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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848

Author: Various


        
Release date: May 13, 2012 [eBook #39676]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram, JoAnn
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 64 NO. 396 OCTOBER 1848 ***




Produced by Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram, JoAnn
Greenwood and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
Journals.)







Transcriber's Note:

On P. 462 and 512 of the text version, words within tilde (~) marks are
transliterations from the Greek in the original. The html version
includes the Greek script.

       *       *       *       *       *




              BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

    NO. CCCXCVI.       OCTOBER, 1848.       VOL. LXIV.




CONTENTS.


    THE CAXTONS. PART VII.,                                 387

    POLITICAL ECONOMY, BY J. S. MILL,                       407

    LIFE IN THE "FAR WEST." PART V.,                        429

    A LEGEND FROM ANTWERP,                                  444

    A FEW WORDS ABOUT NOVELS.--A DIALOGUE,
    IN A LETTER TO EUSEBIUS,                                459

    CONTINENTAL REVOLUTIONS--IRISH REBELLION--ENGLISH
    DISTRESS,                                               475

    BYRON'S ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN,                           499




EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER
ROW, LONDON.

_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.




              BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

    NO. CCCXCVI.       OCTOBER, 1848.       VOL. LXIV.




THE CAXTONS.--PART VII.


CHAPTER XXVI.

Saith Dr Luther, "When I saw Dr Gode begin to tell his puddings
hanging in the chimney, I told him he would not live long!"

I wish I had copied that passage from "The Table Talk" in large round
hand, and set it before my father at breakfast, the morn preceding
that fatal eve in which Uncle Jack persuaded him to tell his puddings.

Yet, now I think of it, Uncle Jack hung the puddings in the
chimney,--but he did not persuade my father to tell them.

Beyond a vague surmise that half the suspended "tomacula" would
furnish a breakfast to Uncle Jack, and that the youthful appetite of
Pisistratus would despatch the rest, my father did not give a thought
to the nutritious properties of the puddings,--in other words, to the
two thousand pounds which, thanks to Mr Tibbets, dangled down the
chimney. So far as the great work was concerned, my father only cared
for its publication, not its profits. I will not say that he might not
hunger for praise, but I am quite sure that he did not care a button
for pudding. Nevertheless, it was an infaust and sinister augury for
Augustine Caxton, the very appearance, the very suspension and
danglement of any puddings whatsoever, right over his ingle-nook, when
those puddings were made by the sleek hands of Uncle Jack! None of the
puddings which he, poor man, had all his life been stringing, whether
from his own chimneys, or the chimneys of other people, had turned out
to be real puddings,--they had always been the _eidola_, the
_erscheinungen_, the phantoms and semblances of puddings. I question
if Uncle Jack knew much about Democritus of Abdera. But he was
certainly tainted with the philosophy of that fanciful sage. He
peopled the air with images of colossal stature, which impressed all
his dreams and divinations, and from whose influences came his very
sensations and thoughts. His whole being, asleep or waking, was thus
but the reflection of great phantom puddings!

As soon as Mr Tibbets had possessed himself of the two volumes of the
"History of Human Error," he had necessarily established that hold
upon my father which hitherto those lubricate hands of his had failed
to effect. He had found what he had so long sighed for in vain, his
_point d'appui_, wherein to fix the Archimedean screw. He fixed it
tight in the "History of Human Error," and moved the Caxtonian world.

A day or two after the conversation recorded in my last chapter, I saw
Uncle Jack coming out of the mahogany doors of my father's banker;
and, from that time, there seemed no reason why Mr Tibbets should not
visit his relations on week-days as well as Sundays. Not a day,
indeed, passed but what he held long conversations with my father. He
had much to report of his interviews with the publishers. In these
conversations he naturally recurred to that grand idea of the
"Literary Times" which had so dazzled my poor father's imagination;
and having heated the iron, Uncle Jack was too knowing a man not to
strike while it was hot.

When I think of the simplicity my wise father exhibited in this crisis
of his life, I must own that I am less moved by pity than admiration
for that poor great-hearted student. We have seen that out of the
learned indolence of twenty years, the ambition which is the instinct
of a man of genius had emerged; the serious preparation of the great
book for the perusal of the world, had insensibly restored the charms
of that noisy world on the silent individual. And therewith came a
noble remorse that he had hitherto done so little for his species. Was
it enough to write quartos upon the past history of Human Error? Was
it not his duty, when the occasion was fairly presented, to enter upon
that present, daily, hourly, war with Error--which is the sworn
chivalry of Knowledge? St George did not dissect dead dragons, he
fought the live one. And London, with that magnetic atmosphere which
in great capitals fills the breath of life with stimulating particles,
had its share in quickening the slow pulse of the student. In the
country, he read but his old authors, and lived with them through the
gone ages. In the city, my father, during the intervals of repose from
the great book, and still more now that the great book had come to a
pause,--inspected the literature of his own time. It had a prodigious
effect upon him. He was unlike the ordinary run of scholars, and,
indeed, of readers for that matter--who, in their superstitious homage
to the dead, are always willing enough to sacrifice the living. He did
justice to the marvellous fertility of intellect which characterises
the authorship of the present age. By the present age, I do not only
mean the present day, I commence with the century. "What," said my
father one day in dispute with Trevanion--"what characterises the
literature of our time is--its _human interest_. It is true that we do
not see scholars addressing scholars, but men addressing men,--not
that scholars are fewer, but that the reading public is more large.
Authors in all ages address themselves to what interests their
readers; the same things do not interest a vast community which
interested half a score of monks or bookworms. The literary _polis_
was once an oligarchy, it is now a republic. It is the general
brilliancy of the atmosphere which prevents your noticing the size of
any particular star. Do you not see, that with the cultivation of the
masses has awakened the Literature of the Affections? Every sentiment
finds an expositor, every feeling an oracle. Like Epimenides, I have
been sleeping in a cave; and, waking, I see those whom I left children
are bearded men; and towns have sprung up in the landscapes which I
left as solitary wastes."

Thence, the reader may perceive the causes of the change which had
come over my father. As Robert Hall says, I think, of Dr Kippis, "he
had laid so many books at the top of his head, that the brains could
not move." But the electricity had now penetrated the heart, and the
quickened vigour of that noble organ enabled the brain to stir.
Meanwhile, I leave my father to these influences, and to the
continuous conversations of Uncle Jack, and proceed with the thread of
my own egotism.

Thanks to Mr Trevanion, my habits were not those which favour
friendships with the idle; but I formed some acquaintances amongst
young men a few years older than myself, who held subordinate
situations in the public offices, or were keeping their terms for the
bar. There was no want of ability amongst these gentlemen; but they
had not yet settled into the stern prose of life. Their busy hours
only made them more disposed to enjoy the hours of relaxation. And
when we got together, a very gay, light-hearted set we were! We had
neither money enough to be very extravagant, nor leisure enough to be
very dissipated; but we amused ourselves notwithstanding. My new
friends were wonderfully erudite in all matters connected with the
theatres. From an opera to a ballet, from Hamlet to the last farce
from the French, they had the literature of the stage at the
finger-ends of their straw-coloured gloves. They had a pretty large
acquaintance with actors and actresses, and were perfect _Walpoluli_
in the minor scandals of the day. To do them justice, however, they
were not indifferent to the more masculine knowledge necessary in
"this wrong world." They talked as familiarly of the real actors of
life as of the sham ones. They could adjust to a hair the rival
pretensions of contending statesmen. They did not profess to be deep
in the mysteries of foreign cabinets, (with the exception of one young
gentleman connected with the Foreign Office, who prided himself on
knowing exactly what the Russians meant to do with India--when they
got it!); but to make amends, the majority of them had penetrated the
closest secrets of our own. It is true that, according to a proper
subdivision of labour, each took some particular member of the
government for his special observation; just as the most skilful
surgeons, however profoundly versed in the general structure of our
frame, rest their anatomical fame on the light they throw on
particular parts of it,--one man taking the brain, another the
duodenum, a third the spinal cord, while a fourth, perhaps, is a
master of all the symptoms indicated by a pensile finger. Accordingly,
one of my friends appropriated to himself the Home Department; another
the Colonies; and a third, whom we all regarded as a future
Talleyrand, (or a de Retz at least,) had devoted himself to the
special study of Sir Robert Peel, and knew, by the way in which that
profound and inscrutable statesman threw open his coat, every thought
that was passing in his breast! Whether lawyers or officials, they all
had a great idea of themselves--high notions of what they were to
_be_, rather than what they were to _do_, some day. As the king of
modern fine gentlemen said of himself, in paraphrase of Voltaire,
"they had letters in their pockets addressed to Posterity,--which the
chances were, however, that they might forget to deliver." Something
"priggish" there might be about some of them; but, on the whole, they
were far more interesting than mere idle men of pleasure. There was
about them, as features of a general family likeness, a redundant
activity of life--a gay exuberance of ambition--a light-hearted
earnestness when at work--a schoolboy's enjoyment of the hours of
play.

A great contrast to these young men was Sir Sedley Beaudesert, who was
pointedly kind to me, and whose bachelor's house was always open to me
after noon; Sir Sedley was visible to no one, but his valet, before
that hour. A perfect bachelor's house it was, too--with its windows
opening on the Park, and sofas niched into the windows, on which you
might loll at your ease, like the philosopher in Lucretius,--

    "Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre,
    Errare,"--

And see the gay crowds ride to and fro Rotten Row--without the fatigue
of joining them, especially if the wind was in the east.

There was no affectation of costliness, or what the French and the
upholsterers call _recherche_, about the rooms, but a wonderful
accumulation of comfort. Every patent chair that proffered a variety
in the art of lounging, found its place there; and near every chair a
little table, on which you might deposit your book or your coffee-cup,
without the trouble of moving more than your hand. In winter, nothing
warmer than the quilted curtains and Axminster carpets can be
conceived. In summer, nothing airier and cooler than the muslin
draperies and the Indian mattings. And I defy a man to know to what
perfection dinner may be brought, unless he had dined with Sir Sedley
Beaudesert. Certainly, if that distinguished personage had but been an
egotist, he had been the happiest of men. But, unfortunately for him,
he was singularly amiable and kind-hearted. He had the _bonne
digestion_, but not the other requisite for worldly felicity--the
_mauvais coeur_. He felt a sincere pity for every one else who lived
in rooms without patent chairs and little coffee tables--whose windows
did not look on the Park, with sofas niched into their recesses. As
Henry IV. wished every man to have his _pot au feu_, so Sir Sedley
Beaudesert, if he could have had his way, would have every man served
with an early cucumber for his fish, and a caraffe of iced water by
the side of his bread and cheese. He thus evinced on politics a naive
simplicity, which delightfully contrasted his acuteness on matters of
taste. I remember his saying, in a discussion on the Beer Bill, "The
poor ought not to be allowed to drink beer, it is so particularly
rheumatic! The best drink in hard work is dry champagne--(not
_mousseux_.) I found that out when I used to shoot on the moors."

Indolent as Sir Sedley was, he had contrived to open an extraordinary
number of drains on his great wealth.

First, as a landed proprietor, there was no end to applications from
distressed farmers, aged poor, benefit societies, and poachers he had
thrown out of employment by giving up his preserves to please his
tenants.

Next, as a man of pleasure, the whole race of womankind had legitimate
demands on him. From a distressed duchess, whose picture lay _perdu_
under a secret spring of his snuff-box, to a decayed laundress, to
whom he might have paid a compliment on the perfect involutions of a
frill, it was quite sufficient to be a daughter of Eve to establish a
just claim on Sir Sedley's inheritance from Adam.

Again, as an amateur of art, and a respectful servant of every muse,
all whom the public had failed to patronise--painter, actor, poet,
musician--turned, like dying sun-flowers to the sun, towards the
pitying smile of Sir Sedley Beaudesert. Add to these the general
miscellaneous multitude, who 'had heard of Sir Sedley's high character
for benevolence,' and one may well suppose what a very costly
reputation he had set up. In fact, though Sir Sedley could not spend
on what might fairly be called "himself," a fifth part of his princely
income, I have no doubt that he found it difficult to make both ends
meet at the close of the year. That he did so, he owed perhaps to two
rules which his philosophy had peremptorily adopted. He never made
debts, and he never gambled. For both these admirable aberrations from
the ordinary routine of fine gentlemen, I believe he was indebted to
the softness of his disposition. He had a great compassion for a
wretch who was dunned. "Poor fellow!" he would say, "it must be so
painful to him to pass his life in saying No." So little did he know
about that class of promisers,--as if a man dunned ever said No! As
Beau Brummell, when asked if he was fond of vegetables, owned that he
had once eaten a pea, so Sir Sedley Beaudesert owned that he had once
played high at piquet. "I was so unlucky as to win," said he,
referring to that indiscretion, "and I shall never forget the anguish
on the face of the man who paid me. Unless I could always lose, it
would be a perfect purgatory to play."

Now nothing could be more different in their kinds of benevolence than
Sir Sedley and Mr Trevanion. Mr Trevanion had a great contempt for
individual charity. He rarely put his hand into his purse--he drew a
great cheque on his bankers. Was a congregation without a church, or a
village without a school, or a river without a bridge, Mr Trevanion
set to work on calculations, found out the exact sum required by an
algebraic _x-y_, and paid it as he would have paid his butcher. It
must be owned that the distress of a man, whom he allowed to be
deserving, did not appeal to him in vain. But it is astonishing how
little he spent in that way. For it was hard, indeed, to convince Mr
Trevanion that a deserving man ever was in such distress as to want
charity.

That Trevanion, nevertheless, did infinitely more real good than Sir
Sedley, I believe; but he did it as a mental operation--by no means as
an impulse from the heart. I am sorry to say that the main difference
was this,--distress always seemed to accumulate round Sir Sedley, and
vanish from the presence of Trevanion. Where the last came, with his
busy, active, searching mind, energy woke, improvement sprang up.
Where the first came, with his warm kind heart, a kind of torpor
spread under its rays; people lay down and basked in the liberal
sunshine. Nature in one broke forth like a brisk sturdy winter, in the
other like a lazy Italian summer. Winter is an excellent invigorator,
no doubt, but we all love summer better.

Now, it is a proof how loveable Sir Sedley was, that I loved him, and
yet was jealous of him. Of all the satellites round my fair Cynthia,
Fanny Trevanion, I dreaded most this amiable luminary. It was in vain
for me to say with the insolence of youth that Sir Sedley Beaudesert
was of the same age as Fanny's father;--to see them together he might
have passed for Trevanion's son. No one amongst the younger generation
was half so handsome as Sir Sedley Beaudesert. He might be eclipsed at
first sight by the showy effect of more redundant locks and more
brilliant bloom. But he had but to speak, to smile, in order to throw
a whole cohort of dandies into the shade. It was the expression of his
countenance that was so bewitching; there was something so kindly in
its easy candour, its benign good-nature. And he understood women so
well! He flattered their foibles so insensibly; he commanded their
affection with so gracious a dignity. Above all, what with his
accomplishments, his peculiar reputation, his long celibacy, and the
soft melancholy of his sentiments, he always contrived to _interest_
them. There was not a charming woman by whom this charming man did not
seem just on the point of being caught! It was like the sight of a
splendid trout in a transparent stream, sailing pensively to and fro
your fly, in a will and a won't sort of way. Such a trout! it would be
a thousand pities to leave him, when evidently so well disposed! That
trout, fair maid, or gentle widow, would have kept you--whipping the
stream and dragging the fly--from morn to dewy eve. Certainly I don't
wish worse to my bitterest foe of five-and-twenty than such a rival as
Sedley Beaudesert at seven-and-forty.

Fanny, indeed, perplexed me horribly. Sometimes I fancied she liked me;
but the fancy scarce thrilled me with delight before it vanished in the
frost of a careless look, or the cold beam of a sarcastic laugh.
Spoiled darling of the world as she was, she seemed so innocent in her
exuberant happiness, that one forgot all her faults in that atmosphere
of joy which she diffused around her. And despite her pretty insolence,
she had so kind a woman's heart below the surface! When she once saw
that she had pained you, she was so soft, so winning, so humble, till
she had healed the wound. But _then_, if she saw she had pleased you
too much, the little witch was never easy till she had plagued you
again. As heiress to so rich a father, or rather, perhaps, mother, (for
the fortune came from Lady Ellinor,) she was naturally surrounded with
admirers not wholly disinterested. She did right to plague _them_--but
ME! Poor boy that I was, why should I seem more disinterested than
others! how should she perceive all that lay hid in my young deep
heart? Was I not in all worldly pretensions the least worthy of her
suitors, and might I not seem, therefore, the most mercenary? I who
never thought of her fortune, or, if that thought did come across me,
it was to make me start and turn pale! And then it vanished at her
first glance, as a ghost from the dawn. How hard it is to convince
youth, that sees all the world of the future before it, and covers that
future with golden palaces, of the inequalities of life! In my
fantastic and sublime romance, I looked out into that Great Beyond, saw
myself orator, statesman, minister, ambassador--Heaven knows what;
laying laurels, which I mistook for rent-rolls, at Fanny's feet.

Whatever Fanny might have discovered as to the state of my heart, it
seemed an abyss not worth prying into by either Trevanion or Lady
Ellinor. The first, indeed, as may be supposed, was too busy to think
of such trifles. And Lady Ellinor treated me as a mere boy--almost
like a boy of her own, she was so kind to me. But she did not notice
much the things that lay immediately around her. In brilliant
conversation with poets, wits, and statesmen--in sympathy with the
toils of her husband--or proud schemes for his aggrandisement, Lady
Ellinor lived a life of excitement. Those large eager shining eyes of
hers, bright with some feverish discontent, looked far abroad as if
for new worlds to conquer--the world at her feet escaped from her
vision. She loved her daughter, she was proud of her, trusted in her
with a superb repose--she did not watch over her. Lady Ellinor stood
alone on a mountain, and amidst a cloud.


CHAPTER XXVII.

One day the Trevanions had all gone into the country, on a visit to a
retired minister, distantly related to Lady Ellinor, and who was one
of the few persons Trevanion himself condescended to consult. I had
almost a holiday. I went to call on Sir Sedley Beaudesert. I had
always longed to sound him on one subject, and had never dared. This
time I resolved to pluck up courage.

"Ah, my young friend!" said he, rising from the contemplation of a
villanous picture by a young artist, which he had just benevolently
purchased, "I was thinking of you this morning--Wait a moment,
Summers, (this to the valet.) Be so good as to take this picture, let
it be packed up, and go down into the country. It is a sort of
picture," he added, turning to me, "that requires a large house. I
have an old gallery with little casements that let in no light. It is
astonishing how convenient I have found it!" As soon as the picture
was gone, Sir Sedley drew a long breath as if relieved; and resumed
more gaily--

"Yes, I was thinking of you; and if you will forgive any interference
in your affairs--from your father's old friend--I should be greatly
honoured by your permission to ask Trevanion what he supposes is to be
the ultimate benefit of the horrible labours he inflicts upon you--"

"But, my dear Sir Sedley, I like the labours; I am perfectly
contented--"

"Not to remain always secretary to one who, if there were no business
to be done among men, would set about teaching the ants to build hills
upon better architectural principles! My dear sir, Trevanion is an
awful man, a stupendous man, one _catches fatigue_ if one is in the
same room with him three minutes! At your age, an age that ought to be
so happy," continued Sir Sedley, with a compassion perfectly angelic,
"it is sad to see so little enjoyment!"

"But, Sir Sedley, I assure you that you are mistaken. I thoroughly
enjoy myself; and have I not heard even you confess that one may be
idle and not happy?"

"I did not confess that till I was on the wrong side of forty," said
Sir Sedley, with a slight shade on his brow.

"Nobody would ever think you were on the wrong side of forty!" said I
with artful flattery, winding into my subject. "Miss Trevanion for
instance--"

I paused--Sir Sedley, looked hard at me, from his bright dark-blue
eyes. "Well, Miss Trevanion for instance?--"

"Miss Trevanion, who has all the best-looking fellows in London round
her, evidently prefers you to any of them." I said this with a great
gulp. I was obstinately bent on plumbing the depth of my own fears.

Sir Sedley rose; he laid his hand kindly on mine and said, "Do not let
Fanny Trevanion torment you even more than her father does!--"

"I don't understand you, Sir Sedley!"

"But if I understand you, that is more to the purpose. A girl like
Miss Trevanion is cruel till she discovers she has a heart. It is not
safe to risk one's own with any woman till she has ceased to be a
coquette. My dear young friend, if you took life less in earnest, I
should spare you the pain of these hints. Some men sow flowers, some
plant trees--you are planting a tree under which you will soon find
that no flower will grow. Well and good, if the tree could last to
bear fruit and give shade; but beware lest you have to tear it up one
day or other, for then--what then? why, you will find your whole life
plucked away with its roots!"

Sir Sedley said these last words with so serious an emphasis, that I
was startled from the confusion I had felt at the former part of his
address. He paused long, tapped his snuff-box, inhaled a pinch slowly,
and continued with his more accustomed sprightliness.

"Go as much as you can into the world--again I say 'enjoy yourself.'
And again I ask, what is all this labour to do for you? On some men,
far less eminent than Trevanion, it would impose a duty to aid you in
a practical career, to secure you a public employment--not so on him.
He would not mortgage an inch of his independence by asking a favour
from a minister. He so thinks occupation the delight of life, that he
occupies you out of pure affection. He does not trouble his head about
your future. He supposes your father will provide for _that_, and does
not consider that meanwhile your work leads to nothing! Think over all
this. I have now bored you enough."

I was bewildered--I was dumb: these practical men of the world, how
they take us by surprise! Here had I come to _sound_ Sir Sedley, and
here was I plumbed, gauged, measured, turned inside out, without
having got an inch beyond the surface of that smiling, _debonnair_,
unruffled ease. Yet with his invariable delicacy, in spite of all this
horrible frankness, Sir Sedley had not said a word to wound what he
might think the more sensitive part of my _amour propre_--not a word
as to the inadequacy of my pretensions to think seriously of Fanny
Trevanion. Had we been the Celadon and Chloe of a country village, he
could not have regarded us as more equal, so far as the world went.
And for the rest, he rather insinuated that poor Fanny, the great
heiress, was not worthy of me, than that I was not worthy of Fanny.

I felt that there was no wisdom in stammering and blushing out denials
and equivocations; so I stretched my hand to Sir Sedley, took up my
hat,--and went. Instinctively I bent my way to my father's house. I
had not been there for many days. Not only had I had a great deal to
do in the way of business, but I am ashamed to say that pleasure
itself had so entangled my leisure hours, and Miss Trevanion
especially so absorbed them, that, without even uneasy foreboding, I
had left my father fluttering his wings more feebly and feebly in the
web of Uncle Jack. When I arrived in Russell Street, I found the fly
and the spider cheek by jowl together. Uncle Jack sprang up at my
entrance, and cried, "Congratulate your father, congratulate _him_.
No; congratulate the world!"

"What, Uncle!" said I, with a dismal effort at sympathising
liveliness, "is the 'Literary Times' launched at last?"

"Oh, that is all settled--settled long since. Here's a specimen of the
type we have chosen for the leaders." And Uncle Jack, whose pocket was
never without a wet sheet of some kind or other, drew forth a steaming
papyral monster, which in point of size was to the political "Times"
as a mammoth may be to an elephant. "That is all settled. We are only
preparing our contributors, and shall put out our programme next week
or the week after. No, Pisistratus, I mean the Great Work."

"My dear father, I am so glad. What! it is really sold then?"

"Hum!" said my father.

"Sold!" burst forth Uncle Jack. "Sold--no, sir, we would not sell it!
No; if all the booksellers fell down on their knees to us, as they
will some day, that book should not be sold! Sir, that book is a
revolution--it is an era--it is the emancipator of genius from
mercenary thraldom;--THAT BOOK!--"

I looked inquiringly from uncle to father, and mentally retracted my
congratulations. Then Mr Caxton, slightly blushing, and shyly rubbing
his spectacles, said, "You see, Pisistratus, that though poor Jack has
devoted uncommon pains to induce the publishers to recognise the merit
he has discovered in the 'History of Human Error,' he has failed to do
so."

"Not a bit of it; they all acknowledge its miraculous learning--its--"

"Very true; but they don't think it will sell, and therefore most
selfishly refuse to buy it. One bookseller, indeed, offered to treat
for it if I would leave out all about the Hottentots and Caffres, the
Greek philosophers and Egyptian priests, and, confining myself solely
to polite society, entitle the work 'Anecdotes of the Courts of
Europe, ancient and modern.'"

"The wretch!" groaned Uncle Jack.

"Another thought it might be cut up into little essays, leaving out
the quotations, entitled 'Men and Manners.'"

"A third was kind enough to observe, that though this particular work
was quite unsaleable, yet as I appeared to have some historical
information, he should be happy to undertake a historical romance from
'my graphic pen'--that was the phrase, was it not, Jack?"

Jack was too full to speak. --"Provided I would introduce a proper
love-plot, and make it into three volumes post octavo, twenty-three
lines in a page, neither more nor less. One honest fellow at last was
found, who seemed to me a very respectable and indeed enterprising
person. And after going through a list of calculations, which showed
that no possible profit could arise, he generously offered to give me
half of those no-profits, provided I would guarantee half the very
visible expenses. I was just meditating the prudence of accepting this
proposal, when your uncle was seized with a sublime idea, which has
whisked up my book in a whirlwind of expectation."

"And that idea?" said I despondently.

"That idea," quoth Uncle Jack, recovering himself, "is simply and
shortly this. From time immemorial authors have been the prey of the
publishers. Sir, authors have lived in garrets, nay, have been choked
in the street by an unexpected crumb of bread, like the man who wrote
the play, poor fellow!"

"Otway," said my father. "The story is not true--no matter."

"Milton, sir, as every body knows, sold Paradise Lost for ten
pounds--ten pounds, sir! In short, instances of a like nature are too
numerous to quote. But the booksellers, sir,--they are leviathans--they
roll in seas of gold. They subsist upon authors as vampires upon little
children. But at last endurance has reached its limit--the fiat has
gone forth--the tocsin of liberty has resounded--authors have burst
their fetters. And we have just inaugurated the institution of 'THE
GRAND ANTI-PUBLISHER CONFEDERATE AUTHORS' SOCIETY,' by which,
Pisistratus--by which, mark you, every author is to be his own
publisher; that is, every author who joins the Society. No more
submission of immortal works to mercenary calculators, to sordid
tastes--no more hard bargains and broken hearts!--no more crumbs of
bread choking great tragic poets in the streets--no more Paradises Lost
sold at L10 a-piece! The author brings his book to a select committee
appointed for the purpose; men of delicacy, education, and
refinement--authors themselves--they read it, the Society publish; and
after a modest commission towards the funds of the Society, the
treasurer hands over the profits to the author."

"So that in fact, Uncle, every author who can't find a publisher any
where else, will of course come to the Society. The fraternity will be
numerous!"

"It will indeed."

"And the speculation--ruinous?"

"Ruinous, why?"

"Because in all mercantile negotiations it is ruinous to invest
capital in supplies which fail of demand. You undertake to publish
books that booksellers will not publish. Why? because booksellers
can't sell them! It is just probable that you'll not sell them any
better than the booksellers. Ergo, the more your business the larger
your deficit. And the more numerous your society, the more disastrous
your condition. Q.E.D."

"Pooh! The select committee will decide what books are to be
published."

"Then where the deuce is the advantage to the authors? I would as lief
submit my work to a publisher as I would to a select committee of
authors. At all events, the publisher is not my rival; and I suspect
he is the best judge, after all, of a book--as an accoucheur ought to
be of a baby."

"Upon my word, nephew, you pay a bad compliment to your father's great
work, which the booksellers will have nothing to do with."

That was artfully said, and I was posed; when Mr Caxton observed, with
an apologetic smile--

"The fact is, my dear Pisistratus, that I want my book published
without diminishing the little fortune I keep for you some day. Uncle
Jack starts a society so to publish it.--Health and long life to Uncle
Jack's society! One can't look a gift-horse in the mouth."

Here my mother entered, rosy from a shopping expedition with Mrs
Primmins; and in her joy at hearing that I could stay dinner, all
else was forgotten. By a wonder, which I did not regret, Uncle Jack
really was engaged to dine out. He had other irons in the fire besides
the "Literary Times" and the "Confederate Authors' Society;" he was
deep in a scheme for making house-tops of felt, (which, under other
hands, has, I believe, since succeeded;) and he had found a rich man
(I suppose a hatter) who seemed well inclined to the project, and had
actually asked him to dine and expound his views!


CHAPTER XXVIII.

Here we three are seated round the open window--after dinner--familiar
as in the old happy time--and my mother is talking low that she may
not disturb my father, who seems in thought.----

Cr-cr-crrr-cr-cr! I feel it--I have it.--Where! What! Where!
Knock it down--brush it off! For Heaven's sake, see to
it!--Crrrr-crrrrr--there--here--in my hair--in my sleeve--in my
ear.--Cr-cr.

I say solemnly, and on the word of a Christian, that, as I sate down
to begin this chapter, being somewhat in a brown study, the pen
insensibly slipt from my hand, and, leaning back in my chair, I fell
to gazing into the fire. It is the end of June, and a remarkably cold
evening--even for that time of year. And while I was so gazing, I felt
something crawling, just by the nape of the neck, ma'am. Instinctively
and mechanically, and still musing, I put my hand there, and drew
forth--What? That _what_ it is which perplexes me. It was a thing--a
dark thing--a much bigger thing than I had expected. And the sight
took me so by surprise that I gave my hand a violent shake, and the
thing went--where I know not. The what and the where are the knotty
points in the whole question! No sooner had it gone than I was seized
with repentance not to have examined it more closely--not to have
ascertained what the creature was. It might have been an earwig--a
very large motherly earwig--an earwig far gone in that way in which
earwigs wish to be who love their lords. I have a profound horror of
earwigs--I firmly believe that they do get into the ear. That is a
subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon philosophical
grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me by Mrs
Primmins--How a lady for many years suffered under the most
excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, "physicians were
in vain;" how she died; how her head was opened, and how such a nest
of earwigs--ma'am--such a nest!--Earwigs are the prolifickest things,
and so fond of their offspring! They sit on their eggs like hens--and
the young, as soon as they are born, creep under them for
protection--quite touchingly! Imagine such an establishment
domesticated at one's tympanum!

But the creature was certainly larger than an earwig. It might have
been one of that genus in the family of _Forficulidae_, called
_Labidoura_--monsters whose antennae have thirty joints! There is a
species of this creature in England, but, to the great grief of
naturalists, and to the great honour of Providence, very rarely
found, infinitely larger than the common earwig or _Forficulida
auriculana_. Could it have been an early hornet? It had certainly a
black head, and great feelers. I have a greater horror of hornets,
if possible, than I have of earwigs. Two hornets will kill a man,
and three a carriage-horse sixteen hands high. However, the
creature was gone.--Yes, but where? Where had I so rashly thrown
it? It might have got into a fold of my dressing-gown--or into my
slippers--or, in short, any where, in the various recesses for
earwigs and hornets which a gentleman's habiliments afford. I
satisfy myself at last, as far as I can, seeing that I am not alone
in the room--that it is not upon me. I look upon the carpet--the
rug--the chair--under the fender. It is _non inventus_. I
barbarously hope it is frizzing behind that great black coal in the
grate. I pluck up courage--I prudently remove, to the other end of
the room. I take up my pen--I begin my chapter--very nicely, too, I
think upon the whole. I am just getting into my subject,
when--cr-cr-cr-cr-cr-crawl--crawl--crawl--creep--creep--creep.
Exactly, my dear ma'am, in the same place it was before! Oh, by the
Powers! I forgot all my scientific regrets at not having
scrutinised its genus before, whether _Forficulida_ or _Labidoura_.
I made a desperate lunge with both hands, something between thrust
and cut, ma'am. The beast is gone. Yes, but again where? I say that
that where is a very horrible question. Having come twice, in spite
of all my precautions--and exactly on the same spot, too--it shows
a confirmed disposition to habituate itself to its quarters--to
effect a parochial settlement upon me; there is something awful and
preternatural in it. I assure you that there is not a part of me
that has not gone cr-cr-cr!--that has not crept, crawled, and
forficulated ever since; and I just put it to you what sort of a
chapter I can make after such a----My good little girl, will you
just take the candle, and look carefully under the table?--that's a
dear! Yes, my love, very black indeed, with two horns, and inclined
to be corpulent. Gentlemen and ladies who have cultivated an
acquaintance with the Phoenician language, are aware that Belzebub,
examined etymologically and entomologically, is nothing more nor
less than Baal-zebub--"the Jupiter-Fly"--an emblem of the
Destroying Attribute, which attribute, indeed, is found in all the
insect tribes, more or less. Wherefore, as Mr Payne Knight, in his
_Inquiry into Symbolical Languages_, hath observed--the Egyptian
priests shaved their whole bodies, even to their eyebrows, lest
unaware they should harbour any of the minor Zebubs of the great
Baal. If I were the least bit more persuaded that that black cr-cr
were about me still, and that the sacrifice of my eyebrows would
deprive him of shelter, by the souls of the Ptolemies! I
would,--and I will, too. Ring the bell, my little dear!
John,--my--my cigar-box! There is not a cr in the world that can
abide the fumes of the Havannah! Pshaw, sir, I am not the only man
who lets his first thoughts upon cold steel end, like this chapter,
in--Pff--pff--pff--!


CHAPTER XXIX.

Every thing in this world is of use, even a black thing crawling over
the nape of one's neck! Grim unknown, I shall make of thee--a simile!

I think, ma'am, you will allow that if an incident such as I have
described had befallen yourself, and you had a proper and ladylike
horror of earwigs (however motherly and fond of their offspring,) and
also of early hornets, and indeed of all unknown things of the insect
tribe with black heads and two great horns, or feelers or forceps,
just by your ear--I think, ma'am, you will allow that you would find
it difficult to settle back to your former placidity of mood and
innocent stitch-work. You would feel a something that grated on your
nerves--and cr'd--cr'd "all over you like," as the children say. And
the worst is, that you would be ashamed to say it. You would feel
obliged to look pleased and join in the conversation, and not fidget
too much, nor always be shaking your flounces, and looking into a dark
corner of your apron. Thus it is with many other things in life
besides black insects. One has a secret care--an abstraction--a
something between the memory and the feeling, of a dark crawling cr,
which one has never dared to analyse. So I sate by my mother, trying
to smile and talk as in the old time,--but longing to move about and
look around, and escape to my own solitude, and take the clothes off
my mind, and see what it was that had so troubled and terrified
me--for trouble and terror were upon me. And my mother, who was always
(heaven bless her!) inquisitive enough in all that concerned her
darling Anachronism, was especially inquisitive that evening. She made
me say where I had been, and what I had done, and how I had spent my
time,--and Fanny Trevanion, (whom she had seen, by the way, three or
four times, and whom she thought the prettiest person in the
world)--oh, she must know exactly what I thought of Fanny Trevanion!

And all this while my father seemed in thought; and so, with my arm
over my mother's chair, and my hand in hers--I answered my mother's
questions, sometimes by a stammer, sometimes by a violent effort at
volubility, when, at some interrogatory that went tingling right to my
heart, I turned uneasily, and there were my father's eyes fixed on
mine. Fixed, as they had been--when, and none knew why, I pined and
languished, and my father said "he must go to school." Fixed, with
quiet watchful tenderness. Ah no!--his thought had not been on the
great work--he had been deep in the pages of that less worthy one for
which he had yet more an author's paternal care. I met those eyes, and
yearned to throw myself on his heart--and tell him all. Tell him what?
Ma'am, I no more knew what to tell him, than I know what that black
thing was which has so worried me all this blessed evening!

"Pisistratus," said my father softly, "I fear you have forgotten the
saffron bag."

"No, indeed, sir," said I smiling.

"He," resumed my father--"he who wears the saffron bag has more
cheerful, settled spirits than you seem to have, my poor boy."

"My dear Austin, his spirits are very good, I think," said my mother
anxiously.

My father shook his head--then he took two or three turns about the
room.

"Shall I ring for candles, sir, it is getting dark: you will wish to
read?"

"No, Pisistratus, it is you who shall read, and this hour of twilight
best suits the book I am about to open to you."

So saying, he drew a chair between me and my mother, and seated
himself gravely, looking down a long time in silence--then turning his
eyes to each of us alternately.

"My dear wife," said he at length, almost solemnly, "I am going to
speak of myself as I was before I knew you."

Even in the twilight I saw that my mother's countenance changed.

"You have respected my secrets, Katherine, tenderly--honestly. Now the
time is come when I can tell them to you and to our son."


CHAPTER XXX.

MY FATHER'S FIRST LOVE.

"I lost my mother early; my father, (a good man, but who was so
indolent that he rarely stirred from his chair, and who often passed
whole days without speaking, like an Indian dervish,) left Roland and
myself to educate ourselves much according to our own tastes. Roland
shot, and hunted, and fished,--read all the poetry and books of
chivalry to be found in my father's collection, which was rich in such
matters, and made a great many copies of the old pedigree;--the only
thing in which my father ever evinced much of the vital principle.
Early in life I conceived a passion for graver studies, and by good
luck I found a tutor in Mr Tibbets, who, but for his modesty, Kitty,
would have rivalled Porson. He was a second Budaeus for industry, and,
by the way, he said exactly the same thing that Budaeus did, viz. 'that
the only lost day in his life was that in which he was married; for on
that day he had only had six hours for reading!' Under such a master I
could not fail to be a scholar. I came from the university with such
distinction as led me to look sanguinely on my career in the world.

"I returned to my father's quiet rectory to pause and look about me,
and consider what path I should take to fame. The rectory was just at
the foot of the hill, on the brow of which were the ruins of the
castle Roland has since purchased. And though I did not feel for the
ruins the same romantic veneration as my dear brother, (for my
day-dreams were more coloured by classic than feudal recollections,) I
yet loved to climb the hill, book in hand, and build my castles in
the air amidst the wrecks of that which time had shattered on the
earth.

"One day, entering the old weed-grown court, I saw a lady, seated on
my favourite spot, sketching the ruins. The lady was young--more
beautiful than any woman I had yet seen, at least to my eyes. In a
word, I was fascinated, and, as the trite phrase goes, 'spell-bound.'
I seated myself at a little distance, and contemplated her without
desiring to speak. By-and-by, from another part of the ruins, which
were then uninhabited, came a tall, imposing, elderly gentleman, with
a benignant aspect; and a little dog. The dog ran up to me, barking.
This drew the attention of both lady and gentleman to me. The
gentleman approached, called off the dog, and apologised with much
politeness. Surveying me somewhat curiously, he then began to ask
questions about the old place and the family it had belonged to, with
the name and antecedents of which he was well acquainted. By degrees
it came out that I was the descendant of that family, and the younger
son of the humble rector who was now its representative. The gentleman
then introduced himself to me as the Earl of Rainsforth, the principal
proprietor in the neighbourhood, but who had so rarely visited the
county during my childhood and earlier youth, that I had never before
seen him. His only son, however, a young man of great promise, had
been at the same college with me in my first year at the university.
The young lord was a reading man and a scholar; and we had become
slightly acquainted when he left for his travels.

"Now, on hearing my name, Lord Rainsforth took my hand cordially, and
leading me to his daughter, said, 'Think, Ellinor, how fortunate; this
is the Mr Caxton whom your brother so often spoke of.'

"In short, my dear Pisistratus, the ice was broken, the acquaintance
made, and Lord Rainsforth, saying he was come to atone for his long
absence from the county, and to reside at Compton the greater part of
the year, pressed me to visit him. I did so. Lord Rainsforth's liking
to me increased: I went there often."

My father paused, and seeing my mother had fixed her eyes upon him
with a sort of mournful earnestness, and had pressed her hands very
tightly together, he bent down and kissed her forehead.

"There is no cause, my child!" said he. It is the only time I ever
heard him call my mother by that paternal name. But then, I never
heard him before so grave and solemn--not a quotation, too--it was
incredible: it was not my father speaking--it was another man. "Yes, I
went there often. Lord Rainsforth was a remarkable person. Shyness,
that was wholly without pride, (which is rare,) and a love for quiet
literary pursuits, had prevented his taking that personal part in
public life for which he was richly qualified; but his reputation for
sense and honour, and his personal popularity, had given him no
inconsiderable influence even, I believe, in the formation of
cabinets, and he had once been prevailed upon to fill a high
diplomatic situation abroad, in which I have no doubt that he was as
miserable as a good man can be under any infliction. He was now
pleased to retire from the world, and look at it through the loopholes
of retreat. Lord Rainsforth had a great respect for talent, and a warm
interest in such of the young as seemed to him to possess it. By
talent, indeed, his family had risen, and were strikingly
characterised. His ancestor, the first peer, had been a distinguished
lawyer; his father had been celebrated for scientific attainments; his
children, Ellinor and Lord Pendarvis, were highly accomplished. Thus,
the family identified themselves with the aristocracy of intellect,
and seemed unconscious of their claims to the lower aristocracy of
rank. You must bear this in mind throughout my story.

"Lady Ellinor shared her father's tastes and habits of thought--(she
was not then an heiress.) Lord Rainsforth talked to me of my career.
It was a time when the French Revolution had made statesmen look round
with some anxiety to strengthen the existing order of things, by
alliance with all in the rising generation who evinced such ability as
might influence their contemporaries.

"University distinction is, or was formerly, among the popular
passports to public life. By degrees Lord Rainsforth liked me so well,
as to suggest to me a seat in the House of Commons. A member of
Parliament might rise to any thing, and Lord Rainsforth had sufficient
influence to effect my return. Dazzling prospect this to a young
scholar fresh from Thucydides, and with Demosthenes fresh at his
tongue's end. My dear boy, I was not then, you see, quite what I am
now; in a word, I loved Ellinor Compton, and therefore I was
ambitious. You know how ambitious she is still. But I could not mould
my ambition to hers. I could not contemplate entering the senate of my
country as a dependant on a party or a patron--as a man who must make
his fortune there--as a man who, in every vote, must consider how much
nearer he advanced himself to emolument. I was not even certain that
Lord Rainsforth's views on politics were the same as mine would be.
How could the politics of an experienced man of the world be those of
an ardent young student? But had they been identical, I felt that I
could not so creep into equality with a patron's daughter. No! I was
ready to abandon my own more scholastic predilections--to strain every
energy at the bar--to carve, or force my own way to fortune--and, if I
arrived at independence, then--what then? why, the right to speak of
love, and aim at power. This was not the view of Ellinor Compton. The
law seemed to her a tedious, needless drudgery: there was nothing in
it to captivate her imagination. She listened to me with that charm
which she yet retains, and by which she seems to identify herself with
those who speak to her. She would turn to me with a pleading look when
her father dilated on the brilliant prospects of a parliamentary
success; for he (not having gained it, yet having lived with those who
had,) overvalued it, and seemed ever to wish to enjoy it through some
other. But when I, in turn, spoke of independence, of the bar,
Ellinor's face grew overcast. The world--the world was with her, and
the ambition of the world, which is always for power or effect! A part
of the house lay exposed to the east wind, 'Plant half way down the
hill,' said I one day. 'Plant?' cried Lady Emily--'it will be twenty
years before the trees grow up. No, my dear father, build a wall, and
cover it with creepers!' That was an illustration of her whole
character. She could not wait till trees had time to grow up; a dead
wall would be so much more quickly thrown up, and parasite creepers
would give it a prettier effect. Nevertheless, she was a grand and
noble creature. And I--in love! Not so discouraged as you may suppose;
for Lord Rainsforth often hinted encouragement, which even I could
scarcely misconstrue. Not caring for rank, and not wishing for fortune
beyond competence for his daughter, he saw in me all he required,--a
gentleman of ancient birth, and one in whom his own active mind could
prosecute that kind of mental ambition which overflowed in him, and
yet had never had its vent. And Ellinor!--heaven forbid I should say
she loved me,--but something made me think she could do so. Under
these notions, suppressing all my hopes, I made a bold effort to
master the influences round me, and to adopt that career I thought
worthiest of us all. I went to London to read for the bar."

"The bar! is it possible?" cried I. My father smiled sadly.

"Every thing seemed possible to me then. I read some months. I began
to see my way even in that short time; began to comprehend what would
be the difficulties before me, and to feel there was that within me
which could master them. I took a holiday and returned to Cumberland.
I found Roland there on my return. Always of a roving adventurous
temper, though he had not then entered the army, he had, for more than
two years, been wandering over the Continent on foot. It was a young
knight-errant whom I embraced, and who overwhelmed me with reproaches
that I should be reading for the law. There had never been a lawyer in
the family! It was about that time, I think, that I petrified him with
the discovery of the printer! I knew not exactly wherefore, whether
from jealousy, fear, foreboding--but it certainly _was_ a pain that
seized me--when I learned from Roland that he had become intimate at
Compton Hall. Roland and Lord Rainsforth had met at the house of a
neighbouring gentleman, and Lord Rainsforth had welcomed his
acquaintance, at first perhaps for my sake, afterwards for his own.

"I could not for the life of me," continued my father, "ask Roland if
he admired Ellinor; but, when I found that he did not put that
question to me, I trembled!

"We went to Compton together, speaking little by the way. We stayed
there some days."

My father here thrust his hand into his waistcoat--all men have their
little ways, which denote much; and when my father thrust his hand
into his waistcoat, it was always a sign of some mental effort--he was
going to prove, or to argue, to moralise, or to preach. Therefore,
though I was listening before with all my ears, I believe I had,
speaking magnetically and mesmerically, an extra pair of ears, a new
sense supplied to me, when my father put his hand into his waistcoat.


CHAPTER XXXI.

WHEREIN MY FATHER CONTINUES HIS STORY.

"There is not a mystical creation, type, symbol, or poetical invention
for meanings abstruse, recondite, and incomprehensible, which is not
represented by the female gender," said my father, having his hand
quite buried in his waistcoat. "There is the Sphynx, and the Enigma,
and the Chimera, and Isis, whose veil no man had ever lifted: they are
all ladies, Kitty, every one of them! And so was Persephone, who must
be always either in heaven or hell--and Hecate, who was one thing by
night and another by day. The Sibyls were females; and so were the
Gorgons, the Harpies, the Furies, the Fates, and the Teutonic Valkyrs,
Nornies, and Hela herself: in short, all representations of ideas,
obscure, inscrutable, and portentous, are nouns feminine."

Heaven bless my father! Augustine Caxton was himself again! I began to
fear that the story had slipped away from him, lost in that labyrinth
of learning. But, luckily, as he paused for breath, his look fell on
those limpid blue eyes of my mother's, and that honest open brow of
hers, which had certainly nothing in common with Sphynges, Chimeras,
Fates, Furies, or Valkyrs; and, whether his heart smote him, or his
reason made him own that he had fallen into a very disingenuous and
unsound train of assertion, I know not, but his front relaxed, and
with a smile he resumed--"Ellinor was the last person in the world to
deceive any one willingly. Did she deceive me and Roland that we both,
though not conceited men, fancied that, if we had dared to speak
openly of love, we had not so dared in vain? or do you think, Kitty,
that a woman really can love (not much, perhaps, but somewhat) two or
three, or half a dozen at a time?"

"Impossible," cried my mother. "And as for this Lady Ellinor, I am
shocked at her--I don't know what to call it!"

"Nor I either, my dear!" said my father, slowly taking his hand from
his waistcoat, as if the effort were too much for him, and the problem
were insoluble. "But this, begging your pardon, I do think, that
before a young woman does really, truly, and cordially centre her
affections on one object, she suffers fancy, imagination, the desire
of power, curiosity, or heaven knows what, to simulate, even to her
own mind, pale reflexions of the luminary not yet risen--parhelia that
precede the sun. Don't judge of Roland as you see him now,
Pisistratus--grim, and gray, and formal; imagine a nature soaring high
amongst daring thoughts, or exuberant with the nameless poetry of
youthful life--with a frame matchless for bounding elasticity--an eye
bright with haughty fire--a heart from which noble sentiments sprang
like sparks from an anvil. Lady Ellinor had an ardent, inquisitive
imagination. This bold fiery nature must have moved her interest. On
the other hand, she had an instructed, full, and eager mind. Am I vain
if I say, now at the lapse of so many years, that in my mind her
intellect felt companionship? When a woman loves, and marries, and
settles, why then she becomes--a one whole, a completed being. But a
girl like Ellinor has in her many women. Various herself, all
varieties please her. I do believe that, if either of us had spoken
the word boldly, Lady Ellinor would have shrunk back to her own
heart--examined it, tasked it, and given a frank and generous answer.
And he who had spoken first might have had the better chance not to
receive a 'No.' But neither of us spoke. And perhaps she was rather
curious to know if she had made an impression, than anxious to create
it. It was not that she willingly deceived us, but her whole
atmosphere was delusion. Mists come before the sunrise. However this
be, Roland and I were not long in detecting each other. And hence
arose, first coldness, then jealousy, then quarrels."

"Oh, my father, your love must have been indeed powerful, to have made
a breach between the hearts of two such brothers!"

"Yes," said my father; "it was amidst the old ruins of the castle,
there, where I had first seen Ellinor--that, winding my arm round
Roland's neck, as I found him seated amongst the weeds and stones, his
face buried in his hands--it was there that I said--'Brother, we both
love this woman! My nature is the calmer of the two, I shall feel the
loss less. Brother, shake hands, and God speed you, for I go!'"

"Austin," murmured my mother, sinking her head on my father's breast.

"And therewith we quarrelled. For it was Roland who insisted, while
the tears rolled down his eyes, and he stamped his foot on the ground,
that he was the intruder, the interloper--that he had no hope--that he
had been a fool and a madman--and that it was for him to go! Now,
while we were disputing, and words began to run high, my father's old
servant entered the desolate place, with a note from Lady Ellinor to
me, asking for the loan of some book I had praised. Roland saw the
hand-writing, and while I turned the note over and over irresolutely,
before I broke the seal, he vanished.

"He did not return to my father's house. We did not know what had
become of him. But I, thinking over that impulsive volcanic nature,
took quick alarm. And I went in search of him; came on his track at
last; and, after many days, found him in a miserable cottage amongst
the most dreary of the dreary wastes which form so large a part of
Cumberland. He was so altered I scarcely knew him. To be brief, we
came at last to a compromise. We would go back to Compton. This
suspense was intolerable. One of us at least should take courage and
learn his fate. But who should speak first? We drew lots, and the lot
fell on me.

"And now that I was really to pass the Rubicon, now that I was to
impart that secret hope which had animated me so long--been to me a
new life--what were my sensations? My dear boy, depend on it that that
age is the happiest, when such feelings as I felt then can agitate us
no more. They are mistakes in the serene order of that majestic life
which heaven meant for thoughtful man. Our souls should be as stars on
earth, not as meteors and tortured comets. What could I offer to
Ellinor--to her father? What but a future of patient labour? And in
either answer, what alternative of misery!--my own existence
shattered, or Roland's noble heart!

"Well, we went to Compton. In our former visits we had been almost the
only guests. Lord Rainsforth did not much affect the intercourse of
country squires, less educated then than now. And in excuse for
Ellinor and for us, we were almost the only men of her own age she saw
when in that large dull house. But now the London season had broken
up, the house was filled; there was no longer that familiar and
constant approach to the mistress of the Hall, which had made us like
one family. Great ladies, fine people, were round her; a look, a
smile, a passing word, were as much as I had a right to expect. And
the talk, too, how different! Before, I could speak on books,--I was
at home there! Roland could pour forth his dreams, his chivalrous love
for the past, his bold defiance of the unknown future. And Ellinor,
cultivated and fanciful, could sympathise with both. And her father,
scholar and gentleman, could sympathise too. But now--"


CHAPTER XXXII.

WHEREIN MY FATHER BRINGS ABOUT HIS DENOUEMENT.

"It is no use in the world," said my father, "to know all the
languages expounded in grammars and splintered up into lexicons, if we
don't learn the language of the world. It is a talk apart, Kitty,"
cried my father warming up. "It is an ANAGLYPH--a spoken anaglyph, my
dear! If all the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians had been A B C to you,
still if you did not know the anaglyph, you would know nothing of the
true mysteries of the priests.[1]

"Neither Roland nor I knew one symbol-letter of the anaglyph. Talk,
talk--talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for.
All _we_ thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles--all we
thought so trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life!
If you found a little schoolboy, on his half holiday, fishing for
minnows with a crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the
wonders of the deep, the laws of the tides, and the antediluvian
relics of iguanodon and ichthyosaurus--nay, if you spoke but of pearl
fisheries, and coral banks, or water-kelpies and naiads, would not the
little boy cry out peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense!
let me fish in peace for my minnows.' I think the little boy is right
after his own way--it was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor
child, not to hear about iguanodons and water-kelpies!

"So the company fished for minnows, and not a word could we say about
our pearl fisheries and coral banks! And as for fishing for minnows
ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had
asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I have
let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these
minnow-fishers there was one who fished with an air that made the
minnows look larger than salmons.

"Trevanion had been at Cambridge with me. We were even intimate. He
was a young man like myself, with his way to make in the world. Poor
as I--of a family upon a par with mine--old enough but decayed. There
was, however, this difference between us. He had connexions in the
great world--I had none. Like me his chief pecuniary resource was a
college fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation
at the university; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one,
than as a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He
aimed at every thing--lost some things, gained others. He was a great
speaker in a debating society, a member of some politico-economical
club. He was an eternal talker--brilliant, various, paradoxical,
florid--different from what he is now. For, dreading fancy, his career
since has been an effort to curb it. But all his mind attached itself
to something that we Englishmen call solid; it was a large mind--not,
my dear Kitty, like a fine whale sailing through knowledge from the
pleasure of sailing--but like a polypus, that puts forth all its
feelers for the purpose of catching hold of something. Trevanion had
gone at once to London from the university: his reputation and his
talk dazzled his connexions, not unjustly. They made an effort--they
got him into parliament: he had spoken, he had succeeded. He came to
Compton with the flush of his virgin fame. I cannot convey to you, who
know him now--with his care-worn face, and abrupt dry manner,--reduced
by perpetual gladiatorship to the skin and bone of his former
self--what that man was when he first stepped into the arena of life.

"You see, my listeners, that you have to recollect that we middle-aged
folks were young then--that is to say, we were as different from what
we are  now, as the green bough of summer is from the dry wood, out
of which we make a ship or a gate-post. Neither man nor wood comes to
the uses of life till the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone.
And then the uses of life transform us into strange things with other
names: the tree is a tree no more--it is a gate or a ship; the youth
is a youth no more, but a one-legged soldier; a hollow-eyed statesman;
a scholar spectacled and slippered! When Micyllus--(here the hand
slides into the waistcoat again!)--when Micyllus," said my father,
"asked the cock that had once been Pythagoras,[2] if the affair of
Troy was really as Homer told it, the cock replied scornfully, 'How
could Homer know any thing about it?--at that time he was a camel in
Bactria.' Pisistratus, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis,
you might have been a Bactrian camel--when that which to my life was
the siege of Troy saw Roland and Trevanion before the walls.

"Handsome you can see that Trevanion has been; but the beauty of his
countenance then was in its perpetual play, its intellectual
eagerness; and his conversation was so discursive, so various, so
animated, and, above all, so full of the things of the day! If he had
been a priest of Serapis for fifty years, he could not have known the
Anaglyph better! Therefore he filled up every crevice and pore of that
hollow society with his broken, inquisitive, petulant light. Therefore
he was admired, talked of, listened to; and everybody said, 'Trevanion
is a rising man.'

"Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since--for we
students and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth,
to look to the _depth_ of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to
the _surface_ it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing
stream, only four feet deep, and certainly more force and more health,
than in a sullen pool, thirty yards to the bottom! I did not do
Trevanion justice. I did not see how naturally he realised Lady
Ellinor's ideal. I have said that she was like many women in one.
Trevanion was a thousand men in one. He had learning to please her
mind, eloquence to dazzle her fancy, beauty to please her eye,
reputation precisely of the kind to allure her vanity, honour and
conscientious purpose to satisfy her judgment. And, above all, he was
ambitious. Ambitious not as I--not as Roland was, but ambitious as
Ellinor was: ambitious, not to realise some grand ideal in the silent
heart, but to grasp the practical positive substances that lay
without.

"Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he. I saw not all
this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no particular court
to Ellinor.

"But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to
thin. Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with
me; and one day walking in his garden he gave me the opportunity. For
I need not say, Pisistratus," said my father, looking at me earnestly,
"that before any man of honour, especially if of inferior worldly
pretensions, will open his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his
duty to speak first to the parent, whose confidence has imposed that
trust." I bowed my head and coloured.

"I know not how it was," continued my father, "but Lord Rainsforth
turned the conversation on Ellinor. After speaking of his expectations
from his son, who was returning home, he said 'But he will of course
enter public life,--will, I trust, soon marry, have a separate
establishment, and I shall see but little of him. My Ellinor!--I
cannot bear the thought of parting wholly with her. And that, to say
the selfish truth, is one reason why I have never wished her to marry
a rich man, and so leave me for ever. I could hope that she will give
herself to one who may be contented to reside at least a great part of
the year with me--who may bless me with another son, not steal from me
a daughter. I do not mean that he should waste his life in the
country; his occupations would probably lead him to London. I care not
where my _house_ is, all I want is to keep my _home_. You know' (he
added, with a smile that I thought meaning,) 'how often I have
implied to you that I have no vulgar ambition for Ellinor. Her portion
must be very small, for my estate is strictly entailed, and I have
lived too much up to my income all my life to hope to save much now.
But her tastes do not require expense; and while I live, at least,
there need be no change. She can only prefer a man whose talents,
congenial to hers, will win their own career, and ere I die that
career may be made.' Lord Rainsforth paused, and then--how, in what
words I know not,--but out all burst!--my long-suppressed, timid,
anxious, doubtful, fearful love. The strange energy it had given to a
nature till then so retiring and calm! My recent devotion to the
law,--my confidence that, with such a prize, I could succeed,--it was
but a transfer of labour from one study to another. Labour could
conquer all things, and custom sweeten them in the conquest. The bar
was a less brilliant career than the senate. But the first aim of the
poor man should be independence. In short, Pisistratus, wretched
egotist that I was, I forgot Roland in that moment; and I spoke as one
who felt his life was in his words.

"Lord Rainsforth looked at me, when I had done, with a countenance
full of affection--but it was not cheerful.

"'My dear Caxton,' said he, tremulously, 'I own that I once wished
this--wished it from the hour I knew you; but why did you so long--I
never suspected that--nor I am sure did Ellinor.' He stopped short,
and added quickly--'However, go and speak, as you have spoken to me,
to Ellinor. Go, it may not yet be too late. And yet--but go.'

"Too late--what meant those words? Lord Rainsforth had turned hastily
down another walk, and left me alone, to ponder over an answer which
concealed a riddle. Slowly I took my way towards the house, and sought
Lady Ellinor, half hoping, half dreading, to find her alone. There was
a little room communicating with a conservatory, where she usually sat
in the morning. Thither I took my course.

"That room, I see it still!--the walls covered with pictures from her
own hand, many were sketches of the haunts we had visited
together--the simple ornaments, womanly but not effeminate--the very
books on the table that had been made familiar by dear associations.
Yes, there the _Tasso_ in which we had read together the episode of
_Clorinda_--there the _AEschylus_ in which I translated to her the
_Prometheus_. Pedantries these might seem to some: pedantries,
perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which
had knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room--it
was the home of my heart! Such, in my vanity of spirit, methought
would be the air round a home to come. I looked about me, troubled and
confused, and, halting timidly, I saw Ellinor before me, leaning her
face on her hand, her cheek more flushed than usual, and tears in her
eyes. I approached in silence, and as I drew my chair to the table, my
eye fell on a glove on the floor. It was a man's glove. Do you know,"
said my father, "that once, when I was very young, I saw a Dutch
picture called The Glove, and the subject was of murder. There was a
weed-grown marshy pool, a desolate dismal landscape, that of itself
inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And two men, as if walking
by chance, came to this pool, the finger of one pointed to a
blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on each other, as
if there were no need of words. That glove told its tale! The picture
had long haunted me in my boyhood, but it never gave me so uneasy and
fearful a feeling as did that real glove upon the floor. Why? My dear
Pisistratus, the theory of forebodings involves one of those questions
on which we may ask 'why' for ever. More chilled than I had been in
speaking to her father, I took heart at last and spoke to Ellinor"----

My father stopped short; the moon had risen, and was shining full into
the room and on his face. And by that light the face was changed;
young emotions had brought back youth--my father looked a young man.
But what pain was there! If the memory alone could raise what, after
all, was but the ghost of suffering, what had been its living reality!
Involuntarily I seized his hand: my father pressed it convulsively,
and said, with a deep breath, "It was too late; Trevanion was Lady
Ellinor's accepted, plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not
envy him now; look up, sweet wife, look up!"


CHAPTER XXXIII.

"Ellinor (let me do her justice) was shocked at my silent emotion. No
human lip could utter more tender sympathy, more noble self-reproach;
but that was no balm to my wound. So I left the house--so I never
returned to the law--so all impetus, all motive for exertion, seemed
taken from my being--so I went back into books. And so, a moping,
despondent, worthless mourner might I have been to the end of my days,
but that heaven, in its mercy, sent thy mother, Pisistratus, across my
path; and day and night I bless God and her, for I have been, and
am--oh, indeed, I am, a happy man!"

My mother threw herself on my father's breast, sobbing violently, and
then turned from the room without a word,--my father's eye, swimming
in tears, followed her; and then, after pacing the room for some
moments in silence, he came up to me, and leaning his arm on my
shoulder, whispered, "Can you guess why I have now told you all this,
my son?"

"Yes, partly: thank you, father," I faltered, and sate down, for I
felt faint.

"Some sons," said my father, seating himself beside me, "would find in
their father's follies and errors an excuse for their own: not so will
you, Pisistratus."

"I see no folly, no error, sir--only nature and sorrow."

"Pause, ere you thus think," said my father. "Great was the folly, and
great the error of indulging imagination that had no basis--of linking
the whole usefulness of my life to the will of a human creature like
myself. Heaven did not design the passion of love to be this tyrant;
nor is it so with the mass and multitude of human life. We dreamers,
solitary students like me, or half poets like poor Roland, make our
own disease. How many years, even after I had regained serenity, as
your mother gave me a home long not appreciated, have I wasted. The
main-spring of my existence was snapped--I took no note of time. And
therefore now, you see, late in life the Nemesis wakes. I look back
with regret at powers neglected, opportunities gone. Galvanically I
brace up energies half palsied by disuse, and you see me, rather than
rest quiet and good for nothing, talked into what, I dare say, are sad
follies, by an Uncle Jack! And now I behold Ellinor again; and I say,
in wonder, All this--all this--all this agony, all this torpor for
that haggard face, that worldly spirit! So is it ever in life. Mortal
things fade; immortal things spring more freshly with every step to
the tomb.

"Ah!" continued my father, with a sigh, "it would not have been so, if
at your age I had found out the secret of the saffron bag!"


CHAPTER XXXIV.

"And Roland, sir," said I; "how did he take it?"

"With all the indignation of a proud unreasonable man. More indignant,
poor fellow, for me than himself. And so did he wound and gall me by
what he said of Ellinor,--and so did he rage against me because I
would not share his rage,--that again we quarrelled. We parted, and
did not meet for many years. We came into sudden possession of our
little fortunes. His he devoted (as you may know) to the purchase of
the old ruins, and the commission in the army, which had always been
his dream--and so went his way, wrathful. My share gave me an excuse
for indolence,--it satisfied all my wants; and when my old tutor died,
and his young child became my ward, and, somehow or other, from my
ward my wife, it allowed me to resign my fellowship, and live amongst
my books--still as a book myself. One comfort, long before my
marriage, I had conceived; and that, too, Roland has since said was
comfort to him. Ellinor became an heiress--her poor brother died; and
all of the estate that did not pass in the male line devolved on her.
That fortune made a gulf between us almost as wide as her marriage.
For Ellinor, poor and portionless, in spite of her rank, I could have
worked, striven, slaved. But Ellinor RICH! it would have crushed me.
This was a comfort. But still, still the past--that perpetual aching
sense of something that had seemed the essential of life withdrawn
from life, evermore, evermore. What was left was not sorrow, it was a
void. Had I lived more with men, and less with dreams and books, I
should have made my nature large enough to bear the loss of a single
passion. But in solitude we shrink up. No plant so much as man needs
the sun and the air. I comprehend now why most of our best and wisest
men have lived in capitals; and therefore again I say, that one
scholar in a family is enough. Confiding in your sound heart and
strong honour, I turn you thus betimes on the world. Have I done
wrong? Prove that I have not, my child. Do you know what a very good
man has said--Listen and follow my precept, not example.

"The state of the world is such, and so much depends on action, that
every thing seems to say aloud to every man, 'Do something--do it--do
it!'"[3] I was profoundly touched, and I rose refreshed and hopeful,
when suddenly the door opened, and who or what in the world should come
in; but certainly he, she, it, or they, shall not come into this
chapter!--On that point I am resolved. No, my dear young lady, I am
extremely flattered;--I feel for your curiosity; but really not a
peep--not one! And yet--well then, if you will have it, and look so
coaxingly--who, or what I say, should come in abrupt, unexpected--taking
away one's breath, not giving one time to say, "By your leave, or with
your leave," but making one's mouth stand open with surprise, and one's
eyes fix in a big round stupid stare, but--


THE END OF THE CHAPTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The anaglyph was peculiar to the Egyptian priests--the hieroglyph
generally known to the well educated.

[2] LUCIAN, _The Dream of Micyllus_.

[3] _Remains of the Rev. Richard Cecil_, p. 349.




POLITICAL ECONOMY, BY J. S. MILL.[4]


In the old feud between the man of experience and the man of theory,
it sometimes happens that the former obtains a triumph by the mere
activity of the latter. Cases have been known where the theorist, in
the clarifying and perfecting his own theory, has argued himself round
to those very truths which his empirical antagonist had held to with a
firm though less reasoning faith. He stood to his post; the stream of
knowledge seemed to be flowing past him, and those who floated on it
laughed at his stationary figure as they left him behind. Nevertheless
he stood still; and by-and-by this meandering stream, with the busy
crew that navigated it, after many a turn and many a curve, have
returned to the very spot where he had made his obstinate halt.

This has been illustrated, and we venture to say will be illustrated
still further, in the progress of the science of political economy.
The man of experience has been taunted for his obstinacy and blindness
in adhering to something which he called common sense and matter of
fact; and behold! the scientific economist, in the course of his own
theorising, is returning to those very positions from which he has
been endeavouring to drive his opponent. The present work of Mr J. S.
Mill, the latest and most complete exposition of the most advanced
doctrines of the political economists, manifests, on more than one
occasion, this _retrograde progress_,--demolishing, on the ground of
still more scientific principles--the value of which time, however,
must test--those arguments by which his scientific predecessors had
attempted to mislead the man of experience or of empirical knowledge.

When, moreover, we consider, that the errors of the political
economist are not allowed to remain mere errors of theory, but are
pushed forward into practice, thrust immediately into the vital
interests of the community, we must admit that never was the man of
experience and common sense more fully justified in holding back and
looking long before he yielded assent to his new teachers. Stranger
paradoxes were never broached than some that have lived their day in
this science; and paradoxes as they were, they claimed immediately
their share of influence in our legislative measures. A learned
professor, a luminary of the science, demonstrated that absenteeism
could have nothing whatever to do with the poverty of Ireland. So the
Greek sophist demonstrated that Achilles could never catch the
tortoise. But the Greek was the more reasonable of the two: he
required of no one to stake his fortune on the issue of the race. The
professor of political economy not only teaches his sophism--he would
have us _back his tortoise_.

Although it has been our irksome task to oppose the application to
practice of half-formed theories, ill made up, and most dangerously
incomplete, yet we surely need not say that we take a genuine interest
in the approximation to a sound and trustworthy state of the science
of political economy. That, notwithstanding its obliquities, the new
science has rendered a substantial service to mankind, and is
calculated, when thoroughly understood, to render still greater
service--that it embraces topics of the widest and most permanent
interest, and that intellects of the highest order have been worthily
occupied in their investigation--this, let no strain of observation in
which from time to time we have indulged, be thought to deny or
controvert. To explain the complicate machinery of a modern commercial
state, is assuredly one of the most useful tasks, and by no means the
most easy, to which a reflective mind could address itself. When Adam
Smith, leaving the arena of metaphysical inquiry, in which he had
honourably distinguished himself, turned his analytic powers to the
examination of the common-place yet intricate affairs of that
commercial community in which he lived, he acted in the same
enlightened spirit which led Bacon to demand of philosophy, that she
should leave listening to the echoes of the school-room, and walk
abroad into nature, amongst things and realities. The author of _The
Wealth of Nations_, like him of the _Novum Organum_, struck out a new
path of wisely utilitarian thinking. If the one led philosophy into
the real world of nature and her daily phenomena, the other conducted
her into a world still more novel to her footsteps--the world of
commerce, of buying and selling, of manufacture and exchange. It may,
indeed, be said of both these men, that in their leading and most
valuable tenets, they were but announcing the claims of common sense;
and that, in doing this, they had from time to time, and in utterances
more or less distinct, been anticipated by others. But the cause of
common sense is, after all, the very last which obtains a fair and
potent advocacy; and the philosophy of one age is always destined, if
it be true, to become the common sense of succeeding ages; and it
detracts very little from the merit of an eminent writer who has been
the means of impressing any great truth upon the minds of men, either
at home or abroad, that others had obtained a view of it also, and
given to it an imperfect and less effective enunciation. Let due
honour, therefore, be paid to our countryman Adam Smith, the founder,
on this side of the Channel at least, of the science of political
economy--honour to him who turned a most keen intellect, sharpened by
those metaphysical studies for which his fragmentary Essays, as well
as and still more than his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, prove him to
have been eminently qualified--turned it from these captivating
subtleties to inquiries into the causes, actually in operation, of the
prosperity of a commercial people. He left these regions of mazy
labyrinthine thought, which, if not as beautiful as the enchanted
gardens in which Tasso imprisoned his knight, are, to a certain order
of spirits, quite as ensnaring, to look into the mystery of bills of
exchange, of systems of banking, customs, and the currency. Be it
admitted at once, and ungrudgingly, that Adam Smith and some of his
successors have done a substantial service in assisting to explain the
machinery of society--the organisation, so to speak, of a commercial
body. Until this is done, and done thoroughly, no proposed measure of
legislation, and no course of conduct voluntarily adopted by the
people, can be seen in all its bearings; the true causes of the most
immediate and pressing evils can never be certainly known, and, of
course, the efficient remedies can never be applied. Our main
quarrel--though we have many--with the political economists is on this
ground--that, having constructed a theory explanatory of the _wealth_
of nations, they have wished to enforce this upon our legislature, as
if it had embraced all the causes which conspire to the _wellbeing_ of
nations; as if wealth and wellbeing were synonymous. Having determined
the state of things best fitted to procure, in general, the greatest
aggregate amount of riches, they have proceeded to deal with a people
as if it were a corporate body, whose sole object was to increase the
total amount of its possessions. They have overlooked the equally
vital questions concerning the distribution of these possessions, and
of the _various employments_ of mankind. Full of their leading idea,
and accustomed to abstractions and generalities, they forget the
_individual_, and appear to treat their subject as if the aggregate
wealth of a community were to be enjoyed in some aggregate manner, and
a sum-total of possessions would represent the comforts and enjoyments
of its several members. To know what measures tend to increase the
national wealth is undoubtedly of great importance, but it is not
_all_; the theory of riches, or of commerce, is not the theory of
society.

As political economy arose with a metaphysician, and has been
prosecuted by men of the same abstract turn of mind, it very soon
aspired to the philosophical character of a science. It laid down its
_laws_. But it has not always been seen that the harmonious and
systematic form it has been able to assume was owing to an arbitrary
division of social topics, which in their nature, and in their
operation on human welfare, are inextricably combined. They laid down
laws, which could only be considered such by obstinately refusing to
look beyond a certain number of isolated facts; and they persisted in
governing mankind according to laws obtained by this imperfect
generalisation.

With regard to the main doctrine of the political economists, that of
free-trade--their advocacy of unfettered industry, whether working for
the home or foreign market--one sees plainly that there is a truth
here. Looking at the matter abstractedly from other considerations,
what doctrine could be more reasonable or more benign than that which
instructs the separate communities of mankind to throw aside all
commercial jealousies, all unnecessary heartburnings--to throw down
their barriers, their custom-houses, their preventive stations--to let
the commerce and industry of the world be free, so that the peace of
the world, as well as the wealth of nations, would be secured and
advanced? What better doctrine could be taught than this? Did not
Fenelon, mildest and best of archbishops, reasoning from the dictates
of his own Christian conscience, arrive at the same conclusion as the
philosophical economist? What better, we repeat, could be taught than
a doctrine which tends to make all nations as one people, and the most
wealthy people possible? But hold a while. Take the microscope, and
deign to look somewhat closer at the little interests of the many
little men that constitute a nation. Condescend to inquire, before you
change the currents of wealth and industry, (though to increase both,)
into what hands the wealth is to flow, and what the class of labourers
you diminish or multiply. Industry free! Good. But is the capitalist
to be permitted, at all times, to gather round him and his machinery
what multitudes of workmen he pleases--workmen who are to breed up
families dependent for their subsistence on the success of some
gigantic and hazardous enterprise? Is he to be allowed, under all
circumstances, to do this, and give the state no guarantee for the
lives of these men and women and children, but what it obtains from
his perhaps too sanguine calculations of his own profit and loss? Is
it any consolation that he bankrupts himself in ruining others, and
adding immensely to a pauper population? Commerce free! Good. It will
increase your imports, and multiply by an advantageous exchange the
products of your industry. But what if your measure to promote this
freedom of commerce foster a mode of industry at home essentially of a
precarious nature, and attended with fearful political and social
dangers, at the expense of other modes of industry of a more
permanent, stable, peaceful character--must nothing still be heard of
but free commerce? Must the utmost amount of products, at all hazard,
be obtained, whatever the mode of industry that earn it, or the fate
of those called into existence by the overgrown manufacture you
encourage? Is it no matter how won, or who enjoys? Is the only
question that the wealth be there? What if England, by carrying out,
without pause or exception, the doctrine of free-trade, should
aggravate the most alarming symptoms of her present social
condition--must this _law_ of the political economist be still, with
unmitigated strictness, urged upon her? She pleads for exception, for
delay; but the political economist will not see the grounds of her
plea--will not recognise her reasons for exception: full of his
partial science, which has been made to occupy too large a portion of
his field of vision, he _cannot_ see them.

England, by a series of well-known mechanical inventions, extended in
a surprising manner her manufacture of cotton, and with it her foreign
commerce in this article. It is unnecessary to repeat figures that we
have given before, or which may be found in any statistical tables.
Enough that her operations here have been on a quite gigantic scale.
Recollect that _this_ is the channel into which must run the industry
and capital which your measures of free-trade may drive from their old
accustomed course. Look for a moment at the nature of this species of
industry, and ask whether it would be wise to foster and augment it at
the expense of other more ordinary and less precarious modes of
earning a subsistence. An enormous population is brought together,
educated, so far as their industrial habits are concerned, in no
independent labour, but taught merely to perform a part in the great
machinery of a cotton-mill, themselves a part of that machinery, and
trusting, they and their families, for their necessary bread, to the
successful sale of the great stock of goods, the annual amount of
which they are annually increasing. Although the home market may
absorb the greatest portion of these goods, yet the foreign market
takes so considerable a share, that any derangement of the external
commerce throws a large number of this densely-congregated multitude
out of employment. Is there nothing peculiarly hazardous in this
condition of things? Granted that nothing can, or ought to be done to
restrain the enterprising capitalist from speculating too freely with
the lives of men, is it a state of things to be aggravated? Now, at
this juncture comes the apostle of free-trade, and demands (for
illustration's sake) that French boots and shoes be admitted
duty-free. He employs the well-known, and, to its own legitimate
extent, unanswerable argument of the political economist. He tells us
that, by so doing, we shall purchase better and cheaper boots and
shoes, and sell more of our cotton; that, in short, by manufacturing
more cotton goods, in which we marvellously excel, we shall procure
better boots and shoes than by the old process of making them
ourselves. We are evidently the gainers. Let us see the gain. The
gentleman pays something less for his shoes, and is somewhat more
luxuriously shod. The owner of the cotton-mill, too, finds that trade
is _looking up_. To balance this, we have so many shoemakers driven
from their employment--the very steady one of making shoes for their
own countrymen--and added to the number of men working at cotton-mills
for the foreign market,--a mode of industry which we know, by painful
experience, to be precarious in the extreme. We describe the
superfluous shoemaker as going over directly to the artisans of the
factory: we say nothing of the miseries of the _middle passage_;
though in truth this transition is accomplished with pain and
difficulty, and after much struggle, and is rather done in the second
generation than the first, it being rather the children of the
shoemaker that are added to the population of the factory than the
shoemaker himself.

We see here that the mere calculation of profit and loss, such as it
might figure in a debtor and creditor account, would justify the
extreme advocate of free-trade. But there are, surely, other
considerations which may properly rank a little higher than such a
tradesman's balance of profit and loss; we are surely allowed to
follow our inquiries a little further, and ask who is enriched, and
how? and what branch of industry is promoted, and what destroyed or
curtailed? It is not our object here to contend against what is called
the factory system--we accept it with its evil and its good; we are
not calling for measures directly hostile to it; but we certainly
should exclaim against the sacrifice of a branch of household, stable,
permanent industry, to be compensated by an increase in this already
enormous system of factory labour, which, together with much good,
brings with it so dreadfully precarious a condition of thousands and
tens of thousands of men. The political economist has proved that
free-trade is the condition under which the industry of man, so far as
the amount of its products is concerned, can be exercised with the
greatest advantage: he has established this principle; it is an
important one, and we thank him for its lucid exposition; but he shall
be no legislator of ours until he has learned to submit his principle
to wise exceptions, until he has learned to estimate the first
necessity of steady and well-remunerated employment to the labourer,
until he is prepared, in short, to give their due weight to other
considerations besides that of multiplying the gross products of human
industry.

We have been viewing the question of free-trade from the position of
an opulent manufacturing people--from the position of England, in
short--and we see that there may be ground even here for exception.
But the case is much stronger, and the claim for exception still
plainer, which might be made out by a less opulent nation, desirous of
fostering its own rising manufactures. These wisely refuse a
reciprocity of free-trade measures. Even on the mere ground of the
increase of national wealth, and without considering the advantage
derived from a variety of employments, and a _due_ admixture of a
manufacturing population, they are fully justified in their protective
policy. The economist will tell them that they deprive themselves of
the opportunity of purchasing cheaper and better goods than they can
produce. We admit that, for a season, they must forego an advantage of
this description; but at the end of a few years how will the account
stand? If the protective duty has fostered a home manufactory that
would not otherwise have existed, (and this is an assumption which the
political economist himself is compelled to admit,) then is there in
that country a new industry--then amongst that people is there more
_labour_ and less idleness, and therefore more of the fruits of
labour. It has created for itself what it otherwise would have had to
purchase with its corn and oil.

The political economists love an extreme case. In order to test the
universality of the principle of free-trade, we give them the
following:--There is a little island somewhere in the Pacific, and it
grows corn, and grapes, and the cotton plant. Two or three great ships
come annually to this island, bringing a store of Manchester goods,
and taking away a portion of the corn and the wine. But the wise men
of the island meet and say, Let us learn to make our own cotton into
stuff for raiment; so shall we have clothes without parting with our
corn and wine. Would the people of the island be very foolish if they
consented to wear, for a time, a much coarser raiment, in order that
they might practise this new industry, and thus provide themselves
with raiment, and keep their provender? We suppose that the same
unequal distribution of property is found in our island as in the rest
of the world--that there are rich and poor. Now, when a people
exchanges its articles of food for articles of clothing, it rarely, if
ever, parts with what, _to the whole of the people_, is a superfluous
quantity of food. Those who own large portions of the land have a
superfluity of produce, which they exchange for other articles either
at home or abroad; but probably no people ever grew a greater quantity
of corn, or other grain for food, than it could very willingly have
consumed itself, could we conceive it distributed amongst all who had
mouths to consume, and half-filled stomachs to stow it away in. Judge,
therefore, whether our little island would not, in a few years, be
much better off for refusing the visit of the great ships, and setting
to work to weave its own cotton into garments. The political
economists always talk of so much labour diverted from one employment
to another; they seem to have forgotten that there is such a thing as
so much idleness converted into so much labour.

In the work of John Stuart Mill, to which we have now to call the
attention of our readers, the science of political economy has
received its latest and most complete exposition. Nor, as the title
itself will inform us, is the work limited to a formal enunciation of
abstract principles, (as was the case with the brief compendium of Mr
Mill, senior,) but it proceeds to apply those principles to the
discussion of some of the most vital and momentous questions with
which public opinion is at present occupied. There are things in these
volumes, as may easily be conceived, in which we do not concur--views
are supported, on some subjects, to which we have been long and
notoriously opposed; but there is, in the exposition of its tenets, so
accurate a statement, so severe and lucid a reasoning, and, withal, so
genuine and manly an interest in the great cause of humanity, that we
cannot hesitate a moment in awarding to it a high rank amongst the
sterling literature of our country. This magazine has never been
slow--it has been second to none--in its hearty recognition of great
talent and ability, from whatever quarter of the political horizon
these have made their appearance. We were amongst the first to give
notice to all whom it concerned of the addition to the students' shelf
of the profound and elaborate work, _The System of Logic_, by the
same author. The present is a work of more general interest, yet it
has the same severe character. In this, as in his logic, the author
has sacrificed nothing deemed by him essential to his task, to the
desire of being popular, or the fear of being pronounced _dry_--the
word of most complete condemnation in the present day. Dry, however,
no person who takes an interest in the actual condition and prospects
of society, can possibly find the greater portion of this work. For,
as we have already intimated, that which honourably distinguishes it
from other professed treatises of political economy is the perpetual,
earnest, never-forgotten interest, which accompanies the writer
throughout, in the great questions at present mooted with respect to
the social condition of man. Mr Mill very wisely refused to limit
himself to the mere abstract principles of his science; he descends
from them, sometimes as from a vantage ground, into the discussions
which most concern and agitate the public mind at the present day;
and, if his conclusions are not always, or even generally, such as we
can wholly coincide with, there is so penetrating an intelligence in
his remarks, and so grave and serious a philanthropy pervading his
book, that it would be impossible for the most complete opponent of
the work not to rise a gainer from its perusal. From what else can we
gain, if not from intercourse with a keen, and full, and sincere mind,
whether we have to struggle with it, or to acquiesce in its guidance?
There are passages in this work, didactic as its style generally is,
which have had on us all the effect of the most thrilling eloquence,
from the fine admixture of severe reasoning and earnestness of
feeling.

For instance--to give at once an idea of the more elevated tone this
utilitarian science has assumed in the work of Mr Mill--it is no
little novelty to hear a political economist speak in the following
manner of the mere elements of national wealth. The author has been
discoursing on that stationary state to which all opulent nations are
supposed to tend, wherein, by the diminution of profits, there is
little means and no temptation to further accumulation of capital:--

     "I cannot," he says, "regard the stationary state of capital
     and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally
     manifested towards it by political economists, of the old
     school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the
     whole, a very considerable improvement on our present
     condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life
     held out by those who think that the normal state of human
     beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling,
     crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which
     form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable
     lot of humankind, or any thing but one of the disagreeable
     symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The
     northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this
     stage of civilisation in very favourable circumstances;
     having apparently got rid of all social injustices and
     inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the
     male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and
     land is such as to insure abundance to every able-bodied
     member of the community who does not forfeit it by
     misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and no
     poverty; and all that these advantages do for them is, that
     the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to
     dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters.
     This is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists
     to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in
     realising....

     "That the energies of mankind should be kept in employment by
     the struggle for riches, as they were formerly by the
     struggle of war, until the better minds succeed in educating
     the others into better things, is undoubtedly more desirable
     than that they should rust and stagnate. While minds are
     coarse, they require coarse stimuli, and let them have them.
     In the mean time, those who do not accept the present very
     early stage of human improvement as its ultimate type, may be
     excused for being comparatively indifferent to the kind of
     economical progress which usually excites the congratulations
     of politicians--the mere increase of production and
     accumulation. For the safety of national independence, it is
     essential that a country should not fall much behind its
     neighbours in these things. But in themselves they are of
     little importance, so long as either the increase of
     population, or any thing else, prevents the mass of the
     people from reaping any part of the benefit of them. I know
     not why it should be matter of congratulation, that persons
     who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have
     doubled their means of consuming things which give little or
     no pleasure, except as representative of wealth; or that
     numbers of individuals should pass over every year from the
     middle classes into a richer class, or from the class of the
     occupied rich to that of the unoccupied. It is only in the
     backward countries of the world that increased production is
     still an important object; in those most advanced, what is
     economically needed is a better distribution, of which an
     indispensable means is a stricter restraint on population.
     Levelling institutions, either of a just or an unjust kind,
     cannot alone accomplish it; they may lower the heights of
     society, but they cannot raise the depths."--(Vol. ii. p.
     308.)

It will be already seen, from even this brief extract, that the too
rapid increase of population presents itself to Mr Mill as the chief,
or one of the chief obstacles to human improvement. Without attempting
to repeat all that we have at different times urged upon this head, we
may at once say here that, in the first place, we never denied, or
dreamt of denying, that it was one of the first and most imperative
duties of every human being, to be assured that he could provide for a
family before he called one into existence. This has been at all times
a plain, unquestionable duty, though it has not at all times been
clearly understood as such. But, in the second place, we have combated
the Malthusian alarm, precisely because we believe that the moral
checks to population will be found a sufficient balance to the
physical law of increase. We have repudiated the idea that there is,
in the shape of the law of population, a constant enemy to human
improvement, convinced that this law will be found to be in perfect
harmony with all other laws that regulate the destiny of man. A
certain pressure of population on the means of subsistence has been
always recognised as an element necessary to the progress of
society--especially at that early stage when bare subsistence is the
sole motive for industry. When not only to live, but to live well,
becomes the ruling motive of men, then come into play the various
moral checks arising from prudence, vanity, and duty. But the mere
thinness of population will not, in the first place, induce a high
standard of comfortable subsistence. It is a delusion to suppose that
the low standard of comfort and enjoyment prevailing amongst the
multitude is the result of excessive population. If Neapolitan
lazzaroni are contented with macaroni and sunshine, it matters not
whether their numbers are five hundred or five thousand, they will
labour for nothing beyond their macaroni. We would challenge the
political economist to prove that in England, at this present time, or
in any country of Europe, the prevailing standard of comfort amongst
the working classes has been permanently determined by the amount of
population. This standard is slowly rising, from better education,
mechanical inventions, and other causes, and _it_ will ultimately
control the increase of population. That wages occasionally suffer a
lamentable depression, owing to the numbers of any one class of
workmen, is a fact which does not touch the point at issue. We say
that, whether a population be dense or rare, you must first excite, by
education and the example of a higher class, a certain taste for
comfort, for a cleanly and orderly mode of life, amongst the mass of
labouring men; that until this taste is called forth, it would be in
vain to offer high wages, for men would only work one half the week,
and spend the other half in idleness and coarse intemperance; and
that, this taste once called forth, there will be no fear of the class
of men who possess it being permanently degraded by over-population,
unless the excess of population were derived from some neighbouring
country, unhappily far behind it in the race of civilisation.

We now continue our quotation.

     "There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old
     countries, for an immense increase of population, supposing
     the arts of life to go on improving and capital to increase.
     But, although it may be innocuous, I confess I see very
     little reason for desiring it. The density of population
     necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest
     degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social
     intercourse, has, in all the more populous countries, been
     attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be
     amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man
     to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his
     species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very
     poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is
     essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and
     solitude, in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is
     the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only
     good for the individual, but which society could ill do
     without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the
     world, with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of
     nature--with every rood of land brought into cultivation
     which is capable of growing food for human beings--every
     flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up--all quadrupeds
     or birds, which are not domesticated for man's use,
     exterminated as his rivals for food--every hedgerow or
     superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where
     a shrub or flower could grow, without being eradicated as a
     weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must
     lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to
     things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population
     would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it
     to support a larger, but not a better or a happier
     population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that
     they will be content to be stationary long before necessity
     compels them to it.

     "It is scarcely necessary to remark, that a stationary
     condition of capital and population implies no stationary
     state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as
     ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social
     progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and
     much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased
     to be engrossed by the art of getting on. Even the industrial
     arts might be as earnestly and as successfully cultivated,
     with this sole difference--that, instead of serving no
     purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements
     would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging
     labour. Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical
     inventions yet made have lightened the daily toil of any
     human being. They have enabled a greater population to live
     the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased
     number of manufacturers and others to make large fortunes.
     They have increased the comforts of the middle classes; but
     they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in
     human destiny which it is in their nature and in their
     futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just
     institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the
     deliberate guidance of a judicious foresight, can the
     conquests made from the powers of nature, by the intellect
     and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common
     property of the species, and the means of improving and
     elevating the universal lot."--(Vol. ii. p. 311.)

These are not the times when truth is to be withheld because it is
disagreeable. There is a morality connected with wealth, its uses and
abuses, not enough taught, certainly not enough understood. The rich
man, who will not learn that there is a _duty_ inseparable from his
riches, is no better fitted for the times that are coming down upon
us, than the poor man who has not learned that patience is a duty
peculiarly imposed upon him, and that the ruin of others, and the
general panic which his violence may create, will inevitably add to
the hardships and privations he already has to endure. If society
demands of the poor man that he endure these evils of his lot, rather
than desperately bring down ruin upon all, himself included; surely
society must also demand of the rich man that he make the best use
possible of his wealth, so that his weaker brother be not driven to
madness and despair. It demands of him that he exert himself manfully
for that safety of the whole in which he has so much more evident an
interest. For, be it known--prescribe whatever remedies you will,
political, moral, or religious--that it is by securing a certain
indispensable amount of wellbeing to the multitude of mankind that the
only security can be found for the social fabric, for life, and
property, and civilisation. If men are allowed to sink into a
wretchedness that savours of despair, it is in vain that you show them
the ruins of the nation, and themselves involved in those ruins. What
interest have they any longer in the preservation of your boasted
state of civilisation? What to them how soon it be all a ruin? You
have lost all hold of them as reasonable beings. As well preach to the
winds as to men thoroughly and bitterly discontented. Those,
therefore, to whom wealth, or station, or intelligence, has given
power of any kind, must do their utmost to prevent large masses of
mankind from sinking into this condition. If they will not learn this
duty from the Christian teaching of their church, they must learn it
from the stern exposition of the economist and the politician.

Political economists have some of them wasted much time, and produced
no little ennui, by unprofitable discussions on the definition of
terms. These Mr Mill wisely spares us: an accurate writer, by a
cautious use of ordinary expressions, will make his meaning more
evident and precise than he will be able to do by any laboured
definitions, or the introduction of purely technical terms. Such have
been the discussions on the strict limits of the science of political
economy, and the propriety of the title it has so long borne; whether
intellectual efforts shall be classed amongst productive or
unproductive labour, and the precise and invariable meaning to be
given to such terms as _wealth_, _value_, and the like. These will
generally be found to be unprofitable controversies, tending more to
confusion of ideas than to precision of language. Let a writer think
steadily and clearly upon his subject, and ordinary language will be
faithful to him; distinctions between the several meanings of the same
term will be made as they are wanted. He who _begins_ by making such
distinctions is only laying a snare for his own feet; he will hamper
himself and perplex his reader. And with regard especially to the
range of topics which an author thinks fit to embrace in his treatise
upon this science, surely he may permit himself some liberty of
choice, without resolving to mete out new boundaries to which all who
follow him are to conform. If M. Dunoyer, for instance, in his able
and, in many respects, valuable work, _De la Liberte du Travail_,
chooses to write a treatise which embraces in fact the whole of human
life, all the energies and activities of man, mental as well as
physical, he could surely have done this without assailing old
distinctions and old titles with so needless a violence. Of what avail
to call in the etymologist at this time of day, to determine the
meaning, or criticise the application of so familiar a term as
political economy?[5]

But there is another class of discussions which, although to the
general reader, who is mostly an impatient one, they will appear at
first sight to be of a purely technical character, must not be so
hastily dismissed. These will be often found to have a direct bearing
on the most important questions that can occupy the mind of the
statesman. They are in fact explanatory of that great machine, a
commercial society, upon which he has to practise--which he has to
keep in order, or to learn to leave alone--and therefore as necessary
a branch of knowledge to him as anatomy or physiology to one who
undertakes to medicine the body. Such are some of the intricate
discussions which concern the nature of _capital_--a subject to which
we shall in the first place and at once turn our attention. It is a
subject which Mr Mill has treated throughout in a most masterly
manner. We may safely say, that there is now no other work to which a
student could be properly directed for obtaining a complete insight
into all the intricacies of this great branch of political economy.
The exposition lies scattered, indeed, through the two volumes; he
must read the entire work to obtain it. This scattering of the several
parts of a subject is inevitable in treating such a science as
political economy, where every topic has to be discussed in relation
to every other topic. We do not think that Mr Mill has been
particularly happy in his arrangement of topics, but, aware as we are
of the extreme difficulty, under such circumstances, of making _any
arrangement at all_, we forbear from any criticism. A man must write
himself out the best way he can; and the reader, after obtaining all
the materials put at his disposition, may pack them up in what
bundles may best suit his own convenience.

We must premise that on this subject--the nature and employment of
capital--there appears to be in one part of Mr Mill's exposition--not
an error--but a temporary forgetfulness of an old and familiar truth,
which ought to have found its place there. Its very familiarity has
occasioned it to be overlooked, in the keen inquiry after truth of a
more recondite nature. The part which the economists call
"unproductive consumption," the self-indulgent luxurious expenditure
of the rich--the part this plays in a system of society based on
individual effort and individual possession, is not fully stated.

He who spends his money, and lives to do little else, however idle he
may be himself, has always had the consolation that he was, at least,
setting other people to work. Mr Mill _seems_ to deny him utterly this
species of consolation; for in contending against a statement, made by
political economists as well as others, that unproductive consumption
is necessary, in a strictly _economical_ sense, to the employment of
the workmen, and as the indispensable relative to productive
consumption, or capital spent in industrial pursuits, he has
overlooked that _moral_ necessity there is, in the present system of
things, that there should be those who spend to enjoy, as well as
those who lay out their money for profit. "What supports and employs
productive labour," says Mr Mill, (Vol. i. p. 97,) "is the capital
expended in setting it to work, and not the demand of purchases for
the produce of the labour when completed. Demand for commodities is
not demand for labour. The demand for commodities determines in what
particular branch of production the labour and capital shall be
employed; it determines the _direction_ of the labour, but not the
more or less of the labour itself, or of the maintenance and payment
of the labour. That depends on the amount of the capital, or other
funds directly devoted to the sustenance and remuneration of labour."
Now, without a doubt, the man who purchases an article of luxury when
it is manufactured, does not employ labour in the same sense as the
manufacturer, who spends his wealth in supporting the artisan, and
finding him the requisites of his art, and who, after selling the
products of this industry, continues to spend the capital returned to
him, together with the profit he has made, in the further sustenance
of workmen. But it has been always understood, and the truth appears
to be almost too trite to insist on, that unless the unproductive
consumer were there to purchase, the capitalist would have had no
motive to employ his wealth in this manner; and, what is of equal
importance to bear in mind, unless the capitalist also calculated on
being, some future day, an unproductive consumer himself, he would
have no motive, by saving and toiling, to increase his wealth.

The necessity for a certain amount of unproductive consumption is not
a necessity in the nature of things. All men might, if they chose, be
saving, might spend upon themselves only what is needful for comfort,
and set apart the residue of their funds for the employment of labour,
not, of course, in the production of articles of luxury, for which
there would be no purchasers, but for such articles as the labourers
themselves, now paid from such ample stores, might be consumers of.
The social machine might still _go on_ under such a regime, and much
to the benefit of the labourer. The capitalists would find their
profits diminishing, it is true--they would be more rapidly
approaching that _minimum_ of profit, that stationary state, of which
we shall by-and-by have to speak; but this diminution of profits must,
at all events, sooner or later, take place, and depends ultimately, as
we shall have occasion to show, on higher laws, over which man has no
control. Men might, if they chose, be all saving, and all convert
superfluous wealth into capital; but need we add, men would never
choose any such thing. There is no necessity in the nature of things,
but there is a necessity in the moral nature of man for a certain
portion of this unproductive consumption. The good of others is not a
motive sufficiently strong to stimulate a man to any of the steady
pursuits of industry. When, therefore, his real wants are satisfied,
it must be the gratification of fictitious wants that induces him to
toil and accumulate, or to part with any thing he has, by way of
barter or exchange. From the time when the rude possessor of the soil
consents to surrender a portion of his surplus produce for some
trinket or piece of gaudy apparel, to the present epoch, when men
consent to live frugally and toil hard during the first period of
life, in order that they or their children may afterwards live idly,
luxuriously, and ostentatiously, this same unproductive expenditure
has performed the part of essential stimulant to human industry. It is
not enough, therefore, to say, that it gives the _direction_ to a
certain portion of labour: it affords the stimulant that converts
idleness into industry, and saving into capital. A very much more
dignified being would man undoubtedly be, if desire for the general
good could replace, as a motive of industry, a selfish desire, which
is often no better than what we ridicule in the savage when he
manifests a most disproportionate anxiety, as it seems to us, for the
possession of glass beads, or a piece of painted calico. But to this
point in the cultivation of human reason we have, at all events, not
yet arrived. And let this be always borne in mind--in order that the
class of society designated as unproductive consumers may not fall
into unmerited odium--that others, who are using their wealth in the
direct and profitable employment of labour, are themselves desirous,
above all things, of taking their place in the class of unproductive
consumers, and are working for that very end.

"Every one can see," writes Mr Mill, "that if a benevolent government
possessed all the food, and all the implements and materials of the
community, it could exact productive labour from all to whom it
allowed a share in the food, and could be in no danger of wanting a
field for the employment of this productive labour, since, as long as
there was a single want unsaturated (which material objects could
supply) of any one individual, the labour of the community could be
turned to the production of something capable of satisfying that want.
Now, the individual possessors of capital, when they add to it by
fresh accumulations, are doing precisely the same thing which we
suppose to be done by our benevolent government."--(Vol. i. p. 83.)
Certainly the individual capitalists could do the same as the
benevolent government, if they had its benevolence. If there are any
political economists who teach otherwise, we hold them in error. We
wish only to add to the statement the old moral truth long ago
recognised, before political economy had a distinct place or name in
the world, that as man is constituted, or rather, as he has hitherto
demeaned himself, (for who knows what moral as well as other
reformations may take place?--the civilised man, such as we have him
at this day, postponing habitually the present enjoyment to the
future, is a creature of cultivation; and who can tell but that
advanced cultivation may make of man a being habitually acting for the
general good, in which general good he finds his own particular
interest sufficiently represented and provided for?)--that, as man has
hitherto acted, this same unproductive selfish expenditure is
indispensable as the motive to set that industry to work, which
ultimately distributes the real necessaries and rational comforts of
life to so many thousands.

Having, in justice to the class of unproductive consumers, brought out
this homely truth, which, in the scientific exposition of Mr Mill,
seemed in danger of being overlooked, we proceed to a branch of the
subject which, if it appears at first of a very technical and abstruse
description, is yet capable of very important applications. One of the
most striking facts relating to the nature of capital is the tendency
of profits, in wealthy and populous countries, to diminish as the
amount of capital increases--a tendency to arrive at a certain
_minimum_ beyond which there would be no motive for saving, and little
possibility of accumulating. This tendency Mr Mill explains as being
the result, not of what has been somewhat vaguely called the
competition of capital, over-production, or general glut in the
market, but, in reality, of the physical laws of nature--of the simple
fact that the products of the soil cannot be indefinitely multiplied.
Manufacturing industry must be ultimately limited by the supply of
the raw material it fashions, which is furnished by the soil, and the
supply of food for the artisan, furnished also by the soil; it
therefore is subjected, as well as agricultural industry, to the
limits which have been set to the productiveness of the earth. Now,
without seeking for any definite ratio, such as might be expressed in
numbers, between the labour and ingenuity of man and the products of
the soil, it may be stated as a simple fact, which admits of no
dispute, that after the land has been fairly cultivated, additional
labour and additional cost yield but a small proportionate return.

     "The limitation to production from the properties of the
     soil," writes our author, "is not like the obstacle opposed
     by a wall, which stands immovable in one particular spot, and
     offers no hindrance to motion, short of stopping it entirely.
     We may rather compare it to a highly elastic and extensible
     band, which is hardly ever so violently stretched that it
     could not possibly be stretched any more; yet the pressure of
     which is felt long before the final limit is reached, and
     felt more severely the nearer that limit is approached.

     "After a certain, and not very advanced stage in the progress
     of agriculture--as soon, in fact, as men have applied
     themselves to cultivation with any energy, and have brought
     to it any tolerable tools--from that time it is the law of
     production from the land, that, in any given state of
     agricultural skill and knowledge, by increasing the labour
     the produce is not increased in an equal degree; doubling the
     labour does not double the produce; or, to express the same
     thing in other words, every increase of produce is obtained
     by a more than proportional increase in the application of
     labour to the land.

     "This general law of agricultural industry is the most
     important proposition in political economy. Were the law
     different, nearly all the phenomena of the production and
     distribution of wealth would be other than they are. The most
     fundamental errors, which still prevail on our subject,
     result from not perceiving this law at work underneath the
     more superficial agencies on which attention fixes itself;
     but mistaking these agencies for the ultimate causes of
     effects of which they may influence the form and mode, but of
     which it alone determines the essence."--(Vol. i. p. 212.)

It is to this physical law, underlying, as it were, the commercial and
industrial energies of man, that we must finally attribute that
gradual diminution of profits, observable in advanced and opulent
countries. This is popularly attributed, we believe, and has been
assigned, by some political economists, to over-production; to a
general glut of the market, or, in other words, a preponderance of
supply over demand. Over-production in this or that article may very
easily, for a time, take place; but general over-production, a general
over-balance in the supply, and deficiency in the demand, may be
demonstrated to be impossible.

The simple but convincing argument against a general glut or
over-balance between supply and demand, which we believe Mr Mill
senior first originated, is this,--that as each producer produces in
order to part with his produce--in order, in fact, to exchange, to
purchase, he must necessarily bring into the market a demand
equivalent to the supply he furnishes. "All sellers," as our present
author expresses it, "are _ex vi termini_ buyers. Could we suddenly
double the productive powers of the country, we should double the
supply of commodities in every market; but we should, by the same
stroke, double the purchasing power. Every body would bring a double
demand as well as supply; every body would be able to buy twice as
much, because every one would have twice as much to offer in
exchange."--(Vol. ii. p. 91.) Of certain articles, there may, of
course, be a superfluity; of certain others a deficiency; but such a
thing as a general over-balance between supply and demand cannot take
place.

The argument, if it laid claim to a sort of mathematical precision,
might be open to an ingenious cavil. The exchange of commodities, it
might be said, is effected through the instrumentality of money; now,
it is one of the peculiar advantages of money that it enables the
vender to sell at one time and purchase at another; it gives him a
command over future markets; it enables him to postpone indefinitely
one half of the operation of barter. Men who come into a market,
wishing to dispose of their commodities _now_, but not intending to
select what commodity they shall take in exchange, till some future
time, postponing indefinitely the other half of the operation of
barter, and seeking only for money, for that _token_ which will give
them or their children a claim on subsequent markets--do _not_ bring
with them a demand equivalent to their supply.

The answer to the objection lets us more fully into the real facts of
the case. Those only who wished to sell their produce in order to
_hoard_, would fall under the description of men who bring a present
supply into the market, postponing indefinitely their demand. But the
producer is almost always a man desirous of increasing his wealth--he
does not hoard; he immediately lays out his capital in some productive
manner, in the purchase of food for labourers, and of the raw
materials of industry. But these articles, it happens, cannot be
supplied to him with the increasing abundance he demands; and thus we
fall back upon the ultimate law to which we have alluded. The
manufacturer finds, that every additional demand he makes for these is
supplied at a greater cost. What has limited the profits of the
agricultural capitalist limits his profits also. He cannot sell his
goods at the accustomed advantage. He exclaims that there is a glut in
the market. What he takes for a glut is a deficiency. It is quite
natural and permissible, however, that this phenomenon of the
diminution of profits should be spoken of as the result of a
superabundance of capital, provided only it be understood _why_ the
later accumulations of capital fail to bring the same return as the
earlier.

A simple law of nature, therefore, is the true cause of this
commercial phenomenon. Countries, after a certain progress in the
career of wealth, must cease to accumulate;--the diminished profit on
capital affording no longer any motive for frugality and toil;--and
they arrive at what may be called the stationary state. "When a
country," says Mr Mill, "has long possessed a large production, and a
large net income to make savings from, and when, therefore, the means
have long existed of making a great annual addition to capital, (the
country not having, like America, a large reserve of fertile land
still unused,) it is one of the characteristics of such a country,
that the rate of profit is habitually within, as it were, a hand's
breadth of the minimum, and the country, therefore, on the very verge
of the stationary state. By this, I do not mean that this state is
likely, in any of the great countries of Europe, to be soon actually
reached, or that capital does not still yield a profit considerably
greater than what is barely sufficient to induce the people of these
countries to save and accumulate. My meaning is, that it would require
but a short time to reduce profits to the minimum, if capital
continued to increase at its present rate, and no circumstances having
a tendency to raise the rate of profit occurred in the mean
time."--(Vol. ii. p. 287.)

Mr Mill then states what are the counteracting circumstances which
arrest this downward tendency of profits. He mentions the waste of
capital in periods of over-trading and rash speculation, the
expenditure of an unproductive kind, and the perpetual overflow of
capital into colonies and foreign countries, to seek higher profits
than can be obtained at home. This last has a twofold operation. "In
the first place, it does what a fire, or an inundation, or a
commercial crisis, would have done,--it carries off a part of the
increase of capital from which the reduction of profits proceeds.
Secondly, the capital so carried off is not lost, but is chiefly
employed either in founding colonies, which become large exporters of
cheap agricultural produce, or in extending, and perhaps improving,
the agriculture of older communities. It is to the emigration of
English capital that we have chiefly to look for keeping up a supply
of cheap food and cheap materials of clothing, proportional to the
increase of our population; thus enabling an increasing capital to
find employment in the country, without reduction of profit, in
producing manufactured articles with which to pay for this supply of
raw produce. Thus, the exportation of capital is an agent of great
efficacy in extending the field of employment for that which remains;
and it may be said truly that, up to a certain point, the more capital
we send away, the more we shall possess and be able to retain at
home."--(Vol. ii. p. 297.)

This last observation we have quoted is well deserving of attention.
It is an instance of what we mentioned in the outset, of the science
correcting as it advances its own errors. What follows is a still more
striking instance, and still more worthy of attention. It occurs in
the chapter entitled,--_Consequences of the tendency of profits to a
minimum_. To such observations we have wished to draw the especial
attention of our readers, but could not do so till the previous
exposition had been gone through.

     "The theory of the effect of accumulation on profits, laid
     down in the preceding chapter, materially alters many of the
     practical conclusions which might otherwise be supposed to
     follow from the general principles of political economy, and
     which were, indeed, long admitted as true by the highest
     authorities on the subject.

     "It must greatly abate, or, rather, altogether destroy, in
     countries where profits are low, the immense importance which
     used to be attached, by political economists, to the effects
     which an event or a measure of government might have in
     adding to, or subtracting from, the capital of the country.
     We have now seen that the lowness of profits is a proof that
     the spirit of accumulation is so active, and that the
     increase of capital has proceeded at so rapid a rate, as to
     outstrip the two counter agencies, improvements in
     production, and increased supply of cheap necessaries from
     abroad: and that unless a considerable portion of the annual
     increase of capital were either periodically destroyed, or
     exported for foreign investment, the country would speedily
     attain the point at which further accumulation would cease,
     or at least spontaneously slacken, so as no longer to
     overpass the march of invention in the arts which produce the
     necessaries of life. In such a state of things as this, a
     sudden addition to the capital of the country, unaccompanied
     by any increase of productive power, would be but of
     transitory duration; since, by depressing profits and
     interest, it would rather diminish, by a corresponding
     amount, the savings which would be made from income in the
     year or two following, or it would cause an equivalent amount
     to be sent abroad, or to be wasted in rash speculations.
     Neither, on the other hand, would a sudden abstraction of
     capital, unless of inordinate amount, have any real effect in
     impoverishing the country. After a few months or years there
     would exist in the country just as much capital as if none
     had been taken away. The abstraction, by raising profits and
     interest, would give a fresh stimulus to the accumulative
     principle, which would speedily fill up the vacuum. Probably,
     indeed, the only effect that would ensue, would be that, for
     some time afterwards, less capital would be exported, and
     less thrown away in hazardous speculation.

     "In the first place, then, this view of things greatly
     weakens, in a wealthy and industrious country, the force of
     the economical argument against the expenditure of public
     money for really valuable, even though industrially
     unproductive purposes. _If for any great object of justice or
     philanthropic policy, such as the industrial regeneration of
     Ireland, or a comprehensive measure of colonisation or of
     public education, it were proposed to raise a large sum by
     way of loan, politicians need not demur to the abstraction of
     so much capital, as tending to dry up the permanent sources
     of the country's wealth, and diminish the fund which supplies
     the subsistence of the labouring population. The utmost
     expense which could be requisite for any of these purposes,
     would not, in all probability, deprive one labourer of
     employment, or diminish the next year's production by one ell
     of cloth or one bushel of grain._ In poor countries the
     capital of the country requires the legislator's sedulous
     care; he is bound to be most cautious in encroaching upon it,
     and should favour to the utmost its accumulation at home, and
     its introduction from abroad. But in rich, populous, and
     highly cultivated countries, it is not capital which is the
     deficient element, but fertile land; and what the legislator
     should desire and promote, is not a greater aggregate saving,
     but a greater return to saving, either by improved
     cultivation, or by access to the produce of more fertile
     lands in other parts of the globe. In such countries, the
     government may take any moderate portion of the capital of
     the country and convert it into revenue, without affecting
     the national wealth; the whole being rather drawn from that
     portion of the annual saving which would otherwise be sent
     abroad, or being substracted from the unproductive
     expenditure of individuals for the next year or two, since
     every million sent makes room for another million to be
     saved, before reaching the overflowing point. When the object
     in view is worth the sacrifice of such an amount of the
     expenditure that furnishes the daily enjoyment of the people,
     the only well grounded economical objection against taking
     the necessary funds directly from the capital, consists of
     the inconveniences attending the process of raising a
     revenue, by taxation, to pay the interest of a debt.

     "_The same considerations enable us to throw aside, as
     unworthy of regard, one of the common arguments against
     emigration as a means of relief for the labouring class._
     Emigration, it is said, can do no good to the labourers, if,
     in order to defray the cost, as much must be taken away from
     the capital of the country as from its population. That any
     thing like this proportion could require to be abstracted
     from capital for the purpose even of the most extensive
     colonisation, few, I should think, would now assert; but even
     on that untenable supposition, it is an error to suppose that
     no benefit could be conferred on the labouring class. If
     one-tenth of the labouring people of England were transferred
     to the colonies, and along with them one-tenth of the
     circulating capital of the country, either wages, or profits,
     or both, would be greatly benefited by the diminished
     pressure of capital and population upon the fertility of the
     land. There would be a reduced demand for food; the inferior
     arable lands would be thrown out of cultivation, and would
     become pasture; the superior would be cultivated less highly,
     but with a greater proportional return; food would be lowered
     in price, and, though money wages would not rise, every
     labourer would be considerably improved in circumstances--an
     improvement which, if no increased stimulus to population and
     fall of wages ensued, would be permanent; while, if there
     did, profits would rise, and accumulation start forward so as
     to repair the loss of capital. The landlords alone would
     sustain some loss of income; and even they, only if
     colonisation went to the length of actually diminishing
     capital and population, but not if it merely carried off the
     annual increase."--(Vol. ii. p. 999.)

Does not all this place the condition of England in a very striking
aspect before us? We have a country here so wealthy, so nearly
approaching that state where its accessions of capital can no longer
be profitably employed, that it wastes its funds in ruinous
speculations, building perhaps useless factories--and, if useless, how
mischievous!--that it sends its money abroad to construct foreign
railways, or throws it away upon South American republics. Yet the
people of this country is degraded and brutalised for want of
education, and it is threatened with political convulsions for want of
a good system of emigration; and you call for education, and you call
for colonisation, and the only obstacle that is opposed to you is--the
want of money! Shame upon England, if this be so! With all her
knowledge and civilisation, she will go down to ruin, rather than
give, in the shape of taxes, for the most necessary as well as
philanthropic purposes, that wealth which she can fling abroad or
waste at home with the most reckless prodigality.

Of late the Irish landlord has been very justly held up to public
reproof for the hard, unthinking, extortionate manner in which he has
been in the habit of dealing with the soil--or allowing certain
middlemen to deal with it--taking a famine-price for the
land--permitting the miserable cottiers to bid against each other,
instead of fixing an equitable rent, such as would finally have
secured to himself better and more profitable tenants. For his
thoughtlessness or cupidity, whichever it may be, both he and the
country at large are paying a severe penalty. But the Irish landlords
are not the only class that are to blame. That indiscriminate recoil
from all taxation, whatever be its object, which characterises the
upper and middling classes of society in England, is a sad blot in
their escutcheon.[6]

Before quitting this subject of capital, we must quote a passage
which occurs at an earlier part of the work, but which is in perfect
harmony with the strain of observations we have been calling attention
to. It serves to show and explain the elastic power there is in every
thoroughly industrious country to revive from any temporary loss, or
sacrifice, or calamity. Let but the people with their knowledge and
habits, the soil and a little food, remain, and there is no effort,
and no ruin or desolation from which it would not speedily recover.
Moreover, it is a passage of a certain popular interest, and we are
glad of the opportunity to relieve our pages by its quotation.

     "Every thing which is produced is consumed; both what is
     saved and what is said to be spent; and the former quite as
     rapidly as the latter. All the ordinary forms of language
     tend to disguise this. When men talk of the ancient wealth of
     a country, of riches inherited from ancestors, and similar
     expressions, the idea suggested is, that the riches so
     transmitted were produced long ago, at the time when they are
     said to have been first acquired, and that no portion of the
     capital of the country was produced this year, except so much
     as may have been this year added to the total amount. The
     fact is far otherwise. The greater part, in value, of the
     wealth now existing in England, has been produced by human
     hands within the last twelve months. A very small proportion
     indeed of that large aggregate was in existence ten years
     ago;--of the present productive capital of the country,
     scarcely any part except farm-houses and factories, and a few
     ships and machines; and even these would not in most cases
     have survived so long, if fresh labour had not been employed
     within that period in putting them in repair. The land
     subsists, and the land is almost the only thing that
     subsists. Every thing which is produced perishes, and most
     things very quickly. Most kinds of capital are not fitted by
     their nature to be long preserved. There are a few, and but a
     few productions, capable of a very prolonged existence.
     Westminster Abbey has lasted many centuries, with occasional
     repairs; some ancient sculptures have existed above two
     thousand years; the Pyramids perhaps double or treble that
     time. But these were objects devoted to unproductive use. If
     we except bridges and aqueducts, (to which may sometimes be
     added tanks and embankments,) there are few instances of any
     edifice applied to industrial purposes which has been of
     great duration: such buildings do not hold out against wear
     and tear, nor is it good economy to construct them of the
     solidity necessary for permanency. Capital is kept in
     existence from age to age, not by preservation, but by
     perpetual reproduction: every part of it is used and
     destroyed, generally very soon after it has been produced;
     but those who consume it are employed meanwhile in producing
     more. The growth of capital is similar to the growth of
     population. Every individual who is born, dies, but in each
     year the number born exceeds the number who die; the
     population, therefore, always increases, although not one
     person of those comprising it was alive until a very recent
     date.

     "This perpetual consumption and reproduction of capital
     affords the explanation of what has so often excited
     wonder--the great rapidity with which countries recover from
     a state of devastation; the disappearance in a short time of
     all traces of the mischief done by earthquakes, of floods,
     hurricanes, and the ravages of war. An enemy lays waste a
     country by fire and sword, and destroys or carries away
     nearly all the movable wealth existing in it: all the
     inhabitants are ruined; yet in a few years after, every thing
     is much as it was before. This _vis medicatrix naturae_ has
     been a subject of sterile astonishment, or has been cited to
     exemplify the wonderful strength of the principle of saving,
     which can repair such enormous losses in so brief an
     interval. There is nothing at all wonderful in the matter.
     What the enemy have destroyed would have been destroyed in a
     little time by the inhabitants themselves; the wealth which
     they so rapidly reproduce would have needed to be produced,
     and would have been reproduced in any case, and probably in
     as short an interval."--(Vol. i. p. 91.)

One of the most interesting portions of the work is that devoted to
questions touching the cultivation of the land--as whether large or
small farms are most advisable. Mr Mill appears to advocate the
latter, and enlarges much on the industry universally displayed by the
peasants of those countries who either cultivate land of their own, or
in which they have a certain and permanent interest. Additional value
is given to these chapters, from the bearing they are made to have on
the vexed questions of the causes and the remedies of the lamentable
state of that unhappy country, Ireland.

We remember well the impression made upon us on reading, some time,
ago, these passages in Sismondi's work which Mr Mill quotes on this
occasion, where the habits and life of the peasant proprietors of
Switzerland are so minutely, and apparently so faithfully described.
Coupling his description with what our own hasty observation had
taught us of this country, we were disposed to believe that nowhere,
and under no circumstances, does human life wear a more enviable
aspect than amongst these small proprietors, this rustic aristocracy
of Switzerland. But we regarded it, as we still do, as one of those
instances of _compensation_ so general in the moral world. All the
wealth of England could not purchase this sort of pastoral happiness.
At all events, only here and there such a primitive state of things
could exist. It was not necessary for our Norman ancestors to have
added manor to manor: a wealthy commercial state, which gives origin
to great fortunes, must inevitably give origin to large properties.
The same wealth which decides for us that the land shall be cultivated
in large farms, would also decide that it should be divided amongst
large proprietors. It is well to keep in mind that neither of these
facts is, to any material extent, owing to any peculiarity in the
history or the laws of England, but to its commercial opulence.

Meanwhile we may be permitted to admire "the picture of unwearied
industry, and what may be called affectionate interest in the land;"
the patience, frugality, and prudence in entering into marriage, that
almost always characterise the class of small proprietors cultivating
their own soil. Our own yeomen, at that distant and almost fabulous
epoch when our country obtained the name of "merry England," were of
this description of men. We wish we had space to transfer to our pages
some of the extracts which our author has drawn together from French,
and German, and English writers, all showing the hearty, incessant,
and, as one author calls it, the "superhuman" industry of the peasant
proprietor.

A great number of such properties England cannot be expected to have;
there may, too, be reasons for not desiring their existence; but one
fact is placed beyond all controversy, both by the testimony of
travellers, and the known operations of the common feelings of our
nature, that they are the most indefatigable of all labourers. If you
wish to convert an idle and improvident man into an industrious and
frugal one, give him a piece of land of his own: the recipe _may_
fail; but if this does not reform him, nothing else will.

It is on the condition of Ireland, as we have intimated, that this
description of the peasant proprietor is made particularly to bear. To
substitute for the wretched cottier system, some system under which
the Irish peasant, having a substantial interest in the improvement of
the soil, would be placed under strong motives to industry and
providence, is the great remedy which Mr Mill proposes for the unhappy
state of that country.

The evils of the cottier system are notorious. A peasantry who have no
resource but the potato field, and who are multiplying as only utter
poverty can multiply, bid against each other for the possession of the
land. They promise rents they cannot possibly pay. They are
immediately and continually in debt; but being there upon the soil,
they can first feed themselves; this they do, and the rest, whatever
it may be, is for the landlord.

     "In such a condition," writes Mr Mill, "what can a tenant
     gain by any amount of industry or prudence, and what lose by
     any recklessness? If the landlord at any time exerted his
     full legal rights, the cottier would not be able even to
     live. If by extra exertion he doubled the produce of his bit
     of land, or if he prudently abstained from producing mouths
     to eat it up, his only gain would be to have more left to pay
     to his landlord, while, if he had twenty children, they would
     still be fed first, and the landlord would only take what was
     left. Almost alone among mankind, the Irish cottier is in
     this condition,--that he can scarcely be either better or
     worse off by any act of his own. If he was industrious or
     prudent, nobody but his landlord would gain; if he is lazy or
     intemperate, it is at his landlord's expense. A situation
     more devoid of motives to either labour or self-command,
     imagination itself cannot conceive. The inducements of free
     human beings are taken away, and those of a slave not
     substituted. He has nothing to hope and nothing to fear,
     except being dispossessed of his holding; and against this he
     protects himself by the _ultima ratio_ of a civil
     war."--(Vol. i. p. 374)

That this system must be got rid of is admitted by all--but how? It is
often proposed to convert the cottiers into hired labourers; but
without entering upon (either to admit or controvert) the other
objections which Mr Mill makes to this plan, it is enough to say that
it is, at present, impracticable. "The conversion of cottiers into
hired labourers," he justly observes, "implies the introduction all
over Ireland of capitalist farmers, in lieu of the present small
tenants. These farmers, or their capital at least, must come from
England. But to induce capital to come in, the cottier population must
first be peaceably got rid of: in other words, that must be already
accomplished, which English capital is proposed as the means of
accomplishing." Besides which, it is the characteristic of the English
system of farming, that it employs the fewest number of labourers.
"Taking the number of Irish peasants in the square mile, and the
number of hired labourers in an equal space in the model counties of
Scotland or England, the former number is commonly computed to be
about three times the latter. Two-thirds, therefore, of the Irish
peasantry would be absolutely dispensed with. What is to be done with
them?... The people are there; and the problem is, not how to improve
the country, but how it can be improved by and for its present
inhabitants."

To wait till the English system of farming can be introduced into
Ireland is tantamount to resigning all attempt to improve the
condition of the people of that country. Something must be done to
prepare the way for the introduction of that system. There are several
schemes afloat for giving or extending a certain _tenant-right_ to the
peasantry. Into these we have not space to enter--for it would take
some to explain the several significations attached to this term
tenant-right. It is sufficient to say, that, whenever the term has any
really important signification, and under it any effective remedy is
proposed, it means this,--that the legislature should interfere
between the landlord and tenant, and assign an equitable rent, and an
equitable duration of the tenancy. Such an act of the legislature
might be perfectly justifiable, and might be found to be as
advantageous to the landlord as the tenant; for the former as much
needs to be protected from his own indolence or thoughtless cupidity,
as the latter from the desperate pressure of want. But we should, of
course, infinitely prefer that such an equitable arrangement between
these parties should be arrived at without the intervention of the
legislature; and we think it would be an indirect result of the scheme
which Mr Mill proposes, or rather advocates. He would begin the work
of reformation by forming a body of peasant proprietors on the waste
lands of Ireland. Carried out with due consideration to the rights of
property, we confess we can detect no objections to this plan. Some
differences of opinion, we believe, exist amongst the best judges as
to the nature of the soil in question, and its capability of being
reclaimed; and on this point we cannot profess to give an opinion:
but, so far as principles of legislation, or the objects in view are
concerned, we cordially approve of the scheme, though we cannot say
that we entertain the same sanguine view of it as the author before
us. It deserves a trial, in conjunction with other measures of relief,
when the temper of that misguided people shall admit of the
application, with any probability of success, of this class of
remedial measures.

We shall give the project as it is stated in the work before us. After
observing that it is not necessary that peasant properties should be
universal, in order to be useful, nor, indeed, desirous that they
should be universal, he thus proceeds:--

     "It is enough, if there be land available on which to locate
     so great a portion of the population, that the remaining area
     of the country shall not be required to maintain greater
     numbers than are compatible with large farming and hired
     labour. For this purpose there is an obvious resource in the
     waste lands, which are happily so extensive, and a large
     portion of them so improveable, as to afford a means by
     which, without making the present tenants proprietors, nearly
     the whole surplus population might be converted into peasant
     proprietors elsewhere. This plan has been strongly pressed
     upon the public by several writers; but the first to bring it
     prominently forward in England, was Mr William Thornton.[7]

     "The detailed estimate of an irrefragable authority, Mr
     Griffith, annexed to the Report of Lord Devon's Commission,
     shows nearly a million and a half of acres reclaimable for
     the spade or plough, some of them with the promise of great
     fertility, and about two millions and a half more reclaimable
     for pasture; the greater part being in most convenient
     proximity to the principal masses of destitute population.
     Besides these four millions of acres, there are above two
     millions and a half, pronounced by Mr Griffith to be
     unimprovable; but he is only speaking of reclamation for
     profit: it is doubtful if there be any land, in a temperate
     climate, which cannot be reclaimed and rendered productive by
     labourers themselves under the inducement of a permanent
     property. Confining ourselves to the one and a half millions
     of arable first mentioned, it would furnish properties
     averaging five acres each to three hundred thousand persons,
     which, at the rate of five persons to a family--a rather low
     rate for Ireland--answers to a population of fifteen hundred
     thousand. Suppose such a number drafted off to a state of
     independence and comfort, together with any moderate
     additional relief of emigration, and the introduction of
     English capital and farming over the remaining surface of
     Ireland would cease to be chimerical.

     "'The improvement of waste,' Mr Thornton observes, 'may
     perhaps be thought to require a good deal of capital; but
     capital is principally useful for its command of labour, and
     the Irish peasantry have quite labour enough at their own
     disposal. Their misfortune is that they have so much. Their
     labour would not be worse applied because they worked for
     themselves instead of for a pay-master. So far is large
     capital from being indispensable for the cultivation of
     barren tracts, that schemes of this kind, which could only
     bring loss to a real speculator, are successfully achieved by
     his penniless rival. A capitalist must have a certain return
     for the money he lays out, but the poor man expends nothing
     but his own superabundant labour, which would be valueless if
     not so employed; so that his returns, however small, are all
     clear profit. No man in his senses would ever have thought of
     wasting money upon the original sand of the Pays de Waes; but
     the hard-working boors who settled there two hundred years
     ago, without any other stock than their industry, contrived
     to enrich both themselves and the land, and indeed to make
     the latter the richest in Europe.'

     "'The profit of reclaiming waste land,' says the Digest of
     Evidence to Lord Devon's Commission, 'will be best understood
     from a practice not uncommon in Ireland, to which farmers
     sometimes resort. This consists in giving the use of a small
     portion of it to a poor cottier or herdsman for the first
     three crops, after which this improved portion is given up to
     the farmer, and a fresh piece of the waste land is taken on
     the same terms by the cottier.' Well may the compiler say,
     'Here we have the example of the very poorest class in
     Ireland obtaining a livelihood by the cultivation of waste
     land under the most discouraging and the least remunerative
     circumstances that can well be imagined.'

     "It is quite worthy of the spirit which pervades the wretched
     attempts as yet made to do good to Ireland, that this
     spectacle of the poorest of mankind making the land valuable
     by their labour for the profit of other people who have done
     nothing to assist them, does not at once strike Lord Devon
     and his Commission as a thing which ought not to be. Mr
     Thornton strongly urges the claims of common justice and
     common sense.

     "'The colonists ought to be allowed to retain permanent
     possession of the spots reclaimed by them. To employ them as
     labourers in bringing the land into a remunerative condition,
     (see Report of Land Occupation Commissioners,) in order that
     it may then be let to some one else, while they are sent to
     shift for themselves where they can, may be an excellent mode
     of enriching the landlord, but must eventually aggravate the
     sufferings of the poor. It is probably because this plan has
     been generally practised, that the reclamation of waste land
     has hitherto done nothing for the benefit of the Irish
     peasantry. If the latter are to derive any advantage from it,
     such of them as may be located on the waste should receive
     perpetual leases of their respective allotments--should be
     made freeholders in fact, or at least perpetual tenants at a
     quit-rent. Such an appropriation of waste land would, of
     course, require that compensation should be made to all who
     previously possessed any interest in it. But the value of a
     legal interest in land which cannot be enclosed or cultivated
     without permission of the legislature, can only be
     proportionate to the actual yearly produce; and as land in a
     natural state yields little or nothing, all legal claims upon
     it might be bought up at a trifling expense, or might be
     commuted for a very small annual payment to be made by the
     settlers. Of the perfect competence of parliament to direct
     some arrangement of this kind there can be no question. An
     authority which compels individuals to part with their most
     valued property on the slightest pretext of public
     convenience, and permits railway projectors to throw down
     family mansions and cut up favourite pleasure-grounds, need
     not be very scrupulous about forcing the sale of boggy
     meadows or mountain pastures, in order to obtain the means of
     curing the destitution and misery of an entire people.'

     "It would be desirable," continues Mr Mill, "and in most
     cases necessary, that the tracts of land should be prepared
     for the labours of the peasant by being drained and
     intersected with roads, at the expense of government; the
     interest of the sums so expended, and of compensation paid
     for the existing rights to the waste land, being charged on
     it, when reclaimed, as a perpetual quit-rent, redeemable at a
     moderate number of years' purchase. The state would thus
     incur no loss, while the advances made would give that
     immediate employment to the surplus labour of Ireland, which,
     if not given in this manner, will assuredly have to be given
     in some other, not only less useful, but far less likely to
     repay its cost. The millions lavished, during the famine, in
     the almost nominal execution of useless works, without any
     result but that of keeping the people alive, would, if
     employed in a great operation in the waste lands, have been
     quite as effectual for relieving immediate distress, and
     would have laid the foundation, broad and deep, for something
     really deserving the name of social improvement. But, as
     usual, it was thought better to throw away money and exertion
     in a beaten track, than to take the responsibility of the
     most advantageous investment of them in an untrodden
     one."--(Vol. i. p. 392.)

We make no apology for the length of the above extract; the subject is
of great importance; but having stated the proposal in the words of
its principal author (if Mr Thornton can claim the distinction) and
its most distinguished advocate, we have nothing left but to express
our own wish that some such wide and general plan will at all events
meet with a fair trial, when the fitting time shall occur for making
the experiment.

Any of our readers into whose hands the work of Mr Mill has already
fallen, will be aware of the numerous topics on which it must excite
controversy or provoke discussion. Some of these topics we had marked
out for examination; but we have no space to enter upon a new subject,
and shall content ourselves with closing our notice with an extract or
two from what is the closing chapter of the work itself--_On the
Limits of the Province of Government_. His observations upon this
subject are so temperate and judicious, and conceived throughout in so
liberal and enlightened a spirit, that although there must always be a
_shade_ of difference between such a writer and ourselves, we should
have little hesitation in adopting almost the whole of the chapter. He
draws a very necessary distinction between the authoritative
interference of government, controlling and interdicting, and that
kind of intervention where a government, "leaving individuals free to
use their own means of pursuing any object of general interest, but
not trusting the object solely to their care, establishes, side by
side with their arrangements, an agency of its own for a like purpose.
Thus it is one thing to maintain a church establishment, and another
to refuse toleration to other religions, or to persons professing no
religion. It is one thing to provide schools or colleges, and another
to require that no person shall act as an instructor of youth without
a government license."

We like the tone of the following remark:--"Whatever theory we adopt
respecting the foundation of the social union, and under whatever
political institutions we live, there is a circle around every
individual human being which no government, be it that of one, of a
few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep; there is a
part of the life of every person, who has come to years of discretion,
within which the individuality of that person ought to reign
uncontrolled, either by any other individual or the public
collectively. That there is, or ought to be, some space of human
existence thus entrenched round, and sacred from authoritative
intrusion, no one who professes the smallest regard to human freedom
or dignity will call in question."

     "Many," he continues, "in latter times have been prone to
     think that limitation of the powers of government is only
     essential when the government itself is badly constituted;
     when it does not represent the people, but is the organ of a
     class, or a coalition of classes; and that a government of a
     sufficiently popular constitution might be trusted with any
     amount of power over the nation, since its power would be
     only that of the nation over itself. This might be true, if
     the nation, in such cases, did not practically mean a mere
     majority of the nation, and if minorities only were capable
     of oppressing, but not of being oppressed. Experience,
     however, proves that the depositaries of power, who are mere
     delegates of the people--that is, of a majority--are quite as
     ready (when they think they can count upon popular support)
     as any organs of oligarchy to assume arbitrary power, and
     encroach unduly on the liberty of private life. The public
     collectively is abundantly ready to impose, not only its
     generally narrow views of its interests, but its abstract
     opinions, and even its tastes, as laws binding upon
     individuals; and our present civilisation tends so strongly
     to make the power of persons acting in masses the only
     substantial power in society, that there never was more
     necessity for surrounding individual independence of thought,
     speech, and conduct with the most powerful defences, in order
     to maintain that originality of mind and individuality of
     character, which are the only source of any real progress,
     and of most of the qualities which make the human race much
     superior to any herd of animals."

It is not the error which Conservative politicians are liable to
commit, to throw too large a share of the management of affairs into
the hands of a central power; they would, therefore, readily coincide
with Mr Mill, when he observes, that even if a government could
comprehend within itself the most eminent intellectual capacity and
active talent of the nation, it would not be the less desirable that
the conduct of a large portion of the affairs of society should be
left in the hands of the persons immediately interested in them. "The
business of life," he remarks, "is an essential part of the practical
education of a people; without which, book and school instruction,
though most necessary and salutary, does not suffice to qualify them
for conduct, and for the adaptation of means to ends.... A people
among whom there is no habit of spontaneous action for a collective
interest--who look habitually to their government to command or prompt
them in all matters of joint concern--who expect to have every thing
done for them, except what can be made an affair of mere habit and
routine--have their faculties only half developed; their education is
defective in one of its most important branches."

We must conclude with the following extract, which is so extremely
applicable to the affairs of our neighbours, that we wish we could
make it heard from the tribune of their National Assembly.

     "A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic
     institutions in detail, but confined to the central
     government, not only is not political freedom, but often
     creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the
     lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political
     domination. In some countries, the desire of the people is
     for not being tyrannised over, but in others, it is merely
     for an equal chance to every body of tyrannising. Unhappily,
     this last state of the desires is fully as natural to mankind
     as the former, and in many of the conditions even of
     civilised humanity, is far more largely exemplified. In
     proportion as the people are accustomed to manage their
     affairs by their own active intervention, instead of leaving
     them to the government, their desires will turn to the
     repelling tyranny, rather than to tyrannising; while, in
     proportion as all real initiative and direction resides in
     the government, and individuals perpetually feel and act as
     under its perpetual tutelage, popular institutions develop in
     them not the desire of freedom, but an unmeasured appetite
     for place and power; diverting the intelligence and activity
     of the country from its principal business to a wretched
     competition for the selfish prizes and the petty vanities of
     office."--(Vol. ii. p. 515.)

In quitting this work, we must again repeat that our task would be
endless if we entered upon every topic on which it provokes
discussion. On some of these we may take a future opportunity to
express ourselves. Amongst the subjects we had designed, had space
permitted, for some discussion, are certain heresies, as we think
them, regarding property in land; and some views, rather hinted at
than explained, on the position which the female sex ought to take in
society. In the extract we first made, the reader may have remarked
this singular expression. Speaking of the Americans, he says they have
"apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that
affect persons of Caucasian race _and of the male sex_;" leaving it to
be inferred, that even in America there still remain certain social
injustices and inequalities affecting _the female sex_. There are many
inuendos scattered throughout the book of the same description, but we
nowhere gather a distinct view of the sort of reformation that is
called for. In a writer of another character these expressions would
be encountered only with ridicule; coming from Mr Mill, they excite
our surprise, and, in some measure, our curiosity.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] _Principles of Political Economy, with some of their applications
to Social Philosophy._ By JOHN STUART MILL. 2 vols.

[5] "Mais d'abord va-t-on designer cet ordre particulier
d'investigations par le nom d'economie politique? Quoi donc! Economie
politique, economie de la societe,--c'est a dire--production,
distribution, consommation des richesses? Mais c'est se moquer; on ne
traduit pas avec une liberte pareille. Il ne faut qu'ouvrir le premier
dictionnaire venu pour voir," &c.--DUNOYER, _De la Liberte du
Travail_.

[6] The discussions upon the income tax reveal a lamentable state of
public feeling on this subject. That this tax might have been more
equitably adjusted, every one but a Chancellor of the Exchequer will
admit. Those who have to insure their lives, or otherwise save a fund
out of their income for survivors, ought not to pay the same tax as
those who can enjoy the whole of their income. But no such
modification as this would have pacified discontent. One often heard
it said that the tax should fall exclusively on realised property. The
prosperous tradesman, with his income of some thousands a-year, was to
pay nothing; the poor widow, who draws her sixty pounds per annum from
her property in the funds, she was to pay the tax. Mr Mill, in
noticing this very equitable proposition, says--"Except the proposal
of applying a sponge to the national debt, no such palpable violation
of common honesty has found sufficient support in this country during
the present generation to be regarded within the domain of discussion.
It has not the palliation of a graduated property-tax, that of laying
the burthen on those best able to bear it; for 'realised property'
includes almost every provision made for those who are unable to work,
and consists, in great part, of extremely small fractions. I can
hardly conceive a more shameless pretension than that the major part
of the property of the country, that of merchants, manufacturers,
farmers, and shopkeepers, should be exempted from its share of
taxation; that these classes should only begin to pay their proportion
after retiring from business, and if they never retire, should be
excused from it altogether."--(Vol. ii. p. 355.)

[7] In a work entitled, _Over-Population and its Remedy_.




Life in the "Far West."

PART V.


The Mission of San Fernando is situated on a small river called Las
Animas, a branch of the Los Martires. The convent is built at the neck
of a large plain, at the point of influx of the stream from the broken
spurs of the sierra. The savanna is covered with luxuriant grass, kept
down, however, by the countless herds of cattle which pasture on it.
The banks of the creek are covered with a lofty growth of oak and
poplar, which near the Mission have been considerably thinned for the
purpose of affording fuel and building material for the increasing
settlement. The convent stands in the midst of a grove of fruit-trees,
its rude tower and cross peeping above them, and contrasting
picturesquely with the wildness of the surrounding scenery. Gardens
and orchards lie immediately in front of the building, and a vineyard
stretches away to the upland ridge of the valley. The huts of the
Indians are scattered here and there, built of stone and adobe,
sometimes thatched with flags and boughs, but comfortable enough. The
convent itself is a substantial building, of the style of architecture
characterising monastic edifices in most parts of the world. Loopholes
peer from its plastered walls, and on a flat portion of the roof a
comically mounted gingall or wall-piece, carrying a two-pound ball,
threatens the assailant in time of war. At one end of the oblong
building, a rough irregular arch of sun-burned bricks is surmounted by
a rude cross, under which hangs a small but deep-toned bell--the
wonder of the Indian peones, and highly venerated by the frayles
themselves, who received it as a present from a certain venerable
archbishop of Old Spain, and who, whilst guarding it with reverential
awe, tell wondrous tales of its adventures on the road to its present
abiding place.

Of late years the number of the canonical inmates of the convent has
been much reduced--there being but four priests now to do the duties
of the eleven who formerly inhabited it: Fray Augustin, a Capuchin of
due capacity of paunch, being at the head of the holy quartette.
Augustin is the conventual name of the reverend father, who fails not
to impress upon such casual visitants to that _ultima Thule_ as he
deems likely to appreciate the information, that, but for his
humility, he might add the sonorous appellations of Ignacio
Sabanal-Morales-y Fuentes--his family being of the best blood of Old
Castile, and known there since the days of Ruy Gomez--el
Campeador--possessing, moreover, half the "vega" of the Ebro, &c.,
where, had fate been propitious, he would now have been the sleek
superior of a rich capuchin convent, instead of vegetating, a
leather-clad frayle, in the wilds of California Alta.

Nevertheless, his lot is no bad one. With plenty of the best and
fattest meat to eat, whether of beef or venison, of bear or mountain
mutton; with good wine and brandy of home make, and plenty of it;
fruit of all climes in great abundance; wheaten or corn bread to suit
his palate; a tractable flock of natives to guide, and assisted in the
task by three brother shepherds; far from the strife of politics or
party--secure from hostile attack, (not quite, by-the-by,) and eating,
drinking, and sleeping away his time, one would think that Fray
Augustin Ignacio Sabanal-Morales-y Fuentes had little to trouble him,
and had no cause to regret even the vega of Castilian Ebro, held by
his family since the days of el Campeador.

One evening Fray Augustin sat upon an adobe bench, under the fig-tree
shadowing the porch of the Mission. He was dressed in a goat-skin
jerkin, softly and beautifully dressed, and descending to his hips,
under which his only covering--tell it not in Gath!--was a long linen
shirt, reaching to his knees, and lately procured from Puebla de los
Angeles, as a sacerdotal garment. Boots, stockings, or unmentionables,
he had none. A cigarito, of tobacco rolled in corn shuck, was
occasionally placed between his lips; whereupon huge clouds of smoke
rushed in columns from his mouth and nostrils. His face was of a golden
yellow colour, relieved by arched and very black eyebrows; his shaven
chin was of most respectable duplicity--his corporation of orthodox
dimensions. Several Indians and half-bred Mexican women were pounding
Indian corn on metates near at hand; whilst sundry beef-fed urchins of
whitey-brown complexion sported before the door, exhibiting, as they
passed Fray Augustin, a curious resemblance to the strongly marked
features of that worthy padre. They were probably his nieces and
nephews--a class of relations often possessed in numbers by priests and
monks.

The three remaining brothers were absent from the Mission; Fray
Bernardo, hunting elk in the sierra; Fray Jose, gallivanting at Puebla
de los Angeles, ten days' journey distant; Fray Cristoval, lassoing
colts upon the plain. Augustin, thus left to his own resources, had
just eaten his vespertine frijolitos and chile colorado, and was
enjoying a post-coenal smoke of fragrant pouche under the shadow of
his own fig-tree.

Whilst thus employed, an Indian dressed in Mexican attire approached
him hat in hand, and, making a reverential bow, asked his directions
concerning domestic business of the Mission.

"Hola! friend Jose," cried Fray Augustin in a thick guttural voice,
"pensaba yo--I was thinking that it was very nearly this time three
years ago when those 'malditos Americanos' came by here and ran off
with so many of our cavallada."

"True, reverend father," answered the administrador, "just three years
ago, all but fifteen days: I remember it well. _Malditos sean_--curse
them!"

"How many did we kill, Jose?"

"Quizas moochos--a great many, I dare say. But they did not fight
fairly--charged right upon us, and gave us no time to do any thing.
They don't know how to fight, these Mericanos; come right at you,
before you can swing a lasso, hallooing like Indios Bravos."

"But, Jose, how many did they leave dead on the field?"

"Not one."

"And we?"

"Valgame Dios! thirteen dead, and many more wounded."

"That's it! Now if these savages come again, (and the Chemeguaba, who
came in yesterday, says he saw a large trail,) we must fight
adentro--within--outside is no go; for as you very properly say, Jose,
these Americans don't know how to fight, and kill us before--before we
can kill them. Vaya!"

At this moment there issued from the door of the Mission Don Antonio,
Velez Trueba, a Gachupin--that is, a native of Old Spain--a wizened
old hidalgo refugee, who had left the mother country on account of his
political opinions, which were stanchly Carlist, and had found his
way--how, he himself scarcely knew--from Mexico to San Francisco in
Upper California, where, having a most perfect contempt for every
thing Mexican, and hearing that in the Mission of San Fernando, far
away, were a couple of Spanish padres of "sangre regular," he had
started into the wilderness to ferret them out; and having escaped all
dangers on the route, (which, however, were hardly dangers to the Don,
who could not realise the idea of scalp-taking savages,) had arrived
with a whole skin at the Mission. There he was received with open arms
by his countryman Fray Augustin, who made him welcome to all the place
afforded, and there he harmlessly smoked away his time; his heart far
away on the banks of the Genil and in the grape-bearing vegas of his
beloved Andalusia, his withered cuerpo in the sierras of Upper
California. Don Antonio was the walking essence of a Spaniard of the
_ancien regime_. His family dated from the Flood, and with the
exception of sundry refreshing jets of Moorish blood, injected into
the Truebas during the Moorish epoch, no strange shoot was ever
engrafted on their genealogical tree. The marriages of the family were
ever confined to the family itself--never looking to fresh blood in a
station immediately below it, which was not hidalgueno; nor above,
since any thing higher in rank than the Trueba y Trueba family, _no
habia_, there was not.

Thus, in the male and female scions of the house, were plainly visible
the ill effects of breeding "in and in." The male Truebas were sadly
degenerate Dons, in body as in mind--compared to their ancestors of
Boabdil's day; and the senoritas of the name were all eyes, and eyes
alone, and hardly of such stamp as would have tempted that amorous
monarch to bestow a kingdom for a kiss, as ancient ballads tell.

    "Duena de la negra toca,
    Por un beso de tu boca,
      Diera un reyno, Boabdil;
    Y yo por ello, Cristiana,
    Te diera de buena gana
      Mil cielos, si fueran mil."

Come of such poor stock, and reared on tobacco smoke and "gazpacho,"
Don Antonio would not have shone, even amongst pigmy Mexicans, for
physical beauty. Five feet high, a frame-work of bones covered with a
skin of Andalusian tint, the Trueba stood erect and stiff in all the
consciousness of his "sangre regular." His features were handsome, but
entirely devoid of flesh, his upper lip was covered with a jet-black
mustache mixed with gray, his chin was bearded "like the pard." Every
one around him clad in deer and goat skin, our Don walked conspicuous
in shining suit of black--much the worse for wear, it must be
confessed--with beaver hat sadly battered, and round his body and over
his shoulder an unexceptionable "capa" of the amplest dimensions.
Asking, as he stepped over him, the pardon of an Indian urchin who
blocked the door, and bowing with punctilious politeness to the sturdy
mozas who were grinding corn, Don Antonio approached our friend
Augustin, who was discussing warlike matters with his administrador.

"Hola! Don Antonio, how do you find yourself, sir?"

"Perfectly well, and your very humble servant, reverend father; and
your worship also, I trust you are in good health?"

"_Sin novedad_--without novelty;" which, since it was one hour and a
half since our friends had separated to take their siestas, was not
impossible.

"Myself and the worthy Jose," continued Fray Augustin, "were speaking
of the vile invasion of a band of North American robbers, who three
years since fiercely assaulted this peaceful Mission, killing many of
its inoffensive inhabitants, wounding many more, and carrying off
several of our finest colts and most promising mules to their dens and
caves in the Rocky Mountains. Not with impunity, however, did they
effect this atrocity. Jose informs me that many of the assailants were
killed by my brave Indians. How many said you, Jose?"

"Quizas mo-o-ochos," answered the Indian.

"Yes, probably a great multitude," continued the padre; "but, unwarned
by such well-merited castigation, it has been reported to me by a
Chemeguaba mansito, that a band of these audacious marauders are now
on their road to repeat the offence, numbering many thousands, well
mounted and armed; and to oppose these white barbarians it behoves us
to make every preparation of defence."[8]

"There is no cause for alarm," answered the Andaluz. "I (tapping his
breast) have served in three wars: in that glorious one 'de la
Independencia,' when our glorious patriots drove the French like sheep
across the Pyrenees; in that equally glorious one of 1821; and in the
late magnanimous struggle for the legitimate rights of his majesty
Charles V., king of Spain, (doffing his hat,) whom God preserve. With
that right arm," cried the spirited Don, extending his shrivelled
member, "I have supported the throne of my kings--have fought for my
country, mowing down its enemies before me; and with it," vehemently
exclaimed the Gachupin, working himself into a perfect frenzy, "I
will slay these Norte Americanos, should they dare to show their
faces in my front. Adios, Don Augustin Ignacio Sabanal-Morales-y
Fuentes," he cried, doffing his hat with an earth-sweeping bow: "I go
to grind my sword. Till then adieu."

"A countryman of mine!" said the frayle, admiringly, to the
administrador. "With him by our side we need not to fear: neither
Norte Americanos, nor the devil himself, can harm us when he is by."

Whilst the Trueba sharpens his Tizona, and the priest puffs volumes of
smoke from his nose and mouth, let us introduce to the reader one of
the muchachitas, who knelt grinding corn on the metate, to make
tortillas for the evening meal. Juanita was a stout wench from Sonora,
of Mexican blood, hardly as dark as the other women who surrounded
her, and with a drop or two of the Old Spanish blood struggling with
the darker Indian tint to colour her plump cheeks. An enagua (a short
petticoat) of red serge, was confined round her waist by a gay band
ornamented with beads, and a chemisette covered the upper part of the
body, permitting, however, a prodigal display of her charms. Whilst
pounding sturdily at the corn, she laughed and joked with her
fellow-labourers upon the anticipated American attack, which appeared
to have but few terrors for her. "Que vengan," she exclaimed--"let
them come; they are only men, and will not molest us women. Besides, I
have seen these white men before--in my own country, and they are fine
fellows, very tall, and as white as the snow on the sierras. Let them
come, say I!"

"Only hear the girl!" cried another: "if these savages come, then will
they kill Pedrillo, and what will Juanita say to lose her sweetheart?"

"Pedrillo!" sneered the latter; "what care I for Pedrillo? Soy
Mejicana, yo--a Mexican girl am I, I'd have you know, and don't demean
me to look at a wild Indian. Not I, indeed, by my salvation! What I
say is, let the Norte Americanos come."

At this juncture Fray Augustin called for a glass of aguardiente,
which Juanita was despatched to bring, and, on presenting it, the
churchman facetiously inquired why she wished for the Americans,
adding, "Don't think they'll come here--no, no: here we are brave men,
and have Don Antonio with us, a noble fellow, well used to arms." As
the words were on his lips, the clattering of a horse's hoofs was
heard rattling across the loose stones and pebbles in the bed of the
river, and presently an Indian herder galloped up to the door of the
Mission, his horse covered with foam, and its sides bleeding from
spur-wounds.

"Oh, padre mio!" he cried, as soon as he caught sight of his
reverence, "vienen los Americanos--the Americans, the Americans are
upon us. Ave Maria purissima--more than ten thousand are at my heels!"

Up started the priest and shouted for the Don.

That hidalgo presently appeared, armed with the sword that had graced
his thigh in so many glorious encounters, the sword with which he had
mowed down the enemies of his country, and by whose aid he now
proposed to annihilate the American savages should they dare to appear
before him.

The alarm was instantly given; peones, vagueros hurried from the
plains; and milpas, warned by the deep-toned bell, which soon rung out
its sonorous alarum. A score of mounted Indians, armed with gun and
lasso, dashed off to bring intelligence of the enemy. The old gingall
on the roof was crammed with powder and bullets to the very muzzle, by
the frayle's own hand. Arms were brought and piled in the sala, ready
for use. The padre exhorted, the women screamed, the men grew pale and
nervous, and thronged within the walls. Don Antonio, the fiery
Andaluz, alone remained outside, flourishing his whetted sabre, and
roaring to the padre, who stood on the roof with lighted match, by the
side of his formidable cannon, not to be affrighted. "That he, the
Trueba, was there, with his Tizona, ready to defeat the devil himself
should he come on."

He was deaf to the entreaties of the priest to enter.

"Siempre en el frente--Ever in the van," he said, "was the war-cry of
the Truebas."

But now a cloud of dust was seen approaching from the plain, and
presently a score of horsemen dashed headlong towards the Mission. "El
enemigo," shouted Fray Augustin; and, without waiting to aim, he
clapped his match to the touch-hole of the gun, harmlessly pointed to
the sky, and crying out "in el nombre de Dios"--in God's name--as he
did so, was instantly knocked over and over by the recoil of the
piece, then was as instantly seized by some of the Indian garrison,
and forced through the trap-door into the building; whilst the
horsemen (who were his own scouts) galloped up with the intelligence
that the enemy was at hand, and in overwhelming force.

Thereupon the men were all mounted, and formed in a body before the
building, to the amount of more than fifty, well armed with guns or
bows and arrows. Here the gallant Don harangued them, and infusing
into their hearts a little of his own courage, they eagerly demanded
to be led against the enemy. Fray Augustin re-appeared on the roof,
gave them his blessing, advised them to give no quarter, and, with
slight misgivings, saw them ride off to the conflict.

About a mile from the Mission, the plain gradually ascended to a ridge
of moderate elevation, on which was a growth of dwarf oak and ilex. To
this point the eyes of the remaining inmates of the convent were
earnestly directed, as at this point the enemy was first expected to
make his appearance. Presently a few figures were seen to crown the
ridge, clearly defined against the clear evening sky. Not more than a
dozen mounted men composed this party, which all imagined must be
doubtless the vanguard of the thousand invaders. On the summit of the
ridge they halted a few minutes, as if to reconnoitre; and by this
time the Californian horsemen were halted in the plain, midway between
the Mission and the ridge, and distant from the former less than
half-a-mile, so that all the operations were clearly visible to the
lookers-on.

The enemy wound slowly, in Indian file, down the broken ground of the
descent; but when the plain was reached, they formed into something
like a line, and trotted fearlessly towards the Californians. These
began to sit uneasily in their saddles; nevertheless they made a
forward movement, and even broke into a gallop, but soon halted, and
again huddled together. Then the mountaineers quickened their pace,
and their loud shout was heard as they dashed into the middle of the
faltering troop. The sharp cracks of the rifles were heard, and the
duller reports of the smooth-bored pieces of the Californians; a cloud
of smoke and dust arose from the plain, and immediately half-a-dozen
horses, with empty saddles, broke from it, followed quickly by the
Californians, flying like mad across the level. The little steady line
of the mountaineers advanced, and puffs of smoke arose, as they loaded
and discharged their rifles at the flying horsemen. As the Americans
came on, however, one was seen to totter in his saddle, the rifle fell
from his grasp, and he tumbled headlong to the ground For an instant
his companions surrounded the fallen man, but again forming, dashed
towards the Mission, shouting fierce war-whoops, and brandishing aloft
their long and heavy rifles. Of the defeated Californians some jumped
off their horses at the door of the Mission, and sought shelter
within; others galloped off towards the sierra in panic-stricken
plight. Before the gate, however, still paced valiantly the proud
hidalgo, encumbered with his cloak, and waving with difficulty his
sword above his head. To the priest and women, who implored him to
enter, he replied with cries of defiance, of "Viva Carlos Quinto," and
"Death or glory." He shouted in vain to the flying crowd to halt; but,
seeing their panic was beyond hope, he clutched his weapon more firmly
as the Americans dashed at him, closed his teeth and his eyes, thought
once of the vega of his beloved Genil, and of Granada la Florida, and
gave himself up for lost. Those inside the Mission, when they observed
th

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