John Hall Ingham.

IN a former paper I have related the rough up-bringing of a French building operative, who yet was heir to an ancestral property of which the acquisition dated back for centuries. Nothing, I think, came out more vividly in the picture than the strength of the family feeling. At seventeen the lad takes upon himself part of the burden of the family debt, and his main concern in after-life is to pay it off. We left that debt reduced in 1842 to one thousand francs. He tells us it was not entirely paid off till 1848.

Other sides of the writer's career have now to be shown. It will be remembered that his father was a strong Bonapartist. It was the Emperor's son whom he would have wished to see proclaimed in 1830. By 1834 the younger Nadaud was already a republican, and, being a better scholar than his fellow-workmen, used

every morning to be asked to read aloud in the wineshop the Populaire, a communistic paper edited by Cabet. A young medical student noticed one morning that he read with energy, and complimented him. "It was the first time that a bourgeois shook me by the hand, and I own that I felt much flattered." The student asked him if he would join the then wellknown Société des Droits de l'Homme, a secret political society, and he was enthusiastically admitted a member in one of its sections, together with two workingmen friends. He found himself here in company with educated and well-mannered men, and this stimulated his desire to learn. When he opened his classes, as described in the previous paper, the book which he first selected for classreading was Lamennais's Paroles d'un Croyant, a work nearly forgotten now,

but which exercised an immense influence at the time. From 1838 to 1848 he bought "the most revolutionary" papers and pamphlets to read to his pupils. "I taught them to love the republic, and to look upon that form of government as being alone capable of gradually lifting the people to the level of the other classes of society, from the moral point of view and from that of political and social rights." He made parade of his republicanism, wearing the obnoxious Phrygian cap, proclaiming his views at the wineshop where he took his meals. Already in 1842, as he discovered more than thirty years later, his movements were reported to the police as those of a "dangerous man," and the record was consigned to a dossier (register of documents relating to a suspicious person), which was from thenceforth regularly continued. He had the honor, as he also discovered on another occasion, of a similar dossier in his department. Still, he was getting on, earning one hundred and fifty francs a month for an eighteen months' engagement, which was almost the maximum pay of a maître compagnon, and he was able eventually to send for his wife. Meanwhile he was becoming acquainted with the leading Socialists and Communists of the day, Cabet in particular, on whose behalf he, with some other workmen, went on deputation to Louis Blanc, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux, to obtain support for the Populaire.1

All this time Louis Philippe's government was carrying on its insane policy of repression, gagging the press, suppressing public meetings, at last forbidding political dinners. One day when Nadaud was working on the mairie of the Pantheon, he saw the troops of the line occupy the place on one side, the national guard on the other. Some political move

1 Cabet, a man of very ordinary capacity, was nevertheless one of sterling character and great kindliness. Nadaud has told me that he took great pains to correct not only faults of speech, but faults of manner, in the workingmen whom he befriended, and, for instance, would teach

ment was evidently going on, and work was at once suspended. At two P. M. the colonel of the national guard received tidings of the king's abdication. The revolution of 1848 had taken place.

After the republic had been proclaimed, Nadaud was surprised to find that those workmen who had till then been most indifferent to their rights and liberties had become suddenly so exacting that no measure taken by the provisional government could satisfy them. Instead of spending their evenings in the clubs, many took to meeting in the open air, and there, before long, the malcontents began to put forward Louis Napoleon as their chief. Nadaud now began to feel himself at issue with the mere revolutionists by whom he was surrounded. They had the republic, they had universal suffrage; he would have been satisfied with consolidating these two great conquests, and would fain have concentrated his whole energies on questions of association. Meanwhile a national assembly had to be elected, and a meeting of Creusois was to be held at the Sorbonne for the choice of departmental candidates to the "Constituent Assembly." He went straight from work, in his working dress. A crowd of young men, “skipping about like grasshoppers," had come up from the Creuse to offer themselves as candidates. He listened to them, and they seemed to him "as parrots trying to amuse the gallery." By a sudden impulse never having spoken in public before he rose from one of the back benches of the amphitheatre and asked to speak. His voice was strong, and when he had to repeat the request it was in a louder tone yet. "Turn him out!” cried some. "To the tribune!" called others; and the tribune he reached at

them how to take off their hats, how to come into a room, would send them out to wipe their boots on the mat if they had not done so, etc.; and all this was done in such a kindly, fatherly way as never to give offense.

last. He spoke at once against the last representative (Émile de Girardin), and against all the young candidates, so prodigal of promises, who had just been heard. At the conclusion of his speech, which was frequently applauded, a welldressed young man, whom he had never seen (a working tailor), proposed him for a candidate, and he was accepted. He failed, however, at the election, and, after speaking at two meetings, returned to Paris, where he found his place taken, but had it restored to him a month later.

A terrible commercial stagnation had soon followed on the revolution, and Bonapartists found easy recruits amongst famished men; nay, the crowds of miscellaneous workers or idlers which poured forth daily from the national workshops, Nadaud declares, would have torn in pieces any one who should have uttered any other cry than that of "Vive Napoléon!" He was himself named a delegate to the Labor Commission for the study of industrial questions, presided over by Louis Blanc, but, owing to his occupations, does not appear to have attended as delegate any meeting after the first. He took part in the founding of a cooperative association in his own trade, which for years stood at the head of the French productive associations. But the year had been an expensive one. His wife had had a severe illness which was to cost her her life. He had intended to start for America, to join Cabet's colony, with the second band of Icarians. On the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, however, he was pressed by his workingmen friends to stand for its successor, the Legislative Assembly, and, notwithstanding a trick sought to be played off upon him by the reactionists, of setting up as a dummy candidate another Nadaud (not Martin), he received, one morning, while at work, a letter directed "Citoyen Nadaud, Représentant du Peuple."

He sat in the Assembly from 1849 to the coup d'état, spoke frequently, sometimes for hours at a time, and was

complimented by men like Jules Favre and Michel de Bourges. He took part in an abortive protest (meant to be something more) against French intervention in Italy. At the prorogation of 1851, the air being full already of rumors as to an impending coup d'état, he went to his department, and, in spite of the enmity of the prefect, was received everywhere with cries of "Vive Nadaud, notre maçon!" More than this, Émile de Girardin, the most influential of French journalists, had put forward the idea of a workingman as President of the republic for the elections of 1852, and Nadaud's name was foremost among those of the workingmen representatives; so that as early as September, 1850, a squib was published on the subject in a reactionary journal. On the other hand, the President, in his struggle against the Assembly, had struck a shrewd blow in his own favor through the reëstablishment of universal suffrage. From this time forth many workingmen among Nadaud's friends began to say that the President was better than the Assembly, and many who had been in the habit of coming to him kept away. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of the 2d of December, when he had scarcely dropped asleep, his concierge woke him up, and he found in his room a commissaire de police and four strapping sergents de ville. He was told at first that he was only to be taken to the house of the police officer; but this was a trick. As soon as he had stepped into the cab that stood in waiting, he found that he was being taken to the prison of Mazas. The yard of the prison was already filled with hackney coaches which had brought other prisoners. Thiers and the ultra-republican Greppo were brought in while Nadaud was waiting in the of fice. For nineteen days he remained at Mazas in solitary confinement, but af ter three days obtained books, and made acquaintance with Guizot's two works on the History of Civilization in Europe and in France, the perusal of which was of

avantage to him years after, during his acer as a teacher. Better days came when he was transferred to Sainte-Pélathe representatives who had been arrested were placed in the left wing of the prison, groups of several in a large ruum. The room he occupied contained, bestes friends of his own, political opponents, such as Duvergier de Hauranne and General Leydet. Their days were pet and as agreeable as possible." Frends were allowed to come to see mem. and supply them with provisions, even beyond their wants. Relations of brotherly esteem grew up between monarnists and republicans. Nadaud was even offered by General Leydet a sum of one thousand francs, subscribed for him by the latter's friends, which he refused. saying that he could always earn his living by his trade. One morning the prisoners received a copy of the othcial paper, which informed Nadaud that he and sixty-five other republican representatives were exiles for life. Nadaud took a passport for Belgium, and the tert who handed it over to him offered aim a letter to a Brussels architect.

As Brussels he seemed to himself to he in the corridors of the Palais Bourbon, where the Assembly had sat, so many former colleagues and friends did he find there. He went into lodgings with one who was both a colleague and a friend, Agricol Perdiguier, nicknamed “Avigmonnais-la-Vertu." a joiner, and one of the chief writers in the workingman's paper. L'Atelier, whose Livre du Compagnonnage is often spoken of by George Sand, and had more effect, according to Nadaud, in moralizing French workmen than all the laws and penalties of the Louis Philippe régime. Perdiguier was the cook, and so economical was he that their expenses rarely exceeded a frane a day each. On the other hand. Nadaud found that wages in his trade were very low in Brussels, not exceeding two and a quarter or two and a half franes a day, and a great public meeting, organ

ized by the Brussels workmen in honor of the exiles, at which he was chosen to return thanks in their names, soon led to his being driven away. On the morrow of the meeting he was ordered to present himself to the burgomaster, who made him understand that he must leave Brussels. Victor Schoelcher and another received the same notice, and all three were sent to Antwerp, where for the first time Nadaud saw the sea. But here also, on inquiry, he found wages in the building trade very low, though somewhat higher than at Brussels, — three francs a day. On learning (January, 1852) from Louis Blane, then in England, and to whom he had written, that he could earn more than double this amount (five shillings) in London, and that Louis Blane had already spoken about him to Mr. Pickard,1 manager of a then existing North London Working Builders' Association (founded in connection with the Christian Socialist movement of the time), he crossed the Channel (at the cost of dreadful seasickness) to the country which was to be his home for eighteen years.

The day after his arrival his future employer (who, alas, went to the bad eventually, both morally and pecuniarily) called upon him, and it was settled that he should begin work three days later. He did not yet speak a word of English, and Louis Blane not only got him an interpreter, in the person of a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but himself took him, the first day, to the building yard at Islington where he was to work. The rain was pouring down in torrents; the roads in the neighborhood of the yard were almost impracticable for foot-passengers, and poor little Louis Blane sank so deep in the mud, tearing himself out of one rut only to tumble into another, that his sturdy companion hardly knew whether to laugh or to urge him to go no farther. Nadaud soon made friends, particularly with two worthy Irishmen, who

1 Louis Blane had been put in relation with Mr. Pickard by the late Mr. Vansittart Neale.

came every day to fetch him from his lodgings, and bought and cooked his dinner for him. He did not find the English plasterer's work as fatiguing as that of the Parisian, and, as the result of four years' experience, considers that English workmen in the trade do not work as hard as those of Paris. But it may be questioned whether this impression was not in consequence of the far better nourishment and generally healthier conditions of life of the worker in England.

Finding thus work at once, Nadaud escaped the "great miseries" that for some time crushed the greater part of the refugees. More than this, indeed: the London building operatives having subscribed to a fund for his support, he declined it, and handed over the amount collected to a general fund established by his countrymen, out of which twelve francs a week were paid for more than three years to every poor French refugee, and he was able to continue subscribing to this fund without ever drawing upon its resources. But the old divisions subsisted, and the refugees split into three groups, one headed by Ledru Rollin, another by Félix Pyat, the third (to which Nadaud himself belonged) by Louis Blanc. Years after, when he had the opportunity of looking over his police dossier, he found reports sent in by false brethren of most of the meetings of refugees which he had attended in London. Of course, the letters which the refugees wrote to their friends in France were opened, and their contents noted.

It was at this time that I first knew Nadaud, a short, sturdy man, with an open countenance and a pleasant smile, who looked you straight in the face, and could evidently hold his own whenever it was needful. I was struck by the enormous size and strength of his wrists, not knowing then that he had broken them both, as related in my previous paper; the result being to increase the power of his grip, though at the cost of its suppleness. After working in London or its neigh

borhood,

at one time on two houses built for my friend Tom Hughes and myself at Wimbledon by the North London Builders' Association, and afterwards in Kent, the building trade becoming very slack in the south at the beginning of the Crimean war, he went to Manchester, where there was more work going on, and where he obtained employment through an Alsatian friend, though he was somewhat coolly received by the men. Here he found himself for the first time in the midst of a dense manufacturing population, and was a witness of a great strike at Preston. Never, he says, can he forget the sight of men coming in for four consecutive hours, laden with long sacks filled with copper money, which they emptied on the floor, when the contents were distributed among the destined recipients, most of whom, though famished, received their portion with a laugh. He was also invited (with Louis Blanc) to a meeting of a so-called Labor Parliament in Manchester, and was introduced by the Chartist leader, Ernest Jones (whom he miscalls "Ernest John "). He now became anxious to see more of industrial England: visited Sheffield, Leeds, the Wigan collieries, Liverpool; crossed over to Dublin; went to Greenock and Glasgow, where he was amazed at the sight of the "vast lighted furnaces streaming forth true flames of hell," whilst "men, bare to the waist, struck blow after blow on the anvil.", He pushed on as far as Loch Lomond, then visited Edinburgh, and returned to London by boat; having spent his last copper, but feeling himself “another man "after his four months' tour. He had, however, a bad time to pass after his return, work being very slack; he took a contract to build two small houses, and found at the end that he had earned less money than his workmen. Some of his friends urged him to become a French teacher, and one of them a pleasant and able man named Barrère, whom I have known personally gave him two months' training, and at the close of this