Well-being without education stupefies people and makes them
insolent: this was noticed in the most ancient times.
Incrassatus est, et recalcitravit, says Deuteronomy. For
the rest, the parcellaire laborer has judged himself: he is
content, provided he has bread, a pallet to sleep on, and plenty
of liquor on Sunday. Any other condition would be prejudicial to
him, and would endanger public order.
At Lyons there is a class of men who, under cover of the monopoly
given them by the city government, receive higher pay than
college professors or the head-clerks of the government
ministers: I mean the porters. The price of loading and
unloading at certain wharves in Lyons, according to the schedule
of the Rigues or porters' associations, is thirty centimes per
hundred kilogrammes. At this rate, it is not seldom that a man
earns twelve, fifteen, and even twenty francs a day: he only has
to carry forty or fifty sacks from a vessel to a warehouse. It
is but a few hours' work. What a favorable condition this would
be for the development of intelligence, as well for children as
for parents, if, of itself and the leisure which it brings,
wealth was a moralizing principle! But this is not the case: the
porters of Lyons are today what they always have been, drunken,
dissolute, brutal, insolent, selfish, and base.
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