Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848
by Various · English · Gutenberg #40099 · 598,942 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848
Author: Various
Release date: June 28, 2012 [eBook #40099]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40099
Credits: Produced by Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram 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.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOLUME 63, NO. 392, JUNE, 1848 ***
Transcriber's note:
This issue contains the index to Volume 63.
Spelling and punctuation are sometimes erratic. A few obvious
misprints have been corrected, but in general the original spelling
and typesetting conventions have been retained. Accents are
inconsistent, and have not been standardised.
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCXCII. JUNE, 1848. VOL. LXIII.
CONTENTS.
HOW TO DISARM THE CHARTISTS, 653
STODDART AND ANGLING, 673
THE CAXTONS. PART III. 685
GUESSES AT TRUTH, 701
LIFE IN THE "FAR WEST." PART I. 713
LOMBARDY AND THE ITALIAN WAR, 733
THE INCA AND HIS BRIDE.--A MEDLEY, 750
SENTIMENTS AND SYMBOLS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, 767
AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND, 780
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.
HOW TO DISARM THE CHARTISTS.
The tempest which has lately passed over the moral world has begun to
subside,--we no longer hear of empires revolutionised, monarchies
overturned, by every post. The states which were to be prostrated by
the blast have already fallen; those which have withstood the shock,
like a cannon which has borne a double-shotted discharge, are only the
more firm from having escaped uninjured from such a trial. France has
been utterly revolutionised: Prussia, to all appearance, scarcely less
thoroughly convulsed: Italy has been thrown into transports: the
smaller states of Germany have, more or less, become republican:
Austria has been violently shaken: the seeds of another bootless
democratic convulsion sown in Poland. This is enough for three months.
Even M. Ledru Rollin and Louis Blanc could scarcely, in their wildest
imaginations, have figured a more rapid consummation of their wishes.
But other states have stood firm. England, the firstborn of freedom,
has shown herself worthy of her glorious inheritance:--she has
repelled tyranny in the form of democracy, as she has repelled tyranny
in the hands of kings. Russia is yet unshaken;--her people have
responded to the call of the Czar, and are preparing on the Vistula
for a crusade into western Europe. Belgium, contrary to all
expectation, has withstood the tempter; the hordes sent down from
Paris to carry desolation into its beautiful plains have been repelled
with disgrace. Denmark has boldly thrown down the gauntlet to
revolutionised and spoliating Prussia, and is striving to maintain its
comparatively inconsiderable dominions against its gigantic aggressor;
and even the rickety and half-revolutionised monarchy of Spain has
survived the shock, and the streets of Madrid have witnessed the
overthrow of a power which the arms of France proved unable to combat.
The worst, therefore, is over, considering the convulsion as one
affecting the internal government and social concerns of nations. The
wild-beast has made his spring: he has cruelly lacerated some of the
party, but many have repelled his claws, and against others he has
missed his blow. But, even more than that, we derive consolation from
this reflection, that the force of the cosmopolitan and general
transports has been weakened, and they are rapidly turning into their
ordinary and comparatively regulated evils of war, conquest, and
military devastation. The polyglot fervour, for the present at least,
is stilled: the national are fast resuming the ascendency over the
social passions. Prussia is at open war with Denmark, in the hope of
wresting from it the German possessions of the Danish crown: Piedmont,
Tuscany, and Lombardy are combating Austria on the Adige: Naples has
declared war against Sicily, and Russia is only waiting till its
gigantic strength is collected in Poland to crush the efforts of
revolution in the Grand-duchy of Warsaw and Duchy of Posen. Thus
revolution is leading every where to its natural and oft predicted
result of universal hostility. The robbery of the weak by the strong,
as in a nation where the authority of law is at an end, has become
general. Spoliation is the order of the day. Nation is rising up
against nation--people against people; civil war has already broken
out in many parts of France--in others it is threatened: Paris is
openly preparing for the conflict: and the reign of liberty, equality,
and _fraternity_ in France is, to all appearance, about to deluge the
world with a stream of blood; second, perhaps, only to that which
followed and punished the first revolution.
God forbid that we should speak lightly of the calamities which such
general warfare must bring in its train. None know them better, or
deplore them more deeply than ourselves. But they are light in
comparison of the evils of successful revolution. War, even in its
bloodiest form, is under some control; it is conducted according to
fixed usages, and by men subject to discipline. But revolutions have
no customs: happily they have not been so frequent in history as to
have induced any consuetudinary usage. They are subject to no
discipline; the principle on which they proceed is the negation of all
authority. They are preceded by the destruction of all those barriers
which experience had erected, and found necessary to restrain vice's
baneful influence. If they bear any resemblance to war, it is to the
universal burst of passion which follows the storming of a fortress or
sack of a city. The murder, rape, and conflagration which then
invariably ensue, are but faint images of the wide-spread ruin which
never fails to follow even the least bloody successful revolution. The
evils of pillage, massacre, or storm affect only the immediate
sufferers under the soldiers' violence: even the dread of plunder by a
victorious host extends only as far as the arm of the marauder can
reach. But the shock to credit, the destruction of capital, the
wasting of industry by a successful revolution, are confined to no
such limits; it devastates like a conflagration every thing within its
reach, and spreads its baneful influence over the whole extent of the
civilised world. There are few operatives in Britain who are not
suffering at this moment under the effects of the French revolution.
Who ever heard of a war which, in two months, destroyed _two-thirds_
of the capital of a nation, and subjected thirty-four millions of men
to the despotism of two hundred thousand armed janizaries in the
capital, as the recent revolution has done in France?
Delivered by the firmness of our government, and the spirit of our
people--by the wisdom which centuries of freedom has diffused, and the
habits which wide-spread and long-continued prosperity have rendered
general--from the immediate dangers of a similar convulsion, it well
becomes us to take advantage of the breathing time thus afforded, to
consider how we may lessen the danger in future times, and remove
those causes which rendered it serious in the crisis through which we
have passed. It is in vain to conceal that the danger was very great.
For the first time for a hundred and sixty years, Revolution walked
our streets; a large portion of our manufacturing population looked
only for the telegraph from London on the 10th April to commence the
work of insurrection. That such insane attempts would have been
defeated is indeed certain; but what unutterable misery to the persons
engaged in them, and the whole industrious population in the realm,
awaited the successful issue of treason, even for a brief period, and
in a single city? If Glasgow had been three days in the hands of the
mob after the 6th March; if a portion even of London had remained in
the possession of the Chartists on the night of the 10th April; if
Dublin had become the theatre of a second rebellion on the 17th March,
and Sackville Street had witnessed the throwing of rockets and
storming of barricades, as Elbœuf and Rouen have lately done, who
can estimate the shock which would have been given to industry, the
ruin to capital, the destruction of employment, that must inevitably
have ensued throughout the empire? It would not have been--as was said
of the failure of the potatoes in Ireland--a famine of the thirteenth,
with the population of the nineteenth century; it would have been the
horrors of the Jacquerie, decimating the myriads of ancient Babylon.
The democratic party throughout the empire have a very simple remedy
for the evils which we have suffered and those we have escaped. They
say, "Extend the suffrage." It has already become evident that it is
to this point that all their efforts will be directed, and in a way
more likely in the end to be successful than by the coarse weapons,
false declamation, and monster meetings of the Chartists. Already an
"Extension of the Suffrage League" has been formed in Manchester with
Mr Cobden at its head; and its ramifications and efforts may be seen
in simultaneous meetings called on the subject in Glasgow, Birmingham,
Liverpool, Leeds, and other manufacturing towns. There is the more
reason to apprehend serious consequences from such a league from the
habit which government, following Sir R. Peel's example, has got into
of late years of yielding to any clamour soever, provided it is
sufficiently loud and lasting. There is reason to fear, from some
ominous hints that have been dropped in several influential Journals,
particularly the _Times_, that it may be in the contemplation of
government, by some concession in regard to the national
representation, to allay, as they conceive, the discontent which has
fostered Chartism in the manufacturing districts, and establish the
legislature in a way more adapted "to the spirit of the age, and the
growing intelligence of the people." It becomes of the last
importance, therefore, to consider what it is of which the Chartists
and discontented operatives really complain; what are the evils which
have rendered their discontent general and alarming on the present
occasion; and what effect an extension of the suffrage would have on
the actual, and, we fear, deep-rooted seats of evil, which at present
disturb the tranquillity and interrupt the industry, and may, in the
end, endanger the existence of the British empire.
The grand practical object of complaint, on the part of the working
classes at present, is _want of employment_. This is so general, at
least in the manufacturing districts, that it may be regarded as all
but _universal_ in those who depend on the chief branches of paid
industry. Statistical facts of unquestionable accuracy demonstrate
that this complaint is too well-founded, and in no situations more so
than in the chief marts of our manufacturing industry. The weekly
returns, made with so much accuracy by the police in Manchester, have
exhibited an average, for the last six months, of about 9000
operatives out of employment, and 11,000 working at short time;[1]
which, supposing there are only two persons on an average dependent on
each, will imply above 27,000 persons out of employment, and 30,000
working short time. At Glasgow, matters are still worse. From
inquiries made by the magistrates of that city, at the principal
manufacturing establishments, with a view to furnish with information
the deputation which was sent up to endeavour to procure some aid from
government to restore credit and relieve the unemployed, it was
ascertained that there are in that city above 11,000 persons out of
employment, and 7000 working on short time, and 14,000 railway
labourers on the railways connected with that city, who have been
dismissed. Taking the ascertained and known unemployed at 25,000, and
their dependents at 2 each, which is below the average of 2½, it is
certain there are 75,000 unemployed persons in Glasgow and its
vicinity. And if the unascertained poor, casual labourers, and Irish
are taken into account, it is much within the mark to say, that there
are A HUNDRED THOUSAND PERSONS IN GLASGOW AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD OUT OF
EMPLOYMENT, besides at least twenty thousand working short time! So
great and lamentable a prostration of industry is probably
unparalleled in Great Britain.
[1] In the week ending April 29, 1848, the workers in Manchester stood
thus,--
Full time, 24,756. Short time, 10,630. Unemployed, 9,303.
_Times, May 4, 1848._
What is in a peculiar manner worthy of observation in this deplorable
prospect, is the _universality_ of the depression. It is not confined
to one branch of industry, or one employment; it spreads alike over
all the _urban_ population in the empire. Doubtless it is more
severely felt in the manufacturing districts than elsewhere, from the
entire dependence of industry in commercial localities on credit, and
the fearful sensitiveness with which any shock to the monetary system
is felt throughout the remotest ramifications of the mercantile world.
But distress, more or less, in towns at least, is now universal. In
Edinburgh the unemployed are increasing to such a degree, as to excite
serious alarm in the better class of citizens. In Dublin, between
general distress and repeal agitation, business is entirely at a
stand; rents cannot be recovered, sales have ended; and the universal
prostration resembles nothing known in recent times but the still more
general and poignant distress which in Paris has followed the triumph
of the revolutionists. London has suffered, as yet, much less than any
other part of the empire from the general depression, because it is
the seat of all the realised wealth and durable fortune of the empire:
it is the place where money is spent, fully more than where it is
made. But even in London, distress, wide-spread and serious, is
beginning to be felt: the diminished expenditure of the West End is
loudly complained of, and the incessant introduction of foreign
manufactures is a standing subject of irritation to the operative
classes. The revenue is collected slowly and with difficulty; and its
diminished amount, showing a falling off of above two millions a-year,
demonstrates that the permanent sources of our strength have at length
come to be affected.
It is extremely remarkable, too--and to this point we in an especial
manner request the attention of our readers--that the distress is felt
_much more strongly in the commercial than the agricultural classes_.
Indeed, were it not for the increased weight of poor-rates, owing to
the manufacturing distress, the multitude of railway labourers thrown
idle by the stoppage of their lines, and the number of land-holders
who have had their finances crippled by the universal fall of railway
and other shares, it may be doubted whether there would now be any
agricultural distress in the empire at all. Where it exists, it is
entirely the reflexion or re-echo, as it were, of commercial ruin.
This is the more remarkable, that the only serious and real disaster
which has affected the country since the depression began, has been
the failure of the potato crop in 1846, which of course blasted, in
the first instance at least, the labours of the cultivators only; and
that the distress now felt as so poignant has been continued only, not
created, by the French and German revolutions. Down to February last,
no class had suffered by real external calamity but the farmers: and
yet the distress which has become so extreme, has arisen not among
them, but among the merchants and manufacturers. This, too, has
occurred at a time when a great change has been made for the interest,
and at the desire, of the commercial classes, in our foreign
mercantile policy,--when free trade has been introduced, to cheapen
bread, lessen the cost of production, and facilitate exchanges; and
when the ruin which was anticipated from the measure was not to the
commercial but the landed interest. This is one of the most remarkable
circumstances in our present condition, and one on which it most
behoves both our legislators, and all interested in their country's
welfare, to ponder.
While this deplorable prostration of the interests of industry in all
its manufacturing branches has taken place, _no corresponding general
decline in prices has occurred_. The producer has in too many cases
been ruined, but the consumers have not as yet at least been
benefited. In some branches of manufacture, indeed, a most frightful
depreciation of value has taken place. Silks, muslins, and ladies'
dresses are now selling for half of what they were a year and a half
ago. But that is the effect of the French revolution, which has thrown
such an immense quantity of articles of this description into the
British market, and of the unparalleled number of failures amongst
ourselves, which have forced such prodigious masses of stock,
belonging to sequestered estates, to sale. These bankruptcies, and the
ruinous contraction of the currency which has occasioned them, afford
too satisfactory an explanation of the depressed prices in most of
the staple articles of British manufacture. But in those articles
which are not so dependent on the maintenance of commercial credit,
and in which the good effects of free-trade might have been expected
to appear, unmitigated by its attendant disasters, no diminution of
price is perceptible.
The last harvest was so fine, that a public thanksgiving was offered
for the blessing; and it came on the back of the importation of
£31,000,000 worth of foreign grain, or above 12,000,000 quarters in
the preceding fifteen months: but the price of wheat is still 51s. a
quarter, and that of oats and barley yet higher in proportion. Oxen
and sheep, as well as all kinds of provisions, have been imported to
an enormous extent during last year;[2] so great, indeed, as to make
the able writers in the _Times_ apprehend that they had drained away
the whole currency of the country in exchange; but butcher meat is
still 7d. a pound. The West Indies are irrecoverably and finally
ruined, but we are paying 5d. and 6d. a pound for our slave-grown Cuba
and Brazil sugar. The _Banker's Circular_ of May 2, 1848, asks whether
there was ever heard of before a monetary crisis which "had _lasted a
year_?" but no man, during that year of fine harvest, general peace,
and universal suffering, has found that his household expenses have
experienced the least diminution from what they were during the
previous years of protected industry, wide-spread contentment, and
unbroken prosperity. Free-trade is evidently driving some of the
staple branches of British industry out of the field; one is expiring
in the West Indies, another languishing in Manchester, a third
tottering in Glasgow; and the diminution of home production keeping
pace with the increase of foreign supply, prices remain what they
were--domestic is superseded by foreign industry; and we shall have
the satisfaction of finding that we have ruined many staple branches
of our own manufacture without benefiting any class of our people.
[2] Imported from January 5 to October 10--
| 1845. | 1846. | 1847.
----------------------+---------+---------+---------
Live animals, | 19,593| 85,542| 172,355
----------------------+---------+---------+---------
Provisions, cwts., | 109,550| 206,455| 403,577
----------------------+---------+---------+---------
Grain, quarters, |1,336,739|2,635,218|7,905,419
----------------------+---------+---------+---------
Grain in flour, cwts.,| 394,908|2,631,341|7,900,800
_Parl. Paper_, 12th Feb. 1848.
It must be evident to every rational observer that this extraordinary
and universal depression must have been owing to some cause _within
the control of the government of this country_, and that neither
external calamities, nor the inclemencies of nature have had any
material share in producing it. Within the short period of three years
not only was there no deficiency of employment in any part of the
empire, but labour bore a high, in general an extravagantly high price
in every part of the empire. Sir R. Peel in an especial manner dwelt
on this general flood of prosperity which had set in upon the country
in spring 1845, and ascribed it, and the diminution of crime with
which it was accompanied, to the measures for liberating commerce from
fiscal restraint, which he had introduced on his first coming into
power. Since that time no external disaster or warfare has arisen,
till the French Revolution broke out in February last, to account for
the stoppage of employment, or the general misery into which the lower
classes have fallen. We were at peace with all the world: our exports
in the year 1845 had reached the unprecedented amount, including the
colonial productions, of £150,000,000;[3] and railways, penetrating
the country in all directions, gave an extraordinary degree of
employment to the working classes. In autumn 1846, it is true, Ireland
and the West Highlands of Scotland were visited by a failure,
amounting in many places to a total ruin, of the potato crop, which is
said to have destroyed agricultural produce to the amount of
£15,000,000 sterling. But though this great defalcation was the source
of extreme distress to the cultivators who suffered by it, and to a
certain degree diminished the general supplies of the empire, yet it
could not be considered as the cause, by itself, of the wide-spread
ruin which has since overtaken every interest in the empire. The
agricultural productions of Great Britain are estimated by statistical
writers at above £300,000,000 sterling annually, and the manufacturing
and mining certainly exceed £200,000,000.[4] What is a failure of
£15,000,000 of potatoes in such a mass? Such as it was, the gap was
more than supplied by the importation, in a year after it occurred, of
£31,000,000, or double the amount in value, of foreign grain. The
harvest of 1847 was so fine that a solemn thanksgiving was, with the
general approbation of the nation, offered to Almighty God for its
blessings. Prices have since been not excessive, wheat being at an
average about 51s. a quarter--yet still, in May 1848, we are in
universal distress; and the want of employment is felt much more
strongly by the manufacturing classes, who have been affected by no
disaster whatever, than the agricultural, who have suffered one which
has now passed away.
[3]
Exports, Official Value. | |Imports,
| |Declared Value.
----------------------------------+-----------+------------+---------------
British and Irish Prod. and Manuf.| Colonial. | Total. |
----------------------------------+-----------+------------+---------------
1844 £131,564,503 |£14,397,246|£145,961,789| £58,584,292
----------------------------------+-----------+------------+---------------
1845 134,599,116 | 16,280,870| 150,879,986| 60,111,081
--PORTER'S _Progress of the Nation_, 358, 2d Edition.
[4] Viz:--
Agricultural Produce. |Manufactures and Mines.
| 1846.
----------------------------------------+------------+-----------+------------
19,135,000 arable acres at £7 each, |£133,945,000| |
----------------------------------------+------------+-----------+------------
27,000,000 grass and meadow, at £6 each,|162,000,000 | Exports, | 51,000,000
----------------------------------------+------------+-----------+------------
15,000,000 waste, | 5,000,000 |Home | 133,000,000
| |market,
----------------------------------------+------------+-----------+------------
Total, |£300,945,000| |£184,000,000
--PORTER'S _Progress of the Nation_, i. 177.
While these are the social evils which the working classes every where
experience, and which have alone rendered the Chartist movement
general or serious in the country, the great complaint, in a political
point, which they every where make is, that the legislature and the
government are alike indifferent to their representations; that they
turn a deaf ear to their complaints, show themselves insensible, to
their tales of woe, and refuse even to give that moderate relief to
them which is easily within their power, which a paternal government
is bound to extend to its distressed subjects, and which, in former
days, under Tory administrations, was never withheld from the people,
when suffering under dispensations not approaching to the present in
duration or intensity. To give an idea of the feeling _now universal_
in the commercial and manufacturing districts, we subjoin an extract
from a journal conducted with much ability, the _Daily Mail_ of
Glasgow.
"The household suffrage movement originates in a deep-seated
conviction that the present legislature works ill. There are
practical measures offered for its acceptance, which it
rejects; and yet the feeling of the country is in their
favour. Means of employing the idle are suggested; but by
the government and by the parliament they are heedlessly
neglected. Some crotchet in political economy is introduced
into a plain matter of accounting; and meanwhile the people
starve, because their sustenance, in the way proposed, is
inconsistent with something that somebody has written in a
book. There is an obvious insufficiency of food, of
employment, and of investment in the country, while land
languishes for lack of tillage; and when the plain remedy
for these great deficiencies is pressed, there arises the
ghost of long-past folly, waving its parchment before the
legislature, and so the living are starved, in strict
accordance not with the meaning but with the mistake of the
dead. Free-trade is proclaimed to be the rule of our
political practice by the same men who enact and maintain
laws to fetter and reduce the circulation of the country,
which is the life of its trade. We hear of free-trade with
foreign countries, in which duties equal to twenty, thirty,
and forty per cent are charged upon our products, although
the existence of freedom of trade under these circumstances
is absolutely impossible.
"The nation holds colonies in all quarters of the world,
purchased and maintained at a costly rate, embracing every
characteristic of soil and climate on the earth, competent
to provide homes and sustenance for nearly the whole
population of the world; and the legislature voluntarily
casts away all interest to be derived from their progress,
except its cost. The national affairs are managed on some
kind of rule altogether different from any thing that a
prudent man would adopt in the guidance of his private
business; and so employment becomes scarce, and food dear
together; while the natural and necessary results are,
popular irritation, and a desire for change, which have led
to the associations for extending the suffrage, now general
throughout the great cities of the empire."--_Glasgow Daily
Mail_, May 2, 1848.
There is too much foundation, all must admit, for these complaints. On
occasion of the dreadful monetary crisis of October 1847, when
ministers were compelled to break through the Bank Charter Act, and
nearly all railway labour and mercantile industry in the country was
suspended from the impossibility of finding funds to carry them on,
the government were besieged with the most earnest memorials from the
chambers of commerce in nearly all the commercial cities of the
empire, and especially London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, and
Edinburgh, pointing out the ruinous effects of the Bank Restriction
Act of 1844; but still they did nothing. They contented themselves
with appointing a committee, in which the bullionists were understood
to have the majority, in parliament, which, after sitting long, and
examining a host of witnesses, and burying the question under heaps of
blue folios, will probably end by reporting a year hence in favour of
the present system. The most vigorous remonstrances have been made by
the same commercial bodies against the threatened abrogation of the
Navigation Laws; but that has not in the slightest degree shaken the
avowed determination of government, to carry the principle of
free-trade without limitation into that vital branch of our national
industry.
The West India interest demonstrated in a manner "_luce meridiana
clarius_," that the equalisation of the duties of foreign slave-grown
to home free-labour-raised sugar, would prove utter ruin to our West
India colonies, and reinstate in frightful activity the infernal
traffic of the slave-trade; but this did not produce the slightest
impression on government, and they without hesitation consigned these
noble colonies to destruction, and restored the slave-trade throughout
the globe, rather than abate one iota of the dogmas of free-trade, or
raise sugar a penny a-pound.[5] All the great cities of the empire
have sent deputations or memorials to government, beseeching in the
most earnest manner a grant of exchequer bills, or the aid of treasury
credit in some way, to set agoing the unfinished lines of railways,
and enable them to find a certain amount of labour for the unemployed;
but they have every where, met with a decided refusal. We must have
free-trade in every thing, in pauperism, typhus fever, and
insurrection, as well as in corn, cotton, or sugar. _Laissez faire_ is
the universal system: all government has to do is to hinder the
competitors coming to blows. Every thing must find its level, though
that level to one-half of the community is the bottom of the cellar.
One thing only is to be protected, and that is gold; one class only is
to be saved from competition, and that class is the great capitalists.
[5] One of the oldest and wealthiest houses in Glasgow in the West
India trade has just failed for £400,000, and in their circular
announcing the suspension of their payments they observe:--
"For upwards of half a century we have steadily followed our
business of West India merchants, never engaging in
speculations of any kind. Our assets chiefly consist of
sugar estates in Trinidad and Demerara. These estates are in
excellent condition, capable of making large crops; but they
have been _rendered worse than unprofitable and of no value
by acts of Parliament--the worst of which being the
Sugar-duty Act of 1846_--whereby slave-made sugar was
admitted to consumption in this country, on terms which the
British colonies are altogether unprepared to compete with.
We are, Sir, your most obedient Servants. ECCLES, BURNLEY, &
CO."
This is the truth, and nothing but the truth, honestly and manfully
spoken. These gentlemen have been as completely spoliated by Act of
Parliament as were the estates of the French emigrants by the
Convention.
This obstinate resistance of government to the wishes, and declared
insensibility to the wants and necessities of the country, is the more
remarkable that it exhibits so striking a contrast to the paternal
spirit by which government was formerly actuated. Suffering, never
indeed approaching in extent and intensity to that which now afflicts
the nation, but still sufficiently distressing, has been often
experienced in former times; but on none of these did the government
hesitate to come forward with a large grant, founded on the public
credit, to alleviate the general calamity, and always with the very
best effects. In 1793, in consequence of the breaking out of the war,
and the general hoarding which took place in France during the terrors
of the Revolution, a great export of gold from the British islands to
the Continent took place; but Mr Pitt at once came forward with a
grant of £5,000,000 to aid the commercial interest; and so rapidly did
this well-timed advance restore credit, that a small part only of this
large sum was taken up, and very little of it was lost to the nation.
In February 1797, a similar cause produced that great run on the bank
which brought that establishment to the verge of ruin; but the same
minister instantly introduced the suspension of cash payments, which
at once restored credit, revived industry, and carried the nation in a
triumphant manner through all the dangers and crises of the war. In
1799 and 1800, two successive bad harvests brought the nation to the
verge of starvation; but government interposed by various sumptuary
laws regarding food, stopped distillation from grain, and themselves
imported immense quantities of Indian corn for the use of the people.
In 1811, a similar calamity ensued from the effects of Napoleon's
continental blockade, and the American Non-intercourse Act; but
government again interposed with an issue of exchequer bills, and
confidence was restored, and with it industry and commerce revived.
In 1826 very great depression existed in all branches of industry, in
consequence of the dreadful monetary crisis of December 1825; but
government stopped the crash, as Lord Ashburton has told us, by
issuing £2,000,000 of old and forgotten _notes_ from the Bank of
England, and then alleviated the distress by a copious issue of
exchequer bills to aid the commercial interest, which soon brought the
nation out of its difficulties. But since the government has been
popularised by the revolution of 1832, nothing of the kind has been
done. The long-protracted distress from 1838 to 1841, and the dreadful
suffering of 1847-8, have been alike unable to extort for British
suffering one farthing in aid of the national industry from the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. The principle _laissez faire_ has
prevailed alike over the strongest claims of justice and the most
piteous tales of suffering. Government seems resolved that the nation
shall drain the lees of free-trade to the dregs, and taste it in all
its bitterness. It is no consolation to suffering British industry to
see that £10,000,000 was in one year voted to suffering Irish
idleness, and £20,000,000 in another to the grand step in West Indian
ruin. The people see that the first was yielded to terror, the last to
fanaticism; and the melancholy conviction has forced itself on every
mind that government now yield to nothing but the strongest pressure
from without; and that the doors of the Treasury will be opened only
to the fierce demand of threatened high treason, or the reverberated
echoes of wide-spread delusion.
Ministers were aware of all this; and they knew also that, on the
first declaration of war with France or any foreign power, they would
at once raise a loan or issue exchequer bills to the extent of at
least £20,000,000 sterling. Here is an enemy worse than the French, or
the French and the Repealers united--want, fever, famine,
disaffection, despair, actually within our bosom, and consuming the
very vitals of the state! A word from the Chancellor of the Exchequer
would at once arrest the misery, dispel the sedition, restore bread to
millions, revive loyalty in a wasted and perishing state.[6] Why,
then, is it not instantly done? why does not government eagerly seize
so glorious an opportunity of healing the wounds of the suffering
people, and extinguishing, by deeds of beneficence, the demons of
discord and disaffection in the realm? Because it would interfere with
a _principle_; it would intercept the free employment of wealth; it
might alarm capitalists, lower the value of Exchequer bills, and for a
week or two depress the funds a-half, or perhaps one per cent. It
would be a substantial _extension of the currency_, and that would
imply an avowal that it had formerly been unduly contracted; it might
be quoted against ministers as a tardy and reluctant admission of the
error of their former monetary policy in the parliamentary committee,
or in the House of Commons! It is for such wretched considerations as
these that relief is refused, and want, wretchedness, and treason
prolonged throughout the kingdom. Were the subject not so serious, and
even terrible in all its bearings, their conduct would remind us of
the well-known reasons assigned by Dr Sangrado to Gil Blas, for
continuing, to the evident destruction of his patients, the system of
hot water and bleeding.
[6] The inquest set on foot by the magistrates of Glasgow in support
of their deputation, showed that six railway companies alone connected
with that city could, if aided by government, employ _for a year_
workmen as follows:--
Caledonian Railway Company could employ 14,000 men
North British do. do. 8,500 "
Scottish Central, and Scottish Midland Junction do. do. 3,500 "
Edinburgh and Glasgow do. do. 2,500 "
Barrhead and Neilston Direct do. do. 500 "
Glasgow and Ayr, and Dumfries and Carlisle, do. do. 10,000 "
_______
Total labourers 39,000
Embracing, with their dependants, at least 120,000 persons, besides
mechanics and others indirectly benefited.
"'Sir,' said I one evening to Dr Sangrado, 'I call heaven to witness,
that I exactly follow out your method, nevertheless all my patients
slip out of my hands to the other world: one would think they _take a
pleasure in dying, to discredit our system_.... If you would follow my
advice,' replied I, 'we would change our system of practice.' 'I would
willingly,' replied he, 'make the trial, if it led to no other
consequences than those you have mentioned; but I have published a
book in which I extol the frequent use of the lancet and hot water;
_do you wish me to decry my own work?_' 'Oh! you are right,' replied
I, 'you must _never think of giving such a triumph to your enemies:
they would say you have at length confessed your error; that would
ruin your reputation: perish rather the noblesse, the clergy, and the
people_. Let us go on as we have begun.' We continued accordingly our
system, and went on with such expedition, that in six weeks we had
occasioned as many funerals as the siege of Troy."[7]
[7] _Gil Blas_, lib. 2, c. 5.
We speak advisedly, and after a full observation of its effects, when
we say, that the great majority of the unhappy persons who, within the
last year, have been sent into the Gazette, owe their ruin as
completely and exclusively to the measures of government, as Dr
Sangrado's patients did their death to the copious bleedings and warm
water draughts which he prescribed to them. Only think what our rulers
have done, and then say whether any save colossal private fortunes,
engaged in mercantile adventures, could withstand the effects of their
measures.
I. The government, in the first place, by the bill of 1819, compelled
the Bank of England to pay its notes in gold; by the act of 1826
prohibited the issuing of any notes below five pounds; and by the act
of 1844 in England, and 1845 in Scotland and Ireland, restricted the
notes issuable on securities, in the whole empire, to £32,000,000,
declaring that, for every note beyond that limit issued by any bank,
sovereigns to an equal amount must be stored up in the vaults of the
issuer. In a word, they made the whole circulation beyond £32,000,000
a metallic currency. At the same time, they provided that, for every
five sovereigns beyond a certain limit withdrawn from the Bank of
England, a five-pound note should be withdrawn by that establishment
from the circulation.
II. Having thus laid the nation fast in golden fetters, and prevented
the possibility of an extension of the currency, for carrying on all
undertakings beyond this £32,000,000, save by an augmentation of the
gold coin in the country, government next proceeded to give every
possible encouragement to railway undertakings, and to pass bills
through the legislature for new undertakings of that description,
requiring the outlay from 1845 to 1848 of at least £150,000,000
sterling, _in addition_ to the ordinary expenditure and operations of
the country, already raised at that period to an unusual and
unprecedented height.
III. Having thus, in 1844 and 1845, landed the empire in an
extraordinary and unheard-of amount of undertakings, requiring the
utmost possible extension of the currency to carry these on,
government, in 1846, next proceeded to introduce the free-trade
system--allow the free importation of foreign grain, and throw down
the protection barriers which had hitherto alone sheltered the native
industry of the empire, and prevented, save on extraordinary
emergencies, any considerable drain upon its metallic resources. They
thus raised the imports to £85,000,000, sent the metallic circulation
headlong out of the country, and of course contracted, by the force of
the law of 1844, in a similar proportion, its paper circulation. By
the two combined, they occasioned such a strain upon the bank that, in
the end of October 1847, it was within a few days of stopping payment.
Ministers were in consequence obliged to suspend the Bank Charter Act;
but not till an amount of bankruptcy had been brought upon the middle
class, and misery upon the people, unparalled in the history of Great
Britain.
IV. Free-trade having exposed our colonists in the West Indies, who
were charged with an indolent emancipated black population, to a
direct competition with the slave colonies of other countries, where
sugar, being raised by forced labour, could be brought to the market
at little more than half the price which it cost in the
British--government next obstinately adhered to their determination to
ruin these colonies, and destroy capital to the amount of £100,000,000
sterling, rather than abate one iota of their free-trade principles;
realising thus, indeed, the exclamation of Robespierre--"Perish the
colonies, rather than one principle be abandoned!" The consequence is,
that one half of the estates in the British West India islands will go
out of cultivation, and be choked with jungle in the course of this
year. Agricultural produce, once averaging £22,000,000 annually, will
be destroyed in the next: a market once taking off £3,600,000 of our
manufactures, and giving employment to 250,000 tons of our shipping,
will be extinguished; and the foreign slave-colonies, having beat down
British competition, will get the monopoly of the sugar-market of the
world into their own hands, and raise its price to 7d. or 8d. a pound
in the English market--thus terminating the miserable advantage for
which all these disasters are incurred.
Whoever considers seriously, and in a dispassionate mode, the
necessary effect of the measures on the part of government which have
now been detailed, so far from being surprised at the extent of the
devastation and ruin which has occurred simultaneously in Great
Britain, Ireland, the East and West Indies, will only be surprised
that it has not been greater and more wide-spread than it actually has
been. He will regard it as the most decisive proof of the vast
resources of the British empire, and the indomitable energy of the
British people, that they have been able to bear up at all against
such repeated and gratuitous blows, levelled, not intentionally, but
from mistaken principles, by their own rulers at the main sources of
national prosperity. And he will not consider it the least remarkable
circumstance, in this age of wonders, that when the ruinous effects of
these their own measures had been clearly and beyond all dispute
demonstrated by experience, government not only positively refused to
make the smallest abatement from, or change in their suicidal policy,
but in every instance declined to give the slightest assistance to the
persons ruined by, or suffering under it.
To us, reflecting on the causes to which this extraordinary and
unprecedented conduct on the part of government is to be imputed, it
appears that it can only be accounted for from two causes, to the
combined operation of which the present distressed condition and
recent danger of the British empire are entirely to be ascribed.
The first of these is the fatal and still undiminished influence of
the _political economists_ in the legislature. So great and disastrous
has it been, that we do not hesitate to say, that we regard that sect
as the worst enemies the empire ever had. What has made them so
disastrous to the best interests of their country is, that they have
introduced the custom of looking upon the science of government, not
as a matter to be based upon experience, modified by its lessons, but
as consisting of theories to be determined entirely by general
reasonings, and considered to depend solely on the conclusions of
philosophers, in works of abstract thought. They have thus come to
disregard altogether the sufferings of nations or classes of society
under their systems, and to adhere to them obstinately in the midst of
general ruin and lamentation, as Dr Sangrado did to his bleedings and
hot-water cure, though they had occasioned more funerals than the
siege of Troy? They look upon a nation as the surgeon does upon a
patient who is held down on the marble table to undergo an operations.
This was just the case with Turgot--one of the first and most eminent
of the economists, and who began the French Revolution by introducing
their doctrines into French legislation. "He regarded," says Senac de
Meilhan, "the body corporate not as a living and sentient, but as a
lifeless and insensible substance, and operated upon it with as little
hesitation as an anatomist does on a dead body." Beyond all doubt it
was the suffering produced by the contraction of the currency from
1826 to 1830 that brought about the storm of discontent which issued
in the Reform Bill. And if the empire is to be further revolutionised,
and the Chartist agitation is to end in household or five-pound
suffrage, it will unquestionably be owing to the wide-spread misery
which the combined operation of free-trade and a fettered currency
have extended through the empire.
The second cause to which this strange insensibility of government to
the evidence of facts, and the sufferings of the empire, is to be
ascribed, is the influence in the legislature of that very class which
was installed in power by the revolution of 1832. The movement in that
year was essentially democratic--it was by the effort of the masses,
joined to that of the middle classes and the Whig aristocracy, that
the crown was overawed, and the change forced upon the country. But
the change actually made was in the interest and for the benefit of
one of these parties only. The shopkeepers, by the framing of the
Reform Act, got the government into their own hands. By schedules A
and B, the colonies and shipping interest were at once disfranchised;
by the ten-pound clause, the majority of votes in the urban
constituencies was vested in the shopkeepers; by the places
enfranchised, two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons were for
towns and boroughs. Thus the majority, both of the seats and the
constituents, was put into the hands of the trading classes. Thence
all the changes which have since taken place in our national policy.
The practised leaders of parliament soon discovered where power was
now practically vested,--they are as quick at finding out that as
courtiers are at finding out who are the favourites that influence the
sovereign. Thence the free-trade measures, and the obstinate retention
of a contracted currency. It is for the interest of capitalists to
lower the price of every thing except money, and render it as dear as
possible; it is for the interest of the retailer and merchant to buy
cheap and sell dear. Thence the free-trade system and contracted
currency, which have now spread such unheard-of devastation throughout
the empire. When a _class_ obtains the ascendency in government, it
becomes wholly inexorable, and deaf to every consideration of justice
or expedience urged by any other class. Of such class government may
be said, what Thurlow, with his usual wit and sagacity, said to a
suitor who was complaining of the denial of justice he had experienced
from an incorporation,--"Justice, Sir! did you ever expect justice
from an incorporation? which has no soul to be damned, and no body to
be kicked."
It is no doubt true that a large proportion of the persons who have
suffered under the system introduced into our colonies, have been the
very commercial and manufacturing class who have imposed it upon
government. The manufacturing operatives joined the shopkeepers in the
cry for free-trade,--and where has it left numbers of them?--in the
workhouse and the Gazette. But that is no uncommon thing in human
affairs; perhaps the greatest evils which befall both nations and
individuals are those which they bring upon themselves by their own
folly or grasping disposition. Providence has a sure mode of punishing
the selfishness of man, which is to let it work out its natural
fruits. If the deserved retribution to selfish and interested conduct
were to be taken out of human affairs, how much misery would be
avoided here below, but what impunity would exist to crime!
The working classes in the manufacturing districts, who now see how
entirely they have been deluded on this subject, and how completely
free-trade has turned to their own ruin, have a very simple remedy for
the evils under which they labour. They say, "Extend the suffrage;
give us a due sway in the legislature, and we will soon protect our
own interests. The revolution of 1832 in Great Britain, and that of
1830 in France, has turned entirely to the advantage of the
_bourgeoisie_; and we must have another Reform Bill to give us the
blessings which Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and the Socialists promise
to France." This idea has taken a great hold of the public mind in a
certain class of society. It is the natural reaction of experience
against the innumerable evils which free-trade and a contracted
currency have brought upon the country. The manufacturing and working
classes, who joined the trading interest in raising the cry for these
measures, finding themselves now crushed, or deriving no benefit from
their effects, see no remedy but in taking the matter entirely into
their own hands, and putting an end at once, by obtaining the command
of the House of Commons, to all those measures which gratuitously, and
for no conceivable purpose but the interest of the trades, spread ruin
and desolation through the nation.
We object strenuously to any such change; and that from no attachment
to the free-trade and fettered currency system, to which we have
always given the most determined resistance, but from a firm desire
for, and clear perception of, the interests of the great body of the
people, to which, though often in opposition to their blind and
mistaken wishes, we have uniformly given the most undeviating support.
A uniform system of voting, such as a £5 or household suffrage, which
is now proposed as a remedy for all the evils of society, is of
necessity a _class representation_, and the class to which it gives
the ascendency is the _lowest_ in whom the suffrage is vested. It must
be so, because the poor being always and in every country much more
numerous than the rich, the humblest class of voters under every
uniform system must always be incomparably the most numerous. It is
this circumstance which has given the ten-pounders the command of the
House of Commons under the new constitution; they are the humblest and
therefore the most numerous class enfranchised by the Reform Act, and
consequently, under the uniform household suffrage, they have the
majority. They have so for the same reason that, under a similar
uniform system, the privates in an army would outnumber the whole
officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. But if the suffrage is
reduced so low as to admit the representatives of the operatives and
"proletaires," or those whom they influence, (which household or a £5
suffrage would undoubtedly do,) what measures in the present state of
society in this country, and feeling throughout the world, would they
immediately adopt? We have only to look at the newly formed republic
of France, where such a system is established, to receive the answer.
Repudiation of state engagements, (as in the case of the railways;)
confiscation of property under the name of a graduated income tax; the
abolition of primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the
issue of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to
credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might with
confidence be looked for. And the question to be considered is, would
these measures in the end benefit _any class of society_, or, least of
all, the operative, in a country such as Great Britain, containing, in
proportion to its population, a greater number of persons dependent on
daily wages for their existence than any other that ever existed?
What is to be expected from such ruin to credit and capital but the
immediate stoppage of employment, and throwing of millions out of
bread? Even if the whole land in the country were seized and divided,
it would afford no general relief--it would only shift the suffering
from one class to another. What, under such a system, would become of
the millions who now exist on the surplus expenditure of the wealthy?
They would all be ruined--England would be overrun by a host of
starving cultivators like France or Ireland. A plunge down to
household suffrage would soon effect the work of destruction, by
reducing us all in a few years to the condition of Irish bog-trotters.
It is no security against these dangers to say that the working class,
if they get the majority, will take care of themselves, and eschew
whatever is hurtful to their interests. Men do not know what is to
prove ultimately injurious in public, any more than they perceive, in
most cases, what is to be for their final interest in private life.
The bourgeoisie got the command of the country in France by the
Revolution of 1830, but have they benefited by the change? Let the
enormous expenditure of Louis Philippe's government, and the present
disastrous state of commerce in France, give the answer. The workmen
of Paris got the entire command of the government by the Revolution of
1848, and already 85,000 of them are kept alive, only working at the
"Ateliers Nationaux," while 200,000 are lounging about, eating up the
country with bayonets in their hands. The middle classes got the
command of Great Britain by the Reform Act, and their representatives
set about free-trade and restricted currency measures, which have
spread distress and bankruptcy to an unparalleled extent among
themselves. The Reform Bill, by establishing these measures, has
destroyed a fourth of the realised capital of Great Britain.[8]
Household or universal suffrage would at once sweep away _a half_ of
what remains, as it has recently done in France. And in what condition
would the 30,000,000 inhabitants of the British empire be if
_three-fourths_ of the capital--in other words, three-fourths of the
means of employing labour, or purchasing its fruits--were destroyed?
We should have Skibbereens in every village of Great Britain, and
grass growing in half of London.
[8] This is within the mark. It, has lowered the funds from 100 to 80,
or a fifth; railway stock on an average a third; West India property
nine-tenths; and mercantile stock, in most cases, nearly a half.
What, then, is to be done to allay the present ferment, and
tranquillise the country, when so rudely shaken by internal distress
and external excitement? Are we to sit with our hands folded waiting
till the tempest subsides? and if the present system is continued, is
there any ground for believing it ever will subside? We answer,
_decidedly not_. We must do something--and not a little, but a great
deal. But what is required is not to augment the political power of
the working classes, but to remove their grievances;--not to give them
the government of the state, which they can exercise only to their own
and the nation's ruin, but to place them in such a condition that
they may no longer desire to govern it. This can be done only by
abandoning the system of class government for the interest chiefly of
the moneyed interests, and returning to the old system of general
protective and national administration.
The first thing which is indispensably necessary towards the
restoration of confidence and enterprise in the moneyed classes, and
consequent employment and happiness in the poor, is to repeal the Bank
Charter Acts of 1844 and 1845; and in lieu thereof to establish such a
system as may provide a _safe, sufficient, and equable_ circulation
for the empire. Above all, it is necessary to establish a circulation
which shall be capable of _expanding_, instead of _contracting_, as
specie is drawn out of the country. This is the one thing needful.
Till this is done, every attempt to alleviate the existing misery, in
a durable way, will prove abortive. Nobody wants to have French
assignats issued amongst us, or to have every insolvent who chooses to
call himself a banker authorised to issue currency _ad libitum_, and
substantially usurp the Queen's prerogative by coining worthless paper
into doubtful money. But as little can the nation go on longer with
our circulation based exclusively on gold coin, and liable to be
contracted as that coin is drawn out of the country; thereby _doubling
the evil_, by first inducing speculation when specie is plentiful, and
then withdrawing the currency when it becomes scarce. Still less can
this be borne, when a system of free-trade has been established
amongst us which has enormously increased our importations, especially
in articles of food and rude produce, for which experience proves
nothing but cash will be taken by the holders; and which, in
consequence, has induced a consequent _tendency outward_ in the
precious metals, from which, if no corresponding increase in domestic
circulation is permitted, nothing but contraction to credit stoppage
to speculation, and ruin to industry is to be anticipated. Least of
all can such a system of drawing in paper as the gold goes out, be
endured when political circumstances have so much increased the demand
for the precious metals in the neighbouring states; when the
revolutions in France and Germany have at once rendered hoarding
general in those countries, and deluged us with their bankrupt stocks,
for which nothing but specie will be taken in exchange; and when the
commencement of hostilities, both in Italy and Germany, has occasioned
the usual demand for gold, as the most portable of the precious
metals, to meet the necessities of war.
The way in which the dreadful evils consequent upon commercial credit,
and consequently universal employment, being kept dependent on such an
unstable equilibrium as that which gold must ever, and most of all in
such circumstances, afford, is perfectly evident. What is wanted is
something to _equalise the supply of currency_; to contract paper when
the precious metals are abundant, and, consequently, credit is
becoming dangerously expansive, and to expand it when they are
withdrawn, and, consequently, credit is in danger of being ruinously
contracted. Sir R. Peel's system does just the reverse of this: it
pours paper in profusion through the country, and consequently fosters
absurd and improvident speculation, when specie is abundant, and draws
it in suddenly, and with frightful rapidity, the moment that the
precious metals begin to be withdrawn, either from the effect of
extended importations or foreign warfare. To go right, and obviate the
dreadful evils which their system has introduced, we have nothing to
do but to establish a monetary policy _precisely the reverse_. What is
wanted is a _sliding scale for paper-money_,--a system which shall
tend to contract paper issues when specie is abundant, and pour them
forth with restorative and beneficial vigour the moment that it begins
to disappear. Thus, and thus alone, it was that Mr Pitt enabled the
country to combat the dangers and surmount the difficulties of the
revolutionary war.[9] Under Sir R. Peel's system, the nation, and
every one in it, would have been bankrupt when the bank stopped
payment in 1797, and we should long ere this have been irrecoverably
rendered a province of France.
[9] Bank of England notes in circulation,--
1796 £10,729,520
1797 11,114,120
1800 £16,854,809
1810 21,019,609
--_Alison's England in 1815 and 1845, Appendix._
It belongs to practical men, versed in the mysteries of Lombard Street
and the Stock Exchange, to say _how_ this important object is to be
attained with due attention to the security of the notes issued, and
sufficient safeguards against an over-issue, and consequent injury to
capital, by an undue rise of prices owing to that cause. That the
thing is _possible_ is self-evident. It appears to be essential to
such a system that one of two things should be done. Either that the
issuing of notes should be left to all banks, under the limitation
that private banks should be obliged to take up their notes at all
times,--in Bank of England paper or gold _or silver_--and deposit
government securities to the extent of the notes so issued, to be
appropriated to their payment in case of bankruptcy; and that the Bank
of England should be bound to pay its notes in gold _or silver_, at
the price those metals bear _at the time of presentment_. _Or_, that
the issuing of notes, like the coining of money, should be confined
entirely to government or its officers; and that the regulation of
their amount should be entrusted to certain elevated functionaries--
like the commissioners of the national debt--with instructions to them
to regulate their issues by the price of gold and silver, _increasing_
them when the rise in the value of those metals showed that they were
leaving the country, and contracting them when the price fell, and it
was evident that the necessity for an extended paper circulation was
passing away.
Of course it would be necessary, under such a system, to impose some
limit to the obligation of the Bank of England to pay in specie; but
this might be done either by obliging that establishment to pay in
either of those metals at the current price they bore in the market at
the date of presentment, or by providing, that beyond a certain amount
of notes payable on demand, as £40,000,000 for Great Britain, and
Ireland, notes of a _different colour_, as red, should be issued,
which were exchangeable for specie only when the precious metals had
again fallen to a certain price in the market. These notes should be
issued when gold rises to a certain price, and is evidently leaving
the country--just as grain from government stores should be issued to
the people in periods of scarcity--and drawn in when it returns, and
the price falls. We throw these out only as crude suggestions, which
may or may not be adequate to answer the purpose in view. What we rest
upon, and press in the most earnest manner upon the consideration of
the country, is the _absolute necessity_ of altering the present
system of contracting the paper when the gold is taken away--in other
words, _limiting the issues of bread when the beef fails_--and
substituting for it one of extending the issue of paper when the
precious metals are withdrawn; in other words, _increasing the issues
of bread when those of beef have become deficient_.
The next measure which appears indispensable to secure internal
tranquillity in the empire is, to make a very considerable government
grant, to enable the railway companies to complete the principal lines
now on foot, but still in an unfinished state. Every consideration of
justice, expedience, and necessity, calls for such a grant. Many of
these railways can be completed in no other way. Their directors have
already borrowed all the money on the security of the undertaking
which the law allows (a third;) and the diminished means and
straitened credit of the shareholders, for the present at least, has
disabled them from answering any further calls. The works must stand
still, a deformity and a disgrace to the country, if government relief
is not afforded. Parliament has declared the expedience of these lines
by having passed the bills for their formation. Most, perhaps all, of
these would have been completed ere this, had not the fetters imposed
on the currency by the Bank Charter Act so straitened credit that it
has become impossible. The very _name_ of government being willing to
advance a certain sum, as two or three millions, to enable these
companies to resume their work, would so restore and vivify credit,
that it is probable a very small part of the sum voted would be taken
up by these undertakings. The restoration of private credit, by such a
measure on the part of government, would unlock the immense coffers of
wealth which now, from the prostration of private credit, lie
unemployed in the country. For, such is the strange and anomalous
condition in which we stand, that while our streets are crowded with
thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers and
artisans seeking employment, our banks and insurance offices are
crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed capital
seeking investment. Yet these two superfluities cannot reach or
relieve each other. Why? Because credit and currency are wanting to
enable the one to pass over to the other. Let government lay the
foundation of the bridge, and the communication, to mutual advantage,
will soon be restored.
Incalculable is the benefit which such a resumption of these works
would occasion, both to the individuals connected with, or employed by
them, and the country at large. It would give bread at once to
hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers, who have been seduced
from their regular avocations by the high wages offered two years ago
on the lines, and now find return to their former employments
impossible, from these having been filled up: it would thin the
Chartist and household suffrage meetings, by stopping the distress
which fills them, and giving the working classes something better to
do than listening to intemperate and seditious speeches: it would
render productive the capital and labour already expended on these
undertakings, and give their directors the means both of paying a
dividend to the proprietors, and liquidating, at no distant period,
the whole debt borrowed from the state: it would assuage and relieve
unbounded distress, both in the once wealthy and the labouring classes
of the state: it would vivify and facilitate commerce, by opening up
means of communication through districts requiring it, and to the
formation of which the sanction of the legislature on that ground has
been given;--but most of all, it would evince, by deeds more eloquent
than words, the sympathy of government with the sufferings of the
people, wrest from the agitators their strongest arguments against the
constitution as it stands, and relieve government of the fearful
imputation to which it is now exposed, of first having encouraged the
nation to engage in vast and important internal measures, and then
deprived them, by legislative enactments, of the means of carrying
them, into complete execution.
A third step which is indispensable to disarm the Chartist agitation
and restore internal confidence and peace to the country, is to
provide on a great scale, and by government machinery, for the relief
of the _labour market_. Various causes have now conspired to render
this a matter of paramount necessity. In Ireland, the long-continued
agitation for Repeal, coinciding with the indolent and improvident
habits of the people, the desolating effects of the potato famine of
1846, and the enervating consequences of the noble government grant of
£10,000,000 to meet its necessities, joined to the seditious and
treasonable efforts of the insane Young Ireland party, have so
completely paralysed industry, that the Emerald Isle may now be
regarded as little more than a huge workshop of pauperism, a sort of
_officina pauperiei_, from whence starving multitudes are incessantly
issuing to deluge the adjoining states. The number of emigrants who
left it for distant colonies in 1847 was above one hundred thousand,
but that is but a small part of the dreadful stream of pauperism which
incessantly pours forth from its still crowded shores. In the first
nine months of 1847, the number of Irish who came to Glasgow was
49,981: and that number has since been on the increase, for, from the
last report of the parochial board of Glasgow, it appears, that in
_five_ months and ten days preceding 25th April 1848, the number of
Irish who landed in Glasgow was 42,288! This is at the rate of
_nearly_ 100,000 _a-year_; and these squalid immigrants, let it be
recollected, come, to a country where labour has already, from the
effects of free-trade and a fettered currency, and the disastrous
stoppage to orders produced by the French and German revolutions,
become a perfect drug in the market; and when in and around the single
city of Glasgow, above 100,000 human beings, including dependants, are
already out of work! Individual charity, local efforts, are nugatory
against such prodigious masses of pauperism; you might as well have
expected the staff of the Russian parishes to have resisted the
invasion of 1812.
Perhaps there is nothing which has occurred, in our time, so much to
be regretted, as that the noble grant of ten millions from Great
Britain to relieve the distress of Ireland during the famine, was not,
in part at least, devoted to the purposes of emigration. We all know
how it was spent. No inconsiderable portion was absorbed by the
never-failing frauds of the local Irish agents employed in its
distribution, and the remainder in making good roads bad ones. No part
was employed in a form which could reproduce itself. There was one
thing, and but one, _already good_ in Ireland, and that was the roads.
On that one good thing the whole magnificent grant was wasted. Now
half the grant, £5,000,000 sterling, would not only have provided
700,000 or 800,000 Irish with the means of crossing the Atlantic, but
it would have transported them from the coast up the country to the
frontier of the Forest. That is the great point which is never
attended to by those who contend for free-trade in emigration; in
other words, for liberty to transport the emigrants in crowded and
crazy ships, half manned and ill provisioned, to the shores of
America, and then leave them in sheds at the first harbour to starve
or die of fever.
The advocates for free-trade in emigration forget that labour is as
great a drug on the sea-coast of America as on the crowded shores of
the Emerald Isle: it is no unusual thing to see five thousand
emigrants, chiefly from Ireland, land at New York in a single day. But
as much as labour is redundant in the American sea-port towns, it is
scarce and in demand in the far west. Millions and tens of millions of
unappropriated acres are there to be had for the asking; and an
able-bodied man is sure to be instantly taken up at half-a-crown or
three shillings a-day. The American papers say that "a stout European,
with nothing in the world but his arms and his legs, _if moved on to
the far west_, is worth _a thousand dollars_ to the United States." He
is worth more to England; for, if settled in Canada, the Irish pauper
immediately becomes a consumer of British manufactures to the extent
of £2 a head: if to Australia, to the extent of £10 a head. The
free-trader in emigration stops short of all these things: instead of
transporting the emigrant to the edge of the Forest, where his labour
could produce these results to himself and his country, it leaves him
to pine, with his starving children, in a shed on the quay--a burden
to the community he is fitted to bless, and carrying with him the
seeds of a mortal typhus pestilence into any region which, if he
survives, he may visit. As a proof that these statements are not
overcharged, we subjoin an official return of the fate of the
emigrants who landed under the free-trade system in Canada in
1847.[10] It displays the most stupendous instance that ever was
exhibited of the manner in which the absurd principles of free-trade,
when applied to pauperism, misery, and typhus fever, may convert what
might, under proper management, be the greatest possible blessing to
our own people and the colonies, into the greatest possible curse to
both.
[10] FREE-TRADE IN EMIGRATION.--The numbers who embarked in Europe, in
1847, for Canada, were 90,006; viz., from England, 32,228; from
Ireland, 54,329; from Scotland, 3,752; and from Germany, 7,697. Of the
whole number, 91,882 were steerage passengers, 684 cabin, and 5,541
were infants. Deducting from this aggregate the Germans and the cabin
passengers, the entire number of emigrants who embarked at British
ports was 89,738, of whom 5,293 died before their arrival, leaving
84,445 who reached the colony. Of these, it is estimated that
six-sevenths were from Ireland. Among the thousands who reached the
colony, a large portion were labouring under disease in its worst
types, superinduced by the extremity of famine and misery which they
had suffered previous to embarkation. Of the 84,445 who reached the
colony alive, no less than 10,037 died at arrival--viz., at
quarantine, 3,452; at the Quebec Emigrant Hospital, 1,041; at the
Montreal Hospital, 3,579; and at other places in the two Canadas,
1,965--leaving 74,408. But of these no less than 30,265 were admitted
into hospital for medical treatment. Thus it will be seen that more
than one-seventh of the total embarkations died, that more than
one-eighth of the total arrivals died, and that more than one-third of
those who arrived were received into hospital. Up to the 12th of
November last, the number of destitute emigrants forwarded from the
agency at Montreal to Upper Canada was 38,781; viz., male adults,
12,932; female adults, 12,153, children under twelve, 10,616; infants
3,080.--_Report of Executive Council, Canada. Parl. Paper_, May 5,
1848.
What should be done is perfectly plain and generally acknowledged. You
will not find ten men of sense or information in Great Britain, out of
the precincts of the colonial and other government offices, who have
two opinions on the subject. To relieve the labour market in Great
Britain and Ireland, a great effort should immediately be made to
transport some hundred thousand of _the very poorest class_, who
_cannot emigrate on their own resources_, to Canada, the Cape, and
Australia. Wages in the latter country are from 4s. to 5s. a-day for
common, 6s. and 7s. a-day for skilled labour. Ireland is the great
quarter to which this relief should be extended: if its surplus
multitudes are taken off, the pressure on Great Britain will speedily
be abated. Ships of war, to lighten the cost of transport, should be
employed to transport the emigrants as they do our regiments.
Government barracks should be established with proper officers, to
receive the emigrants at their landing, separate the healthy from the
sick, establish the latter in proper hospitals, so as to stop the
spread of typhus fever, and forward, at the public expense, the
healthy and active to the frontier. Other officers should be appointed
there to allot to them ground, find them tools, furnish them with
seed, or provide them with employment. This should be done to at least
three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand emigrants annually for
some years to come. We should like to see the Chartism or Repeal Mania
which would long stand against such a course of humane, and withal
wise and truly liberal, legislation.
But such great measures would require money. The average cost of each
emigrant so transported and looked to in the colony would be £6 or £7;
three or four hundred thousand persons so provided with the means of
emigration would cost from £2,000,000 to £2,500,000 a-year.
Granted.--Could the money be better bestowed? It would not yield no
return, like that devoted to making good Irish roads bad ones: it
would convert three hundred thousand paupers annually into consumers
of British manufactures to the amount of three or four pounds a head:
it would add £1,000,000 or £1,200,000 a-year to the export of British
manufactures: it would secure a durable vent for our goods by planting
British descendants in the New World: it would spread joy and comfort
through Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, not less than Tipperary
and Galway: it would extinguish--and extinguish by means of Christian
beneficence--the flame of disaffection in the realm: it would give to
our people all that French socialism has that is really beneficial,
and save them from the unutterable and incalculable evils with which
it is fraught: it would restore the balance between capital and
industry, so grievously and ruinously deranged by the effects of
free-trade of late years: it would go far to alleviate the misery
which the pernicious dogmas regarding the currency have spread through
the country. For blessings such as these, is the issue of exchequer
bills to the extent of two or three millions a-year for some years an
extravagant price to pay? Would not _five times the sum_ be at once
borrowed by the state in a single year if war were to break out with
France or America? Are the dangers of any such war to be compared to
those which must inevitably be incurred if the present frightful mass
of pauperism, idleness, and destitution, is allowed to continue
unrelieved, and to go on increasing in the country? What must, in the
end, be the result of such a state of things, but internal anarchy,
foreign degradation, ultimate ruin? And is there no obligation upon
those whose policy since 1846 has brought these calamities on the
nation, to apply the national credit in the attempt at least to
relieve them? Hear the just and eloquent observations of the _Times_
on the subject:--
"There is a multitudinous population growing yearly more
multitudinous, more exacting, more wretched. The end of each
succeeding year sees the addition of nearly a quarter of a
million of human beings to the inhabitants of this country.
The crowded seats of our manufactures and
commerce--Liverpool and Manchester, Nottingham and
Stockport--teem with the annual increment of creatures, who
exclaim, 'Give us work and bread.' How shall we meet this
cry? Shall we tell them that work is an affair of demand;
that demand depends upon competition; that competition is an
effect of population; that population outruns subsistence;
that they are too many; in a word, that they have no right
to exist? They would be bold men--that would be a bold
government, which should hold such language as this. With
Chartism in front, and discontent in the rear, it would be
perilous to begin such lecturing. But is not the principle
acted on, though not avowed, when--with a vast territorial
dominion, in which labour might grow into power, and poverty
into wealth--with mines of ore and fields of fertility--with
capital calling for labour, and adventure crying for
help--the State refuses to acknowledge the duty of settling
its redundant multitudes in its own distant lands, or
discharges it in a niggardly and grudging mood?
"The danger of such neglect or such parsimony is great. Time
glides on, adding alike to the numbers and the discontent of
the masses. Misery has strange axioms. The misery of
multitudes invents a wild policy. They whose normal
condition is endurance, will avenge themselves on the empire
by a normal agitation. They whom the national wealth does
not assist in bettering their fortune, will wage an
obstinate war against wealth, property, and order. We have
put down Chartism; but we have not conciliated discontent.
Let us beware lest the discontented become the majority.
Much depends upon ourselves, much on the use to which we
turn our existing establishments; and no establishments have
we more valuable than our colonies. A colonial empire
founded on the sparings of our superfluous wealth and the
cravings of our unemployed industry, would be a grander
commemoration of victorious order and triumphant law than a
century of hospitals or a myriad of wash-houses. Those who
were elated and those who were dejected by the 10th of
April, might alike view with pleasure the glorious fabric of
a new empire springing from the ruins of a broken faction
and the energies of a noble purpose, emblematic of the 'bow
of hope that spans the earth'--emblematic of the only faith
that ever yet inculcated liberty, fraternity, and equality
aright."--_Times_, May 12, 1848.
But towards finding this vent for our indigent and unemployed
population at home, in the colonies, it is indispensable that the
colonies should be preserved to the British crown; and from the
effects of free-trade, it is very doubtful whether this will long be
the case. Every body knows that the West Indies have been utterly
ruined by the act of 1846: estates are valueless, and the planting of
canes is rapidly ceasing. We know of an estate which, within fifteen
years, was sold for £38,000, which was knocked down within these few
weeks for £20! To give an idea of the feelings which the unexampled
injustice to which they have been subjected have excited in these once
noble and loyal islands, we subjoin an extract from the _Jamaica
Despatch_ of April 7:--
"The affairs of Jamaica have now arrived at that desperate
crisis that there is, we believe, not one man in the colony
whose dependence rests solely on property invested within
it, that would not, could his single voice effect the
change, pronounce at once for adhesion to any other
government than that which has beggared him. Loyalty is, at
best, but a sentiment dependent for stability upon
circumstances. We love our country so long as, and because
we think, our country protects our lives, our liberties, and
our properties. We are patriots whilst the government of our
country secures to us those possessions which our industry
has earned for us, and which the written constitution has
guaranteed us. All human experience shows this limit to the
most exalted spirit of loyalty and patriotism. True it is we
have not the power of Canada. We are as unable as we are
unwilling to change our lot by force; but let England beware
lest passive alienation of every sentiment that can attach
us to her as a nation do not prove even more dangerous to
her colonial power than any active spirit of disaffection
could be. This magnificent colony has, indeed, been sinfully
and treasonably sacrificed. _The property of the Queen's
subjects has been confiscated without offence on their
part_; whilst, in a political point of view, each day
renders the colony less and less valuable to the Crown as a
national dependency. All commerce between Jamaica and the
mother country must speedily cease. Of exports there can be
none. Ministers--the fatal Whig Government, which has proved
to be the evil genius of the West Indies whenever destiny
has placed it in the ascendant--have pronounced the final
doom of West Indian cultivation. After August next, when the
present crops shall have been taken off, _five estates in
six must of necessity cease to become sugar
producers_."--_Jamaica Despatch_, April 7.
Canada will, ere long, if the present system be adhered to, follow the
example of the West Indies; and having ceased, from the destruction of
all its privileges, to have any interest in the maintenance of its
connexion with Great Britain, it will take the first convenient
opportunity to break it off. If we have lost our colonies, what
security have we that they will not refuse to admit the stream of
pauperism which now flows into them from the parent state: that they
will not treat them as the fraternising French republicans did the
British artisans, and send them all home? And even if they should
still consent to receive them, what security should we have for the
maintenance of export of the £16,000,000 of British manufactures which
now go out to our colonies, if, like the Americans, they levy their
whole revenue to maintain their independent government upon imports
from this country? Recollect the exports to America, with 20,000,000
inhabitants, are not £10,000,000 annually, or 10s. a head; to Canada,
with 1,900,000, about £3,800,000, or £2 a head; and to the West
Indies, hitherto about £3,000,000 to 800,000 souls, or nearly £4 a
head.
If the English like free-trade--if they are content to have their
sovereigns by the million go out, as in 1847, to buy foreign grain,
and foreign manufactures supplant British in all our staple branches
of manufacture, by all means let them have it. Let them perpetuate the
year 1847, with all its blessings, to all eternity. Free-trade is
their own work; let them taste its fruits, and drain the cup they have
selected to the dregs. But the colonies, be it recollected, had no
hand in introducing that system. They were utterly and entirely
disfranchised by the Reform Bill; schedules A and B cut up their
representation by the roots. Free-trade was forced upon them by the
representatives of Great Britain, not only without their concurrence,
but in opposition to their most earnest remonstrances. Whatever may be
said as to our present distress being the work of our own hands, and
of our now reaping the fruits of the seed we have sown, that is wholly
inapplicable to the colonies. Protection to their industry is what
they have always prayed for; it is to them the condition of existence;
it is the sole bond which unites them to the empire. Soon the bond and
the connexion will be dissolved. And when dissolved, we shall have the
woful reflection,--we shall incur the damning imputation with future
times, that it was lost for no national or worthy object; from no
foreign danger, or external catastrophe; but from the mere ascendency
of interested legislation in the parent state: and that the greatest
colonial empire that ever existed, that which had grown up during two
centuries, and resisted the assaults of Napoleon in the plenitude of
his power--was dissolved from the desire to maintain a principle which
promised no greater benefit but, for a few years, to lower the price
of sugar a penny a pound to the British consumers.
It is from measures such as we have now advocated, and from them
alone, that we expect the extinction of the Chartist or household
suffrage agitation, and the restoration of the wonted feelings of
steady loyalty in the British nation. The subordinate matters, so much
the objects of anxiety and care to the legislature, are not to be
despised; but they will prove entirely nugatory, if measures such as
these are not simultaneously and vigorously adopted. There is no way
of really improving the condition of the working classes, but by
augmenting the demand for labour. This is what they want; we never
hear of them petitioning for wash-houses and cold baths, or a
health-of-towns bill: it is a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work"
which they always desire. Rely upon it, they are right. By all means
give them wash-houses and cold baths; broad streets and common sewers;
airy rooms and moderately sized houses; but recollect, if you do not
give them work at the same time, it will all prove nugatory. Lodge
them all by a miracle, or a successful revolution, in Buckingham
Palace and Stafford House to-morrow, and in a week, if you do not give
them the means of earning good wages, they will be as filthy, squalid,
and diseased as ever. Thirty families will be located in the grand
saloon; twenty-five in the green library; forty or fifty starving
Irishmen will be comfortably lodged on the great stair. Typhus will
spread, sedition will be hatched, treason prepared in the royal
palaces, as well as in St Giles, or Manchester. There was not a more
depraved or miserable set in Paris than the seven or eight hundred
persons who squatted down in the Tuileries after the late revolution,
and were only dislodged by bringing up artillery. Restore protection
to colonial industry; relieve the great works in progress throughout
the empire; engage in a great system of government emigration; give
the country a currency adequate to its necessities, and commensurate
to its transactions; and you may bid defiance to Chartist agitation,
and drain off, if you cannot extirpate, the stream of Irish pauperism
and treason.
STODDART AND ANGLING.[11]
[11] _The Angler's Companion to the Rivers and Lochs of Scotland._ By
THOMAS TOD STODDART. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London.
1847.
We do not lose a moment--we take the earliest opportunity--to thank Mr
Stoddart for his book. Well, this is a cool piece of effrontery! So
say some flippant folks, who fancy themselves abreast of the
literature of the day, and in whose arid waste of mind, as in the
desert, one may pick up now and then a few dates. They are so kind as
to remind us that Mr Stoddart's book was published early in the spring
of 1847. Apart altogether from our perfect knowledge of the time of
the publication, we fling back the charge of effrontery with
imperturbable contempt. The spring of 1847! There never was any such
season. Who saw the glimpses of its smiles? who heard the chirping of
its songs? who smelt its perfume? who felt its refreshing airs? who
nibbled its green shoots? None of the human senses recognised its
presence, or acknowledged its influence. Notorious it is that a tiny
urchin in an infant school, whose little teeth had been previously
knocking together in its head in shivering concussion for a month,
refused, when brought up to the mellifluous passage, to perpetrate the
vernal invocation of Mr James Thomson; and equally defying the
allurements or the terrors--the sugar-cane or the birch-rod--the moral
or the physical force of tuition, pronounced with Denmanic emphasis
any allusion to "etherial mildness," or "showers of roses," even in
the month of May 1847, to be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare. He
never angled who speaks of the spring of 1847. The gentle craft
perished for a while beneath the obdurate inclemency of the weather,
and the ceaseless floods of snow-water, which polluted every lucid
stream into "gruel thick and slab." We do not pretend to remember when
the cloud and the tempest passed away; at all events, it was too late
for angling purposes. In breezy, ay in stormy days, there are many
bold and happy hits to be made by the cunning hand; but the zany, who
throws his line in the teeth of a perpetual tornado, will catch, of
course, nothing except what the indignant lexicographer has placed at
the extremity farthest from the worm. Besides, there are those,
including our author, who think that angling is a bilateral pastime.
It is a part of their creed, (which we may look into hereafter,) that
the silly fishes enjoy the fun of being captured, and often chuckle
audibly on being "encreeled" by a triumphant artist like Mr Stoddart.
And lordly salmon, or gentlemanlike trout, may probably dislike, as
much as their adversary, an excess of piercing winds and dirty waters.
In short, it was thoroughly understood, in the beginning of 1847, by
the fisher and the fished, that the atmosphere was too preposterously
rude to deserve encouragement at the hands or fins of either party.
The temporary cessation of hostilities was accordingly complete. What
could we do?
Little difficulty, to be sure, there was in finding pretexts daily for
putting up the rod in the dining-room four or five times in the course
of the forenoon, and executing, without line, a phantom cast of
unerring accuracy across the table diagonally into an imaginary eddy
rippling and softly gurgling on the floor round several bottles of
Alsop's pale ale, linking sometimes, in our mood of finest frenzy,
such preprandial dexterity, with the apparition in the same locality,
at a later hour, of a cod's head and shoulders, not without oyster
sauce. The music of the reel was also occasionally stirred by the
supposititious tugs of a voracious gillaroo, (which is by far the
dreadfullest fish of which we any where read,) enacted for the nonce
by the same curly scion of truth who disdained to lend himself, in the
miscalled spring of 1847, to the untruthful sycophancy of the bard of
Ednam. The very fact, however, of its being "our young barbarian at
play," and not a gillaroo in earnest, who was thus--
"Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony,"
carried the sound of the whirring thread to our ears "with a
difference." The glancing armoury of the fishing-book, meriting better
than Hector's helmet did the untranslatable epithet of Homeric
monotony, was over and over again paraded and arranged, disordered and
re-classified, extricated and intermingled, from pocket to pocket,
until each particular hook in the pools and currents of our fancy
became prospectively commemorative of multitudinous massacres, "making
the green one red." But the basket or the bag, (and we prefer the
latter,) would have felt, in the mean time, heavier under the burden
of a single minnow than it ever did feel beneath the possible pressure
of shoals of contingent bull-trouts. The experiment of wading through
the house in enormous India-rubber boots, taking four steps at once in
coming down stairs, and jumping suddenly from chairs upon the carpet,
for the purpose of persuading ourselves that we were getting into deep
water, afforded but a very transitory hallucination. The act of
jerking at dinner a young turkey, with a gaff, from a remote dish, to
our plate, did not elicit the general acknowledgment of its graceful
precision which we had anticipated; while an excellent and polished
steel-yard, with which, in the absence of a salmon, we had been
practising in the kitchen on a casual leg of mutton, having dazzled,
perhaps, the eye of the butcher's boy, and being forgotten by us for a
brief hour or so, has been, "like the lost Pleiad, seen no more
below." During such moments, the memory even of delectable old Isaac
was losing a little of its perennial fragrance--the reminiscences of
all kinds of fishes were beginning to stink in the nostrils. "Who
comes here?--A grenadier;" and in walked "The Angler's Companion to
the Lochs and Rivers of Scotland, by Thomas Tod Stoddart."
Ordinary mortals, to whom, as to Peter Bell, yellow primroses are
simply yellow primroses, might instantly, upon getting the book, open
it, read it, and be delighted with it. But we sat for six weeks gazing
at the volume without daring or wishing to lay a finger upon it. There
was a great deal for us to think about before spreading our sails for
another voyage with an old companion. The fact is, that we were
humming, after our own fashion, one of Mr Stoddart's angling songs at
the moment when his new work was placed before us, Now, these songs
were not published yesterday; and many a time and oft out of them had
we amused ourselves by forming the liveliest picture of the angler's
life, pursuits, meditations, and emotions. From his being up with the
sweet thrushes to meet "the morn upon the lea," till "homeward from
the stream he turns," we followed him in Stoddart's musical track. His
call to "bring him osier, line, and reel"--his scrutiny of the airs
and clouds of heaven--his communings with bird and bee, flower and
fay--his welcome to the cuckoo--his blessing of the "spring-tide
bland"--his entreaty to the winds to waken--
"For the low welcome sound of their wandering wings"--
his repose and summer trance, "beneath a willow wide"--his pensive
musings, and comments, shaped by the enchanting realities around him,
or by the pleasant shadows of his own memory and fancy--his feats of
guile and skill--his patience and his toil--the excitement of his
suspense--the exultation of his victory, and the joyousness and
harmony which round his well-spent day,--all were represented and
embodied in numbers than which none more melodious, heartier, or
happier ever strengthened and gladdened, by stream or board, the
disciples of Cotton and Walton. We paused before unfolding a new book;
and then we read it thoroughly from beginning to end, without missing
any word.
But time brings with it many vicissitudes. Winter, when nobody but a
Stoddart fishes; swarms of European revolutions, which keep every
thing, including fishing-rods, out of joint; and again, in this
present 1848, a terrible spring-tide, which, standing sentinel at our
doors with the keenness of a sword and the strength of a portcullis,
has forbidden any body to think of fishing this year till June;--these
things have inevitably, forcibly, and wisely obliged us to be silent.
We take the earliest opportunity to thank Mr Stoddart for his book.
"Who is the happy warrior?" appears to us to be an interrogatory as
nearly as possible destitute of all meaning. But upon the double
hypothesis that it may have some meaning, and that we can paint in
fresco, such a question might suggest an idea that the felicitous
gentleman for whom the poet asks would be best pictured as Julius
Caesar in the act of correcting the proof-sheets of his Commentaries.
To do good and great actions is agreeable, but dangerous; to write
well and nobly of the great and good things we have done is also
agreeable, but troublesome; but when the danger and the trouble are
both past and gone, to read what we have well written of what we have
well done, with the conviction that an endless posterity will read it
after us with pleasure and approbation, must be, we shall venture to
imagine, most prodigiously agreeable to any respectable individual,
whether he is actually a soldier, having purchased his commission at a
heavy regulation price, or whether he is only provisionally obnoxious
to be balloted for militia service, or accidentally liable to be
called out, with a curse and a cutlet in his month, for the guerilla
warfare of a special constable. We avow for ourselves, without a
blush, that we are only one of those who may become warriors hereafter
by statutory or municipal contingency. As yet we have not served in
any campaign. On one occasion, indeed, the housemaid discovered, at
early dawn, sprouting from the key-hole of the door, a notice, by
which we were hastily summoned to quell a dreadful tumult at nine
o'clock the night before. Late as the summons came, on reading it a
thrill of posthumous glory permeated our frame; nor, when perusing in
the newspapers at breakfast the eloquent recognition by the public
authorities of the services of other special constables, could we
repress the riotous throbbings of martial spirit and martial sympathy
within us, as being one who, though _de facto_ inert in dressing-gown
and slippers, was entitled _de jure_, as the notice testified, to be
active with badge and baton. We severely reprimanded, of course, the
housemaid for bringing into the house stray bits of paper, which might
have wrapped up most deleterious combustibles. She promised to be more
cautious in future; and it has so happened that the magistrates have
never taken practical advantage of our vigilant anxiety to protect the
tranquillity of the city. But we are well aware that it has ever been
exactly with a corresponding spirit that we have studied the Gallic
battles and campaigns of the great Roman, where we have been free
alike from the risk of fighting, and the botheration of writing. Our
impression is, therefore, on the whole, exceedingly strong that the
happy warrior may be more faithfully portrayed by ourselves than by
Cæsar.
According to these principles of interpretation, let us inquire, who
is the happy angler? To such a question any body who, in the former
case, prefers Cæsar's claim to ours, will not fail to reply by bawling
out the name of Stoddart. The parallel is a very good one. There is
nothing in the science of angling theoretically of which Mr Stoddart
is ignorant; there is nothing in the art of angling practically which
Mr Stoddart has not tried with his own hand. He has been writing the
annals of a laborious, persevering, incessant, and successful
experience. He tells others what they may do, by showing them vividly
and precisely what he has himself done. It is the record of a
conqueror whose career exhibits occurrences so numerous, various, and
striking, that the simple narrative of events teaches general
principles; the mere accumulation of facts causes theory to
vegetate--the movements which lead to victory on a particular occasion
are adopted as laws to regulate subsequent operations in similar
circumstances; the strategy of the emergency is accepted as
universally normal. In a history so instructive, there must
necessarily be a remarkable amount of patience and zeal, assiduity and
skill, quick apprehension, and sagacious reflection. And where, as in
the present instance, it happens that all this information is
communicated with healthy racy vigour, and picturesque effect of
language, while a dewy freshness of enthusiasm exhilarates the whole
composition, it is not surely very surprising that, comfortably
pendulous in our rocking-chair, conscious of never having encountered
a billionth part of the fatigues undergone by Mr Stoddart, and
possessing, in the manageable volume in our hand, a complete repertory
of the fruits of the toil, experience, and judgment of that "admirable
Triton," we should thus complacently believe that we are the happy
angler--leaving it of course to Mr Stoddart, if he likes, to be a
Julius Cæsar.
From the frontispiece we start, and after perambulating the book, to
the frontispiece we return. "A day's fishing" will then be wondrously
intelligible, and ought to be regarded with an angler's love, and an
angler's pride. The picture from which the engraving is taken has been
long familiar to us. Who painted it? At the left-hand corner of the
plate the artist's name is legible enough; but there is much more,
besides the name, printed in sympathetic ink which is visible only to
the eye of the initiated. A word in thine ear, gentlest of piscatorial
readers! The skill of the pencil is the animated reflection of the
skill of the fishing rod. Nothing finny has the painter drawn which
the angler has not killed. On the canvass his faithful brush has
placed nothing which his success as an angler has not enabled him to
observe for himself, to mark, and to daguerreotype in his inmost soul.
No graceful outline has he traced; no gorgeous bulk has he stretched
out in massive breadth or wavy length; no small head has he delicately
curved; no, flood of light has he poured on gleaming panoply of
interwoven scales of gold and silver; no shifting ray of exquisite
colour has he caught in the very instant of brilliant evanescence; no
purple spot or crimson star has he made to shine with distinctive
brightness on the flank; no aureate or orange tint has he permitted to
fade away along the body into pearly whiteness; no fin quivers; no
tail curls; no gill is muddy red; no eye is lustreless,--without or
beyond the bidding, the teaching, the guarantee, and express image of
nature. Pity it is that we should not feel at liberty to say a word or
two of other matters--of a happy temper, which has cheered us with its
mellow sunshine on many a raw and cloudy day; or of a richly-stored
mind, which, when fish were sulky, has often made the lagging hours
spin on with jocund speed. Almost, under this hot bright sky, we are
tempted, unbidden, to enter the studio, and ask to share with yon
sequestered stags the shelter of the favourite pines. But we dare not;
for we know the man as well as the artist and angler. We know both
the anglers. It is, in sooth, fitting that GILES should illustrate
STODDART.
Is not angling cruel? Now, before attempting any responsive
observation, be so good as to read the following impetuous passage:--
"Is it not, for instance, in the attitude of hope that the
angler stands, while in the act of heaving out his flies
over some favourite cast? Of hope increased, when he
beholds, feeding within reach of his line, the monarch of
the stream? But now, mark him! He has dropt the hook
cautiously and skilfully just above the indicated spot; the
fish, scarcely breaking the surface, has seized it. A fast,
firm hold it has, but the tackle is fine, and the trout
strong and active. Look! how the expression of his features
is undergoing a change. There is still hope, but mingled
with it are traces of anxiety--of fear itself. His
attitudes, too, are those of a troubled and distempered man.
Ha! all is well. The worst is over. The strong push for
liberty has been made, and failed. Desperate as that
summerset was, it has proved unsuccessful. The tackle--knot
and barb--is sufficient. Look now at the angler. Hope with
him is stronger than anxiety, and joy too beams forth under
his eyelids; for lo! the fish is showing symptoms of
distress. No longer it threatens to exhaust the winch-line;
no longer it combats with the rapids; no more it strives,
with frantic fling or wily plunge, to disengage the hook. It
has lost all heart--almost all energy. The fins, paralysed
and powerless, are unable for their task. So far from
regulating its movements, they cannot even sustain the
balance of the fish. Helpless and hopeless it is drawn
ashore, upturning, in the act of submission, its starred and
gleamy flanks. The countenance of the captor--his movements,
(they are those which the soul dictates,) are all joyous and
self-congratulatory. But the emotion, strongly depicted
though it be, is short-lived. It gives way successively to
the feelings of admiration and pity--of admiration, as
excited on contemplating the almost incomparable beauty of
the captive, its breadth and depth, the harmony of its
proportions, as well as the richness and variety of its
colours; of pity, as called forth in accordance with our
nature,--an unconscious, uncontrollable emotion, which
operates with subduing effect on the triumph of the moment.
"And now, in their turn, content and thankfulness reign in
the heart and develop themselves on the countenance of the
angler; now haply he is impressed with feelings of adoring
solemnity, stirred up by some scene of unlooked-for
grandeur, or the transit of some sublime phenomenon. I say
nothing of the feelings of disappointment, anger, envy, and
jealousy, which sometimes find their way into the bosom, and
are portrayed on the features even of the worthiest and
best-tempered of our craft. Too naturally they spring up and
blend themselves with our better nature; yet well it is that
they take no hold on the heart--scorching, it may be true,
but not consuming its day of happiness.
"Hence it is, from the very variety of emotions which
successively occupy the mind, from their blendings and
transitions, that angling derives its pleasures; hence it
holds precedence as a sport with men of thoughtful and ideal
temperament; hence poets, sculptors, and philosophers--the
sons and worshippers of genius--have entered, heart and
hand, into its pursuit. Therefore it was that Thomson,
Burns, Scott, and Hogg, and, in our present day, Wilson and
Wordsworth, exchanged eagerly the gray-goose quill and the
companionship of books, for the taper wand and the
discourse, older than Homer's measures, of streams and
cataracts. Therefore it was that Paley left his meditative
home, and Davy his tests and crucibles, and Chantrey his
moulds, models, and chisel-work,--each and all to rejoice
and renovate themselves; to gather new thoughts and
energies, a fresh heart and vigorous hand, in the exercise
of that pastime which is teeming with philosophy."
Mr Stoddart blinks our problem altogether. Fish, it will be noticed,
are treated, firstly, as bits of cork, and, secondly, as lumps of
lead. But the bad example of all the great men before or since
Agamemnon will not lessen the cruelty, if it be cruelty, of dragging a
large fish or a little fish out of its "native element" forcibly, and
against its will. Obliging a fish to come out of the water when it has
not the slightest wish to be a fish out of water, has an apparent
resemblance to the ejecting of a human being unseasonably from his bed
who has made up his mind to prosecute a steady snooze for the next
three hours. The absence or presence of a little bodily suffering in
the process of ejection, has really nothing to do with the merits of
the abstract question. A man who is jerked out of bed by a string
tied to his toe must endure an uncomfortable twinge. But the votary of
Morpheus may be induced to change his quarters quite as effectually by
painlessly removing beyond his reach the blankets and the sheets. It
is not the application of positive compulsion to the person, but the
disturbance of existing comfort in his present condition, which may be
pain, and hardship, and cruelty. In point of fact, it is nothing of
the sort, because the analogy, as stated, is entirely fallacious. The
true analog is to be stated thus: Any body who, being already in bed,
and therefore legitimately somniferous, happens to overhear us in the
next room loudly declaring our intention of beginning forthwith a
supper of savoury and palatable dishes, and who, thereupon, greedily
shakes off his incipient torpidity, and rushes into the apartment in
order to share the banquet, but finds no supper, and ourselves
laughing at his credulity, has no right at all to assert that he has
been subjected to hardships or treated with cruelty. He left his
proper sphere, and was punished for his eccentricity. How is a fish
that lives in the water entitled to snap at a fly that lives out of
the water? But then the fly goes into the water. Very well: but if the
fish comes up into the air, as it does, to bite at a fly, which is a
denizen of the air, it is just that a fly, when it goes down into the
water, should indulge in a reciprocal bite at a fish, which is a
denizen of the waters. And if flies cannot bite for themselves, it is
a noble thing in man to bite for them. All the fish encreeled by all
the human fishers of every year make but a molehill to the mountain of
flies butchered and gorged by a single trout in a month. Heliogabalus
was temperate, Nero was merciful, when compared with a gillaroo. And
as for a PIKE!
Let us listen to Stoddart on pikes. It is proper, perhaps, to mention
that we are legally informed that the "open and advised speaking" of
our author about pikes is very constitutional, although very
marvellous. It pleases him now to buffet these freshwater sharks with
extremely hard words. Yet have we seen his nerves more fluttered by a
dead pike, surreptitiously introduced into his nocturnal couch at
Tibbie's--whom mortals, we believe, call Mrs Richardson, and whose
green rural hostelry, on the margin of St Mary's Loch, is the sweet
and loved haunt of every true brother of the craft--than ever was the
heart of fisherman when a twenty-pounder has darted off like an
express locomotive towards the foaming and rocky cataract. What horrid
shriek is that, making night hideous? With bursts of laughter at this
moment returns the scene when that grim visitor murdered the first
efforts of the weary angler to woo repose, as his naked feet came into
unexpected contact with the slimy mail of the water-pirate. Such
recollections are part and parcel of the many hundred things which
make the fisher's life a happy one. We shall hear, therefore, Mr
Stoddart avenging himself on all pikes, dead or living, not excluding
an incidental foray against eels; which latter are not surely, while
they live, loveable.
"No one that ever felt the first attack of a pike at the
gorge-bait can easily forget it. It is not, as might be
supposed from the character of the fish, a bold, eager,
voracious grasp; quite the contrary, it is a slow
calculating grip. There is nothing about it dashing or at
all violent; no stirring of the fins--no lashing of the
tail--no expressed fury or revenge. The whole is mouth-work;
calm, deliberate, bone-crashing, deadly mouth-work. You
think at the moment you hear the action--the clanging
action--of the fish's jaw-bones; and such jaw-bones, so
powerful, so terrific! You think you hear the compressing,
the racking of the victim betwixt them. The sensation is
pleasurable to the angler as an avenger. Who among our
gentle craft ever pitied a pike? I can fancy one lamenting
over a salmon or star-stoled trout or playful minnow; nay, I
have heard of those who, on being bereft of a pet gold-fish,
actually wept; but a pike! itself unpitying, unsparing, who
would pity?--who spare?
"Returning, however, to the point in my narrative at which I
broke off. I no sooner felt the well-known intimation, than,
drawing out line from my reel, and slightly slackening what
had already passed the top-ring of my rod, I stood prepared
for further movements on the part of the fish. After a short
time he sailed slowly about, confining his excursions to
within a yard or two of the spot where he had originally
seized the bait. It was evident, as I knew from experience,
that he still held the trout cross-wise betwixt his jaws,
and had not yet pouched or bolted it. To induce, him,
however, to do so without delay, I very slightly, as is my
wont, tightened or rather jerked the line towards myself, in
order to create the notion that his prey was making
resistance, and might escape from his grasp. A moment's halt
indicated that he had taken the hint, and immediately
afterwards, all being disposed of at one gulp, out he
rushed, vigorous as any salmon, exhausting in one splendid
run nearly the whole contents of my reel, and ending his
exertions, in the meanwhile, with a desperate summerset,
which revealed him to my view in all his size, vigour, and
ferocity; the jaws grimly expanded, the fins erect, and the
whole body in a state of uncontrollable excitement. Being
provided with a single-handed rod, and winch-line suited in
respect of strength and thickness to light fishing, it was a
marvel that either of these stood the test on an occasion so
very trying. The worst, however, was over; and although the
pike, as fish of its kind under similar circumstances always
do, showed signs of remaining strength, coupled with great
sullenness, it nevertheless, in the course of a few minutes,
submitted to its fate, and allowed itself to be drawn ashore
at a convenient landing-place, which fortunately was not far
off.
"This fish, the first I ever captured in Teviot, weighed
nearly a stone, and preceded in its fate no fewer than four
others, of the respective weights, or nearly so, of ten,
eight, seven, and three pounds, all of which I took from
about the same spot in less than an hour's time. Shortly
after, three or four days intervening, I killed two pike of
twelve pounds weight each, close to the place mentioned, and
in the same season met with an incident which, as it has
some connexion with pike-trolling, is worthy of being
recorded in this chapter. It happened in the month of July,
on which day, Teviot, owing to recent rains, was somewhat
discoloured, and I had ventured as far up its banks as the
Roxburgh pool, intending to trout with fly and minnow, and
also to give the pike a trial. That I might not, however,
consume much time upon the latter fish, I had provided
myself with a couple of set lines formed of strong cord.
These it was my intention to lay out in a portion of the
pool hitherto untried, and to allow them to remain there,
while I angled for trout higher up the river. With the view
of doing this, I had secured, by desultory throwing in my
progress, towards Roxburgh, several small trout, and when
arriving at the spot where I had intended to lay the lines,
was unable to resist an anticipatory trial for pike with the
rod itself, which, on this occasion, was a double-handed
one, and provided with a good-sized reel and line to
correspond.
"Having affixed and baited a gorge-hook, I accordingly
commenced operations, and in the course of a few throws
hooked what I conceived to be a pike of extraordinary size.
It pouched quickly, ran far, and forcibly crossed and
recrossed the river, which, at the spot in question, is by
no means narrow,--rushed upwards to a distance of at least a
hundred yards and down again, seemingly without the least
fatigue. Having regained, however, the spot from which it
had commenced its run, all on a sudden the fish halted, and
immediately, without any jerk or strain on my part, the line
came to hand, neatly severed or cut through by the teeth,
above the wire-fastenings to which the gorge-hook had been
appended. No slight disappointment it was. I fancied of
course that I had lost a pike of such uncommon size, as to
have been able to engross, in pouching, the whole extent of
arming in question, measuring nearly a foot. My sole
resource therefore, or hope of retrieve,--and I was by no
means sanguine of the result,--lay in the setting of the two
lines I had brought along with me, at or near the spot where
the fish had made its escape. Accordingly, baiting each with
a trout of at least four ounces in weight, I threw them in
not far from one another, with small floats attached, in
order to show off the lure and keep it from the bottom. This
done, I pursued my way further up the river, and commenced
trouting. On my return, after the expiry of two or three
hours, to the place where I had set the lines, I found that
both the corks were out of sight and the cords stretched to
the uttermost, but quite motionless. Drawing the nearer one,
I was surprised to observe it, although made of strong and
fresh material, snapped through at the middle. It was not
so, however, with the other. There was evidently something
attached to it of considerable weight and bulk, without,
however, any live resistance. Imagine my surprise, when, on
hauling it nearer the bank, I beheld a huge eel enveloped
among the cords, quite choked and lifeless. Of river eels it
was the largest I had ever witnessed, although I certainly
have seen congers of greater size. About four feet and a
half in length, and in girth fully eleven inches, I think it
could not have weighed less than twenty pounds. This point,
however, I wanted the ready means of determining, although I
regret not having made an effort to acquaint myself with it.
On examining the stomach of the monster, I found that it
contained all the three gorge-hooks employed by me, and the
trouts with which, individually, they had been baited. My
experience in eel fishing has not been very great, but I
have taken some hundreds of them in my time, and I do not
remember above one or two that showed fight in the same
manner this one did, while on the rod. In general, they
waddle or twist about, betake themselves under rocks,
stones, or roots of trees, but very seldom push out directly
across or up the pool. With the gorge-hook indeed, and a
small trout as the bait, I have often, both before and since
the occasion above-mentioned, captured them; also while
trolling for pike with gimp and swivel tackle, and that in
mid water betwixt the bottom and surface; nor, indeed, will
eels, when impelled by hunger, shrink from assailing the
largest fish, should these happen to be sickly or in adverse
circumstances. It is well known that what are termed river
cairns, or heaps of stones raised by the tacksman of salmon
fishings for the purpose of inveigling running fish into a
certain description of net attached to them, afford shelter
to large numbers of eels and lampreys, which, if the grilse
or salmon happening to become entangled is allowed, through
neglect or otherwise, to continue two or three hours in this
state of thraldom, will, forcing an entrance through the
gill or mouth, speedily disencumber it of its entrails; nay
if allowed to pursue their work of molestation unchecked,
absolutely hollow it out, until little remains but a sack or
skinful of bones."
This is a horrible picture,--"a sack or skinful of bones," while the
salmon, we presume, still exists in its ribbed transparency. The
dreams of eels, who sup so full of horrors, must be very awful. But
infinitely more awful must be the visions which people the slumbers of
those mortals who, in their turn, eat those eels who have eaten those
salmon. Our repugnance to eel-pies was never strong. It were better
for us to think of something else.
A crust of statistics may ward off sickening and remorseful qualms.
The indiscriminate destructiveness which characterises pikes, is
unfortunately and disgracefully displayed by other queer fish. It is
not necessary to enumerate the perplexing multiplicity of devices
which human ingenuity has invented and constructed for annihilating
salmon. As of the kings about whose deaths their royal brother Richard
tells sad stories, so of salmon, however various may be the manner of
their dissolutions, it is safe to affirm that they are "all murdered."
Statutes kill myriads of them; poachers, in spite of statutes, kill
myriads more of them; honest anglers, who sport in the seasons, and
with the weapons proper to sportsmen, kill a few individual fishes;
and it will be demonstrated that pikes are the powerful and natural
allies of statutes and poachers:--
"With regard to the ravages committed among the fry of the
salmon, I may mention that almost every pike captured by me
during the months of April and May contained in its stomach,
or disgorged, on being landed, the remains of one or more
smolts. These frequently were quite entire--to all
appearance, indeed, newly killed; they were sometimes also
in a partly-digested state, and on other occasions presented
to the eye little more than was sufficient to distinguish
them as having been small fish. I have taken five or six
salmon-fry, in the stages above described, out of the
stomach of a single pike. Two, three, or four, is a matter
of common occurrence. Such being the case, and if it be
true, what many ichthyologists affirm, that fish dissolve
their food with such astonishing rapidity as to rival in
some instances the action of fire; nay, allowing that the
stomach of the pike occupied a couple of hours in completing
the digestive process, the amount of havoc committed by this
ravager on Teviot during the smolt season is quite
astonishing. Confining my calculation within very moderate
bounds, I shall presume that each pike, on the average, as
his daily meal, during the months already referred to,
engrosses four salmon or bull-trout fry. This, in the course
of sixty days, gives an allowance to every individual in
Teviot of two hundred and forty smolts; and supposing there
are from Ancrumbridge downward, a stretch of water nine or
ten miles in length, not more than one thousand pike, the
entire number consumed by these, in less than one-sixth of
the year, amounts to two hundred and forty thousand, or
nearly a quarter of a million of salmon-fry,--a greater
number, there is no question, than is killed during the
same extent of time by all the angling poachers in the
district put together."
We acknowledge that we must be indiscreet to involve ourselves again
in an offensive topic. A hint, however, of our opinion, and we pass
away from the subject. The abominable slaughter of "FOUL" fish,
perpetrated by people whom we are obliged to repudiate as sportsmen,
and whom we are not obliged to recognise as gentlemen, is a shocking,
dirty, disreputable mal-practice, to be condemned with unmodified
severity of language. Apologies, explanations, palliations, are in
vain. The filthy mass which is unrighteously dragged out of the water
is not then a fish. It is against the use of nature for the hand of
man to touch it. And yet the same man who would with easy indifference
"leister" a salmon in that state, teeming with ten thousand thousand
lives, shall, on the morrow, in a jury-box, violate his oath by
acquitting the guilty in the face of the clearest evidence, because he
thinks capital punishments unlawful. Phaugh! Call Mr Stoddart into
court as an authoritative witness.
"I find a number of anglers at one with me in opinion upon
this subject; and all who have witnessed night-leistering on
Tweed during the autumnal or winter months, will acknowledge
that even the romantic character which torch-light and
scenery invest it with, fails as an apology for the ignoble,
wasteful, and injurious nature of the occupation. In nine
cases out of ten, it is pursued, either during the spawning
season itself, or when the fish are heavy with roe--when
they are red or foul, having lain a considerable time in the
river, and, moreover, when they have lost all power of
escape, or are cut off from exercising it, both by the
lowness of water, and by the circumstance of their being
hemmed in, at the head and foot of the pool or place of
action, by nets and other contrivances stretched from bank
to bank.
"It can scarcely be credited, but I relate a fact known to
many on Tweedside, that, about four or five years ago,
upwards of three hundred breeding fish, salmon and grilses,
were slaughtered in the course of a single night, from one
boat, out of a stretch of water not far from Melrose, two
leisters only being employed; and of this number--I allude
to the fish--scarcely one was actually fit to be used as
food, while by far the greater part of them were female
salmon, on the eve of depositing their ova. In the
neighbourhood of Kelso, upwards of ninety have frequently
been butchered with this implement during a single night,
from one boat,--all of them fish in the same rank and
unhealthy condition above described. In September 1846,
according to the most moderate calculation, no fewer than
four thousand spawning fish, consisting chiefly of
full-grown salmon, and comprehending the principal breeding
stock of the season--those fish which, from their forward
state, promised the earliest and most vigorous supply of
fry, were slaughtered in Tweed, with the consent, and under
the auspices, of the upper holders of fishings, in the
manner I speak of. Need it be said, that the injury done to
the salmon-fishings in general by this malpractice on the
part of two or three lesser proprietors, is incalculable,
and, when linked with the doings of poachers during
closetime, to which it unquestionably gives encouragement,
and the system pursued on Tweed of capturing and destroying
the kelts and baggits, it must operate most prejudicially
against every plan devised to further the breeding of this
highly-prized article of food."
Simply we shall say, that any body who so leisters fish from this day
forward is a BRUTAL BARBARIAN, fit for the society of a Burke or a
Hare, who did not venture to immolate their victims till gross
physical corruption--the heavy prostration of drunkenness--rendered
them in general the easy and stupid prey of a disgusting assassin. Let
the leisterer of foul fish be accursed in the sporting calendar.
Under all circumstances, to be quite candid, we remonstrate against
the leister. It is not a fair way of going to work--the fish has no
option. There is too much of the tinge of the Venetian bravo in the
blow. Less apology must there always be for striking a salmon than for
striking a man behind his back. The man who detects the stealthy
thrust may turn and smite his enemy. The fish, vigilant happily of the
descending trident, can but shift its quarters and swim away. Basking,
too, at the moment under the broad beam of the all-rejoicing sun--as
motionless, as tranquil, as bright, and as beautiful, as the silver
pebbles in the river's bed--why should idle human violence invade and
extinguish that unsuspecting repose? At this very instant, while he is
in such attitude and mood, fling, if you can, with delicate precision,
over his snout the most attractive mottled wing in your book, and
then--if the pensive Zoroaster of the stream quits his meditations to
swallow your temptation--then hook him, play him, land him, and
encreel him; but do not, without any warning, plunge a barbed steel
fork into his heart. Or, at this very instant, let the seduction of
the triple worm travel athwart his ruminations, and if the glutton
shall overcome the sage, then, even in his voracious throat, strike
home, and overcome the glutton; but do not hack the noble form with
ruffianly prongs of rusty iron--
"Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds."
Pr'ythee permit the leister, for the future, to decorate a museum
along with other implements of the Cannibal, not the British islands!
Mr Stoddart must feel neither anger nor surprise if we deliberately
avoid not merely any discussion, but even any notice whatever, of
theories or speculations, directly or collaterally referring to the
breeding or propagation of fishes. We have not been, as the pages of
Maga prove, unwatchful of what conjectural philosophy might propose,
or ingenious experimentalism might exhibit. We hold some piscine
opinions, so curious but so true, that if we could enunciate them in a
language intelligible to fish (which ought to be the Finnish dialect,)
the liveliest salmon in Norway could not execute summersets
sufficiently numerous to express his astonishment at our knowledge. We
could likewise put such puzzling objections to the most elaborate and
seemingly satisfactory systems, as to demonstrate irrefragably that,
in spite of every thing which every body has said about every variety
of the _salmo_ race, nobody knows any thing certain as to the age Of
OLD PARR. But, for one good reason, we shall be discreet and silent.
Nobody cares a straw, or a horse-hair, or a thread of gut, whether
Stoddart is overthrown, or Shaw is predominant,--nobody, whose sole
and laudable object is to enjoy a day's good fishing. The great fact
remains--the waters are full of fish. What matter is it whence the
fins came or come? The question is not how they got into, but how they
are to be taken out of the burn, the river, or the lake? It is not we
who mean to go
"Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave;"
but up out of it we hope to draw many dozens of its peopling swarms.
And we desire to learn from Mr Stoddart how best we may, by baits and
guileful spells, reach and inveigle, them--
"In their obscured haunts of inmost bowers."
The companion we want is the Angler's Companion. Now the angler is an
individual who sallies out at early dawn, rejoicing, not only in his
own strength, and, haply, the strength of a glass of whisky, but in a
fishing-basket, or pannier, or bag; in a fishing-rod, or three or four
fishing-rods; in a fishing-book, more voluminous in its single volume
than the Encyclopædia Britannica; in wading boots and water-proof
cloaklets; in a reel, and a gaff, and a landing net, and sometimes a
boat; in gut, and in horse hair; in hooks and hackles; in feathers and
silk thread; in wax and wire; in leads and floats; in tin boxes of
worms, and earthen pots of salmon roe; in minnows, and parr-tails; in
swivels and gorge-hooks; in lobs, and in bobs; in ferrules, and in
rings; in a brown paper parcel of four large sandwiches, and a pocket
flask of six large glasses of sherry; in a dingy coat, and
inexpressible unmentionables; and finally, in the best humour, and a
shocking bad hat. Is it imaginable that all this can be done, as it is
done every day, by any body who has not made up his mind, or who
thinks it necessary to know, what fish are, and where they came from?
There is no such humbug within him. He goes to the Tweed or the Tay;
the Don, or the Conan; to Loch Craggie, or Loch Maree; to Loch Awe, or
Loch Etive; to the Clyde, or the Solway; to Loch Doon, or Loch Ken;
because all over broad Scotland there is plenty of fish; and because,
where-ever he goes, Stoddart can tell him how there most readily, most
surely, and most pleasantly to encreel them. Of all the Caledonians
who, in countless crowds, daily leave their native homes in the flesh,
and return to the domestic hearthstone in the evening, with their
flesh more or less fishified, there are not twenty to whom it is not a
point of the utmost indifference, whether the fish in the Tweed, or
any other river where they have been angling, are rained down once a
month from the clouds, or are brought over as ballast in ships once
a-week from Denmark. The fish are there. We are going to catch them.
Hand us Stoddart's Angler's Companion.
As a teacher of practical angling in Scotland, we look on Mr Stoddart
to be without a rival or equal. To call him a good instructor in the
art, does not properly describe him. He is strictly and literally a
manuductor. Nature has given to him what Beddoes terms "a well
organised and very pliant hand," which for more than twenty years, as
we can honestly testify, has waved the osier over all the streams of
his native country. We exaggerate nothing in declaring angling to have
been, during that long period, Stoddart's diurnal and nocturnal study.
And the result has been what it ought to be. Nobody else, for example,
(we affirm it without fear of any contradiction or cavil,) could have
written, as it is written, the sixth chapter,--"On fishing with the
worm for trout."
"To a perfect novice in the art of angling, nothing appears
simpler than to capture trout with the worm, provided the
water be sufficiently muddled to conceal the person and
disguise the tackle of the craftsman. A mere urchin, with a
pea-stick for a wand, a string for his line, and a pin for
his hook, has often, under such favourable circumstances,
effected the landing of a good-sized fish. But to class
performances of this description among feats of skill were
quite ridiculous, and they are just, to as small an extent,
samples of successful worm-fishing. It may perhaps startle
some, and these no novices in the art, when I declare, and
offer moreover to prove, that worm-fishing for trout
requires essentially more address and experience, as well as
a better knowledge of the habits and instincts of the fish,
than fly-fishing. I do not, be it observed, refer to the
practice of this branch of the art as it is followed on hill
burns and petty rivulets, neither do I allude to it as
pursued after heavy rains in flooded and discoloured waters;
my affirmation bears solely upon its practice as carried on
during the summer months in the southern districts of
Scotland, when the rivers are clear and low, the skies
bright and warm. Then it is, and then only, that it ought to
be dignified with the name of sport; and sport it assuredly
is, fully as exciting, perhaps more so, than angling with
the fly or minnow. In the hands of a skilful practitioner,
indeed, there is no mode of capturing well-conditioned fish
with the rod more remunerative;--I say well-conditioned, for
in the spawning months, lean, lank, and unhealthy trout may
be massacred in any number by means of salmon-roe or pastes
formed from that substance.
"In the present chapter, I shall attempt to make plain the
principal points to be attended to by the worm-fisher
desirous of success. These I class under the following
heads:--
1. The rod and tackle to be employed.
2. The kind of worm, and how prepared,
3. When and where to fish.
4. How to bait and manage the line."
Excellently well is the task executed. At the conclusion of the
chapter, when he says "I have embraced, methinks, most of the points
connected with the subject it treats of, and endeavoured, to the best
of my ability, to set them forth in a plain and practical light," he
speaks with the modest but honest consciousness of one who has been
handling a subject so familiar, and yet so interesting to himself,
that if he has only allowed words to clothe his thoughts as they
flowed in their natural stream, he feels he must have written clearly,
sensibly, agreeably, and usefully. Mind you, we do not intend to
reprint Mr Stoddart's volume in these pages. Buy it and read it. But,
as we rebuked at starting those who spoke of the spring of 1847, we
shall not withhold at once comfort and advice from precipitate
anglers, who fancy they cannot commence operations too early in the
season.
"On Tweedside, worm-fishing seldom commences until the
latter end of May or beginning of June, when the main stream
and its tributaries are in ordinary seasons considerably
reduced. The trout in a certain measure require to be sated
with fly-food before having recourse to any coarser
aliment,--at any rate, some change seems to be effected in
their tastes and habits, virtually inexplicable, but yet
dependent upon the instinct implanted by nature--an instinct
which, as regards many animals, has, in all ages, baffled,
perplexed, and silenced the minutest inquiry. Before trout
take the worm freely, it is necessary also that the
temperature of the water should be at a state of
considerable elevation--at least fifty degrees of
Fahrenheit; and, moreover, that it be acted upon at the time
by a fair proportion of sun-light; indeed, a bright hot day
is not at all objectionable, the air being calm, or but
slightly agitated. Such a condition both of water and
weather often occurs during the month of June, and its
occurrence is, indeed, frequently protracted throughout
July. These, in fact--June and July, added to the latter
half of May--constitute, as regards the southern districts
of Scotland, our best worm-fishing months. Be it noted,
however, by way of repetition, that I am not at present
alluding to the simple and coarse practice of the art
pursued among starved and unwary fish in mountain rivulets,
nor do I refer to worm-fishing in flooded and discoloured
streams; but I treat of it solely as respects clear waters,
inhabited by cunning, cautious trout, and, in consequence,
as a method of angling which requires of the craftsman great
skill and no stinted amount of prudence. With regard to hill
burn-fishing, undoubtedly it is more in season during August
and September, when rains are frequent, than in June and
July; and in discoloured waters, trout may be captured with
worm throughout the whole year, no one month excepted."
Precocity does not flourish in Scotland. Never do any thing in a
hurry. In good time for all good purposes of angling,--not too soon,
but not a minute too late, have come our commendations of this
admirable treatise and manual. What does it lack? any thing? no, not
even a "SIMPLE RECIPE FOR COOKING A WHITLING OR GOOD TROUT BY THE
RIVER-SIDE." What a smack there is here of inimitable and beloved
Isaac! But, before we part, Mr Stoddart shall pronounce his benison.
"Angler! that all day long hast wandered by sunny stream,
and heart and hand plied the meditative art--who hast filled
thy pannier brimful of star-sided trout, and with aching
arms, and weary back, and faint wavering step, crossed the
threshold of some cottage inn--a smiling, rural retreat that
starts up when thy wishes are waning into despondency,--how
grateful to thee is the merry song of the frying-pan, strewn
over with the daintiest of thy spoils, and superintended by
a laughter-loving hostess and her blooming image! and thou,
too, slayer of salmon! more matured and fastidious, what
sound when thy reel is at rest, like the bubbling and
frothing of the fish-kettle! what fare more acceptable than
the shoulder-cut, snowed over with curd, of a gallant
sixteen-pounder; and where, in the wide world, is to be
found wholesomer and heartier sauce, to the one as well as
to the other, than a goblet generously mixed of Islay, and
piping hot? Stretch thy hand over thy mercies, and be
thankful."
Indispensable in all time to come, as the very strength and grace of
an angler's Tackle and Equipment in Scotland, must and will be
"STODDART'S ANGLER'S COMPANION."
THE CAXTONS.--PART III.
BOOK II.--CHAPTER I.
It was a beautiful summer afternoon when the coach set me down at my
father's gate. Mrs Primmins herself ran out to welcome me; and I had
scarcely escaped from the warm clasp of her friendly hand, before I
was in the arms of my mother.
As soon as that tenderest of parents was convinced that I was not
famished, seeing that I had dined two hours ago at Dr Herman's, she
led me gently across the garden towards the arbour. "You will find
your father so cheerful," said she, wiping away a tear. "His brother
is with him."
I stopped. _His_ brother! Will the reader believe it?--I had never
heard that he had a brother, so little were family affairs ever
discussed in my hearing.
"_His_ brother!" said I. "Have I then an Uncle Caxton as well as an
Uncle Jack?"
"Yes, my love," said my mother. And then she added, "Your father and
he were not such good friends as they ought to have been, and the
Captain has been abroad. However, thank heaven! they are now quite
reconciled."
We had time for no more--we were in the arbour. There, a table was
spread with wine and fruit--the gentlemen were at their dessert; and
those gentlemen were my father, Uncle Jack, Mr Squills, and, tall,
lean, buttoned-to-the-chin--an erect, martial, majestic, and imposing
personage, who seemed worthy of a place in my great ancestor's "Boke
of Chivalrie."
All rose as I entered; but my poor father, who was always slow in his
movements, had the last of me. Uncle Jack had left the very powerful
impression of his great seal-ring on my fingers; Mr Squills had patted
me on the shoulder, and pronounced me "wonderfully grown;" my
new-found relative had with great dignity said, "Nephew, your hand,
sir--I am Captain de Caxton;" and even the tame duck had taken her
beak from her wing, and rubbed it gently between my legs, which was
her usual mode of salutation, before my father placed his pale hand on
my forehead, and, looking at me for a moment with unutterable
sweetness, said, "More and more like your mother--God bless you!"
A chair had been kept vacant for me between my father and his brother.
I sat down in haste, and with a tingling colour on my cheeks and a
rising at my throat, so much had the unusual kindness of my father's
greeting affected me; and then there came over me a sense of my new
position. I was no longer a schoolboy at home for his brief holiday: I
had returned to the shelter of the roof-tree, to become myself one of
its supports. I was at last a man, privileged to aid or solace those
dear ones who had ministered, as yet without return, to me. That is a
very strange crisis in our life when we come home "_for good_." Home
seems a different thing: before, one has been but a sort of guest
after all, only welcomed and indulged, and little festivities held in
honour of the released and happy child. But to come home _for
good_--to have done with school and boyhood--is to be a guest, a child
no more. It is to share the every-day life of cares and duties--it is
to enter into the _confidences_ of home. Is it not so? I could have
buried my face in my hands, and wept!
My father, with all his abstraction and all his simplicity, had a
knack now and then of penetrating at once to the heart. I verily
believe he read all that was passing in me as easily as if it had been
Greek. He stole his arm gently round my waist, and whispered, "Hush!"
Then lifting his voice, he cried aloud, "Brother Roland, you must not
let Jack have the best of the argument."
"Brother Augustine," replied the Captain, very formally "Mr Jack, if I
may take the liberty so to call him"--
"You may indeed," cried Uncle Jack.
"Sir," said the Captain, bowing, "it is a familiarity that does me
honour. I was about to say that Mr Jack has retired from the field."
"Far from it," said Squills, dropping an effervescing powder into a
chemical mixture which he had been preparing with great attention,
composed of sherry and lemon-juice--"far from it. Mr Tibbetts--whose
organ of combativeness is finely developed, by the bye--was saying,--"
"That it is a rank sin and shame, in the nineteenth century"--quoth
Uncle Jack--"that a man like my friend Captain Caxton"--
"_De_ Caxton, sir--Mr Jack."
"De Caxton--of the highest military talents, of the most illustrious
descent--a hero sprung from heroes--should have served twenty-three
years in his Majesty's service, and should be only a captain on
half-pay. This, I say, comes of the infamous system of purchase, which
sets up the highest honours for sale as they did in the Roman
Empire"--
My father pricked up his ears; but Uncle Jack pushed on before my
father could get ready the forces of his meditated interruption;--
"A system which a little effort, a little union, can so easily
terminate. Yes, sir"--and Uncle Jack thumped the table, and two
cherries bobbed up and smote Captain de Caxton on the nose--"yes, sir,
I will undertake to say that I could put the army upon a very
different footing. If the poorer and more meritorious gentlemen, like
Captain de Caxton, would, as I was just observing, but unite in a
grand anti-aristocratic association, each paying a small sum
quarterly, we could realise a capital sufficient to outpurchase all
these undeserving individuals, and every man of merit should have his
fair chance of promotion."
"Egad, sir!" said Squills, "there is something grand in that--eh,
Captain?"
"No, sir," replied the Captain, quite seriously; "there is in
monarchies but one fountain of honour. It would be an interference
with a soldier's first duty--his respect for his sovereign."
"On the contrary," said Mr Squills, "it would still be to the
sovereigns that one would owe the promotion."
"Honour," pursued the Captain, colouring up, and unheeding this witty
interruption, "is the reward of a soldier. What do I care that a young
jackanapes buys his colonelcy over my head? Sir, he does not buy from
me my wounds and my services. Sir, he does not buy from me the medal I
won at Waterloo. He is a rich man, and I am a poor man; he is
called--colonel, because he paid money for the _name_. That pleases
him; well and good. It would not please me: I had rather remain a
captain, and feel my dignity, not in my title, but in the services of
my three-and-twenty years. A beggarly, rascally association of
stockbrokers, for aught I know, buy _me_ a company! I don't want to be
uncivil, or I would say, Damn 'em, Mr--sir--Jack!"
A sort of thrill ran through the Captain's audience--even Uncle Jack
looked touched, as I thought, for he stared very hard at the grim
veteran, and said nothing. The pause was awkward--Mr Squills broke it.
"I should like," quoth he, "to see your Waterloo medal--you have not
it about you?"
"Mr Squills," answered the Captain, "it lies next to my heart while I
live. It shall be buried in my coffin, and I shall rise with it, at
the word of command, on the day of the Grand Review!" So saying, the
Captain leisurely unbuttoned his coat, and, detaching from a piece of
striped ribbon as ugly a specimen of the art of the silversmith
(begging its pardon) as ever rewarded merit at the expense of taste,
placed the medal on the table.
The medal passed round, without a word, from hand to hand.
"It is strange," at last said my father, "how such trifles can be made
of such value--how in one age a man sells his life for what in the
next age he would not give a button! A Greek esteemed beyond price a
few leaves of olive twisted into a circular shape, and set upon his
head--a very ridiculous headgear we should now call it. An American
Indian prefers a decoration of human scalps, which, I apprehend, we
should all agree (save and except Mr Squills, who is accustomed to
such things) to be a very disgusting addition to one's personal
attractions; and my brother values this piece of silver, which may be
worth about five shillings, more than Jack does a gold mine, or I do
the library of the London Museum. A time will come when people will
think that as idle a decoration as leaves and scalps."
"Brother," said the Captain, "there is nothing strange in the matter.
It is as plain as a pike-staff to a man who understands the principles
of honour."
"Possibly," said my father mildly. "I should like to hear what you
have to say upon honour. I am sure it would very much edify us all."
CHAPTER II.
MY UNCLE ROLAND'S DISCOURSE UPON HONOUR.
"Gentlemen," began the Captain, at the distinct appeal thus made to
him--"Gentlemen, God made the earth, but man made the garden. God made
man, but man re-creates himself."
"True, by knowledge," said my father.
"By industry," said Uncle Jack.
"By the physical condition of his body," said Mr Squills. "He could
not have made himself other than he was at first in the woods and
wilds if he had fins like a fish, or could only chatter gibberish like
a monkey. Hands and a tongue, sir; these are the instruments of
progress."
"Mr Squills," said my father, nodding, "Anaxagoras said very much the
same thing before you, touching the hands."
"I can't help that," answered Mr Squills; "one could not open one's
lips if one were bound to say what nobody else had said. But, after
all, our superiority is less in our _hands_ than the greatness of our
_thumbs_."
"Albinus, _De Sceleto_, and our own learned William Lawrence, have
made a similar remark," again put in my father.
"Hang it, sir!" exclaimed Squills, "what business have you to know
every thing?"
"Every thing! No; but thumbs furnish subjects of investigation to the
simplest understanding," said my father, modestly.
"Gentlemen," recommenced my Uncle Roland, "thumbs and hands are given
to an Esquimaux, as well as to scholars and surgeons--and what the
deuce are they the wiser for them? Sirs, you cannot reduce us thus
into mechanism. Look within. Man, I say, re-creates himself. How? BY
THE PRINCIPLE OF HONOUR. His first desire is to excel some one
else--his first impulse is distinction above his fellows. Heaven
places in his soul, as if it were a compass, a needle that always
points to one end,--viz., to honour in that which those around him
consider honourable. Therefore, as man at first is exposed to all
dangers from wild beasts, and from men as savage as himself, COURAGE
becomes the first quality mankind must honour: therefore the savage is
courageous; therefore he covets the praise for courage; therefore he
decorates himself with the skins of the beasts he has subdued, or the
scalps of the foes he has slain. Sirs, don't tell me that the skins
and the scalps are only hide and leather; they are trophies of honour.
Don't tell me they are ridiculous and disgusting; they become glorious
as proofs that the savage has emerged out of the first brute-like
egotism, and attached price to the praise which men never give except
for works that secure or advance their welfare. By-and-by, sirs, our
savages discover that they cannot live in safety amongst themselves
unless they agree to speak the truth to each other; therefore TRUTH
becomes valued, and grows into a principle of honour; so, brother
Augustine will tell us that, in the primitive times, truth was always
the attribute of a hero."
"Right," said my father: "Homer emphatically gives it to Achilles."
"Out of truth comes the necessity for some kind of rude justice and
law. Therefore men, after courage in the warrior, and truth in all,
begin to attach honour to the elder, whom they intrust with preserving
justice amongst them. So, sirs, LAW is born--"
"But the first lawgivers were priests," quoth my father.
"Sirs, I am coming to that. Whence arises the desire of honour, but
from man's necessity of excelling--in other words, of improving his
faculties for the _benefit_ of others,--though, unconscious of that
consequence, man only strives for their _praise_? But that desire for
honour is unextinguishable, and man is naturally anxious to carry its
rewards beyond the grave. Therefore, he who has slain most lions or
enemies, is naturally prone to believe that he shall have the best
hunting fields in the country beyond, and take the best place at the
banquet. Nature, in all its operations, impresses him with the idea
of an invisible Power; and the principle of honour,--that is, the
desire of praise and reward,--makes him anxious for the approval which
that Power can bestow. Thence comes the first rude idea of RELIGION;
and in the death-hymn at the stake, the savage chants songs prophetic
of the distinctions he is about to receive. Society goes on; hamlets
are built; property is established. He who has more than another has
more power than another. Power is honoured. Man covets the honour
attached to the power which is attached to possession. Thus the soil
is cultivated; thus the rafts are constructed; thus tribe trades with
tribe; thus COMMERCE is founded and CIVILISATION commenced. Sirs, all
that seems least connected with honour, as we approach the vulgar days
of the present, has its origin in honour, and is but an abuse of its
principles. If men now-a-days are hucksters and traders--if even
military honours are purchased, and a rogue buys his way to a
peerage--still all arise from the desire for honour, which society, as
it grows old, gives to the outward signs of titles and gold, instead
of, as once, to its inward essentials,--courage, truth, justice,
enterprise. Therefore, I say, sirs, that honour is the foundation of
all improvement in mankind."
"You have argued like a schoolman, brother," said Mr Caxton
admiringly; "but still, as to this round piece of silver,--don't we go
back to the most barbarous ages in estimating so highly such things as
have no real value in themselves--as could not give us one opportunity
for instructing our minds."
"Could not pay for a pair of boots," added Uncle Jack.
"Or," said Mr Squills, "save you one twinge of the cursed rheumatism
you have got for life from that night's bivouac in the Portuguese
marshes--to say nothing of the bullet in your cranium, and that cork
leg, which must much diminish the salutary effects of your
constitutional walk."
"Gentlemen," resumed the Captain, nothing abashed, "in going back to
these barbarous ages, I go back to the true principles of honour. It
is precisely because this round piece of silver has no value in the
market that it is priceless, for thus it is only a proof of desert.
Where would be the sense of service if it could buy back my leg, or if
I could bargain it away for forty thousand a-year? No, sirs, its value
is this--that when I wear it on my breast men shall say, 'that formal
old fellow is not so useless as he seems. He was one of those who
saved England and freed Europe.' And even when I conceal it here,"
(and devoutly kissing the medal, Uncle Roland restored it to its
ribbon and its resting-place,) "and no eye sees it, its value is yet
greater in the thought that my country has not degraded the old and
true principles of honour by paying the soldier who fought for her in
the same coin as that in which you, Mr Jack, sir, pay your bootmaker's
bill. No, no, gentlemen. As courage was the first virtue that honour
called forth--the first virtue from which all safety and civilisation
proceed, so we do right to keep that one virtue at least clear and
unsullied from all the money-making, mercenary, pay-me-in-cash
abominations which are the vices, not the virtues, of the civilisation
it has produced."
My Uncle Roland here came to a full stop; and, filling his glass, rose
and said solemnly--"A last bumper, gentlemen.--'To the dead who died
for England!'"
CHAPTER III.
"Indeed, my dear, you must take it. You certainly _have_ caught cold:
you sneezed three times together."
"Yes, ma'am, because I would take a pinch of Uncle Roland's snuff,
just to say that I _had_ taken a pinch out of his box--the honour of
the thing, you know."
"Ah, my dear! what was that very clever remark you made at the same
time which so pleased your father--something about Jews and the
college?"
"Jews and--oh! '_pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat_,' my dear
mother--which means, that it is a pleasure to take a pinch out of a
brave man's snuff-box. I say, mother, put down the posset. Yes, I'll
take it; I will, indeed. Now, then, sit here--that's right--and tell
me all you know about this famous old Captain. Imprimis, he is older
than my father?"
"To be sure!" exclaimed my mother indignantly; "he looks twenty years
older; but there is only five years' real difference. Your father must
always look young."
"And why does Uncle Roland put that absurd French _de_ before his
name--and why were my father and he not good friends--and is he
married--and has he any children?"
Scene of this conference--my own little room, new papered on purpose
for my return _for good_--trellis-work paper, flowers and birds--all
so fresh, and so new, and so clean, and so gay--with my books ranged
in neat shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the
window, shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open; you
scent the flowers and new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his
dear mother are all alone.
"My dear, my dear! you ask so many questions at once."
"Don't answer them then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins
does with her fairy tales--'Once on a time.'"
"Once on a time, then," said my mother--kissing me between the
eyes--"once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in
Cumberland, who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys
were to make their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage,
on the brow of a hill, rose an old ruin, with one tower left, and
this, with half the county round it, had once belonged to the
clergyman's family; but all had been sold--all gone piece by piece,
you see, my dear, except the presentation to the living, (what they
call the advowson was sold too,) which had been secured to the last of
the family. The elder of these sons was your Uncle Roland, the younger
was your father. Now I believe the first quarrel arose from the
absurdest thing possible, as your father says; but Roland was
exceedingly touchy on all things connected with his ancestors. He was
always poring over the old pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins,
or reading books of knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began I
know not, but it seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in
Cumberland to one Sir Adam de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the
pedigree went regularly from father to son till Henry V.; then,
apparently from the disorders, produced, as your father says, by the
wars of the Roses, there was a sad blank left--only one or two names,
without dates or marriages, till the time of Henry VII., except that
in the reign of Edward IV. there was one insertion of a William Caxton
(named in a deed.) Now in the village church there was a beautiful
brass monument to one Sir William de Caxton, who had been killed at
the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that wicked King Richard III. And
about the same time there lived, as you know, the great printer,
William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to be in town on a visit
to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all the old papers he
could find at the Heralds' College; and sure enough he was overjoyed
to satisfy himself that he was descended, not from that poor Sir
William, who had been killed in so bad a cause, but from the great
printer, who was from a younger branch of the same family, and to
whose descendants the estate came, in the reign of Henry VIII. It was
upon this that your Uncle Roland quarrelled with him; and, indeed, I
tremble to think that they may touch on that matter again."
"Then, my dear mother, I must say my uncle is wrong there, so far as
common-sense is concerned; but still, somehow or other, I can
understand it--surely this was not the only cause of estrangement!"
My mother looked down, and moved one hand gently over the other, which
was her way when embarrassed. "What was it, my own mother?" said I,
coaxingly.
"I believe--that is, I--I think that they were both attached to the
same young lady."
"How! you don't mean to say that my father was ever in love with any
one but you?"
"Yes, Sisty--yes, and deeply! and," added my mother after a slight
pause, and with a very low sigh, "he never was in love with me; and
what is more, he had the frankness to tell me so!"
"And yet you--"
"Married him--yes!" said my mother, raising the softest and purest
eyes that ever lover could have wished to read his fate in;--
"Yes, for the old love was hopeless. I knew that I could make him
happy. I knew that he would love me at last, and he does so! My son,
your father loves me!"
As she spoke, there came a blush as innocent as virgin ever knew, to
my mother's smooth cheek; and she looked so fair, so good, and still
so young, all the while, that you would have said that either Dusius,
the Teuton fiend, or Nock, the Scandinavian sea-imp, from whom the
learned assure us we derive our modern Daimones, "The Deuce" and Old
Nick, had indeed possessed my father, if he had not learned to love
such a creature.
I pressed her hand to my lips, but my heart was too full to speak for
a moment or so; and then I partially changed the subject.
"Well, and this rivalry estranged them more? And who was the lady?"
"Your father never told me, and I never asked," said my mother simply.
"But she was very different from me, I know. Very accomplished, very
beautiful, very high-born."
"For all that, my father was a lucky man to escape her. Pass on. What
did the Captain do?"
"Why, about that time your grandfather died, and shortly after an
aunt, on the mother's side, who was rich and saving, and unexpectedly
left them each sixteen thousand pounds. Your uncle, with his share,
bought back, at an enormous price, the old castle and some land round
it, which they say does not bring him in three hundred a-year. With
the little that remained, he purchased a commission in the army; and
the brothers met no more, till last week, when Roland suddenly
arrived."
"He did not marry this accomplished young lady?"
"No! but he married another, and is a widower."
"Why, he was as inconstant as my father; and I am sure without so good
an excuse. How was that?"
"I don't know. He says nothing about it."
"Has he any children?"
"Two; a son--by the bye, you must never speak about _him_. Your uncle
briefly said, when I asked him what was his family, 'a girl, ma'am. I
had a son, but,--'
'He is dead,' cried your father, in his kind pitying voice.
'Dead to me, brother,--and you will never mention his name!' You
should have seen how stern your uncle looked. I was terrified."
"But the girl,--why did not he bring her here?"
"She is still in France, but he talks of going over for her; and we
have half promised to visit them both in Cumberland.--But, bless me!
is that twelve? and the posset quite cold!"
"One word more, dearest mother--one word. My father's book--is he
still going on with it?"
"Oh yes, indeed!" cried my mother, clasping her hands; "and he must
read it to you, as he does to me--_you_ will understand it so well. I
have always been so anxious that the world should know him, and be
proud of him as we are,--so--so anxious!--for perhaps, Sisty, if he
had married that great lady, he would have roused himself, been more
ambitious--and I could only make him happy, I could not make him
great!"
"So he has listened to you at last?"
"To me!" said my mother, shaking her head and smiling gently: "No,
rather to your Uncle Jack,--who, I am happy to say, has at length got
a proper hold over him."
"A proper hold, my dear mother! Pray beware of Uncle Jack, or we shall
be all swept into a coal-mine, or explode with a grand national
company for making gunpowder out of tea-leaves!"
"Wicked child!" said my mother laughing; and then, as she took up her
candle and lingered a moment while I wound my watch, she said
musingly,--"Yet Jack is very, very clever,--and if for your sake we
_could_ make a fortune, Sisty!"
"You frighten me out of my wits, mother! You are not in earnest?"
"And if _my_ brother could be the means of raising _him_ in the
world"--
"Your brother would be enough to sink all the ships in the Channel,
ma'am," said I, quite irreverently. I was shocked, before the words
were well out of my mouth; and throwing my arms round my mother's
neck, I kissed away the pain I had inflicted.
When I was left alone and in my own little crib, in which my slumber
had ever been so soft and easy,--I might as well have been lying upon
cut straw. I tossed to and fro--I could not sleep. I rose, threw on my
dressing-gown, lighted my candle, and sat down by the table near the
window. First, I thought of the unfinished outline of my father's
youth, so suddenly sketched before me. I filled up the missing
colours, and fancied the picture explained all that had often
perplexed my conjectures. I comprehended, I suppose by some secret
sympathy in my own nature, (for experience in mankind could have
taught me little enough,) how an ardent, serious, inquiring
mind--struggling into passion under the load of knowledge, had, with
that stimulus sadly and abruptly withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of
passive, aimless study. I comprehended how, in the indolence of a
happy but unimpassioned marriage, with a companion so gentle, so
provident and watchful, yet so little formed to rouse, and task, and
fire an intellect naturally calm and meditative,--years upon years had
crept away in the learned idleness of a solitary scholar. I
comprehended, too, how gradually and slowly, as my father entered that
stage of middle life, when all men are most prone to ambition--the
long silenced whispers were heard again; and the mind at last escaping
from the listless weight which a baffled and disappointed heart had
laid upon it, saw once more, fair as in youth, the only true mistress
of Genius--Fame!
Oh! how I sympathised, too, in my mother's gentle triumph. How now,
looking over the past, I could see, year after year, how she had
stolen more and more into my father's heart of hearts,--how what had
been kindness had grown into love,--how custom and habit, and the
countless links in the sweet charities of home, had supplied that
sympathy with the genial man, which had been missed at first by the
lonely scholar.
Next I thought of the gray, eagle-eyed old soldier, with his ruined
tower and barren acres,--and saw before me his proud, prejudiced,
chivalrous boyhood, gliding through the ruins or poring over his
mouldy pedigree. And this son, so disowned,--for what dark
offence?--an awe crept over me. And this girl,--his ewe-lamb--his
all,--was she fair? had she blue eyes like my mother, or a high Roman
nose and beetle-brows like Captain Roland? I mused, and mused, and
mused,--and the candle went out--and the moonlight grew broader and
stiller; till at last I was sailing in a balloon with Uncle Jack, and
had just tumbled into the Red Sea--when the well-known voice of nurse
Primmins restored me to life, with a "God bless my heart! the boy has
not been in bed all this 'varsal night!"
CHAPTER IV.
As soon as I was dressed, I hastened down stairs, for I longed to
revisit my old haunts--the little plot of garden I had sown with
anemones and cresses; the walk by the peach wall; the pond wherein I
had angled for roach and perch.
Entering the hall, I discovered my Uncle Roland in a great state of
embarrassment. The maid-servant was scrubbing the stones at the hall
door; she was naturally plump, and it is astonishing how much more
plump a female becomes when she is on all fours!--the maid servant
then was scrubbing the stones, her face turned from the Captain, and
the Captain evidently meditating a sortie, stood ruefully gazing at
the obstacle before him, and hemming loud. Alas, the maid servant was
deaf! I stopped, curious to see how Uncle Roland would extricate
himself from the dilemma.
Finding that his hems were in vain, my uncle made himself as small as
he could, and glided close to the left of the wall: at that instant,
the maid turned abruptly round towards the right, and completely
obstructed, by this manœuvre, the slight crevice through which hope
had dawned on her captive. My uncle stood stock-still,--and to say the
truth, he could not have stirred an inch without coming into personal
contact with the rounded charms which blockaded his movements. My
uncle took off his hat and scratched his forehead in great perplexity.
Presently, by a slight turn of the flanks, the opposing party, while
leaving him the opportunity of return, entirely precluded all chance
of egress in that quarter. My uncle retreated in haste, and now
presented himself to the right wing of the enemy. He had scarcely done
so, when, without looking behind her, the blockading party shoved
aside the pail that crippled the range of her operations, and so
placed it that it formed a formidable barricade, which my uncle's cork
leg had no chance of surmounting. Therewith Captain Roland lifted his
eyes appealingly to heaven, and I heard him distinctly ejaculate--
"Would to God she was a creature in breeches!"
But happily at this moment the maid-servant turned her head sharply
round, and seeing the Captain, rose in an instant, moved away the
pail, and dropped a frightened curtsey.
My Uncle Roland touched his hat. "I beg you a thousand pardons, my
good girl," said he; and, with a half bow, he slid into the open air.
"You have a soldier's politeness, uncle," said I, tucking my arm into
Captain Roland's.
"Tush, my boy," said he, smiling seriously, and colouring up to the
temples; "tush, say a gentleman's! To us, sir, every woman is a lady,
in right of her sex."
Now, I had often occasion later to recall that aphorism of my uncle's;
and it served to explain to me, how a man, so prejudiced on the score
of family pride, never seemed to consider it an offence in my father
to have married a woman whose pedigree was as brief as my dear
mother's. Had she been a Montmorenci, my uncle could not have been
more respectful and gallant than he was to that meek descendant of the
Tibbettses. He held, indeed, a doctrine which I never knew any other
man, vain of family, approve or support,--a doctrine deduced from the
following syllogisms: 1st, That birth was not valuable in itself, but
as a transmission of certain qualities which descent from a race of
warriors should perpetuate, viz., truth, courage, honour; 2dly, That,
whereas from the woman's side we derive our more intellectual
faculties, from a man we derive our moral; a clever and witty man
generally has a clever and witty mother; a brave and honourable man, a
brave and honourable father. Therefore, all the qualities which
attention to race should perpetuate are the manly qualities traceable
only from the _father's_ side. Again, he held, that while the
aristocracy have higher and more chivalrous notions, the people
generally have shrewder and livelier ideas. Therefore, to prevent
gentlemen from degenerating into complete dunderheads, an admixture
with the people, provided always it was on the female side, was not
only excusable but expedient; and, finally, my uncle held, that,
whereas a man is a rude, coarse, sensual animal, and requires all
manner of associations to dignify and refine him, woman is so
naturally susceptible of every thing beautiful in sentiment, and
generous in purpose, that she has only to be a true woman to be a fit
peer for a king. Odd and preposterous notions, no doubt, and capable
of much controversy, so far as the doctrine of race (if that be any
way tenable) is concerned; but, then, the plain fact is, that my Uncle
Roland was as eccentric and contradictory a gentleman--as--as--why, as
you and I are, if we once venture to think for ourselves.
"Well, sir, and what profession are you meant for?" asked my uncle.
"Not the army, I fear?"
"I have never thought of the subject, uncle."
"Thank heaven," said Captain Roland, "we have never yet had a lawyer
in the family! nor a stockbroker; nor a tradesm--ahem!"
I saw that my great ancestor the printer suddenly rose up in that hem!
"Why, uncle, there are honourable men in all callings."
"Certainly, sir. But in all callings honour is not the first principle
of action."
"But it may be, sir, if a man of honour pursue it! There are some
soldiers who have been great rascals!"
My uncle looked posed, and his black brows met thoughtfully.
"You are right, boy, I dare say," he answered somewhat mildly. "But do
you think that it ought to give me as much pleasure to look on my old
ruined tower, if I knew it had been bought by some herring-dealer,
like the first ancestor of the Poles, as I do now, when I know it was
given to a knight and gentleman, (who traced his descent from an
Anglo-Dane in the time of King Alfred,) for services done in Aquitaine
and Gascony, by Henry the Plantagenet? And do you mean to tell me,
that I should have been the same man, if I had not from a boy
associated that old tower with all ideas of what its owners were, and
should be, as knights and gentlemen? Sir, you would have made a
different being of me, if at the head of my pedigree you had clapped a
herring-dealer; though, I dare say, the herring-dealer might have been
as good a man as ever the Anglo-Dane was! God rest him!"
"And for the same reason, I suppose, sir, that you think my father
never would have been quite the same being he is, if he had not made
that notable discovery touching our descent from the great William
Caxton, the printer!"
My uncle bounded as if he had been shot; bounded so uncautiously,
considering the materials of which one leg was composed, that he would
have fallen into a strawberry-bed if I had not caught him by the arm.
"Why, you--you--you young jackanapes," cried the Captain, shaking me
off as soon as he had regained his equilibrium. "You do not mean to
inherit that infamous crotchet my brother has got into his head? You
do not mean to exchange Sir William de Caxton, who fought and fell at
Bosworth, for the mechanic who sold blackletter pamphlets in the
sanctuary at Westminster?"
"That depends on the evidence, uncle!"
"No, sir, like all noble truths, it depends upon _faith_. Men,
now-a-days," continued my uncle, with a look of ineffable disgust,
"actually require that truths should be proved."
"It is a sad conceit on their part, no doubt, my dear uncle. But till
a truth is proved, how can we know that it is a truth?"
I thought that in that very sagacious question I had effectually
caught my uncle. Not I. He slipped through it like an eel.
"Sir," said he, "whatever, in Truth, makes a man's heart warmer, and
his soul purer, is a belief, not a knowledge. Proof, sir, is a
handcuff--belief is a wing! Want proof as to an ancestor in the reign
of King Richard! Sir, you cannot even prove to the satisfaction of a
logician that you are the son of your own father. Sir, a religious man
does not want to reason about his religion--religion is not
mathematics. Religion is to be felt, not proved. There are a great
many things in the religion of a good man which are not in the
catechism. Proof!" continued my uncle, growing violent--"Proof, sir,
is a low, vulgar, levelling, rascally Jacobin--Belief is a loyal,
generous, chivalrous gentleman! No, no--prove what you please, you
shall never rob me of one belief, that has made me--"
"The finest hearted creature that ever talked nonsense," said my
father, who came up like Horace's deity just at the right moment.
"What is it you must believe in, brother, no matter what the proof
against you?"
My uncle was silent; and with great energy dug the point of his cane
into the gravel.
"He will not believe in our great ancestor the printer," said I,
maliciously.
My father's calm brow was overcast in a moment.
"Brother," said the Captain loftily, "you have a right to your own
ideas, but you should take care how they contaminate your child."
"Contaminate!" said my father; and for the first time I saw an angry
sparkle flash from his eyes, but he checked himself on the instant;
"change the word, my dear brother."
"No, sir, I will not change it! to bely the records of the family!"
"Records! A brass plate in a village church against all the books of
the College of Arms!"
"To renounce, as your ancestor, a knight who died in the field!"
"For the worst cause that man ever fought for!"
"On behalf of his king!"
"Who had murdered his nephews!"
"A knight! with our crest on his helmet!"
"And no brains underneath it, or he would never have had them knocked
out for so bloody a villain!"
"A rascally, drudging, money-making printer!"
"The wise and glorious introducer of the art that has enlightened a
world. Prefer, for an ancestor, to one whom scholar and sage never
name but in homage, a worthless, obscure, jolter-headed booby in mail,
whose only record to men is a brass plate in a church in a village!"
My uncle turned round perfectly livid. "Enough, sir! enough! I am
insulted sufficiently. I ought to have expected it. I wish you and
your son a very good day."
My father stood aghast. The Captain was hobbling off to the iron gate;
in another moment he would have been out of our precincts. I ran up
and hung upon him. "Uncle, it is all my fault. Between you and me, I
am quite of your side; pray, forgive us both. What could I have been
thinking of, to vex you so! And my father, whom your visit has made so
happy!"
My uncle paused, feeling for the latch of the gate. My father had now
come up, and caught his hand. "What are all the printers that ever
lived, and all the books they ever printed, to one wrong to thy fine
heart, brother Roland? Shame on me! A bookman's weak point, you know!
It is very true, I should never have taught the boy one thing to give
you pain, brother Roland;--though I don't remember," continued my
father, with a perplexed look, "that I ever did teach it him either!
Pisistratus, as you value my blessing, respect, as your ancestor, Sir
William de Caxton, the hero of Bosworth. Come, come, brother!"
"I am an old fool," said Uncle Roland, "whichever way we look at it.
Ah, you young dog! you are laughing at us both!"
"I have ordered breakfast on the lawn," said my mother, coming out
from the porch, with her cheerful smile on her lips; "and I think the
devil will be done to your liking to-day, brother Roland."
"We have had enough of the devil already, my love," said my father,
wiping his forehead.
So, while the birds sang overhead, or hopped familiarly across the
sward for the crumbs thrown forth to them, while the sun was still
cool in the east, and the leaves yet rustled with the sweet air of
morning, we all sate down to our table, with hearts as reconciled to
each other, and as peaceably disposed to thank God for the fair world
around us, as if the river had never run red through the field of
Bosworth, and that excellent Mr Caxton had never set all mankind by
the ears with an irritating invention, a thousand times more
provocative of our combative tendencies than the blast of the trumpet
and the gleam of the banner!
CHAPTER V.
"Brother," said Mr Caxton, "I will walk with you to the Roman
encampment."
The Captain felt that this proposal was meant as the greatest
peace-offering my father could think of; for, 1st, it was a very long
walk, and my father detested long walks; 2dly, it was the sacrifice of
a whole day's labour at the great work. And yet, with that quick
sensibility, which only the generous possess, Uncle Roland accepted at
once the proposal. If he had not done so, my father would have had a
heavier heart for a month to come. And how could the great work have
got on while the author was every now and then disturbed by a twinge
of remorse?
Half-an-hour after breakfast, the brothers set off arm in arm; and I
followed, a little apart, admiring how steadily the old soldier got
over the ground, in spite of the cork leg. It was pleasant enough to
listen to their conversation, and notice the contrasts between these
two eccentric stamps from Dame Nature's ever-variable mould,--Nature
who casts nothing in stereotype, for I do believe that not even two
fleas can be found identically the same.
My father was not a quick or minute observer of rural beauties. He had
so little of the organ of locality, that I suspect he could have lost
his way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to
external impressions--not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At
every fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed
the lark soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the
hill-top, his nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its
delight. My father, with all his learning, and though his study had
been in the stores of all language, was very rarely eloquent. The
Captain had a glow and a passion in his words which, what with his
deep, tremulous voice, and animated gestures, gave something poetic to
half of what he uttered. In every sentence of Roland's, in every tone
of his voice, and every play of his face, there was some outbreak of
pride; but, unless you set him on his hobby of that great ancestor the
printer, my father had not as much pride as a homœopathist could
have put into a globule. He was not proud even of not being proud.
Chafe all his feathers, and still you could rouse but the dove. My
father was slow and mild, my uncle quick and fiery; my father
reasoned, my uncle imagined; my father was very seldom wrong, my uncle
never quite in the right; but, as my father once said of him, "Roland
beats about the bush till he sends out the very bird that we went to
search for. He is never in the wrong without suggesting to us what is
the right." All in my uncle was stern, rough, and angular; all in my
father was, sweet, polished, and rounded into a natural grace. My
uncle's character cast out a multiplicity of shadows like a Gothic
pile in a northern sky. My father stood serene in the light like a
Greek temple at mid-day in a southern clime. Their persons
corresponded with their natures. My uncle's high aquiline features,
bronzed hue, rapid fire of eye, and upper lip that always quivered,
were a notable contrast to my father's delicate profile, quiet,
abstracted gaze, and the steady sweetness that rested on his musing
smile. Roland's forehead was singularly high, and rose to a peak in
the summit where phrenologists place the organ of veneration, but it
was narrow, and deeply furrowed. Augustine's might be as high, but
then soft, silky hair waved carelessly over it--concealing its height,
but not its vast breadth--on which not a wrinkle was visible. And yet,
withal, there was a great family likeness between the two brothers.
When some softer sentiment subdued him, Roland caught the very look of
Augustine; when some high emotion animated my father, you might have
taken him for Roland. I have often thought since, in the greater
experience of mankind which life has afforded me, that if, in early
years, their destinies had been exchanged--if Roland had taken to
literature, and my father had been forced into action--that, strange
as it may seem, each would have had greater worldly success. For
Roland's passion and energy would have given immediate and forcible
effect to study; he might have been a historian or a poet. It is not
study alone that produces a writer; it is _intensity_. In the mind, as
in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn hot and quick, you must
narrow the draught. Whereas, had my father been forced into the
practical world, his calm depth of comprehension, his clearness of
reason, his general accuracy in such notions as he once entertained
and pondered over, joined to a temper that crosses and losses could
never ruffle, an utter freedom from vanity and self-love, from
prejudice and passion, might have made him a very wise and enlightened
counsellor in the great affairs of life--a lawyer, a diplomatist, a
statesman, for what I know, even a great general--if his tender
humanity had not stood in the way of his military mathematics.
But, as it was--with his slow pulse never stimulated by action, and
too little stirred by even scholarly ambition--my father's mind went
on widening and widening, till the circle was lost in the great ocean
of contemplation; and Roland's passionate energy, fretted into fever
by every let and hindrance, in the struggle with his kind--and
narrowed more and more as it was curbed in the channels of active
discipline and duty--missed its due career altogether; and, what might
have been the poet, contracted into the humourist.
Yet, who that had ever known ye, could have wished you other than ye
were--ye guileless, affectionate, honest, simple creatures? simple
both, in spite of all the learning of the one, all the prejudices,
whims, irritabilities, and crotchets of the other? There you are both
seated on the height of the old Roman camp, with a volume of the
Stratagems of Polyœnus, (or is it Frontinus?) open on my father's
lap; the sheep grazing in the furrows of the circumvallations; the
curious steer gazing at you where it halts in the space whence the
Roman cohorts glittered forth. And your boy biographer standing behind
you with folded arms; and, as the scholar read or the soldier pointed
his cane to each fancied post in the war, filling up the pastoral
landscape with the eagles of Agrippa and the scythed cars of Boadicea!
CHAPTER VI.
"It is never the same two hours together in this country," said my
Uncle Roland, as, after dinner, or rather after dessert, we joined my
mother in the drawing-room.
Indeed, a cold drizzling rain had come on within the last two hours;
and, though it was July, it was as chilly as if it had been October.
My mother whispered to me, and I went out: in ten minutes more, the
logs (for we lived in a wooded country) blazed merrily in the grate.
Why could not my mother have rung the bell, and ordered the servant to
light a fire? My dear reader, Captain Roland was poor, and he made a
capital virtue of economy!
The two brothers drew their chairs near to the hearth: my father at
the left, my uncle at the right; and I and my mother sat down to "Fox
and geese."
Coffee came in--one cup for the Captain--for the rest of the party
avoided that exciting beverage. And on that cup was a picture of--His
Grace the Duke of Wellington!
During our visit to the Roman camp, my mother had borrowed Mr
Squills's chaise, and driven over to our market town, for the express
purpose of greeting the Captain's eyes with the face of his old chief.
My uncle changed colour, rose, lifted my mother's hand to his lips,
and sate himself down again in silence.
"I have heard," said the Captain, after a pause, "that the Marquis of
Hastings, who is every inch a soldier and a gentleman--and that is
saying not a little, for he measures seventy-five inches from the
crown to the sole--when he received Louis XVIII. (then an exile) at
Donnington, fitted up his apartments exactly like those his majesty
had occupied at the Tuilleries--it was a kingly attention, (my Lord
Hastings, you know, is sprung from the Plantagenets)--a kingly
attention to a king. It cost some money and made some noise. A woman
can show the same royal delicacy of heart in this bit of porcelain,
and so quietly, that we men all think it a matter of course, brother
Austin."
"You are such a worshipper of women, Roland, that it is melancholy to
see you single. You must marry again!"
My uncle first smiled, then frowned, and lastly sighed somewhat
heavily.
"Your time will pass slowly in your old tower, poor brother,"
continued my father, "with only your little girl for a companion."
"And the past!" said my uncle; "the past, that mighty world--"
"Do you still read your old books of chivalry, Froissart and the
Chronicles, Palmerin of England and Amadis of Gaul?"
"Why," said my uncle, reddening, "I have tried to improve myself with
studies a little more substantial. And" (he added with a sly smile)
"there will be your great book for many a long winter to come."
"Um!" said my father, bashfully.
"Do you know," quoth my uncle, "that Dame Primmins is a very
intelligent woman; full of fancy, and a capital story-teller?"
"Is not she, uncle!" cried I, leaving my fox in a corner. "Oh, if you
could have heard her tell me the tale of King Arthur and the enchanted
lake, or the grim white women!"
"I have already heard her tell both," said my uncle.
"The deuce you have, brother! My dear, we must look to this. These
captains are dangerous gentlemen in an orderly household. Pray, where
could you have had the opportunity of such private communications with
Mrs Primmins?"
"Once," said my uncle, readily, "when I went into her room, while she
mended my stock; and once--" he stopped short, and looked down.
"Once when? out with it."
"When she was warming my bed," said my uncle, in a half whisper.
"Dear!" said my mother, innocently, "that's how the sheets came by
that bad hole in the middle. I thought it was the warming-pan."
"I am quite shocked!" faltered my uncle.
"You well may be," said my father. "A woman who has been heretofore
above all suspicion! But come," he said, seeing that my uncle looked
sad, and was no doubt casting up the probable price of twice six yards
of Holland; "but come, you were always a famous rhapsodist or
tale-teller yourself. Come, Roland, let us have some story of your
own; something your experience has left strong in your impressions."
"Let us first have the candles," said my mother.
The candles were brought, the curtain let down--we all drew our chairs
to the hearth. But, in the interval, my uncle had sunk into a gloomy
reverie; and, when we called upon him to begin, he seemed to shake off
with effort some recollections of pain.
"You ask me," he said, "to tell you some tale which my own experience
has left deeply marked in my impressions--I will tell you one apart
from my own life, but which has often haunted me. It is sad and
strange, ma'am."
"Ma'am, _brother_?" said my mother reproachfully, letting her small
hand drop upon that which, large and sunburnt, the Captain waved
towards her as he spoke.
"Austin, you have married an angel!" said my uncle; and he was, I
believe, the only brother-in-law who ever made so hazardous an
assertion.
CHAPTER VII.
MY UNCLE ROLAND'S TALE.
"It was in Spain, no matter where or how, that it was my fortune to
take prisoner a French officer of the same rank that I then held--a
lieutenant; and there was so much similarity in our sentiments, that
we became intimate friends--the most intimate friend I ever had,
sister, out of this dear circle. He was a rough soldier, whom the
world had not well treated; but he never railed at the world, and
maintained that he had had his deserts. Honour was his idol, and the
sense of honour paid him for the loss of all else.
"There was something similar, too, in our domestic relationships. He
had a son--a child, an infant--who was all in life to him, next to his
country and his duty. I, too, had then such a son of the same years."
(The Captain paused an instant: we exchanged glances, and a stifling
sensation of pain and suspense was felt by all his listeners.) "We
were accustomed, brother, to talk of these children--to picture their
future, to compare our hopes and dreams. We hoped and dreamed alike. A
short time sufficed to establish this confidence. My prisoner was
sent to headquarters, and soon afterwards exchanged.
"We met no more till last year. Being then at Paris, I inquired for my
old friend, and learned that he was living at R----, a few miles from
the capital. I went to visit him. I found his house empty and
deserted. That very day he had been led to prison, charged with a
terrible crime. I saw him in that prison, and from his own lips
learned his story. His son had been brought up, as he fondly believed,
in the habits and principles of honourable men; and, having finished
his education, came to reside with him at R----. The young man was
accustomed to go frequently to Paris. A young Frenchman loves
pleasure, sister, and pleasure is found at Paris. The father thought
it natural, and stripped his age of some comforts to supply luxuries
to the son's youth.
"Shortly after the young man's arrival, my friend perceived that he
was robbed. Moneys kept in his bureau were abstracted he knew not how,
nor could guess by whom. It must be done in the night. He concealed
himself, and watched. He saw a stealthy figure glide in, he saw a
false key applied to the lock--he started forward, seized the felon,
and recognised his son. What should the father have done? I do not ask
_you_, sister! I ask these men; son and father, I ask you."
"Expelled him the house," cried I.
"Done his duty, and reformed the unhappy wretch," said my father.
"_Nemo repentè turpissimus semper fuit_--No man is wholly bad all at
once."
"The father did as you would have, advised, brother. He kept the
youth; he remonstrated with him; he did more--he gave him the key of
the bureau. 'Take what I have to give,' said he: 'I would rather be a
beggar than know my son a thief.'"
"Right: and the youth repented, and became a good man?" exclaimed my
father.
Captain Roland shook his head. "The youth promised amendment, and
seemed penitent. He spoke of the temptations of Paris, the
gaining-table, and what not. He gave up his daily visit to the
capital. He seemed to apply to study." Shortly after this, the
neighbourhood was alarmed by reports of night robberies on the road.
Men, masked and armed, plundered travellers, and even broke into
houses.
The police were on the alert. One night an old brother officer knocked
at my friend's door. It was late: the veteran (he was a cripple, by
the way, like myself--strange coincidence!) was in bed. He came down
in haste, when his servant woke, and told him that his old friend,
wounded and bleeding, sought an asylum under his roof. The wound,
however, was slight. The guest had been attacked and robbed on the
road. The next morning the proper authority of the town was sent for.
The plundered man described his loss--some billets of five hundred
francs in a pocket-book, on which was embroidered his name and coronet
(he was a vicomte.) The guest stayed to dinner. Late in the forenoon
the son looked in. The guest started to see him: my friend noticed his
paleness. Shortly after, on pretence of faintness, the guest retired
to his room, and sent for his host. 'My friend,' said he, 'can you do
me a favour? go to the magistrate, and recall the evidence I have
given.'
"'Impossible,' said the host. 'What crotchet is this?'
"The guest shuddered. '_Peste!_' said he: 'I do not wish in my old age
to be hard on others. Who knows how the robber may have been tempted,
and who knows what relations he may have--honest men, whom his crime
would degrade for ever! Good heavens! if detected, it is the galleys,
the galleys!'
"'And what then?--the robber knew what he braved.'
"'But did his father know it?' cried the guest.
"A light broke upon my unhappy comrade in arms: he caught his friend
by the hand--'You turned pale at my son's sight--where did you ever
see him before? Speak!'
"'Last night, on the road to Paris. The mask slipped aside. Call back
my evidence!'
"'You are mistaken,' said my friend calmly. 'I saw my son in his bed,
and blessed him, before I went to my own.'
"'I will believe you,' said the guest; 'and never shall my hasty
suspicion pass my lips--but call back the evidence.'
"The guest returned to Paris before dusk. The father conversed with
his son on the subject of his studies; he followed him to his room,
waited till he was in bed, and was then about to retire, when the
youth said, 'Father, you have forgotten your blessing.'
"The father went back, laid his hand on the boy's head, and prayed. He
was credulous--fathers are so! He was persuaded his friend had b
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40099