110 DISCOUKSES OF FATHER HYACINTHE. 



own country, so one may best serve and love his coun- 

 try in his family. Tlicre, most of all, is plaj^ed the 

 drama of human life, intense and ravishing as the best 

 passions of the heart, grave as duty, active as the pur- 

 suit of interest (Avliich is itself a duty), calm and recol- 

 lected as study and prayer. It is, therefore, to impel 

 any people in a direction full of falsehood and i)eril, 

 to hold exclusively, or even principally, before it the 

 prospects of the political career. Doubtless the life of 

 a great nation is at the polls and in the legislature, but 

 far more than this, it is at tlie fireside. Where shall we 

 find philosophers to teach us tliis— authors and artists 

 to depict it — where, above all, the men to live it ? Ah ! 

 look beyond the Alps, at our little neighbor, Switzer- 

 land, home of toilsome industry and of the household, 

 of simjde, honest, happy life ! — home, too, of free, tra- 

 ditional democracy ! x\nd here, poor French democracy, 

 despising the family, despising religion, here thou art 

 lying yet, after eighty years, crying, helpless, in thy 

 bloody swaddling clothes ! 



II. The Law of Lahor in the Field, 



[Coming to tliis law of labor, so closely related to tlie law of 

 the family, Fatlier Hyacinthe remarked that it is peculiar to the 

 human race. Generally speaking, the brute, left to himself, does 

 no labor ; while man from his very creation was under the glori- 

 ous necessity of work. " The Lord God placed him in the garden 

 of Eden to dress it and to keep it."* By the great mass of men this 

 toil is exercised by the hands and upon matter, and, more partic- 

 ularly still, in the tillage of the ground. " In the sweat of his 

 face, he is to cat bread."]] 



Agriculture, then, is one of the chief laws of civiliza- 

 tion. And considering that at tliis very hour wliile I 



♦Genesis, ii. 15. + Ibid., iii. 19. 



