a point where the road breaks into a long sweeping declivity, embracing within its ample circuit an extended valley, crowned at its higher extremities by an irregular outline of wood, and presenting nearer hand the traces of a garden, with farm-house and venerable dove-cot; and nearer still the ruins of a chapel, with the ground in front terraced and intersected. An air of neglect and ruin * Select Memoirs of Port Royal. By M. A. Schimmelpenninck. Fifth Edition. London: Longman and Co. 1858. 1859.] Monastery of Port Royal des Champs. rested on the whole. And as we descended the slope, and the valley gradually opened up, we could notice more distinctly the appearances of waste and sad decay that everywhere presented themselves. It was not much, after all, to have come to see; but a strange thrill of emotion seized us as we stood and looked down on that valley, and its rude and broken monuments, and thought of the hallowed memories that clung to them, and the passionate devotions of which they had once been the scene. It was impossible not to admire the seclusion of the spot. Imagine a vast amphitheatre, shagged with forest-treesbeech, horse and Spanish chestnut, lime and ash'-rising on one side in somewhat precipitous banks, and on the other extending in a more gentle eminence, with a narrow stream gleaming through the brushwood in the centre. Save on the side on which we stood, the world seemed shut out altogether. The dove-cot and the farm-house were silent in the grey, hazy atmosphere. There were no signs of life or of cheerful order about. The stillness as of a buried past-an ancient devotion, which still remembered its long vigils there-hung around the scene. On a closer inspection we were able to trace, with some degree of detail, the outline of the ruins, especially of the chapel and of the terrace, on which the house of the Duchess de Longueville stood. The former is almost entirely destroyed; the broken bases of the pillars and the steps of the altar alone surviving. The grass grows around them in wild profusion as when Mrs. Schimmelpenninck visited the place in 1814; but there were no longer 483 any appearances of the heads of angels, or rich pieces of gothic fretwork, or broken columns, or capitals peeping out under the rich profusion of wild-flowers which covered them.' Near where the high altar stood, there still stands the spreading walnut tree' under which she moralized; and there has been erected since a slight and rude building on the very site of the altar, a kind of rough sanctum, surmounted by a cross, and enclosing various memorials of the spot. It was a melancholy pleasure to wander meditatively along the deserted and grass-grown aisles, and to survey with a heart full of vague but vivid reminiscences the relics to which our attention was invited. The portraits were perhaps the most interesting. Arnauld, Le Maitre, De Saci, Quesnel, Nicole, Pascal, the Mère Angelique, the Mère Agnes; and Jacqueline Pascal, and Dr. Hamon the physician, looked down upon us with a mute pathos from those bare walls. There where their sublime and tender piety reached its highest expressionwhere the recluses from the neighbouring Grange came to mingle their prayers with the sainted sisterhood -their silent presence still dwelt. Never before had we so well realized the unearthly beauty and self-sacrifice of their lives, the sad and terrible glory of their sufferings, and the calm triumph of their unfailing faith. We were particularly struck with two portraits of the Mère Agnes, exquisitely and tenderly touching in the depth of earnest patience and long-borne trial which they express. Above the entrance to the building, and below the cross, which is its only external ornament, the following lines are inscribed : Entres dans un profond et saint recueillement, Various inscriptions of a similar character, of no poetic grace or vigour, but impressive in their devotional simplicity and their unaf fected spirit of admiration, are attached to several of the portraits. The Mère Angelique is addressed in lines beginning O Mère en Israël! O femme vraiment forte;' the eloquent Le Maitre is the 'l'Aigle des Orateurs;' De Sacy a 'vrai chrétien dès l'enfance.' And the great Arnauld, with more extended encomium, as was becoming, is held forth as the Prince of Doctors, and the most zealous defender of the Catholic faith Contemplez nos amis, ce Docteur admirable The most interesting spot, perhaps, after the chapel, is the fountain of the Mère Angelique. It is situated at the corner of the terrace occupied by the Hôtel Longueville, which extended along almost the whole side of Port Royal in the direction of the Chevreuse road. The Hôtel has long since disappeared, but the outline of the terrace is distinctly marked; and one long dilapidated corridor is still visible, running underneath the ground : Near this place (says Mrs. Schimmelpenninck), oozing from a rocky bed, and entirely enclosed with venerable and aged trees, gushes a cool and limpid fountain; it is called the fountain of Our Mère Angelique; and close by its side are the remains of the stone seat which was her favourite place of retirement and prayer. This sacred spot, where the trees, interweaving their branches above, form a thick gloom, and where no sound is heard but the gurgling of the water, was peculiarly striking. We do not know whether Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's somewhat lively feelings have here, as elsewhere, given a colouring to her description scarcely warranted by the bare realities, or whether, as is not unlikely, considerable changes have occurred in the interval; but we certainly did not find the fountain of the Mère Angelique so secluded and embowered a spot as she represents it; while the stone seat of prayer does not dwell in our memory. It is still, however, a sheltered and meditative retreat; a holier spot within the dim religious solitariness of the valley. On the opposite extremity from that on which we entered, surmounting the steepest side of the valley, rises the celebrated farmhouse of Les Granges, the abode of Arnauld and Pascal, and the other distinguished recluses whose writings have shed an undying lustre around Port Royal. It is separated from the monastery about half a mile, perhaps, and a pathway down the steep conducted the recluses, morning and evening, to their devotions in the chapel. But the monastery was kept sacred even from their hallowed intrusion. About a half of the original building is still standing, a high and solid-looking structure with narrow windows, conveying now, as in the days when Hamon fasted and Pascal studied in it, the idea of great security and privacy. In Hamon's room were preserved the furnace, oven, mortar, and various other utensils,' which he used for preparing medicines for the poor, and a board on which he used to sleep instead of a mattress;' with the staples which held his book-case, and the alarum by which he called himself to midnight prayer. In the centre of the court-yard is still to be seen Pascal's famous well, constructed under his superintendence, to draw up the water from the level of the valley beneath; so happily devised in its machinery, that a child of ten years old could with ease draw up a quantity of water equal to nine common buckets.' Around the farm-house there is a large garden, or rather orchard, thickly planted with trees, and presenting here and there beautiful prospects of the valley. Little arbours were arranged in this garden, which served as places of retirement and meditation to the recluses during their work. Aged trees were still standing which carried the thoughts back to the sainted men who lived and laboured there; and the hastening evening invited to meditation; but also to departure. With a quiet saunter through this |