thoughtful and practically wise as well as intelligent. Girls who read are apt to prefer fiction. Women with families read little or none. In general, a limited range of intelligence is characteristic. The law of Massachusetts requires ability to read as a qualification for voting; in practice the slightest ability is accepted. In one of the large manufacturing towns of the Commonwealth, it is said that from twenty to twenty-five per cent. of the voters are not able to read a page of an ordinary book intelligently.

There is as great diversity in respect to thrift as in respect to intelligence. Wages are never high, and are often low; but the amount of wages does not determine thrift. In one of the largest manufacturing cities of the Commonwealth a thousand barrels of beer are consumed every week. With other liquors also consumed, the amount of money thus paid to retailers cannot be less than a million and a half of dollars annually; and very much the larger part of it is paid by mill operatives. The assessments paid during strikes sometimes exhaust the entire savings of a year or two. The absence of discerning economy in the methods of housekeeping means waste. An intelligent and thrifty man, who has worked in a mill from boyhood almost to middle life, writes, "If the wife of a factory worker would practice the same economy practiced by an average mechanic's wife, she would be just as able to make the ends meet without going to the mill. The native American," he goes on, "has a pleasant sitting-room with carpet and pictures, a piano or organ, and a cozy home look everywhere, while many a mill operative, with the same wages, lives in a tenement house with bare walls." Nevertheless, the majority of operatives who are not intemperate or unusually unfortunate, and who desire to save, do save something, though it be little, year by

year.

The writer just quoted says of the religious question: "There are no causes hindering a religious life among factory people except those which operate among other classes. I have known some of the best Christians among factory workers." The last statement, probably made of the best class of English operatives, is certainly true. But the social and religious usages, the personal habits and associations of a foreign land, have some influence to prevent a home feeling in our churches, and to hinder the free manifestation of piety. Therefore, there are some who maintain a degree of religious life in large measure apart from our churches and religious conventionalities. It keeps them reverent and conscientious, but has no propagating power. The best are a small

minority. Among operatives other than the best there is often a low spiritual and religious condition. There are many nominal Protestants who have but little spiritual sensibility in the forms in which we recognize it. Children are sent to Sunday-school, and perhaps attend more than one school. They form the hopeful element, but many counteracting influences hinder the full realization of hope. From sheer inertia of mind rather than of body there are many adults who seldom or never attend church. They do not appreciate the uplifting and inspiring influence of Sabbath worship on all the forces of life, and therefore neglect it. Many lack the intellectual qualifications for hearty participation in the services of perhaps most American churches. Yet it must be said that they were probably just as neglectful in their native land. The baptism of children has some mystical power, they think; they go to the minister to be married, and to secure burial services for their dead; beyond that they are apathetic. Their lack of education, their common deprivation of intelligent society, the caste fetters which many of the foreign-born never shake off, the nature of their home life, the absorbing monotony and mechanical routine of their work, all combine to produce, in many, a condition peculiarly insusceptible to the highest influences. A certain amount of "practical" morality and a very uncertain attendance upon services of worship make out the idea of religion. If they begin a religious life, they easily fall out of the habits of it; they need watchful and unremitting care, and even then cannot always be held. When the impulse of novelty has gone, when the freshness of first experiences or of early life are over, they easily drop away. Some come to this country already biased by the influence of the philosophy of positivism, which has been popularized among the working classes of England. By friction between labor and capital, by caste prejudices, by real or fancied lack of regard for their humanity in practical life, some become disaffected or embittered toward the churches in which their employers worship, and toward the Christianity which they may profess. Such easily fall into the mood of captiousness or of skepticism. If requested to attend church, or if spoken to respecting personal piety, they ask, Am I not already as good as such an one? Some who ask such questions are upright and faithful men in daily life; some are spiritually stolid; some are the victims of the prejudices of ignorance, of caste, and of personal discontent.

It remains to complete this presentation by more briefly considering the relations existing between employers and employed,

and the relations between operatives and the community around them.

FALL RIVER, Mass.

William W. Adams.

THE RELIGION OF VICTOR HUGO.

THE genius of France generally incarnates itself in a man. In the seventeenth century Richelieu, in the eighteenth century Voltaire, were the leading spirits of the nation. Toward them all the secondary talents, as it were, gravitated; they were the springs which originated all the streams of thought and of action in their age.

At the beginning of the present century a man arose from the plebeian ranks, who became the incarnation of the armed Revolution. His name was Bonaparte. He passed like a meteor, but not before he had set on fire another genius, who became afterwards, in the world of letters, what Napoleon had been in the world of politics. That young genius, who was destined to fill the evening of the century with his glory, as Bonaparte had filled the beginning of it, was Victor Hugo. These two men occupy the whole age. Both sprung out of the great Revolution; both in more senses than one were the heirs and continuators of Voltaire. Voltaire, Napoleon, Victor Hugo; the philosopher, the soldier, the poet: these three names will be closely connected by posterity, and will shine like a cluster of stars in the skies of history, as the threefold representation of modern France.

The life of Victor Hugo has not yet been written. His ashes are scarcely cold; the time has not yet come when impartial history can render her verdict on the great poet. For the present, we are restricted to the works of his glowing panegyrists and of his passionate detractors. There is much in our actual estimation of Victor Hugo's character, and in his great popularity, that will be swept away. Future generations will forget the politician and remember only the writer, while many have loved him, and love him still, more for his political opinions than for his literary genius. His private life has not yet been wholly disclosed, and we do not feel at liberty to speak of those facts which, though of public notoriety, have not yet been formally published. Yet some of these facts would go far towards giving us an explanation of Victor Hugo's contradictions in religious matters. They would

enable us to understand how such a man may have been, at some epochs of his life, so near the kingdom of heaven without ever entering into it.

It is not easy to compress into a few pages the religious history of a man who lived eighty-three years, and professed, in turn, all the different opinions which produced themselves during that period. However, we shall try to do so, and afterwards determine what, amidst these many theories, were the standing and permanent principles which governed Victor Hugo's moral life, as they appear in his writings. We shall then conclude by some considerations on the influence which these principles have had upon his fellowcitizens and his contemporaries.

I.

Victor Hugo was the third son of General Léopold Sigisbert Hugo and of Sophie Trébuchet, his wife. He was born February 26, 1802, in the old city of Besançon, but his father was from Lorraine, and his mother from Brittany. Two kinds of blood mingled in his veins the Red Republican blood of his father, who had been a volunteer under the Revolution and had then changed his name from Léopold to Brutus in order to show the genuineness of his democratic convictions, and the blue blood of his mother, who was the daughter of a rich shipowner of Nantes, a staunch Royalist. Indeed, if Victor Hugo's recollections 1 are true, his mother would have been a brigande, that is, one of the Royalist rebels of Vendée, at the same time that his father was fighting the same rebels in the service of the Republic. But, under the Directoire, political passions had subsided on both sides, and Captain Hugo married the Royalist young lady, giving up, at the same time, his name of Brutus. There was no religious ceremony performed at the wedding, for the bride, as much as the husband, was a decided Voltairean.

When the First Consul Bonaparte became the Emperor Napoleon we find both husband and wife among those around the newly established throne. Whatever their, inward preferences were, they managed to appear very loyal and faithful to the new Cæsar. After a while Captain Hugo became General Hugo, aidde-camp of Joseph, King of Spain, first major-domo of his palace,

1 In the book entitled, Victor Hugo raconté par un Témoin de sa Vie, which was written by his daughter-in-law, under his supervision. I am compelled to say that some of the statements of that book do not agree with facts. The memory of the poet must sometimes have failed him.

Count of Cisuentes, etc., etc. He fought with great zeal for the Napoleonic dynasty in Spain, and had the special confidence of the emperor's brother. At times he took his family with him. It was thus that Victor Hugo, for about a year, was a pupil in the College of the Nobles in Madrid: a happy event, which gave him a knowledge of Spanish history and literature. He followed his father also to Corsica and to Italy. Those were heroic times: the beating of drums, the thunder of guns, were constantly heard throughout Europe, and in the child's little head all those glorious echoes resounded, to be afterwards translated into immortal poetry. But this vagrant life did not please Madame Hugo, who does not seem to have lived in perfect harmony with her husband. She came back to Paris, and settled in an old convent, the garden of which was large and mossy, that maison des Feuillantines which some of the poet's best rhymes have made immortal, though it has disappeared long ago.

The direct influence of the father on the son's education was very small. Victor Hugo Victor Hugo-like almost all the great men of the world was educated by his mother. She was a person of remarkable intellect, but of a wild imagination. She was, as we said, a Voltairean; she believed in a God, but cared very little, I am afraid, about Him. She was a true representative of that class of women of the last part of the eighteenth century who, with a refined intelligence, had a very loose standard of life. Her elder sons were baptized a long while after their birth, and only for worldly considerations. It has never been ascertained that Victor was baptized. When he entered the College of the Nobles, in Madrid, she declared him to be a Protestant, in order to save him from the necessity of being confessed and of going to mass.

Madame Hugo was exceedingly fond of reading. She read, in her hunger, anything that fell under her eyes. But, as she did not like to begin a book which might prove uninteresting, she had a curious method of proceeding. She employed her two younger boys, Eugéne and Victor (Abel being with his father), in trying the books for her. They had an old bookseller, named Royol, as their neighbor. "The two boys used to search the good man's shop, and they carried away anything they liked. With these two purveyors, who never let her lack her daily supply, Madame Hugo had soon read all the ground-floor of the bonhomme; there was an upper story, but Royol did not like to show it to the children, for he had there books of such a philosophy and such a morality as to unfit them for their reading. He said so to