Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 434, December, 1851
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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 434, December, 1851
Author: Various
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 70, NO. 434, DECEMBER, 1851 ***
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* * * * *
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXXIV. DECEMBER, 1851. VOL. LXX.
CONTENTS.
TO THE SHOPKEEPERS OF GREAT BRITAIN, 629
THE JEW'S LEGACY. A TALE OF THE SIEGE OF GIBRALTAR, 648
LIFE AMONGST THE LOGGERS, 669
MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. PART XVI., 681
JOHNSTON'S NOTES ON NORTH AMERICA, 699
THE ANSAYRII, 719
THE CHAMPIONS OF THE RAIL, 739
INDEX, 751
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET;
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXXIV. DECEMBER, 1851. VOL. LXX.
TO THE SHOPKEEPERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.
GENTLEMEN,--As it is customary for most men about this season of
the year, when accounts are balanced and squared, to take a serious
survey of the posture of their affairs, and to examine into their
business prospects, perhaps you may not consider a few observations,
touching the welfare and position of that important class of the
community to which you belong, either impertinent or ill-timed. You
are aware that, for the last year or two, Her Majesty's Ministers
have been in the habit of opening Parliament with a congratulatory
assurance of the continued, and even augmented, prosperity of the
country. The reason why such statements were made, altogether
irrespective of their truth or falsehood, is obvious enough. In a
political point of view, they were necessary for the vindication
of the measures which Government either originated or adopted. To
have admitted that the country was not prospering under the new
commercial system, would have been considered by the public as
tantamount to an acknowledgment that the policy which dictated
those measures was vicious; and that the Whig ministry, if not
deficient in duty, had at least erred sorely in judgment. In private
life, we rarely meet with that degree of candour which amounts to
an unequivocal admission of error in point of judgment--in public
life, such an admission is altogether unknown. Failure may indeed
be acknowledged when the fact becomes too evident to admit of
further denial; but the causes of that failure are never attributed
to their real source. Not only the purity of the motive, but the
wisdom of the conception, is vindicated to the last. In this case,
however, failure is totally denied. So far from being put upon their
defence, the Whigs maintain that they have achieved a triumph. Their
averment is, that, with the exception of the agricultural producers,
among whom they allow that a certain degree of distress prevails,
all other classes of the community are prosperous. Even for the
agriculturists there is balm in store. The prosperity of the other
classes is to react upon them; so that, within some indefinite
period of time, we shall all find ourselves in circumstances of ease
and comfort which have hitherto been unknown in our land.
With you the benefit is represented, not as prospective, but as
present. The agriculturist may have to wait a little longer, but you
are already provided for. Your cake is baked; and we are assured
that you are eating it in thankfulness and joy. If this is really
the case, there is no more to be said on the subject. If the harvest
of Free Trade has actually yielded you such a large measure of
profit, it would be madness in anyone to decry that line of policy
in your hearing. You constitute the class which, from its peculiar
position and vocation, is better qualified than any other to judge
accurately, and from experience, of the degree of prosperity which
is actually known in the country. The verdict of twelve shopkeepers,
given after an inspection of their books for an average of years,
ought to be of more weight, in settling the merits of any disputed
commercial question, than the random assurances of a dozen cabinet
ministers whose reputation and official existence are bound up in
the vindication of their own policy. The reason of this is perfectly
obvious. Your profit is simply a commission upon your sales. You
do not produce or manufacture articles of consumption--you simply
retail them. Your profit depends upon the briskness of trade, that
is, the amount of demand. It rises or falls according to the general
circumstances of your customers. In good times you make large
profits; in bad times those profits decrease. One while your stock
sells off rapidly; at another, it remains upon your hands. Your
interest is inseparable from that of the great body of consumers by
whom you live. You have little or nothing to do with the foreign
trade; for, whatever be the nature, of the articles in which you
deal, you sell them in the home market. You have, therefore, the
best opportunity of estimating the real condition of your customers.
The state of your own books, and the comparative degree of ease or
difficulty which you experience in the collection of your accounts,
furnish you with a sure index of the purchasing power of the
community. Compared with this criterion, which is common to every
man among you, tables of exports and imports, statements of bank
bullion, and such like artificial implements as have been invented
by the political impostors and economists, are absolutely worthless.
When our sapient Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Mr Labouchere,
tell you, with an air of unbounded triumph, that the exportation
of calicoes to China or Peru has mightily increased--and therefore
argue, without condescending to inquire whether such exportation
has been attended with any profit at all to the manufacturers, that
the prosperity of the country is advancing at a railway pace--you
may indeed be gratified by the statistical information, but you
will fail to discover in what way the public are benefited thereby.
It is pleasant to know that there are fifteen millions of gold in
the vaults of the Bank of England, and that, so long as this hoard
remains undiminished, there is little chance of a commercial crisis,
or a violent contraction of credit. But we take it you would be
infinitely better pleased to know that sovereigns were circulating
freely from hand to hand amongst the people, and that your customers
had their pockets so well filled as to enable them to purchase
largely, and to pay their accounts when due. To you any depression
whatever is a serious matter--a depression which assumes a permanent
appearance cannot be much short of ruin. Therefore you ought most
especially to take care that no false representation is made
regarding your circumstances, which may be the means of perpetuating
a system that has already proved detrimental to a large body of your
customers.
Were we to take for granted the ministerial statement of
prosperity--which no doubt will be repeated next February--your Whig
minister being an incorrigible cuckoo--this paper would certainly
not have been written. But, having had occasion early to doubt the
truthfulness of this vernal note, and having taken some pains to
examine the statements which from time to time are issued by the
great houses engaged in commercial and manufacturing industry, as
also the accounts of the present condition of the poor, which have
excited so much public interest, we have really been unable to
discover any one influential class, beyond the money-lenders and
creditors, or any one large and important branch of industry, which
can, with truth, be described as prospering, or will confess to the
existence of such prosperity. Shipmasters, manufacturers, merchants,
iron-masters, and agriculturists, all tell the same tale. This is
very strange. You may possibly remember that Mr M'Gregor, once
Secretary to the Board of Trade, and now member for Glasgow, the
great commercial city of Scotland, estimated the additional amount
of wealth which was to accrue to Great Britain, in consequence of
the repeal of the Corn Laws, at two millions sterling per week! Upon
what data that profound gentleman, who thus enunciated the prophecy
and assumed the mask of Midas, proceeded in his calculation, we know
not, and perhaps it would be superfluous to inquire. It certainly
was a good round sum; for, by this time, without insisting upon
compound, or even simple interest, it should have amounted to
rather more than one-half of the national debt; but unfortunately
nobody will own to having fingered a farthing of the money. In
recalling to your memory this little circumstance, it is by no
means our intention to offer any disrespect to the intellectual
powers of M'Gregor, for whom, indeed, we entertain a high degree of
veneration, similar to that which is manifested by the Mussulman
when he finds himself in the company of a howling derveesh. We
merely wish to reproduce to you one phantom of the golden dream,
which, five or six years ago, when the fever of gain was epidemical,
possessed the slumbers of so many; and having done so, to ask you,
now that the fever is gone, whether it was not indeed a phantom? We
are wiser now--at all events, we have had more experience--and the
producing classes tell us very distinctly, and quite unanimously,
that they have derived no benefit whatever from the commercial
changes which have taken place. Capital, whether invested in ships,
factories, mines, or land, is less profitable, and therefore less
valuable, than it was before; and in some instances, where the
depression has been most heavy, it has been almost annihilated.
These are not our statements, but the statements of the several
interests, as put forward by their own representatives. They
are statements which emanate alike from the Free-Trader and the
Protectionist. Men may differ as to the cause, but they all agree
as to the grand fact of the depression. So that, when we hear
ministers congratulating themselves and the country upon its general
prosperity, and, _pari passu_ with this congratulation, find the
accredited organs of each of the great branches of productive
industry vehemently asserting that they are exceptions from the
general rule, an anxious believer in the probity of all parties has
his faith somewhat rudely shaken.
We believe that, collectively, you are the best judges as to this
disputed matter. As the real wealth of the country depends upon
the amount and value of its yearly produce--as from that annual
creation, when measured by the monetary standard, and circulated
through a thousand channels, all our incomes are derived--you,
who supply the whole population with the necessaries and luxuries
of life, (fabricated by others, but passing through your hands,)
must necessarily have the best means of knowing whether the
circumstances of that population have, on the aggregate, been
bettered or made worse. When Napoleon in the bitterness of his heart
declared that we were a nation of shopkeepers, he uttered no terms
of reproach, though he intended to convey a taunt. Your position
in the community is such that you cannot flourish independent of
its general prosperity. The exporting manufacturer, and even the
foreign merchant, may multiply their gains, and realise fortunes,
whilst other classes, whose wellbeing is far more important to the
stability of the empire, are hastening to decay. Such phenomena are
common in old states, when the process of dissolution has begun.
The parasite lives and thrives, while the tree round which it has
wound its tendrils is crumbling into rottenness. But such is not
your case. Your interests are identical with those of the productive
classes, for without them you could not exist. Ill-remunerated
labour--unproductive capital--lessened means--deteriorated
property--are things which affect you as deeply as though you were
the direct sufferers or losers. Upon the wealth of your customers
depends your own. And therefore, in such an important crisis as
the present, when the existing commercial system of the country is
vigorously assailed by one party, and as obstinately defended by
another--when facts and statements apparently of much weight are
adduced on either side, to serve as arguments for the overthrow or
the maintenance of that system--when some cite statistical tables to
prove that the country must be prosperous, and others adduce real
evidence to show that the reverse is the case--you cannot afford
to sit idly by, without throwing the weight of your testimony and
experience into one or other of the scales. You have had admirable
opportunities of noticing the working of the Free-Trade system. It
matters not what were the original prepossessions of any of you,
or what might have been your opinion with regard to the merits of
this or that scheme, while it was still in embryo and untried. A
more complex question than that of Free Trade, as affecting the
importation of corn, probably never was presented to the public
consideration. Many excellent, judicious, and thoroughly patriotic
men, relying upon the truth of statements which were regarded by
others as mere plausible theories, were willing to submit to the
experiment. And when, by the grossest act of political perfidy
that was ever perpetrated--an act which future times, if not the
present, will stigmatise with deserved opprobrium--the last and most
important change, save that which subsequently assailed our maritime
interest, was suddenly effected, it was the declared opinion of the
majority that the new system must at least have a trial, until its
real results were developed, and until it became apparent to the
nation whether or not Free Trade would operate for the advantage of
the people, as its advocates and promoters had predicted.
Here we must, for a moment or two, however unwillingly, digress. The
later measures of Free Trade have assailed interests so important
and so strong, that its former and earlier advances, stealthily and
cautiously made, have almost faded from the public view. Free Trade,
as a political system, did not alone strike at the agricultural or
the shipping interest. Since the days of Mr Huskisson, who brought
with him into active life the principles which he had imbibed in
youth from his associates in French Jacobinism, the principles of
Free Trade have been gradually but cautiously applied to various
branches of British industry. The slow and insidious nature of the
movement on the part of the statesmen, who, even then, were yielding
to the influence of the modern economical school, showed their
distrust of the system, which, if true, ought at once to have been
openly promulgated. Like the late Sir Robert Peel, Huskisson was
destitute of that manly courage which scorns concealment or deceit,
and walks steadfastly to its goal. Cunning was an ingredient of
his nature: whatever he did was accomplished by tortuous methods,
and vindicated upon false pretences. The tendency of that policy
which he commenced was to maintain by all means, at all hazards,
and at the sacrifice, if needful, of every other interest, the
manufacturing supremacy, of England in the foreign market--an object
for which we still are striving, though at the imminent risk of the
dismemberment of the British empire. It is due, however, to the
memory of Mr Huskisson, to remark, that, although the originator
of this policy, he does not seem to have contemplated the extent
to which it would be carried out by his successors. His opinions
upon the subject of protection to agriculture were clear and
decided: "There is no effectual security, either in peace or war,
against the frequent return of scarcity, but in making ourselves
independent of foreign supply. Let the bread we eat be the produce
of corn grown among ourselves; and, for one, I care not how cheap
it is--the cheaper the better. It is cheap now, and I rejoice at
it, because it is altogether owing to a sufficiency of corn of our
own growth; but, to insure a continuance of that cheapness, and
that sufficiency, we must insure to our own growers _protection
against foreign importation_, which has produced those blessings,
and by which alone they can be permanently maintained." The time,
however, was fast approaching when the reins of government were to
fall into the hands of a scion of the manufacturing body, in whose
eyes the momentary supremacy of party was of more importance than
any principle of national policy. There is no more curious page in
history than that which records the rise of British manufactures
towards the close of last century. Invention after invention,
whereby manual labour was superseded by machinery, and the power of
production almost indefinitely multiplied, paved the way for that
monopoly which our manufacturers enjoyed for at least a quarter of
a century, during which time every other country in Europe except
our own was devastated by war, and the peaceful arts forgotten or
overthrown. It was during that period that the gigantic fortunes of
the Arkwrights and the Peels were made, and that influence secured
to the manufacturing body in the British House of Commons which it
never possessed before. But with the return of peace the monopoly
disappeared. By invention in mechanical appliances, Britain had
the start of other nations in the creation of manufactures; by
war, she was enabled long to enjoy the undivided benefits. But
inventions are not the property of a single nation; they pass from
one to another with the rapidity of lightning; they are available
by the foreign, even more easily than by the domestic, rival. Hence
it very soon became apparent that other states were preparing to
compete with us in those branches of industry which had proved
so exceedingly profitable. France, Belgium, Germany, Russia,
Switzerland, and America, all entered keenly into the contest; and
then commenced that decline of prices which has continued, almost
without intermission, to the present hour. Reciprocity treaties were
tried, but were in fact of little avail; for the great bulk of the
English exports consisted of those very textile fabrics which it
was the object of each country to produce for its own consumption,
if not to export to others. During the war, both the expenses of
government and the interest of the National Debt had doubled in
amount, and the monetary changes effected in 1819 added at least
one-third to the weight of that augmented burden. In order to make
this taxation bearable, the industry of the people was protected in
their own market by a scale of customs duties, which prevented the
influx of foreign produce at rates which must have annihilated the
British workman. Protection is a clear necessity which arises out
of taxation. If the tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar, beer, soap, and
other articles of the labourer's consumption, are taxed in order
to maintain an expensive establishment, and to defray the interest
of an enormous debt, he must have a compensation of some kind. The
only kind of compensation which can be granted, and which the wit of
man can devise, is to be found in an equitable scale of duties, by
means of which all produce imported into Britain shall be taxed as
heavily as though it had been reared, grown, or made up on British
ground by British labourers. Unless this be done, there is no fair
competition. The less burdened foreigner must ultimately carry the
day against the heavily-taxed Englishman. And when we consider that
all taxes must be paid out of produce, there being no other source
whatever from which they can be drawn, the importance of maintaining
the market value of our produce at a point equal to the pressure of
our taxation will at once become apparent.
There are, however, plausible, though in reality most fallacious
grounds, upon which the Protective System may be assailed. In this,
as in every other country, the first and most important branch
of industry is that which provides food for the population. To
that all others are subordinate. It is impossible to estimate the
amount of capital which has been laid out upon the soil of Britain,
first in reclaiming it from a state of nature, and, since then,
in maturing and increasing its fruitfulness. But some idea may be
formed of its magnitude from the fact that, in 1846, the annual
agricultural produce of the United Kingdom was valued, according
to the prices then current, at £250,000,000. Whatever imperial
taxation is imposed on other classes of the community is shared
equally by the agriculturists; and they are, moreover, exposed to
heavy local rates, from which the others are comparatively free.
It is a received maxim in political economy--we ought rather to
say a rule of common sense--that all taxes and charges paid by the
producer, over and above his necessary profit, fail ultimately to
be defrayed by the consumer--that is, that such taxes and charges
form a component part of the selling price of the article. There is
no specialty whatever in the case of corn or provisions to exempt
them from the general rule. But all restrictions which tend to
enhance the price of the first necessaries of life are obnoxious
to that section of the people who, from ignorance or incapacity,
cannot understand why bread should be dear in one country and
cheap in another. They, too, are subjected to their share of
indirect taxation, and the knowledge that they are so taxed in
the consumption of articles which constitute their only luxuries,
renders them doubly impatient of a system which, on the authority
of wicked and designing demagogues, they are led to believe was
invented by the landlords solely for their own benefit. Thus heavy
taxation, however engendered, must always be fraught with great
peril to the permanency of a state. The burden of such taxation
falls most heavily upon the land, and yet the agriculturist is
expected to provide food for the people as cheaply as though he were
altogether exempt from the burden.
The reason why the exporting manufacturers, and those politicians
who entered thoroughly into their views, were so bent upon the
destruction of the Corn Laws, was twofold. In the first place, the
competition in foreign markets threatened to become so strong, owing
to the rapid development of textile industry on the Continent, that
it was necessary to lower prices. England had given machinery and
models to the Continent, and the Continent was now fighting her
with her own weapons, and at a cheaper cost, as labour abroad is
less expensive than it is here. In order to bring down the value
of labour in England, for the purpose of protracting this grand
manufacturing contest, it was necessary to lower, in some way
or other, the price of food in England, and this could only be
accomplished by free admission of foreign supplies. In short, their
object was to bring down wages. On this point we have the testimony
of Mr Muntz, M.P. for Birmingham, as early as February 1842. He
wrote as follows:--"Say what you will, the _object_ of the measure
is _to reduce wages_, and the _intention_ is to reduce them to
the Continental level. I repeat it, the Corn Laws very materially
support labour in this country.... Why, the professed object of
the repeal is to enable the English merchant to compete with the
foreigner, and how can he do that _unless by a reduction of wages_,
which reduction will be upon all trade, home and foreign?" Mr John
Bright was not less clear as to the necessity of such reduction of
wages in order to maintain our exports: "If the tariff in Russia
imposed a heavy duty on English yarn, and if English yarn went there
and had to be sold at the same rate as the yarn of the Russian
spinner, he (that is, the Russian spinner) not paying the heavy
duty, it followed that we must, _by some means or other_, make our
goods cheaper by the amount of duty which we paid, and to do that
_it was absolutely necessary that the wages of the operatives in
this country should be reduced_." And Mr Greg of Manchester, a
leading member of the Anti-Corn Law League, wrote as follows:--"In
the only remaining item of the cost of production--that is, the
wages of labour--foreign nations have a decided advantage; and
although a free trade in provisions, by lowering them here, and
raising them abroad, might regulate the difference, I doubt if it
ever could be entirely removed. Better education, more sober habits,
more frugality, and general forethought, together with cheaper food,
will no doubt enable our people to live in much greater comfort
than at present UPON CONSIDERABLY SMALLER EARNINGS." These extracts
sufficiently disclose the designs of the Free-Traders against the
wages of the workman. In the second place, it was believed by many
of them, that, by sacrificing the agriculturists, they would be
able to turn the attention of other countries, especially America,
from the prosecution of their rising manufactures. They argued,
that if we were to surrender and secure our provision market to
foreign states, they would return the compliment by allowing us
to manufacture for them--in other words, that the foreigners were
to feed England, and England was to clothe the foreigners! This
precious scheme has since been avowed, seriously and gravely, by men
who have seats in the present House of Commons; and, so far as we
can understand their language, the philosophers of the _Edinburgh
Review_ consider this a most sensible arrangement!
The agricultural interest, however, was of too great magnitude to
be attacked at once. Several outworks were to be gained before
the citadel was summoned to surrender. Accordingly Mr Huskisson
began, and Sir Robert Peel continued, that system of commercial
relaxations, (which, some five-and-twenty years ago, was exposed
and denounced in this Magazine,) annihilating some branches of
industry and depressing others--pauperising whole districts, as in
the Highlands, and merging the villages in the towns--until the time
seemed ripe, and the opportunity propitious, for the accomplishment
of the grand design. It is not now necessary to dwell upon the
circumstances which attended the change in the Corn and Navigation
Laws--these are still fresh in the memory of all of us, and will
not soon be forgotten. Our object in this digression was simply to
remind you that Free Trade, in its insidious and stealthy progress,
has warred with other interests than those which belong to the
agricultural and the maritime classes.
Neither is it necessary at present to advert to the gross
inconsistencies of the system--to the restrictions which it still
continues upon that very branch of industry which it has laid bare
to foreign competition. Let us take the system as it is, of which
you have had now nearly three years' experience, dating from the
time when the ports were opened.
Three years constitute a long period for the endurance of a
commercial experiment. During that time you have had ample
opportunity of observing how the system has worked. Are you richer
or poorer than you were before the experiment began? If the former,
Free Trade has worked well; if the latter, it is a mischievous
delusion.
This is a question which you alone can answer--or rather, every man
must answer it for himself. But this much we may be allowed to say,
that, from what information we can gather regarding the state of
general trade--from the sentiments which we have heard expressed by
many of the most respectable of your own body--the experiences of
the last year have not been such as to give you much encouragement
for the future. If it is so, then you will do well to consider
whether or not you ought to lend that great political influence
which you undoubtedly possess, in support of a system which has not
only failed to realise the anticipations of its founders, but has
actually diminished in a great degree the power of purchase of the
community.
This is no trivial matter to any of us, least of all is it trivial
to you. The next general election will be, in its results, by far
the most important of any which has taken place for centuries. If,
in the new Parliament, all idea of a return to the Protective System
is abandoned, we may prepare ourselves for that most dismal conflict
which can convulse a country--a war against taxation, and ultimately
against property. For--rely upon this--heavy taxation and cheap
produce are things which never can be reconciled. You may, if you
please, hand over the home market of Britain to the foreigner, and
allow him, without toll or custom, to supply our wants with produce
of his own rearing; but, if you do so, what is to become of our
own population, and their labour?--and how are you to levy those
taxes which labour alone can supply? That manufacturing interest,
for which such desperate sacrifices have been made, is daily losing
ground in the markets of the world. The fact will brook no denial,
and it is admitted even by its own members. America has refused
the bait offered to her by the Free-Traders, and is engaged heart
and soul in the cotton manufacture, for which she possesses within
herself the command of the raw material. _To those countries which
supply us with corn, our exports of manufactures have alarmingly
decreased._ We may continue to glut (for that is what we are doing
at present) the markets of India and China, and our export tables
may exhibit a cheering increase in the amount of yards of calico
sent out; but, unless the trade circulars are utterly mendacious,
the speculation has been, and will continue to be for a long tract
of time, unprofitable. The fact is, that the extent and value of
our foreign trade in manufactures is little understood by most
of us, and grossly exaggerated by others. It constitutes, after
all, a mere fraction of the national production. The consumption
of manufactures at home is, or was, before the late changes were
made, twice as great as the whole amount of our annual exports. The
prosperity of this country does not depend upon the amount of wares
which it sends or forces abroad, though that is the doctrine which
is constantly clamoured in our ears by the political economists--a
generation of ridiculous pretenders, of whom it is only necessary
to know one, in order to form an accurate estimate of the mental
capabilities of his tribe. It depends on our own labour, on our
own internal arrangements, and on that reciprocity between man and
man, and between class and class of our fellow-subjects, which is
the only real security for the peace and tranquillity of a kingdom.
Those exporting manufacturers, who rummage foreign markets, are
no better than so many buccaneers. Their object is to evade the
burden of taxation at home, and, wherever they can with advantage
to themselves, to bring in foreign labour, untaxed and untolled, to
supersede that of the British workman.
You cannot have failed to remark that the arguments which are now
put forward by the Free-Traders, in support of their system, are
totally different from those which they advanced while recommending
it for the adoption of the country. How often were we told, during
the struggle which preceded the repeal of the Corn Laws, that all
the apprehensions expressed of a permanent fall in the value of
produce, and of overwhelming importations from abroad, were purely
visionary! Learned statists undertook to prove by figures that the
whole quantity of grain which could be brought into this country was
absolutely insignificant, and that it could not disturb prices. Mr
James Wilson of the _Economist_, in his valuable tractate entitled
_Influences of the Corn Laws_, which was published eleven years ago,
thus favoured the public with _his_ anticipations for the future, in
the event of the repeal of the Corn Laws:--
"Our belief is," says the sage of Westbury, "that the whole of
these generally received opinions are erroneous; that if we had had
a free trade in corn since 1815, the average price of the whole
period, actually received by the British grower, would have been
higher than it has been; that little or no more foreign grain would
have been imported; and that if, for the next twenty years, the
whole protective system shall be abandoned, _the average price of
wheat will be higher than it has been for the last seven years_,
(52s. 2d.,) or than it would be in the future with a continuance of
the present system;--but with this great difference, that prices
would be nearly uniform and unaltering from year to year; that the
disastrous fluctuations would be greatly avoided, which we have
shown, in the first proposition, to be so ruinous under the present
system."
For this very notable sentiment, Mr Wilson was clapped on the back
by the Manchester men, and commended thus in the seventh circular
of the League:--"We are much indebted to Mr Ibbotson of Sheffield,
_Mr James Wilson_, and our esteemed correspondent, for labouring to
prove to the landlords that they may safely do justice to others,
without endangering their own interests. And we think very much has
been done towards justifying their opinions, _that the money price
of grain would not be lowered even by the total repeal of the Corn
Laws_!" Sir Robert Peel, in the memorable debates of 1846, attempted
to justify his experiment on the ground that previous commercial
relaxations had been found beneficial to the parties who were
directly engaged in the trade, his inference being, that the same
result would follow in the case of the agriculturists. Unfortunately
the data upon which he proceeded were altogether fallacious; for,
notwithstanding his dexterity in selecting figures, and bringing
out balances which were apparently favourable, it was clearly
demonstrated by Lord George Bentinck, that in no one instance
whatever had those relaxations proved favourable to the British
producer, and that many of them had moreover occasioned a large
loss to the public revenue. But the language held by Sir Robert
Peel, upon that occasion, cannot be construed otherwise than as
the expression of an opinion that, by the repeal of the Corn Laws,
prices would not be materially disturbed--at all events, that they
would not be lowered so as to fall below the remunerative point.
The immense influx of foreign grain which followed the opening
of the ports in 1849, and the immediate fall of price, were
calculated to alarm not only the farmers, but even that section of
the Free-Traders who believed conscientiously that the productive
powers of Europe and America were unequal to the supply of so very
considerable a surplus. It is no wonder that the farmers were
frightened, when they saw grain coming in at the rate of a million
of quarters per month! They were, however, told by the highest
Free-trading authorities in both Houses of Parliament, and the same
view was violently maintained by the Liberal press, that their
fears were altogether groundless; that such importations could not
possibly be maintained; and that the first inundation was simply
caused by an accumulation of corn at the foreign ports, stored up
in readiness for the opening of the English market--a contingency
which could not happen again. The utmost pains were taken, by those
who had consented to the repeal of the Corn Laws, to persuade the
farmers that the low prices of 1849 were attributable principally to
the superabundance of the harvest at home; and they were exhorted
to wait patiently, but hopefully, for the advent of better times.
In short, every means were taken to persuade the agriculturists
that they were labouring under a temporary but not a permanent
difficulty, and that a very short time would suffice to restore them
to their former condition. But no one attempted to maintain, in
1849, that, if wheat continued to sell at or about 40s. per quarter,
its cultivation could be profitable in Britain; and when, at a later
period, one or two rash theorists attempted to broach that doctrine,
they were instantly put to silence by the overwhelming nature of the
proof which was brought against them--not the least instructive part
of it being the admissions of the leading Free-Traders as to what
really was, on an average of years, the remunerative price of wheat
to the British grower.
It is now clearly established, that, under Free Trade, 40s. per
quarter is a price which the British farmer cannot calculate on
receiving. The averages of England are now about 36s. per quarter,
being 20s. lower than the sum which Sir Robert Peel considered as
the lowest which could remunerate the grower. Therefore, taking
the average yield of good wheat-land at four quarters per acre,
it appears that, by continuing to grow that kind of grain which
is convertible into ordinary bread, the farmer must be a positive
loser to the extent of _four pounds per acre_! In other words,
even suppose no rent at all were taken for the land, wheat cannot
continue to be grown at a profit in Great Britain, so long as
the averages remain below 40s.; and we leave a large margin to
the credit of improved husbandry and strict economy, exercised,
as it must be, at the expense of the labourer's wages. That such
is the present condition of the British farmers--a hopeless one,
unless a legislative remedy is applied--will brook no denial. Last
year we were told of farms letting at an increase of rent, and of
other symptoms of agricultural prosperity, whereof nothing now is
heard. The fact of the depression--if we may use so mild a term in
respect to a branch of industry which is now merely existing upon
capital, not by income--is beyond all possibility of doubt or cavil.
The causes of it are obvious; and it now only remains to be seen
whether we can afford to allow agriculture to be extinguished from
among us, or at best raised to that point which will afford a bare
subsistence to the grower, without the risk of involving the rest of
us in a like calamity.
You may have heard it said--for it has been often written--that it
signifies little to the people of this country from what source they
receive their bread. It is worth your while to examine into this.
That a loaf baked of American flour, grown in the valley of the
Mississippi, may taste quite as well in the mouth of the consumer as
a loaf of English material is a circumstance which we can readily
believe; but is this all that is to be considered? Does the American
bear any part of our national taxation? Does he contribute, directly
or indirectly, to the burdens which are common to the British
producer? Does he deal with any of you, and can you call him a
customer? These are the questions which you ought to ask yourselves,
in making up your minds on this matter; and if you will only examine
the subject patiently and dispassionately, your own common sense
will lead you to a just conclusion. Let us suppose that all the food
which you purchase and consume was grown on a foreign soil, and
admitted free of duty. You might then have cheap bread, but, as a
necessary consequence, you would lose more than half your customers.
Unless people have money they cannot buy; and if agricultural
production were to be abandoned in the British islands, all those
who derive their incomes--not only directly, but indirectly--from
the soil, would necessarily be stripped of their means. Are you
aware of the fact that, on a minute analysis of the census of
1841, it appeared that the relative numbers of the population of
Great Britain and Ireland, supported and maintained by the two
great sources of production, agriculture and manufactures, were as
18,734,468, dependent on the first, to 8,091,621, dependent on the
second? Do you believe that the country can remain prosperous, if
you strike a deathblow at the produce which maintains more than
two-thirds of its inhabitants?
Let us go a little farther, and suppose--what may hereafter be the
case--that other countries could undersell us in the home market in
the article of manufactures--that America, France, or Germany could
send us cotton and woollen stuffs, and other ware, cheaper than we
could make them at home. In that case, where would be the sources
of our income? All industry would be prostrated--for you know very
well that a losing trade will not and cannot be carried on long, and
that the time will soon arrive when, through the failure of capital,
it must be abandoned. In such an event, what would become of our
population, with their labour entirely destroyed? How could the
taxes be levied, and the expenses of government paid, to say nothing
of the interest of the National Debt? Great cheapness you would
have, no doubt, but nobody would be able to buy.
If cheapness is a blessing in food, it is a blessing in clothing
and in everything else. The rule admits of no exception. It is as
advantageous for any of us to save a pound on the price of his coat
as a penny on the price of his loaf. Bread is, no doubt, the most
important article of the workingman's consumption, but at the same
time it is no less a fact that the raising of food is the most
important part of the production of the labouring-classes. Without
home labour, all capital in this country would be annihilated, or
at least would depart from it. Labour depends entirely upon wages,
and wages upon the market price of the article produced. If from
the introduction of foreign labour, in the shape of products, the
price of any article is forced down below the cost of production,
then wages begin to fall, and in the end production is extinguished.
Why is it that foreign countries have imposed heavy duties upon
our exported articles of manufacture? Simply for this object--that
their own manufacturers, who give employment to large numbers of
their population, may not be undersold by ours, nor those means of
employment annihilated. In acting thus, these governments perform a
paternal duty to the people--shielding them against the competition
of an older manufacturing power, and preparing them hereafter, when
skill and capital are acquired, to enter neutral markets, with a
fair chance of ultimately overcoming the other.
It stands to reason that, with an equal degree of energy on the part
of its inhabitants, the country which is the least heavily burdened
must distance others in all branches of industry, where nature does
not oppose a barrier, or place it at a disadvantage. The mineral
wealth of England, and our priority in manufacturing invention, gave
us for a long time an advantage over all other nations. America
was not advanced enough to enter into the lists of manufacturing
competition; the distracted state of the Continent, and the
perpetual presence or apprehension of war, effectually prevented the
European states from attempting to rival Britain. But since that
time vast changes have taken place. The mineral resources of other
countries have been developed. Some idea of the manufacturing power
which America now possesses may be formed from the enormous increase
of her domestic production of iron and coal. In 1829, the amount of
iron manufactured in the United States was 90,000 tons; in 1848,
it had risen to 800,000 tons. The coal raised in 1829 was 37,000
tons; in 1849 it was 3,200,000 tons. In the article of cotton, which
is our great manufacturing staple, America has the inestimable
advantage of growing the raw material--an advantage which never
can be counterbalanced, as, even if we were to obtain our supplies
from some other quarter, the expenses of freightage must still
continue to be great. In fact, to all appearance, our supremacy in
the conversion of cotton is already doomed. That branch of industry
rests upon no substantial basis. It rose like an exhalation, and so
it will disappear. These are not merely our opinions, but those of
the most shrewd and calculating of the Free-Traders. Hear Mr Greg
of Manchester on this subject, previous to the repeal of the Corn
Laws:--
"At present we are undersold by foreigners in neutral markets in
all the staple articles of English manufacture. In the articles
of cotton, hosiery, and cutlery, which amount altogether to
three-fourths of our exports, this is notoriously the case. In
cotton fabrics the Swiss undersell us in several markets. In
cutlery Sheffeld is immensely undersold by the Alsace, and our
exports are yearly decreasing. In hosiery, the case is still
worse. Saxon hosiery, after paying a duty of 20 per cent, is
sold in London 25 to 30 per cent cheaper than the produce of
the Leicester and Nottingham looms. In Leicester the stocking
frames have diminished from 16,000 in 1815 to 14,000 in 1840;
whilst in Saxony, in the same time, they have increased from
4590 to 25,000. The English manufacturer pays 2s. 6d. for the
same work that the French manufacturer gets done for 2½d. The
American cutlery market (the most important of all) has been
wrested from us, and our exports of that article to all the
world have fallen from £1,620,000 in 1831 to £1,325,000 in 1841.
_How far with cheaper food, no taxes on the raw material, and
no duties but for the sake of revenue, we might yet recover our
lost superiority, is a matter for grave consideration._ I do not
believe we could either in woollens or hosiery; and even in the
cutlery or cotton trade I think it very doubtful. Now, under a
free commercial system, the raw material would be nearly the
same in all countries, and the advantage, where there was one,
would be generally on the side of foreigners. France and Italy
would have an advantage in silk, and America in cotton; the
current expenses would also be nearly equal. The machinery of
foreign nations even now is not very inferior to our own, and is
daily and rapidly improving; their capital is fast accumulating,
and the yearly interest of it approximating to our own rate."
Here, you see, is a confession of opinion by a leading Free-Trader,
that even the cheapening of food, by which he means the reduction of
the wages of labour, will not suffice ultimately to secure us the
supremacy of the foreign markets. He is perfectly right. In this
insane, and we believe almost entirely unprofitable competition with
the rest of the world, we must infallibly be overcome. No cheapness
of food can countervail the pressure of our heavy taxation. The
cotton-lords, if they could, would fain bring down the price of
labour to the Continental level, which doubtless would enable them,
for a long time, to prolong the contest; but this they cannot do, if
our national engagements are to be fulfilled, and our most valuable
institutions maintained. So long as the revenue duties exist,
labour cannot be forced down to that point. But, in the mean time,
agriculture may be ruined, and the home trade, by which alone you
subsist, be palsied. In fact, the present struggle lies between
the home trade and the foreign trade. One or other of these must
ultimately succumb. The effect of our present commercial system is
to paralyse the home trade, by decreasing the value of all kinds of
domestic produce; by lowering all incomes, and consequently reducing
the amount of the internal business of the country. It has enabled
our manufacturers, for the time, to make a show of larger exports
than before; but it has not, according to their own acknowledgement,
at all enhanced their profits. It may have enabled them to lower
their prices, but it has not increased their returns.
And no wonder that it should be so. Except in the most miserable and
unimportant quarters, our relaxations have been met by augmented
tariffs instead of eager reciprocity. The nations of the world have
refused to sacrifice their advantages, to renounce their prospects,
and to become Free-Traders at the call of Britain. Their statesmen
thoroughly understood the motive of the ingenuous offer: they were
not to be cozened even by the plausibility of Sir Robert Peel. It
is almost melancholy now, when we remember what has actually taken
place, to revert to the peroration of that statesman's speech
delivered on 16th February 1846. A more lamentable instance of
delusion, as to the true feeling and position of other countries,
was never perhaps exhibited. Mark his words:--
"Many countries are watching with anxiety the selection you may
make. Determine for 'Advance,' and it will be the watchword
which will animate and encourage in every state the friends
of liberal commercial policy. Sardinia has taken the lead.
Naples is relaxing her protective duties, and favouring British
produce. Prussia is shaken in her adherence to restriction.
The government of France will be strengthened; and, backed by
the intelligence of the reflecting, and by conviction of the
real welfare of the great body of the community, will perhaps
ultimately prevail over the self-interest of the commercial
and manufacturing aristocracy which now predominates in her
Chambers. Can you doubt that the United States will soon
relax her hostile tariff, and that the friends of a freer
commercial intercourse--the friends of peace between the two
countries--will hail with satisfaction the example of England?"
How strangely did this remarkable man, whose career in all time
coming will be a warning to the aspiring statesman, misunderstand
the true nature of his country's position! In order to tempt
reciprocity he opened the British ports--that is, he conceded
gratuitously the only condition by which we ever could have hoped to
insure it! At the expense of the British agriculturist he opened the
British market to the foreigner, in the expectation, as he expressly
declared, that the boon would be repaid by measures which would
prevent the rise of manufactures abroad, and restrain other nations
from employing capital profitably, from entering into rivalry with
Britain, and from using those natural advantages which were ready
to their hand; and which, if used, could not fail to add to their
wealth, and to furnish employment for millions of their increasing
population! Most egregious was the blunder, and terrible is the
penalty which we are certain to pay for it, if we do not retrace our
steps.
It is always useful to know what intelligent men of other countries
think of our system. They survey and examine it without those
prejudices which are apt to beset all of us, and are better able
than ourselves to determine with what degree of favour it will be
received, or is received, by those who are removed beyond the scope
of our immediate observation. Certainly, of all others, from their
affinity to ourselves, and their proverbially shrewd acuteness in
all matters of commercial detail, the Americans are most likely to
form an accurate estimate both of our position and our prospects
in regard to foreign trade. It is well worth our while to read and
consider the following opinion of Mr Carey, the most distinguished
Transatlantic writer on points of political economy. It occurs in
his work entitled _The Harmony of Interests_, published in America
so late as December 1849.
"Men are everywhere flying from British commerce, which
everywhere pursues them. Having exhausted the people of the
lower lands of India, it follows them as they retreat towards
the fastnesses of the Himalaya. Affghanistan is attempted, while
Scinde and the Punjaub are subjugated. Siamese provinces are
added to the empire of Free Trade, and war and desolation are
carried into China, in order that the Chinese may be compelled
to pay for the use of ships, instead of making looms. The
Irishman flies to Canada; but there the system follows him, and
he feels himself insecure until within the Union. The Englishman
and the Scotchman try Southern Africa, and thence they fly
to the more distant New Holland, Van Diemen's Land, or New
Zealand. The farther they fly, the more they use ships and other
perishable machinery, the less steadily can their efforts be
applied, the less must be the power of production, and the fewer
must be the equivalents to be exchanged; and yet in the growth
of ships caused by such circumstances, we are told to look for
evidence of prosperous commerce!
"_The British system is built upon cheap labour, by which is
meant low-priced and worthless labour._ Its effect is to cause
it to become from day to day more low-priced and worthless; and
thus _to destroy production upon which commerce must be based_.
The object of protection is to produce dear labour--that is,
high-priced and valuable labour, and its effect is to cause
it to increase in value from day to day, and to increase the
equivalents to be exchanged, to the great increase of commerce.
"The object of what is now called Free Trade, is that of
securing to the people of England the further existence of _the
monopoly of machinery_, by aid of which Ireland and India have
been ruined, and commerce prostrated. Protection seeks _to break
down this monopoly_, and to cause the loom and the anvil to take
their natural places by the side of the food and the cotton,
that production may be increased, and that commerce may revive."
In short, the harmony of interests is regarded in America as the
grand point of aim for the statesman. With us, our most important
home interests, on which depend the welfare of by far the greater
part of our population, are sacrificed to prolong a struggle in
which our exporting manufacturers cannot possibly be the victors,
and from which, even at present, they derive little or no profit.
Now, let us ask you to consider for one moment, what is the natural
effect, upon the whole of us, of a forcible diminution of prices,
and depreciation of produce. Here we shall borrow an illustration
and argument from our adversaries, referring to a point which
is in the recollection of all of you, and about which there can
be no possible mistake. You will recollect that the Liberal and
Free-trading journals, almost without exception, as well as most of
the defenders of the Peel policy in the House of Commons, attributed
much of that general depression and stagnation of trade which
followed the repeal of the Corn Laws to the losses sustained by
the failure of the potato-crop in 1845-6. Was there a general want
of confidence visible--were the shopkeepers scant of custom--was
there a less demand than usual within the country for home
manufactures--was there a decline in the price of iron--all was laid
at the door of the unfortunate potato. Since Cobbett uttered his
anathema against the root, it never was in such bad odour. To every
complaint, remonstrance, or lamentation, the reply was ready--"How
can we remedy a calamity of this kind? The potato has done it all!"
At that time it was very convenient, nay, absolutely necessary,
for the Free-Traders to discover some tangible cause for the gross
failure of their predictions. They looked about them in every
direction, and they could discover nothing except the potato which
could endure the blame. Now, although we believe that this esculent
has been unduly reviled, and made to bear a greater burden than
was its due for political misfortune, we nevertheless accept the
illustration at the hands of our opponents, and we beg you to mark
its significance. The loss of the potato-crop in Great Britain and
Ireland, during the year in question, has been variously estimated,
but if we assume it to have been £20,000,000 we are making a very
large calculation indeed. So then, _according to the Free-Traders,
the loss of twenty millions of agricultural produce_ was sufficient
to bring down profits, embarrass trade, and cause a stagnation in
home manufactures! And yet, when Mr Villiers came forward in the
beginning of 1850, and told you, in his capacity of proposer of
the Address to the Crown, that £91,000,000 were _annually_ taken
from the value of the agricultural produce of the country, you
were expected, and directed, to clap your hands with joy, and to
congratulate one another on this symptom of the national prosperity!
The sum of twenty millions lost by the failure of the potato-crop--a
single event, not one of annual occurrence--was taken from the
country's power of produce; and _therefore_, said the Free-Traders,
there was stagnation. But they, of course, could not help it. Of
course they could not; but what about the ninety-one millions
of _annual_ loss, which is equally deducted from the internal
expenditure of the country? About _that_ we do not hear a word. And
yet ask yourselves, and that most seriously--for it is time that we
should get rid of all such pitiful paltering--whether there is any
difference whatever between the two cases, except that the one was
an isolated casualty, and that the other is an annual infliction to
which we are subjected by statute? Weigh the matter as you will,
you cannot, we are satisfied, be able to detect any difference. If
the grower of grain at present prices has no remuneration for his
toil, or return for his capital, he cannot buy from you, any more
than could the farmer whose crop perished by the potato disease.
What caused the stagnation? The failure of the power to purchase,
because there was no return for produce. What causes the stagnation?
Precisely the same thing perpetrated by Act of Parliament.
Do not, we beseech you, allow yourselves to be fooled any longer
by the jesuitry of these political economists, but apply your own
reason to discover the cause of the present depression. Do not
believe them when they talk about exceptional causes, affecting
temporarily the industry of the nation, but certain immediately to
disappear. If you were to live as long as Methusaleh, no one year
would elapse without furnishing those gentlemen with a special and
exceptional cause. One year it is the potato disease; another the
French Revolution; another the Great Exhibition. Heaven only knows
what will be their excuse next year--perhaps the new Reform Bill, or
some other similar godsend. You are the particular class upon whom
the deception is to be played, and for whose especial benefit the
fraud is concocted. The producers know very well how they stand,
and what they have to expect. They can be no longer cajoled by
assurances of higher prices, by vague promises of profit after the
disappearance of "the transition state," or by impudent averments
that, by an entire change of system and the expenditure of more
capital, they will be able to maintain themselves in affluence. To
do the Free-Traders justice, they have for some time desisted from
such attempts. They now address their victims, through their organs,
in a fine tone of desperado indifference, telling them that, if they
do not like the present arrangement, the sooner they go elsewhere
the better. And the people are taking them at their word and going.
Hundreds of thousands of tax-payers are leaving the country as fast
as possible, carrying with them the fragments of their property,
and bequeathing to those who remain behind their share of the
national burdens. But in your case, the Free-Traders cannot yet
afford to pull off the mask. They are apprehensive that you should
see them in their real character; and therefore, so long as you are
likely to be amused with "specialties" and "exceptional causes,"
these will be furnished to you gratis, and in great variety. There
seems, however, to be an apprehension among their camp that you are
beginning to evince suspicion. Recent elections have not been quite
as they should be; and in the seaport and large commercial towns
there are evident symptoms of mutiny. So, by way of diverting your
attention, you are likely to have a measure of Reform next year,
possibly as satisfactory in its result as the Ecclesiastical Titles
Bill, upon which Ministers cleverly managed to concentrate the whole
public attention throughout last session, and then, having carried
it, allowed its provisions to become a dead letter, almost before
the ink, which made the measure complete, was dry! We say this, not
as opponents of an extension of the suffrage--for on that point we
reserve our opinion until the details are fully before us--but as
enemies and loathers of a miserable system of chicane and deception
which has now crept into the public counsels, and which threatens
very speedily to destroy the independence of public opinion, by
opposing state obstacles to its free and legitimate expression. We
ask any of you, fearlessly, to look back at the records of last
session, and then say whether the country was not degraded and
stultified by the act of the Prime Minister? Right or wrong, at his
invitation and call, the Protestants of Great Britain demanded a
security against what they considered an intolerable instance of
Romish insolence and aggression. They received it from Parliament;
and the moment it passed into the hands of the executive power, it
became as worthless as the paper upon which it was written! And why
was this? Simply because the object was gained--you had been amused
for a whole session. If nothing was intended to be done in the way
of repelling aggression, and if Ministers durst have told you so
a year ago, there were many points affecting your more immediate
interests which would have been forced upon their attention. But
they were very glad to escape from such discussions under cover of a
Protestantism which they did not feel, and an affected indignation
of Papal claims, which they had done everything in their power, by
diplomatic agency, to encourage; and, having escaped the perils of
one session upon that ground, they will strain every effort to turn
your attention from your own position, during the next, by bringing
forward some measure which they hope may enlist your sympathies,
or provoke controversy, so far as to render you indifferent to the
real nature of your position. The selection of the battlefield is
the oldest trick in strategy. Get up the appearance of a battle,
and people will flock from any distance to witness it, regardless
of their own interest. Lord John Russell is famous for bloodless
fields, which resolve themselves into reviews--shall we have another
such in the course of the approaching session?
That manufactures are now exceedingly depressed, and have been so
for a long time, notwithstanding the reduction in the price of food
consequent upon foreign importations, is an admitted and notorious
fact. We have from time to time kept this before the public view by
quoting from the trade circulars; and though further evidence may
be unnecessary, we shall subjoin extracts from the last accounts
received from three seats of industry, two of which are represented
in Parliament by Colonel Peyronnet Thompson and Mr Feargus O'Connor.
Gloomy as they are, they are by no means the worst which we have had
occasion to cite during the last two years.
"BRADFORD, _November 6_.--The market here does not show any
symptom of improvement in the demand for any kind of combing
wools. All seem in wonder and anxiety as to what may be next
expected, for to buy none are willing, whether with stock or
without. The staplers appeared to expect that the spirited
buying of colonial wools would give a tone of confidence, but
that appears to have no effect. The spinners pause when they
contrast the comparative high prices of English wool, especially
those of the finer class, with what they were in 1848, when
yarns were at the present prices, and will not buy with the
certainty of making so great a loss as a purchase would entail.
The supply of Noils and Brokes was never so limited as at
present, and the small quantity making brings full prices. The
business doing in yarns is certainly small, and the transactions
confined to immediate delivery. No one seems inclined to enter
into engagements for distant delivery. For to go on at the
present prices of yarns is worse than madness, the price for
low numbers of good spinning and standing having reached 8s.
per gross, and those of a secondary class sold, if reeled, for
what may be the instructions to the commission houses, who have
needy parties pressing sales. The quantity so offering is not so
great, but the sacrifices which have now for so long been made
render the position of the trade exceedingly embarrassing. _The
production continues to be daily curtailed, and from the whole
district the same cheerless tidings are received. Some large
houses, who have never reduced their operations before, have
adopted it, their loss being so immense, and the whole condition
of the trade so thoroughly disjointed._ In pieces the business
during the week has not shown any feature of increased activity,
and the stocks in the manufacturers' hands are somewhat
increasing, but not so fast as last year at this period, and
especially in Coburgs and fancy goods: the former are chiefly
made in this district, and not in Lancashire, for the ruinous
price has driven them on to other classes of goods adaptable
to their looms; and for some months several large houses have
been engaged in making Bareges for the American market. This has
prevented mousselines-de-laine being made to stock, and, perhaps
for many years, this branch of the trade has not opened with so
small a stock on hand.
"NOTTINGHAM, _November 6_.--In lace we have no improvement
to notice this week in the general sale of goods, and, with
very few exceptions, there is a great falling off in demand;
but, as many of the manufacturers are wisely lessening their
production, we do not anticipate any serious losses resulting
from the present temporary stagnation. Many are stopping their
frames to make fresh designs altogether; which, if done with
good taste, some advantage may result from present difficulties.
In hosiery our trade is not so much depressed as we had reason
to anticipate. There is still a fair business doing in wrought
hose, and a little increased demand for 'cut-ups,' as well as
gloves made of thread and spun silk. The price of yarn is low,
which is in favour both of the manufacturer and merchant.
"LEICESTER, _November 6_.--The unsettled state of the price of
workmanship for straight-down hose has caused a great depression
in that branch, and led to nearly a total cessation of work,
many hosiers declining to give out until prices are settled. In
wrought hose a better business is doing, though not so good as
usual at this season. Yarns continue dull of sale."
Now, why do we insist upon these things? For two reasons. In
the first place, we wish you to observe that the cheapness of
manufacturing products does not of itself induce consumption.
There must be buyers as well as sellers in order to constitute
a market, and the tendency of our late legislation has been to
diminish the means of the former. It by no means follows that, if
we have cheap food and cheap manufactures, the relative position
of all classes can be maintained. Never forget _that our burdens
all the while remain at a fixed money rate_, and that, as the value
of produce is lowered, the weight of those burdens is aggravated.
This consideration, which is now well understood, is beginning to
tell strongly against the doctrines of the Free-Traders, even with
some of those, who were once their ardent supporters. Mr James
Harvey of Liverpool, late a member of the Anti-Corn-Law League,
but now a strenuous opponent of their system, thus chronicles the
leading cause of his conversion. We quote from his pamphlet just
published, _Remunerative Price the Desideratum, not Cheapness_. He
says:--"My suspicions were first awakened by the blind devotion
of the Manchester school of political economy to the doctrine of
CHEAPNESS; for it struck me as a self-evident proposition, that to
buy cheap is to sell cheap, in which case there can be no possible
gain, but a positive loss, arising from the necessary aggravation of
all fixed charges." In order to place the producers of this country
in the same position as before, it would be necessary to reduce all
fixed charges, the interest of debt both public and private, the
expenses of government, and all salaries and annuities, to an amount
corresponding to the forced decline of prices. This would be called
a war against property; but, in reality, the war against property
began when the Legislature admitted foreign untaxed produce to
compete with the produce and labour of our tax-paying population at
home.
Our second reason for drawing your attention to the cheerless
prospect of manufactures, has reference to the sacrifices, not
only indirect but direct, which the other classes of the community
were called upon to make in order to prop them up. In the first
place, the Property and Income Tax, which we are still called upon
to pay, was imposed by Sir Robert Peel expressly for the object of
effecting "such an improvement in the _manufacturing interests_ as
will react on every other interest in the country." He admitted
that it was an unjust and partial impost, and therefore promised
that it should be only temporary--however, we have endured it for
ten years, and the Whigs will no doubt make an effort to continue
it still longer. Here, then, you have a sum of five millions and a
half annually confiscated for the benefit of the manufacturers, who
were relieved from taxation to that amount. So far for sacrifice the
first. Then came sacrifice the second, in the shape of Free Trade,
mulcting the productive classes of this country to the extent of at
least five-and-thirty per cent of their annual returns. Then came
sacrifice the third, which handed over the carrying trade to the
foreigner.
Now, considering that all these sacrifices have been made for the
encouragement of manufactures, or at least with that professed
object, is it not, to say the least of it, extraordinary that
they have not thriven? How are we to account for a result so
wholly contrary to the avowed anticipations of our statesmen? The
explanation is, after all, not very difficult. All these sacrifices
have been made, not for the great body of the manufacturers, but for
a mere section of them. We possess no authentic official information
as to the amount of manufactures consumed at home; but we have
records, more or less trustworthy, of the amount of our exports,
and these are used to mislead the minds of the multitude as to the
actual extent and relative importance of our trade. England has no
more title than France has to the character of the workshop of the
world. We are driven from the markets of civilised countries by the
protective duties imposed by their governments for the righteous and
prudent purpose of fostering native industry, and we are compelled
to seek our marts among people who are not yet so far advanced in
political economy as to detect the enormous discrepancy between our
principles and our practice. Listen to Mr Harvey's sketch of our
foreign trade:--
"From the theories and systems I turned my attention to passing
events and recorded facts: I saw the West Indies prostrated;
Canada thrown into a state of revolt, succeeded by a smothered
feeling of discontent; Ireland depopulated; the magnificent
resources of India undeveloped; and the British farmer
reduced to the dire necessity of paying rent out of capital.
I also perceived that the change in our commercial policy had
substituted a cosmopolitan cant in the place of patriotism and
nationality. To become the friend of every country but his own
had become the pride and the glory of statesmanship. Foreign
goods were admitted, duty free, into our ports, in the vain hope
of reciprocity being established; but our manufactures were
subjected to heavy imposts on the Continent of Europe, and in
the United States. China, unversed in the mysteries of political
economy, only levies five per cent upon our goods, whilst,
in direct contravention of our pet notions of Free Trade and
reciprocity, we impose a tax of 300 per cent upon her teas. OUR
HOPES HAVE BEEN DISAPPOINTED, OUR CALCULATIONS FALSIFIED. WE ARE
THE DUPES OF OUR OWN FANTASTIC IDEAS AND QUIXOTIC CONCESSIONS.
We are the laughing-stock of the Old and the New Worlds. The
Germanic Zollverein shuns our overtures; the American excludes
our ships from his seaboard."
Can these things be controverted? We defy the ingenuity of mankind
to do it.
So much for the foreign trade; but there still remains the home
trade, in which by far the largest portion of our manufacturing
capital is embarked, and which furnishes a much greater amount of
employment to British labour than the other. You see what is the
state of that trade, notwithstanding the savings which may have been
effected by the lowered price of food, and also notwithstanding that
partial protection which several branches of it are still allowed
to retain. One word as to that incidental point. Mr Cobden is
reported to have said, that he did not care how soon these remnants
of protection were abolished. Let him be as good as his word, and,
IF HE DARES, rise up in his place in the House of Commons, and
make a motion to that effect. We shall then have an opportunity of
testing the exact nature of his principles. To what cause can such
a depression as this, so long and continuous, be attributed, except
to a general curtailment of demand on the part of the consumers,
arising from the insufficiency of their means to make purchases as
before? You are probably aware that what is called strict economy
in families is not favourable to the interests of manufacture or
of trade. Of manufactures of all kinds there must be a certain
yearly consumption, based upon the necessities of the people.
Besides food, men require clothes to cover them, and houses in which
to dwell, and those houses must be more or less furnished. But
between the bare supply of such necessities, and that point which
is considered by persons, according to their tastes, education, or
habits, as constituting comfort, there is a wide interval. Nothing
is a more sure criterion of the wealth and income of a people than
the ordering of their homes, and the manner of their living; and the
traveller who passes from one country into another can at once form
an estimate, from such appearances, of their respective wealth or
poverty. Diminish income, and a reduction is immediately made. All
superfluities are lopped off and renounced. The broker, who deals
in second-hand articles, drives a larger business than the man who
is the vendor of new ones; and even in domestic labour there is a
large economy practised, by reducing establishments. That this must
be so, will be evident on the slightest reflection. Reduce a man's
income from £1000 to £800 or £600, and he will, if he has any wisdom
or prudence, cut down his expenses to meet the fall. It is upon
the home manufacturer in the first place, and upon the shopkeeper
secondly, that these reductions tell. The one finds that his amount
of production is much greater than the demand; the other does not
turn over his capital nearly so rapidly as before. Add to this
that the home manufacturer, in many branches, is exposed to strong
foreign competition. Sir Robert Peel, in his last alterations of
the tariff, did indeed continue Protection--more largely than is
generally understood, for the mere amount of revenue-duty drawn from
importations of foreign articles, adapted to compete with ours in
the home, is no criterion of the Protective value--to some branches
of industry; but others were exposed without shelter, and have since
suffered accordingly. It is undeniable that a very large amount of
foreign manufactures, which have paid no duty at all, or merely an
elusory one, are consumed within this country--thereby inflicting
extreme injury upon British labour, and depressing trades which,
though severally not important, give in the aggregate, or ought to
give, the means of employment to thousands. Regard the subject in
any light you will, this cheapness, of which we have heard so much,
just amounts to a diminution of the income of every class, except
the annuitants and fund-holders, while it consequently renders the
payment of the fixed burdens more grievous to every one of us.
You, gentlemen, to whom we have ventured to submit these remarks,
have a very great deal in your power. You can, by your decision,
either confirm the present policy, or cause it to be reversed; and
your own experience will suffice to show you in what manner the
system has worked. Statists may parade their figures, economists may
puff their plans, statesmen may indulge in high-coloured pictures
of the success which they expect to follow their measures--but the
true test of every measure which has a practical tendency will be
found in the effect which it produces upon the circumstances of the
people, and especially upon those of the middle classes. We, who
have, from the very first, anticipated the baneful effects of this
attack upon British industry--we, who have no more connection than
any of yourselves with territorial aristocracy, and who consider
the welfare of the people as the grand object which it is the duty
of the Government to promote--ask you to apply your own reason to
the facts which are before you and in your reach, and to decide and
act accordingly. It was, we knew from the very beginning of this
struggle, impossible that you could decide until the effects of the
Free-Trade experiment became visible and palpable among yourselves.
We foresaw that it was only through the suffering and impoverishment
of the producers that the practical lesson could reach you, and
that, until this took place, it was of little use to invoke your
aid, or even to entreat your judgment. Probably, by this time, you
will have formed an accurate estimate of the value of the doctrines
promulgated by the babblers on political economy--a sect which has
never yet been allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of
any nation, without producing the most disastrous results. To them
we are indebted for that change of the currency which has added
fully one-third to our fixed burdens, and for those complex monetary
arrangements which insure periodically the return of a commercial
crisis. But whatever you may think of them, do not allow yourselves
to be influenced by their representations, or by those of their
accredited organs. The time for theory is over. You have now to deal
with facts, regarding which every man of you is competent to form
an opinion. We do not ask you to accept our statements implicitly,
any more than those of our opponents--though, if we did so, we might
hold ourselves justified on this ground, that the greater part of
our evidence is taken from the admissions of our adversaries. We
appeal to your own experience, and upon that we leave you to decide.
And do not be afraid to give free utterance to your opinion. There
exists not in this land--there exists not in all the world, the
power which can rise up against you. The British producer on the
one hand, and the exporting manufacturer on the other, may have
conflicting interests not altogether reconcilable with the public
good, for isolated interest always begets selfishness; and where
individual or class profit is concerned, principle is apt to be
overlooked. But you are, eminently, THE CLASS to pronounce upon
conflicting opinions. Your interest is that of the nation whose
pulse is beneath your finger. You can tell, with greater accuracy
than others, whether any political prescription has stimulated
the circulation of the blood, or caused it to run torpidly in the
national veins. You can mark the changes in the circumstances of
your customers, and from these you can form an estimate whether or
not the late experiment has been successful.
If, judging by that test, you should think it has been successful,
our case is lost. We, who have advocated the Protective Principle in
legislation, cannot continue to maintain it, if those whose incomes
depend mainly upon British custom find themselves advantaged by
measures which have reduced the value of British produce. In matters
of this kind there is no abstract dogma involved, on the strength
of which any man could make himself a creditable martyr. Men have
died for their faith or for their allegiance, believing either to be
their highest duty; but no one in his senses will spend a lifetime,
or any considerable portion of it, in combating absolute facts. The
reason why Protection is still a living principle--the reason why it
finds so many supporters among the learned and the thoughtful--the
reason why it is progressing step by step towards triumph--is
because, in the minds of those who advocate it, there is a strong
and deep-rooted conviction that you already know that the opposite
system has entirely failed to realise the predictions of its
advocates, and that you feel that its permanency is contrary to your
interest, and to that of the great body of the people. If we are
right in this conviction, then we are entitled not only to solicit,
but to demand, your earnest co-operation. These are not times
for political cowardice, or weak suppression of opinion. Liberty
of thought, and liberty of the expression of sentiment, are our
unalienable prerogative; but of late years, and in the hands of a
certain party, that prerogative has been scandalously overstretched.
We now hear men--even members of the Legislature--threatening the
country, and you, with hints of insurrection, in case you exercise
your undoubted right of pronouncing a free and unbiassed judgment
upon any point of commercial policy. Let the caitiffs bluster! They
know, from the bottom of their ignoble souls--for none save an
ignoble soul would have dared to conceive that such threats would
intimidate any man of British birth or blood--that their menace is
as meaningless and vain as their miserable motives are apparent.
Let them bluster! They, the advocates of lowered wages--they, the
combatants for lengthened labour--they, the crushers of the infants,
have no large margin of operative sympathy upon which they can
afford to trade. Had John Fielden been alive, he could have told
you what these men were, and what sympathy they were likely to
command. Well do the workmen know with whom they have to deal!
Let us not be misunderstood. We never have underrated the difficulty
of a change such as we contemplate; but no difficulty attending
that, is for a moment to be put into the balance against the general
welfare of the country, if, on reflection, and on considering your
own position, you shall be of opinion that the interests of the
country demand that change. But, at any hazard, we cannot afford to
go down-hill. To bring us, as the Manchester men contemplate, to
the Continental level in point of wages as well as expenditure, is
to seal the ruin of the British empire, burdened as it is; or, in
the least dangerous view, to necessitate repudiation. That matter
is, as we have said before, for you to decide; and the period for
your decision is rapidly drawing near. On the next general election
depends the fate of the country, and--without saying one syllable
more upon the merits of the systems at issue--the decision or
inclination of your body will form the most important, because it
must be considered, as between conflicting interests, the most
impartial element, of the expression of British opinion.
THE JEW'S LEGACY.
A TALE OF THE SIEGE OF GIBRALTAR.
CHAPTER I.
The note-book of my grandfather, Major Flinders, contains much
matter relative to the famous siege of Gibraltar, and he seems to
have kept an accurate and minute journal of such of its incidents
as came under his own observation. Indeed, I suspect the historian
Drinkwater must have had access to it, as I frequently find the same
notabilia chronicled in pretty much the same terms by both these
learned Thebans. But while Drinkwater confines himself mostly to
professional matters--the state of the fortifications, nature of the
enemy's fire, casualties to the soldiery, and the like--and seldom
introduces an anecdote interesting to the generality of readers
without apologising for such levity, my grandfather's sympathies
seem to have been engrossed by the sufferings of the inhabitants
deprived of shelter, as well as of sufficient food, and helplessly
witnessing the destruction of their property. Consequently, his
journal, though quite below the dignity of history, affords, now and
then, a tolerably graphic glimpse of the beleagured town.
From the discursive and desultory nature of the old gentleman's
style, as before hinted, it would be vain to look for a continuous
narrative in his journal, even if it contained materials for such.
But here and there a literary Jack Horner might extract a plum or
two from the vast quantity of dough--of reflections, quotations,
and all manner of irrelevant observations, surrounding them. The
following incidents, which occurred at the most interesting period
of the long and tedious siege, appear to me to give a fair idea of
some of the characteristics of the time, and of the personages who
figured in it; and accordingly, after subjecting them to a process
analogous to gold-washing, I present them to the reader.
After a strict blockade of six months, reducing the garrison to
great extremity for want of provisions, Gibraltar was relieved by
Sir George Rodney, who landed a large quantity of stores. But about
a year after his departure, no further relief having reached them
except casual supplies from trading vessels that came at a great
risk to the Rock, their exigencies were even worse than before. The
issue of provisions was limited in quantity, and their price so
high, that the families, even of officers, were frequently in dismal
straits. This has given rise to a wooden joke of my grandfather's,
who, although he seldom ventures on any deliberate facetiousness,
has entitled the volume of his journal relating to this period of
the siege, _The Straits of Gibraltar_. He seems to have estimated
the worth of his wit by its rarity, for the words appear at the top
of every page.
The 11th of April 1781 being Carlota's birthday, the Major had
invited Owen (now Lieutenant Owen) to dine with them in honour of
the occasion. Owen was once more, for the time, a single man; for
Juana, having gone to visit her friends in Tarifa just before the
commencement of the siege, had been unable to rejoin her husband. In
vain had Carlota requested that the celebration might be postponed
till the arrival of supplies from England should afford them a
banquet worthy of the anniversary--the Major, a great stickler for
ancient customs, insisted on its taking place forthwith. Luckily,
a merchantman from Minorca had succeeded in landing a cargo of
sheep, poultry, vegetables, and fruit the day before, so that the
provision for the feast, though by no means sumptuous, was far
better than any they had been accustomed to for many months past.
The Major's note-book enables me to set the materials for the
dinner, and also its cost, before the reader--viz. a sheep's head,
price sixteen shillings, (my grandfather was too late to secure any
of the body, which was rent in pieces, and the fragments carried
off as if by wolves, ere the breath was well out of it)--a couple
of fowls, twenty shillings, (scraggy creatures, says my ancestor
in a parenthesis)--a ham, two guineas--raisins and flour for a
pudding, five shillings--eggs, (how many the deponent sayeth not,)
sixpence each--vegetables, nine and sixpence--and fruit for dessert,
seven and tenpence. Then, for wine, a Spanish merchant, a friend
of Carlota's, had sent them two bottles of champagne and one of
amontillado, a present as generous then as a hogshead would have
been in ordinary times; and there was, moreover, some old rum, and
two lemons for punch. Altogether, there was probably no dinner half
so good that day in Gibraltar.
At the appointed hour, the Major was reading in his quarters (a
tolerably commodious house near the South Barracks, and at some
distance outside the town) when Owen appeared.
"You're punctual, my boy; and punctuality's a cardinal virtue about
dinner-time," said my grandfather, looking at his watch; "three
o'clock exactly. And now we'll have dinner. I only hope the new cook
is a tolerable proficient."
"What's become of Mrs Grigson?" asked Owen. "You haven't parted with
that disciple of Apicius, I should hope?"
"She's confined again," said my grandfather, sighing; "a most
prolific woman that! It certainly can't be above half-a-year since
her last child was born, and she's just going to have another. 'Tis
certainly not longer ago than last autumn," he added musingly.
"A wonderful woman," said Owen; "she ought to be purchased by the
Government, and sent out to some of our thinly-populated colonies.
And who fills her place?"
"Why, I'll tell you," responded the Major. "Joe Trigg, my old
servant, is confined too--in the guardroom, I mean, for getting
drunk--and I've taken a man of the regiment, one Private Bags, for a
day or two, who recommended his wife as an excellent cook. She says
the same of herself; but this is her first trial, and I'm a little
nervous about it."
"Shocking rascal that Bags," said Owen.
"Indeed!" said my grandfather; "I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't
inquire about his character. He offered his services, saying he came
from the same part of England as myself, though I don't recollect
him."
"Terrible work this blockade," said the Major after a pause. "Do
you know, if I was a general in command of a besieging army, I
don't think I could find it in my heart to starve out the garrison.
Consider now, my dear boy," (laying his forefinger on Owen's
arm,)--"consider, now, several thousand men, with strong appetites,
never having a full meal for months together. And just, too, as my
digestion was getting all right--for I never get a nightmare now,
though I frequently have the most delicious dreams of banquets
that I try to eat, but wake before I get a mouthful. 'Tis enough
to provoke a saint. And, as if this was not enough, the supply of
books is cut off. The _Weekly Entertainer_ isn't even an annual
entertainer to me. The last number I got was in '79, and I've been
a regular subscriber these twelve years. There's the _Gentleman's
Magazine_, too. The last one reached me a year since, with a capital
story in it, only half-finished, that I'm anxious to know the end
of; and also a rebus that I've been longing to see the answer to.
'The answer in our next,' says the tantalising editor. It's a
capital rebus--just listen now. 'Two-thirds of the name of an old
novelist, one-sixth of what we all do in the morning, and a heathen
deity, make together a morsel fit for a king.' I've been working at
it for upwards of a year, and I can't guess it. Can you?"
"Roast pig with stuffing answers the general description," said
Owen. "That, you'll admit, is a morsel fit for a king."
"Pooh!" said my grandfather. "But you must really try now. I've
run through the mythology, all that I know of it, and tried all
the old novelists' names, even Boccaccio and Cervantes. Never were
such combinations as I've made--but can't compound anything edible
out of them. Again, as to what we do in the morning: we all shave,
(that is, all who have beards)--and we yawn, too; at least I do,
on waking; but it must be a word of six letters. Then, who can the
heathen deity be?"
"Pan is the only heathen deity that has anything to do with
cookery," said Owen. "Frying-pan, you know, and stew-pan."
My grandfather caught at the idea, but had not succeeded in making
anything of it, or in approximating to the solution of the riddle,
when Carlota entered from an inner room.
"I wish, my dear, you would see about the dinner," said the Major;
"'tis a quarter past three."
"_Si, mi vida_," (yes, my life,) said Carlota, who was in the habit
of bestowing lavishly on my grandfather the most endearing epithets
in the Spanish language, some of them, perhaps, not particularly
applicable--_niño de mi alma_, (child of my soul,) _luz de mis
ojos_, (light of my eyes,) and the like; none of which appeared to
have any more effect on the object of them than if they had been
addressed to somebody else.
Carlota rung the bell, which nobody answered. "Nurse is busy with
de _niña_," she said, when nobody answered it; "I go myself to de
_cocina_," (kitchen,)--she spoke English as yet but imperfectly.
"There's one comfort in delay," said the Major; "'tis better to boil
a ham too much than too little--and yet I shouldn't like it overdone
either."
Here they were alarmed by an exclamation from Carlota. "_Ah Dios!
Caramba! Ven, ven, mi niño!_" cried she from the kitchen.
The Major and Owen hastened to the kitchen, which was so close
at hand that the smell of the dinner sometimes anticipated its
appearance in the dining-room. Mrs Bags, the new cook, was seated
before the fire. On the table beside her was an empty champagne
bottle, the fellow to which protruded its neck from a pail in one
corner, where the Major had put it to cool; and another bottle
of more robust build, about half-full, was also beside her. The
countenance of Mrs Bags wore a pleasant and satisfied, though not
very intelligent smile, as she gazed steadfastly on the ham that
was roasting on a spit before the fire--at least one side of it was
done quite black, while the other oozed with warm greese; for the
machinery which should have turned it was not in motion.
"_Caramba!_" exclaimed Carlota, with uplifted hands. "_Que
picarilla!_"--(What a knave of a woman!)
"Gracious heavens!" said my grandfather, "she's roasting it! Who
ever heard of a roast ham?"
"A many years," remarked Mrs Bags, without turning her head, and
still smiling pleasantly, "have I lived in gentlemen's families--"
Here this fragment of autobiography was terminated by a hiccup.
"And the champagne bottle is empty," said Owen, handling it. "A nice
sort of cook this of yours, Major. She seems to have constituted
herself butler, too."
My grandfather advanced and lifted the other bottle to his nose.
"'Tis the old rum," he ejaculated with a groan. "But if the woman
has drunk all this 'twill be the death of her. Bags," he called,
"come here."
The spouse of Mrs Bags emerged from a sort of scullery behind the
kitchen--a tall bony man, of an ugliness quite remarkable, and with
a very red face. He was better known by his comrades as Tongs, in
allusion probably to personal peculiarities; for the length of his
legs, the width of his bony hips, and the smallness of his head,
gave him some distant resemblance to that article of domestic
ironmongery; but as his wife called herself Mrs Bags, and he was
entered in the regimental books by that name, it was probably his
real appellation.
"Run directly to Dr Fagan," said the Major, "and request him to come
here. Your wife has poisoned herself with rum."
"'Tisn't rum," said Bags, somewhat thickly--"'tis fits."
"Fits!" said my grandfather.
"Fits," doggedly replied Mr Bags, who seemed by no means disturbed
at the alleged indisposition of his wife--"she often gets them."
"Don't alarm yourself, Major," said Owen, "I'll answer for it she
hasn't drunk _all_ the rum. The scoundrel is half-drunk himself, and
smells like a spirit-vault. You'd better take your wife away," he
said to Bags.
"She can leave if she ain't wanted," said Private Bags, with
dignity: "we never comes where we ain't wanted." And he advanced to
remove the lady. Mrs Bags at first resisted this measure, proceeding
to deliver a eulogium on her own excellent qualities, moral and
culinary. She had, she said, the best of characters, in proof of
which she made reference to several persons in various parts of the
United Kingdom, and, as she spoke, she smiled more affably than ever.
"_La picarilla no tiene verguenza_," (the wretch is perfectly
shameless,) cried Carlota, who, having hastily removed the ham
from the fire, was now looking after the rest of the dinner. The
fowls, cut up in small pieces, were boiling along with the sheep's
head, and, probably to save time, the estimable Mrs Bags had put
the rice and raisins destined for a pudding into the pot along with
them--certainly, as Owen remarked, a bold innovation in cookery.
Still continuing to afford them glimpses of her personal history,
Mrs Bags was at length persuaded to retire along with her helpmate.
"What astonishing impudence," said the Major, shutting the door upon
her, "to pretend to be a cook, and yet know no better than to roast
a ham!"
Carlota, meanwhile, was busy in remedying the disaster as far as she
could; cutting the ham into slices and frying it, making a fricassee
of the fowls, and fishing the raisins out of the pot, exclaiming
bitterly all the while, in English and Spanish, against the
_tunanta_ (equivalent to female scoundrel or scamp) who had spoilt
the only nice dinner her _pobrecito_, her _niño_, her _querido_,
(meaning my grandfather,) had been likely to enjoy for a long time,
stopping occasionally in her occupations to give him a consolatory
kiss. However, my grandfather did not keep up the character of a
martyr at all well: he took the matter really very patiently; and
when the excellent Carlota had set the dinner on the table, and he
tasted the fine flavour of the maltreated ham, he speedily regained
his accustomed good-humour.
"It is very strange," he said presently, while searching with a fork
in the dish before him, "that a pair of fowls should have only three
wings, two legs, and one breast between them."
It certainly was not according to the order of nature; nevertheless
the fact was so, all my grandfather's researches in the dish
failing to bring to light the missing members. This however, was
subsequently explained by the discovery of the remains of these
portions of the birds in the scullery, where they appeared to have
been eaten after being grilled; and Mrs Bags' reason for adopting
this mode of cooking them was also rendered apparent--viz., that she
might secure a share for herself without immediate detection.
However, all this did not prevent them from making the best of what
was left, and the Major's face beamed as he drank Carlota's health
in a glass of the remaining bottle of champagne, as brightly as if
the dinner had been completely successful.
"It is partly my fault, Owen," said the Major, "that you haven't a
joint of mutton instead of this sheep's head. I ought to have been
sharper. The animal was actually sold in parts before he was killed.
Old Clutterbuck had secured a haunch, and he a single man you
know--'tis thrown away upon him. I offered him something handsome
for his bargain, but he wouldn't part with it."
"We're lucky to get any," returned Owen. "Never was such a scramble.
Old Fiskin, the commissary, and Mrs O'Regan, the Major's wife, both
swore the left leg was knocked down to them; neither would give in,
and it was put up again, when the staff doctor, Pursum, who had just
arrived in a great hurry, carried it off by bidding eightpence more
than either. Not one of the three has spoken to either of the others
since; and people say," added Owen, "Mrs O'Regan avers openly that
Fiskin didn't behave like a gentleman."
"God knows!" said my grandfather, "'tis a difficult thing in such a
case to decide between politeness and a consciousness of being in
the right. Fiskin likes a good dinner."
The dinner having been done justice to, Carlota removed the remains
to a side-table, and the Major was in the act of compounding a bowl
of punch, when there was a knock at the door. "Come in," cried
Carlota.
A light and timid step crossed the narrow passage separating the
outer door from that of the room they sat in, and there was another
hesitating tap at this latter. "Come in," again cried Carlota, and a
young girl entered with a basket on her arm.
"'Tis Esther Lazaro," said Carlota in Spanish. "Come in, child; sit
here and tell me what you want."
Esther Lazaro was the daughter of a Jew in the town, whose
occupations were multifarious, and connected him closely with the
garrison. He discounted officers' bills, furnished their rooms, sold
them everything they wanted--all at most exorbitant rates. Still,
as is customary with military men, while perfectly aware that they
could have procured what he supplied them with elsewhere at less
expense, they continued to patronise and abuse him rather than
take the trouble of looking out for a more liberal dealer. As the
difficulties of the garrison increased, he had not failed to take
advantage of them, and it was even said he was keeping back large
stores of provisions and necessaries till the increasing scarcity
should enable him to demand his own terms for them.
His daughter was about fifteen years old--a pretty girl, with hair
of the unusual colour of chestnut, plaited into thick masses on the
crown of her head. Her skin was fairer than is customary with her
race--her eyes brown and soft in expression, her face oval, and
her figure, even at this early age, very graceful, being somewhat
more precocious than an English girl's at those years. She was a
favourite with the ladies of the garrison, who often employed her to
procure feminine matters for them. Carlota, particularly, had always
treated her with great kindness--and hence the present visit. She
had come, she said timidly, to ask a favour--a great favour. She had
a little dog that she loved. (Here a great commotion in the basket
seemed to say she had brought her _protégé_ with her.) He had been
given to her by a young school friend who was dead, and her father
would no longer let her keep it, because, he said, these were no
times to keep such creatures, when provisions, even those fit for a
dog, were so dear. He was a very good little dog--would the Señora
take him?
"Let us look at him, Esther," said Owen--"I see you have brought him
with you."
"He is not pretty," said Esther, blushing as she produced him from
the basket. He certainly was not, being a small cur, marked with
black and white, like a magpie, with a tall curling over his back.
He did not appear at all at his ease in society, for he tried to
shrink back again into the basket.
"He was frightened," she said, "for he had been shut up for more
than a month. She had tried to keep him in her bedroom, unknown to
her father, feeding him with part of her own meals; but he had found
it out, and had beaten her, and threatened to kill the dog if ever
he saw it again."
"_Pobrecito!_" (poor little thing,) said the good Carlota--"we shall
take good care of it. _Toma_," (take this,) offering him a bit of
meat. But he crept under her chair, with his tail so depressed, in
his extreme bashfulness, that the point of it came out between his
forelegs.
Carlota would have made the young Jewess dine there forthwith, at
the side-table still spread with the remains of the dinner; but
she refused to take anything, only sipping once from a glass of
wine that Carlota insisted on making her drink of. Then she rose,
and, having tied the end of a string that was fastened to the dog's
collar to the leg of the table, to prevent his following her, took
her leave, thanking Carlota very prettily.
"_A Dios, Sancho!_" she said to the little dog, who wagged his
tail and gave her a piteous look as she turned to go away--"_A
Dios, Sancho_," she repeated, taking him up and kissing him very
affectionately. The poor child was ready to cry.
"Come and see him every day, my child," said Carlota, "and when
better times come you shall have him again."
CHAPTER II.
Lazaro the Jew was seated towards dusk that evening in a sort of
office partitioned off by an open railing from a great store filled
with a most motley collection of articles. Sofas, looking-glasses,
washing-stands--bales of goods in corded canvass--rows of old boots
purchased from officers' servants--window curtains lying on heaps
of carpeting and matting--bedsteads of wood and iron--crockery
and glass--were all piled indiscriminately. Similar articles had
also overflowed along the passage down the wooden steps leading
to the square stone court below, which was lumbered with barrels,
packing-cases, and pieces of old iron. This court was entered
from the street, and an arched door on one side of it, barred and
padlocked, opened on a large warehouse, which nobody except the Jew
had set foot in for many months.
The Jew himself was a spare, rather small man, with a thin eager
face, small sharp features, and a scanty beard. Being by descent
a Barbary Jew, he wore the costume peculiar to that branch of his
race--a black skull-cap; a long-skirted, collarless, cloth coat,
buttoned close, the waist fastened with a belt; loose light-coloured
trousers and yellow slippers--altogether he looked somewhat like an
overgrown scholar of Christ's Hospital. He was busied in turning
over old parchment-covered ledgers, when an officer entered.
Von Dessel was a captain in Hardenberg's regiment. He was a square,
strong-built man, about forty, with very light hair, as was apparent
since the governor's order had forbidden the use of powder to the
troops, in consequence of the scarcity of flour. His thick, white,
overhanging eyebrows, close lips, and projecting under jaw gave
sternness to his countenance.
"Good afternoon, captain," said the Jew; "what I do for you to-day,
sare?"
"Do for me! By Gott, you have done for me already, with your cursed
Hebrew tricks," said the captain. The German and the Jew met on a
neutral ground of broken English.
"I always treat every gentleman fair, sare," said the Jew. "I tell
you, captain, I lose by that last bill of yours."
"_Der teufel!_ who gains, then?" said Von Dessel, "for you cut me
off thirty per cent."
The Jew shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't make it so, sare; the siege makes it so. When the port is
open, you shall have more better exchange."
"Well, money must be had," said the German. "What will you give now
for my bill for twenty pounds?"
The Jew consulted a book of figures--then made some calculations on
paper--then appeared to consider intently.
"Curse you, speak!" said the choleric captain. "You have made up
your mind about how much roguery long ago."
"Captain, sare, I give you feefty dallars," said the Jew.
The captain burst forth with a volley of German execrations.
"Captain," said the Jew presently, "I like to please a gentleman if
I can. I give you one box of cigars besides--real Cubas--one hundred
and feefty in a box."
The captain at this broke forth again, but checked himself presently
on the entrance of the Jew's daughter, who now returned from the
Major's. She advanced quietly into the room, made a little bow to
the captain, took off and laid aside her shawl, and, taking up some
work, sat down and began to sew.
Von Dessel resumed his expostulation in a milder tone. The Jew,
however, knew the money was necessary to him, and only yielded
so far as to increase his box of cigars to two hundred; and the
captain, finding he could get no better terms from him, was forced
to agree. While the Jew was drawing out the bills, the German gazed
attentively at Esther, with a good deal of admiration expressed in
his countenance.
"I can't take the money now," said he, after signing the bills. "I
am going on duty. Bring it to me to-morrow morning, at nine o'clock."
"I'm afraid I can't, sare," said Lazaro; "too moch business.
Couldn't you send for it, captain?"
"Not possible," said the German; "but you must surely have somebody
that might bring it--some trustworthy person you know." And his eye
rested on Esther.
"There's my dater, sare," said the Jew--"I shall send her, if that
will do."
"Good," said the captain, "do not forget," and quitted the room
forthwith.
He was scarcely gone when a pair with whom the reader is already
slightly acquainted, Mr and Mrs Bags, presented themselves. The
effects of their morning conviviality had in a great measure
disappeared.
"Your servant, sir," said Bags. The Jew nodded.
"We've got a few articles to dispose of," pursued Mr Bags, looking
round the room cautiously. "They was left us," he added in a low
tone, "by a _diseased_ friend."
"Ah!" said the Jew, "never mind where you got 'em. Be quick--show
them."
Mrs Bags produced from under her cloak, first a tin teakettle, then
a brass saucepan; and Mr Bags, unbuttoning his coat, laid on the
table three knives and a silver fork. Esther, passing near the table
at the time, glanced accidentally at the fork, and recognised the
Flinders crest--a talbot, or old English bloodhound.
"Father," said she hastily, in Spanish, "don't have anything to do
with that--it must be stolen." But the Jew turned so sharply on her,
telling her to mind her work, that she retreated.
The Jew took up the tea-kettle, and examined the bottom to see that
it was sound--did the same with the saucepan--looked at the knives
narrowly, and still closer at the fork--then ranged them before him
on the table.
"For dis," said he, laying his hand on the tea-kettle, "we will say
one pound of rice; for dis (the saucepan) two pounds of corned beef;
for de knives, a bottle of rum; and for de fork, seex ounces of the
best tea."
"Curse your tea!" said Mr Bags.
"Yes!" said Mrs Bags, who had with difficulty restrained herself
during the process of valuation, "we doesn't want no tea. And the
things is worth a much more than what you say: the saucepan's as
good as new, and the fork's silver--"
"Plated," said the Jew, weighing it across his finger.
"A many years," said Mrs Bags, "have I lived in gentlemen's
families, and well do I know plate from silver. I've lived with Mrs
Milson of Pidding Hill, where everything was silver, and nothing
plated, even to the handles of the doors; and a dear good lady she
was to me; many's the gown, she giv me. And I've lived with--"
Here the Jew unceremoniously interrupted the train of her
recollections by pushing the things from before him. "Take what I
offer, or else take your things away," said he, shortly.
Mr and Mrs Bags grumbled considerably. The tea they positively
refused at any price: Mr Bags didn't like it, and Mrs Bags said it
disagreed with her. So the Jew agreed to give them instead another
bottle of rum, a pound of onions, and two pounds of beef; and with
these terms they at length closed, and departed with the results of
their barter.
During the altercation, a soldier of another regiment had entered,
and stood silently awaiting his turn to be attended to. He was a
gaunt man, with want written legibly in the hollows of his face
and the dismal eagerness of his eye. He now came forward, and with
trembling hands unfolded an old gown, and handed it to the Jew.
"'Tis no good to me," said the latter, giving it back, after holding
it against the light; "nothing but holes."
"But my wife has no other," said the man: "'tis her last stitch of
clothes, except her petticoat and a blanket. I've brought everything
else to you."
The Jew shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands, in token
that he could not help it.
"I swear 'tis her last!" reiterated the man, as if he really fancied
this fact must give the garment as much value in the Jew's eyes as
in his own.
"I tell you I won't have it!" said the Jew, testily.
"Give me only a loaf for it, or but one pound of potatoes," said the
soldier: "'tis more than my wife and four children have had among
them for two days. Half-rations for one, among six of us, is too
hard to live."
"A pound of potatoes," said the Jew, "is worth four reals and
a-half--eighteenpence; your wife's gown is worth--nothing!"
"Then take this," said the man, beginning frantically to pull off
his uniform coat; "anything is better than starving."
The Jew laughed. "What!" said he, "you think I don't know better
than to buy a soldier's necessaries, eh? Ah, ah! no such a fool, I
think, my friend. What your captain say?--eh?"
The man struck his hand violently on the table. "Then give me--or
lend me," said he, "some food, much or little, and I'll work for you
every hour I'm off duty till you're satisfied. I will, Mr Lazaro, so
help me God!"
"I got plenty of men to work for me," said Lazaro; "don't want any
more. Come again, when you've got something to sell, my friend."
The man rolled up the gown without speaking, then lifted it over his
head, and dashed it into the furthest corner of the store. He was
hurrying from the place, when, as if unwilling to throw away his
last chance, he turned back, gathered it up, and, thrusting it under
his arm, quitted the store with lingering steps, as if he even yet
hoped to be called back. No such summons reached him, however; but,
immediately after he was gone, Esther rose and stole softly down the
stairs. She overtook him at the street-door opening from the court
before mentioned, and laid her hand on his arm. The man turned and
glared on her. "What!--he'll buy it, will he?" said he.
"Hush!" said Esther--"keep it for your poor wife. Look; I have no
money, but take these," and she placed in his hand two earrings
hastily detached from her ears.
The man stood looking at her for a space, as if stupified, without
closing his hand on the trinkets that lay on the palm; then,
suddenly rousing himself, he swore, with tears in his eyes, that
for this service he would do for her anything on earth she should
require from him; but she only begged him to go away at once, and
say nothing, lest her father should overhear the transaction, who
would certainly be angry with her for it.
Bags and his wife had stopt in a corner of the court, to pack
up their property in a commodious form for conveyance, and had
witnessed this scene in silence. As soon as the soldier had, in
compliance with Esther's entreaties, disappeared, Bags came forward.
"And your father would be angry, would he, my dear?" said he.
"Oh, very--oh, so angry! Please don't stop me," she said, trying to
pass him.
"And what'll ye give me not to tell him, now?" asked Mr Bags.
"Ain't ye got nothing for me?"
"No--oh, no--indeed, nothing. Do let me pass."
"Yes, you have; you've got this, I think," said Bags, snatching at
a silver-mounted comb glistening in her hair, which, thus loosened,
all fell down on her shoulders as she darted past him. "And now,"
said Mr Bags, inspecting his prize, "I think me and that 'ere
cheating Jew is quits for the silver fork. I'll allow it's plated
now."
CHAPTER III.
Early the next morning (the 12th of April) a rumour went through
the town that an English fleet was signalled as in sight. The news
roused the starving people like electricity. The pale spectres of
men that, on the previous day, had stalked so gauntly through the
dreary streets--the wretched, sinking women, and children careworn
as grandfathers--poured forth, with something like a natural light
in their hollow eyes, to witness the joyful spectacle. The sea-wall
of the city was, like the margin of a vast pool of Bethesda,
thronged with hopeful wretches awaiting the coming of the angel.
The streets were instantly deserted. Those who could not leave their
homes got on the housetops, but the great mass of the population
spread itself along the line-wall, the Grand Parade and Alameda,
and the heights skirting the chief slopes of the Rock. Moors and
Jews, Spaniards and English, citizens and soldiers, men, women,
and children, of all ages, grades, and nations, ranged themselves
indiscriminately wherever they could obtain a view of the sea.
For some time the wished-for sight was delayed by a thick fog that
spread itself across the Straits and the entrance of the bay. A
murmur rose from each successive rank of people that forced itself
into a front place on the line-wall. Terrible doubts flew about,
originating no one knew where, but gaining strength and confirmation
as they passed from mouth to mouth. On the summit of the Rock behind
them the signal for a fleet flew steadily from the mast at Middle
Hill; but still in this, as in all crowds, were some of little
faith, who were full of misgivings. Many rushed up to the signal
station, unable to bear the pain of the delay. My grandfather
noticed the Jew Lazaro among the throng, watching the event with an
anxious eye, though his anxiety was from the opposite cause to that
of most of the spectators. The arrival of supplies would at once
bring down the price of provisions, and rob him, for the present,
of his expected profits; and as each successive rumour obtained
credence with the crowd, his countenance brightened as their hopes
fell, and sank as they again emerged from despondency.
Not far from him was an old Genoese woman, wearing the quaint red
cloak, trimmed with black velvet, that old Genoese women usually
wear in Gibraltar. She hovered round the skirts of the crowd,
occasionally peering beneath an uplifted arm, or thrusting it
between two obstructing figures, to catch a glimpse, though it was
evident that her dim eyes would fail to discern the fleet when
it should come in view. Her thin shrivelled features, relieved
against her black hood, were positively wolfish from starvation.
She frequently drew one hand from beneath her cloak, and gazed at
something she held in it--then, muttering, she would again conceal
it. My grandfather's curiosity was roused. He drew near and watched
for the reappearance of the object that so engrossed her. It was a
blue mouldy crust of bread.
The wished-for spectacle was at length revealed. "As the sun became
more powerful," says Drinkwater, rising into positive poetry
with the occasion, "the fog gradually rose, _like the curtain of
a vast theatre_, discovering to the anxious garrison one of the
most beautiful and pleasing scenes it is possible to conceive. The
convoy, consisting of near a hundred vessels, were in a compact
body, led by several men-of-war--their sails just filled enough for
steerage, while the majority of the line-of-battle ships lay to
under the Barbary shore, having orders not to enter the bay, lest
the enemy should molest them with their fireships."
Then rose a great shout--at once the casting-off of long-pressing
anxiety and the utterance of delight. Happy tears streamed down
haggard faces overgrown with hair, and presently men turned to one
another, smiling in the face of a stranger neighbour as in that of
an old friend, while a joyful murmur, distilled from many languages,
rose upward. Assuredly, if blessings are of any avail, the soul of
Admiral Darby, who commanded the relieving fleet, is at this moment
in Paradise.
Friends and relations now began to search for one another in
the crowd, which broke quickly into knots, each contriving how
to enjoy together the plenty that was to descend upon them. My
grandfather's eye at this juncture was again attracted by the old
Genoese woman. When the crowd shouted, she screened her eyes with
her withered hand, and, with her nostril spread, her chin fallen, in
her eagerness gazed towards the sea--but presently shook her head,
discerning nothing. Then she plucked by the arm a joyful Spaniard.
"_Es verdad? Por Dios, es verdad?_" she cried; "_jura! jura!_"--(Is
it true? Swear by Heaven it is true.)
"_Si, si,_" said the Spaniard, pointing; "_es verdad_," ('tis true.)
"You may see them yourself."
Instantly the old woman, for the last time, drew forth her
treasured crust, and began to devour it, muttering, as she tore
away each mouthful, "_Mas mañana! mas mañana!_" (I shall have more
to-morrow--more to-morrow!)
After the crowd had partially dispersed, Owen was returning to
his quarters to breakfast, when, as he paused to open the door,
he heard a voice he thought he knew crying out in affright in the
rooms opposite, where Von Dessel resided. Presently the door of the
quarters was opened, and the flushed and frightened face of Esther
Lazaro appeared, as she struggled to escape from Von Dessel, who
held her arm.
"Señor, señor, speak to the gentleman!" she cried to Owen.
"Leetle foolish girl," said Von Dessel, grinning a smile on seeing
him; "she frightens at nothing. Come in, child"--trying to shut the
door.
"Why don't you let her alone?" said Owen; "don't you see she doesn't
like you?"
"Pouf!" said the captain. "We all have trouble with them
sometimes--you must know that well."
"No, by Jupiter!" cried Frank Owen. "If I couldn't gain them
willingly, they might go to the devil for me. But you hurt her--pray
let her go--you must indeed."
"Do you mind your own affair," said the captain, "and don't meddle;"
and, exerting his strength, he drew Esther in, and partially
succeeded in shutting the door--she calling the while again on Owen
to help her. Frank stepped forward, and, putting his foot against
the door, sent it into the room, causing Captain Von Dessel, who was
behind it, to stagger back with some violence, and to quit his hold
of Esther, who ran down stairs.
"Very good, sir," said the captain, stalking grimly out of his room,
pale with rage. "You have thought right to interfere with me, and to
insult me. By Gott! I will teach you better, young man. Shall we say
in one hour, sir, in the Fives' Court?"
Owen nodded. "At your pleasure," said he, and, entering his own
quarters, shut the door.
Meanwhile my grandfather walked about with the telescope he had
brought with him to look after the fleet under his arm, enjoying the
unusual sight of happy faces around him. And he has remarked it as
a singular feature of humanity, that this prospect of relief from
physical want inspired a far more deep and universal joy than he
had witnessed in any public rejoicings arising from such causes as
loyalty or patriotism evinced at a coronation or the news of a great
victory; and hence my grandfather takes occasion to express a fear
that human nature, as well as other nature, is, except among the
rarer class of souls, more powerfully and generally influenced by
its animal propensities than by more refined causes.
He was so engrossed with the philanthropic pursuit of enjoying the
joy of the multitude, and the philosophic one of extracting moral
reflections therefrom, that he quite forgot he had not breakfasted.
He was just beginning to be reminded of the circumstance by a
feeling of hollowness in the region of the stomach, and to turn
his steps homeward, when a light hand was laid on his arm. My
grandfather turned, and beheld the face of the young Jewess looking
wistfully in his.
She began at first to address him in Spanish--the language she spoke
most naturally; but, quickly perceiving her mistake on hearing the
extraordinary jargon in which he replied, (for it is a singular
fact that nobody but Carlota, who taught him, could understand my
grandfather's Spanish,) she exchanged it for his own tongue. She
told him in a few hurried words of the quarrel Owen had incurred on
her account with Von Dessel, and of the challenge she had overheard
given by the latter, beseeching the major to hasten to prevent the
result.
"In the Fives' Court! in an hour!" said my grandfather. "When did
this happen?"
Esther thought nearly an hour ago--she had been almost so long
seeking my grandfather.
"I'll go, child--I'll go at once," said the Major. "With Von Dessel,
too, as if he could find nobody else to quarrel with but the best
swordsman in the garrison. 'Souls and bodies' quoted my grandfather,
'hath he divorced three.'"
With every stride he took, the Major's uneasiness was augmented. At
any time his anxiety would have been extreme while peril threatened
Frank; but now, when he was calculating on him as a companion
at many a well-spread table, when they might forget their past
miseries, it peculiarly affected him.
"To think," muttered my grandfather, "that these two madmen should
choose a time when everybody is going to be made so happy, by
getting plenty to eat, to show their gratitude to Providence by
cutting one another's throats!"
The danger to Owen was really formidable; for, though a respectable
swordsman, he was no unusual proficient in the graceful art, while
his opponent was not only, as my grandfather had said, the best
swordsman in the garrison, but perhaps the best at that time in the
army. As a student in Germany he had distinguished himself in some
sanguinary duels; and since his arrival in Gibraltar, a Spanish
gentleman, a very able fencer, had fallen beneath his arm.
"God grant," said my grandfather to himself, as he neared the Fives'
Court, "that we may settle this without the perdition of souls.
Frank, my dear boy, we could better spare a better man!"
On attempting to enter the Fives' Court he was stopped by the
master, posted at the door. "It was engaged," he said, "for a
private match."
"Ay, ay," said my grandfather, pushing past him; "a pretty match,
indeed! Ay, ay--pray God we can stop it!"
Finding the inner door locked, the Major, who was well acquainted
with the locality--for, when he had nothing else particular to
do, he would sometimes mark for the players for a rubber or
two--ascended the stairs to the gallery.
About the centre of the court stood the combatants. All
preliminaries had been gone through--for they were stripped to their
shirts--and the seconds (one a German, the adjutant of Hardenberg's
regiment--the other, one Lieutenant Rushton, an old hand at these
affairs, and himself a fire-eater) stood by, each with a spare sword
in his hand. In a corner was the German regimental surgeon, his
apparatus displayed on the floor, ready for an emergency. Rushton
fully expected Owen to fall, and only hoped he might escape without
a mortal wound. Von Dessel himself seemed of the same opinion,
standing square and firm as a tower, scarcely troubling himself to
assume an attitude, but easy and masterly withal. Both contempt and
malice were expressed for his antagonist in his half-shut eyes and
sardonic twist of the corners of his mouth.
"Owen, Owen, my boy!" shouted my grandfather, rushing to the front
of the gallery, and leaning over, as the swords crossed--"stop, for
God's sake. You mustn't fight that swashbuckler! They say he hath
been fencer to the Sophy," roared the Major, in the words of Sir
Toby Belch.
The combatants just turned their heads for a moment to look at the
interrupter, and again crossed swords.
Immediately on finding his remonstrance disregarded, the Major
descended personally into the arena--not by the ordinary route of
the stairs, but the shorter one of a perpendicular drop from the
gallery, not effected with the lightness of a feathered Mercury. But
the clatter of his descent was lost in the concussion of a discharge
of artillery that shook the walls. Instantly the air was alive
with shot and hissing shells; and before the echoes of the first
discharge had ceased, the successive explosion of the shells in the
air, and the crashing of chimneys, shattered doors, and falling
masonry, increased the uproar. One shell burst in the court, filling
it with smoke. My grandfather felt, for a minute, rather dizzy with
the shock. When the smoke cleared, by which time he had partially
recovered himself, the first object that caught his eye was Von
Dessel lying on the pavement, and the doctor stooping over him. The
only other person hurt was Rushton, a great piece of the skin of
whose forehead, detached by a splinter, was hanging over his right
eye. Von Dessel had sustained a compound fracture of the thigh,
while the loss of two fingers from his right hand had spoiled his
thrust in tierce for ever.
"What can be the matter?" said my grandfather, looking upward, as a
second flight of missiles hurtled overhead.
"Matter enough," quoth Rushton, mopping the blood from his eye with
his handkerchief; "those cursed devils of Spaniards are bombarding
the town."
The Major went up to Owen, and squeezed his hand. "We won't abuse
the Spaniards for all that," said he--"they've saved your life, my
boy."
CHAPTER IV.
Enraged at seeing their blockade evaded by the arrival of Darby's
fleet, the Spaniards revenged themselves by directing such a fire
upon Gibraltar, from their batteries in the Neutral Ground, as in
a short time reduced the town to a mass of ruins. This misfortune
was rendered the more intolerable to the besieged, as it came in
the moment of exultation and general thanksgiving. While words of
congratulation were passing from mouth to mouth, the blow descended,
and "turned to groans their roundelay."
The contrast between the elation of the inhabitants when my
grandfather entered the Fives' Court, and their universal
consternation and despair when he quitted it, was terrible. The
crowd that had a few minutes before so smilingly and hopefully
entered their homes, now fled from them in terror. Again the
streets were thronged by the unhappy people, who began to believe
themselves the sport of some powerful and malevolent demon. Whole
families, parents, children, and servants, rushed together into
the streets, making their way to the south to escape the missiles
that pursued them. Some bore pieces of furniture snatched up in
haste, and apparently seized because they came first to hand; some
took the chairs they had been sitting on; one man my grandfather
noticed bearing away with difficulty the leaf of a mahogany table,
leaving behind the legs which should have supported it; and a woman
had a crying child in one hand, and in the other a gridiron, still
reeking with the fat of some meat she had been cooking. Rubbish
from the houses began to strew the streets; and here and there
a ragged breach in a wall rent by the cannon afforded a strange
incongruous glimpse of the room inside, with its mirrors, tables,
and drapery, just as the inhabitants left them. Armed soldiers
were hastening to their different points of assembly, summoned by
bugles that resounded shrilly amid the din, and thrusting their way
unceremoniously through the impeding masses of fugitives.
The house of the Jew Lazaro was one of the first that was seriously
injured. The blank wall of the great warehouse before mentioned,
that faced the street, had, either from age or bad masonry, long
before exhibited several cracks. A large segment, bounded by
two of these cracks, had been knocked away by a shot, and the
superincumbent mass falling in consequence, the great store, and all
its hoarded treasures, appeared through the chasm.
The Jew's instincts had, at first, led him to save himself by
flight. But, on returning timorously to look after his property, the
sight of the ruined wall, and the unprotected hoards on which he had
so securely reckoned as the source of wealth, obliterated in his
mind, for the time, all sense of personal danger. Seeing a party of
soldiers issuing from a wine-house near, he eagerly besought them to
assist him in removing his property to a place of safety, promising
to reward them largely for their risk and trouble.
One of the soldiers thus appealed to was Mr Bags.
"Ho, ho!" said Mr Bags; "here's a chance--here's a pleasure,
comrades. We can help Mr Lazaro, who is always so good to us--this
here Jewish gentleman, that gives such liberal prices for our
things. Certainly--we'll remove 'em all, and not charge him nothing.
Oh--oh--ah!" And, to give point to his irony, Mr Bags distorted his
face hideously, and winked upon his friends.
The idea of giving Lazaro any assistance was considered a capital
joke, and caused a great deal of mirth as they walked towards the
store, to which the Jew eagerly led the way.
"If there's anything good to eat or drink in the store, we may
remove some of it, though it won't be on our backs, eh, boys?" said
Bags, as he stept in advance, over a heap of rubbish, into the store.
"These first--these, my friends," cried the Jew, going up to a row
of barrels, standing a little apart from the crowded masses of
articles.
"Oh, these first, eh?" said Bags; "they're the best, be they? Thank
you, Mr Lazaro; we'll see what's in 'em;" and, taking up a gimlet
that lay near, he proceeded to bore a hole in one of the barrels,
desiring a friend, whom he addressed as Tim, to tap the next one.
"Thieves!" screamed the Jew, on witnessing this proceeding, seizing
Bags' arm, "leave my store--go out--let my goods alone!" Bags lent him
a shove that sent him into a corner, and perceiving liquor flowing
from the hole he had drilled, applied his mouth to the orifice.
"Brandy," said he, as he paused for breath, "real Cognac. Comrades,
here's luck to that 'ere shot that showed us the way in;" and he
took another diligent pull at the hole.
Meantime his comrades had not been idle; other barrels were opened,
and their contents submitted to a critical inspection.
The Jew tried various modes to induce them to relinquish their
booty: first threats--then offers of reward--then cajolery; and,
at last, attempted to interpose and thrust them from their spoil.
A shot from the enemy entering the store, enfiladed a long line of
barrels, scattering the staves and their contents. The place was
instantly flooded with liquor--wine, molasses, spirits, and oil,
ran in a mingled stream, soaking the _débris_ of biscuit and salt
provisions that strewed the floor. One soldier was struck dead, and
Mr Bags only escaped destruction by the lucky accident of having his
head at that moment apart from the barrel which had engrossed his
attention, and which was knocked to pieces.
The Jew, partly stunned by a wound in the forehead from the splinter
of a barrel, and partly in despair at the destruction of his
property, came to the entrance of the store, seating himself among
the rubbish. Other plunderers speedily followed the example of the
marauding soldiers, but he made no attempt to stop them as they
walked past him. My grandfather, passing at the time on his way
home, was horrified at the sight of him. Flour from a splintered
barrel had been scattered over his face, and blood from the wound
in his forehead, trickling down, had clotted it on his cheeks and
scanty beard, giving him an aspect at once appalling and disgusting.
His daughter had waited at the door of the Fives' Court till she
saw Owen come forth in safety, and had then availed herself of
the protection of the Major as far as her own home. Shrieking at
the dismal sight, she sprang forward and threw herself before the
Jew, casting her arms around him. This seemed to rouse him. He
arose--looked back into the store; and then, as if goaded by the
sight of the wreck into intolerable anguish, he lifted his clenched
hands above his head, uttering a sentence of such fearful blasphemy,
that a devout Spaniard, who was emerging from the store with some
plunder, struck him on the mouth. He never heeded the blow, but
continued to rave, till, suddenly overcome by loss of blood and
impotent rage, he dropt senseless on the ground.
My grandfather, calling some soldiers of his regiment who were
passing, desired them to convey him to the hospital at the South
Barracks, and, again taking the terrified and weeping Esther under
his protection, followed to see the unfortunate Jew cared for.
At the various parades that day Mr Bags was reported absent, being
in fact engaged in pursuits of a much more interesting nature than
his military duties. A vast field of interprise was opened to him
and other adventurous spirits, of which they did not fail to avail
themselves, in the quantity of property of all kinds abandoned by
the owners, in houses and shops where locks and bolts were no longer
a protection; and although the firing, which ceased for an hour
or two in the middle of the day, was renewed towards evening and
continued with great fury, the ardour of acquisition by no means
abated.
About midnight a sentry on the heights of Rosia (the name given
to a portion of the rugged cliffs towards the south and near the
hospital) observed, in the gloom, a figure lurking about one of the
batteries, and challenged it. Receiving no answer, he threatened to
fire, when Bags came forward reluctantly, with a bundle in his hand.
"Hush, Bill," said Bags, on finding the sentry was a personal
friend--"don't make a row: it's only me, Bags--Tongs, you know," he
added, to insure his recognition.
"What the devil are you doing there, you fool?" asked his friend in
a surly tone--"don't you know the picquet's after you?"
"I've got some little things here that I want to lay by, where
nobody won't see 'em, in case I'm catched," returned Bags. "Don't
you take no notice of me, Bill, and I'll be off directly."
"What have ye got?" asked Bill, whose curiosity was awakened by the
proceedings of his friend.
"Some little matters that I picked up in the town," returned Bags.
"Pity you should be on guard to-day, Bill--there was some pretty
pickings. I'll save something for you, Bill," added Bags, in an
unaccountable access of generosity.
The sentry, however, who was a person in every way worthy of the
friendship of Mr Bags, expressed no gratitude for the considerate
offer, but began poking at the bundle with his bayonet.
"Hands off, Bill," said Bags, "they won't abear touching."
"Let's see 'em," said Bill.
"Not a bit on it," said Bags; "they ain't aworth looking at."
"Suppose I was to call the sergeant of the guard," said Bill.
"You wouldn't do such a action?" said Bags, in a tone strongly
expressive of disgust at such baseness. "No, no, Bill, you ain't
that sort of fellow, _I'm_ sure."
"It's my dooty," said the sentry, placing the butt of his musket on
the ground, and leaning his elbow on the muzzle. "You see that what
you said, Tongs, was very true, about its being hard upon me to be
carrying about this here damnable weppin" (slapping the barrel of
the musket) "all day for fourpence ha'penny, while you are making
your fortin. It is, Tongs, d--d hard."
"Never mind; there'll be plenty left to-morrow," said Bags in a
consolatory tone.
"What shall we say, now, if I lets ye hide it?" said Bill, pointing
to the bundle. "Half-shares?"
"This ain't like a friend, Bill," returned Tongs, highly disgusted
with this ungenerous proposal. "Nobody ever knowed me interfere
with a comrade when I was on sentry. How long ago is it since I let
ye stay in my box an hour, till ye was sober enough to walk into
barracks, when I was sentry at the gate? Why, the whole bundle ain't
worth eighteenpence--and I've worked hard for it."
"Half-shares?" reiterated Bill, not melted in the least by the
memory of ancient benefits.
"No, by G--!" said Bags in great wrath.
"Serg----," began Bill in an elevated voice, porting his arms at the
same time.
"Stop!" said Bags; "don't call the sergeant. Half is better nor
nothing, if ye're going to behave like that. We'll say half, then."
"Ah," said Bill, returning to his former position--"I thought we
should agree. And now let's see 'em, Tongs."
Muttering still his disapprobation of this unworthy treatment, Bags
put his bundle on the stone embrasure of the battery, and began to
unfold it.
Eighteenpence was certainly a low valuation. Bags appeared to have
visited a jeweller's shop. Watches, rings, bracelets, gold chains,
and brooches glittered on the dingy surface of the handkerchief.
"My eye!" said Bill, unable to repress a low laugh of delight--"why,
we'll turn bankers when we've sold 'em. Tongs and Co., eh?" said
Bill with considerable humour.
Bags, however, told him he was altogether mistaken in his
estimate--most of the things were pinchbeck, he said, and the stones
all glass; and, to save Bill any trouble, he offered to dispose of
them himself to the best possible advantage, and bring his partner
his share of the proceeds, which would certainly be at least
ninepence, and might perhaps be half-a-dollar. This arrangement
did not, however, meet the approbation of the astute William, who
insisted on dividing the spoils by lot. But here, again, there was
a slight misunderstanding, for both fixed their affections on a
gigantic watch, which never could have been got into any modern
pocket, and whose face was ornamented with paintings from the
heathen mythology. Both of them supposed, from the size and the
brilliancy of the colours, that this must be of immense value.
Finding they were not likely to come to a speedy arrangement on
this point, they agreed to postpone the division of the spoils till
morning.
"I'll tell ye where to put it, Bags," said Bill. "These here guns in
this battery haven't been fired for years, nor ain't likely to be,
though they loaded 'em the other day. Take out the wad of this one,
and put in the bundle."
Bags approved of the idea, withdrew the wad from the muzzle of the
gun, put in the bundle as far as his arm would reach, and then
replaced the wad.
"Honour bright?" said Bags, preparing to depart.
"Honour bright," returned Bill; and Bags disappeared.
Nevertheless he did not feel sufficient confidence in his
confederate's integrity to justify his quitting the place and
leaving him to his own devices. He thought Bill might perhaps avail
himself of his absence to remove the treasure, or be guilty of some
other treachery. He therefore crept back again softly, till he got
behind a crag from whence he had a full view of the battery.
For some time Bill walked sternly to and fro on his post. Bags
observed, however, that he always included the gun where the deposit
lay in his perambulations, which became shorter and shorter. At last
he halted close to it, laid down his musket against the parapet,
and, approaching the muzzle of the gun, took out the wad.
At this moment a neighbouring sentry gave an alarm. The guard
turned out, and Bill, hastily replacing the wad, resumed his arms
and looked about for the cause of the alarm. About a mile out in
the bay several red sparks were visible. As he looked there were a
corresponding number of flashes, and then a whistling of shot high
overhead told that the guns from which they had been discharged had
been laid too high. The Spanish gunboats were attacking the south.
The drums beat to arms, and in a few minutes the battery was manned
with artillerymen. To the inconceivable horror of Bags and Bill, the
whole of the guns in the battery were altered in position, and a
gunner took post at the rear of each with a lighted portfire. Then
a flushed face might be seen, by the blue light of the portfires,
rising from behind a neighbouring piece of rock, the eyes staring,
the mouth open in agonised expectation.
"Number one--fire!" said the officer in command, to the gunner in
rear of the gun in which Mr Bags had invested his capital.
"No, no!" shouted Bags, rising wildly from behind the rock.
The portfire touched the vent--there was a discharge that seemed to
rend Mr Bags's heartstrings and blow off the roof of his skull--and
the clever speculation on which he had counted for making his
fortune ended, like many others, in smoke. He gazed for a moment out
in the direction of the flash, as if he expected to see the watches
and rings gleaming in the air; then he turned and disappeared in the
darkness.
After a few ineffectual discharges, the Spaniards seemed to become
aware of the badness of their aim, and to take measures to amend it.
Several shot struck the hospital; and some shells falling through
the roof, exploded in the very wards where the sick lay. The unhappy
Jew, Lazaro, lying in a feverish and semi-delirious state from his
former hurt and agitation, was again struck by a splinter of a
shell which burst in the ward where the Major's care had seen him
deposited, blowing up the ceiling and part of the wall. In the midst
of the confusion, the Jew, frantic with terror, rushed unrestrained
from the building, followed only by his daughter, who was watching
by his bed. He was not missed for some time, and the attempts to
discover him, made after his disappearance became known, were of no
avail. A neighbouring sentry had seen a white figure, followed by
another crying after it, dash across the road and disappear in the
bushes; but the search made about the vicinity of the spot failed in
detecting any traces of them, and those who troubled themselves to
think of the matter at all, surmised that they had fallen into the
sea.
CHAPTER V.
For some pages, my grandfather's note-book is filled with memoranda
of singular casualties from the enemy's shot, wonderful escapes,
and hasty moments of quietude and attempted comfort snatched "even
in the cannon's mouth." The fire from the Spanish batteries shortly
reduced the town to ruins, and the gunboats at night precluded all
hope of peace and oblivion after the horrors of the day. Dreams, in
which these horrors were reproduced, were interrupted by still more
frightful nocturnal realities. One of the curious minor evils that
my grandfather notices, as resulting from an incessant cannonade,
to those not engaged in it actively enough to withdraw their
attention from the noise, is the extreme irritation produced by its
long continuance, amounting, in persons of nervous and excitable
temperament, to positive exasperation.
Some of the numerous incidents he chronicles are also recorded by
Drinkwater, especially that of a man who recovered after being
almost knocked to pieces by the bursting of a shell. "His head was
terribly fractured, his left arm broken in two places, one of his
legs shattered, the skin and muscles torn off his right hand, the
middle finger broken to pieces, and his whole body most severely
bruised and marked with gunpowder. He presented so horrid an object
to the surgeons, that they had not the smallest hopes of saving his
life, and were at a loss what part to attend to first. He was that
evening trepanned; a few days afterwards his leg was amputated,
and other wounds and fractures dressed. Being possessed of a most
excellent constitution, nature performed wonders in his favour,
and in eleven weeks the cure was completely effected. His name,"
continues Mr Drinkwater, with what might be deemed irony--if the
worthy historian ever indulged in that figure of rhetoric--"is
Donald Ross, and he" (_i. e._ the remaining fragment of the said
Donald Ross) "now enjoys his sovereign's bounty in a pension of
ninepence a-day for life." One might almost suppose that Mr Hume had
some hand in affixing the gratuity; but in those days there was a
king who knew not Joseph.
My grandfather appears to have had also an adventure of his own.
During a cessation of the cannonade, he was sitting one morning on
a fragment of rock, in the garden behind his quarters, reading his
favourite author. The firing suddenly recommenced, and a long-ranged
shell, striking the ground at some distance, rolled towards him.
He glanced half-absently at the hissing missile; and whether he
actually did not for a moment recollect its character, or whether,
as was often the case on such occasions, the imminence of the danger
paralysed him, he sat immovably watching it as it fizzed within a
couple of yards of him. Unquestionably in another three seconds
my grandfather's earthly tabernacle would have been resolved into
its original atoms, had not the intrepid Carlota (who was standing
near gathering flowers to stick in her hair) darted on him, and,
seizing him by the arm, dragged him behind a wall. They were scarce
under shelter when the shell exploded--the shock laying them both
prostrate, though unhurt but for a few bruises--while the stone
on which the Major had been sitting was shivered to atoms. To the
description of this incident in the Major's journal are appended a
pious reflection and a short thanksgiving, which, being entirely of
a personal nature, I omit.
The stores landed from the fleet were in a very precarious position.
Owing to the destruction of the buildings, there were no means of
placing them where they might be sheltered at once from the fire of
the enemy and from rain. Some were piled under sails spread out as
a sort of roof to protect them, and some, that were not likely to
sustain immediate injury from the damp air of such a depository,
were ordered to be conveyed to St Michael's Cave.
This cave is one of the most curious features of the Rock. Its
mouth--an inconsiderable opening in the slope of the mountain--is
situated many hundred feet above the sea. Within, it expands into a
spacious hall, the roof, invisible in the gloom, supported by thick
pillars formed by the petrified droppings of the rock. From this
principal cavern numerous smaller ones branch off, leading, by dark,
broken, and precipitous passages, to unknown depths. Along one of
these, according to tradition, Governor O'Hara advanced farther than
ever man had gone before, and left his sword in the inmost recess to
be recovered by the next explorer who should be equally adventurous.
But whether it is that the tradition is unfounded, or that the
weapon has been carried off by some gnome, or that the governor's
exploit is as yet unrivalled, the sword has never been brought to
light.
For the duty of placing the stores here, the name of Lieutenant
Owen appeared in the garrison orders. My grandfather having nothing
particular to do, and being anxious to escape as much as possible
for a short time from the din of the bombardment, offered to
accompany Frank in the execution of this duty.
The day was dark and gloomy, and the steep path slippery from rain,
so that the mules bearing the stores toiled with difficulty up the
ascent. At first, my grandfather and Owen indulged in cheerful
conversation; but shortness of breath soon reduced the Major to
monosyllables, and the latter part of the journey was accomplished
in silence. Frequently the Major paused and faced about, at once
to look at the prospect and to take breath. Far below, on his
right, was seen the southern end of the town, consisting partly
of a heap of ruins, with here and there a rafter sticking out of
the mass, partly of roofless walls, among which was occasionally
heard the crashing of shot; but the guns that discharged them, as
well as those that replied from the town, were invisible from
this point. Directly beneath him the ground afforded a curious
spectacle, being covered with tents, huts, and sheds, of all sorts
and sizes, where the outcast population of the ruined town obtained
a precarious and insufficient shelter. The only building visible
which still retained its former appearance was the convent--the
governor's residence--which was protected by bomb-proofs, and where
working-parties were constantly engaged in repairing the injuries.
The bay, once thickly wooded with masts and dotted with sails, was
now blank and cheerless; only the enemy's cruisers were visible,
lying under the opposite shore of Spain.
Owen and my grandfather arrived at the mouth of the cave somewhat in
advance of the convoy. To their surprise a smoke was issuing from
it; and, as they approached nearer, their nostrils were greeted by
an odour at once savoury and spicy. Going softly up they looked in.
Mr Bags and a couple of friends were seated round a fire, over which
was roasting a small pig, scientifically butchered and deprived of
his hair, and hung up by the heels. The fire, in the absence of
other fuel, (of which there was an extreme scarcity in Gibraltar,)
was supplied by bundles of cinnamon plundered from the store of some
grocer, and, as the flame waxed low, Mr Bags took a fresh bundle
from a heap of that fragrant spice by his side, and laid it on the
embers. Mrs Bags was occupied in basting the pig with lard, which
she administered from time to time with an iron ladle.
Presently Mr Bags tapped on the pig's back with his knife. It sent
forth a crisp crackling sound, that made my grandfather's mouth
water, and caused Mr Bags to become impatient.
"Polly," said he, "it's my opinion it's been done these three
minutes. I can't wait much longer."
And he cast a glance at the other two soldiers, (in whom, as well as
in Bags, Owen recognised men of his company who had been reported
absent for some days, and were supposed to have gone over to the
enemy,) to ascertain if their opinions tallied with his own on this
point.
"It can't be no better," said one, taking hold of the pig's neck
between his finger and thumb, which he afterwards applied to his
mouth.
"I can't abear my meat overdone," said the third. "What I say is,
let them that likes to wait, wait, and let them that wants to begin,
begin." So saying, he rose, and was about to attack the ribs of the
porker with his knife.
"Do stop a minute--that's a dear," said Mrs Bags; "another bundle of
cinnament will make it parfect. I'll give ye something to stay your
stomach;" and stepping to a nook in the wall of the cavern, where
stood a large barrel, she filled a pewter measure, and handed it to
the impatient advocate for underdone pork, who took a considerable
dram, and passed it to his companions.
"Cinnament's better with pork nor with most things," said Bags. "It
spoils goose, because it don't agree with the inions, and it makes
fowls wishy-washy; but it goes excellent with pig."
"What's left in the larder?" asked one of the party.
"There's a week's good eating yet," said Mrs Bags, "and we _might_
make it do ten days or a fortnight."
"Well!" said the other, "they may say what they like about sieges,
but this is the jolliest time ever _I_ had."
"It's very well by day," said Bags, "but the nights is cold, and the
company of that ghost ain't agreeable--I seed it again last night."
"Ah!" said his friend, "what was it like, Tongs?"
"Something white," returned Bags in an awful whisper, "with a
ghost's eyes. You may allays know a ghost by the eyes. I was just
rising up, and thinking about getting a drink, for my coppers was
hot, when it comes gliding up from that end of the cave. I spoke to
you, and then I couldn't see it no more, because it was varnished."
"Ghosts always varnishes if you speak," said Mrs Bags. "But never
mind the spirit now--let's look after the flesh," added the lady,
who possessed a fund of native pleasantry: "the pig's done to a
turn."
At this interesting juncture, and just as they were about to fall
to, the footsteps of the approaching mules struck on their ears.
Owen went to meet the party, and hastily selecting six men from it,
advanced, and desired them to secure the astounded convivialists.
On recovering from their first astonishment, Bags begged Owen would
overlook the offence; they were only, he pleaded, having a little
spree--times had been hard lately. Mrs Bags, as usual, displayed
great eloquence, though not much to the purpose. She seemed to have
some idea that an enumeration of the gentlemen's families she had
lived in, and the high estimation in which she had been held in
all, would really tell powerfully in favour of the delinquents, and
persevered accordingly, till they were marched off in custody of the
escort, when she made a final appeal to my grandfather, as the last
gentleman whose family she had lived in--with what advantage to the
household the reader knows. The Major, who could not forgive the
roasting of his ham, called her, in reply, a "horrible woman," but,
at the same time, whispered to Owen that he hoped the fellows would
not be severely punished. "If we had caught them after dinner," said
he, "I shouldn't have pitied them so much."
"Never mind them," said Owen; "let us proceed to business. We must
select the driest spot we can find to put the stores in."
[Here, by way of taking leave of Mr Bags, I may remark, that he
narrowly escaped being hanged as a plunderer--failing which, he was
sentenced by a court-martial to receive a number of lashes, which I
refrain from specifying, because it would certainly make the hair of
a modern humanitarian turn white with horror.]
"Come along, Major," said Owen; "perhaps we may find more of these
scoundrels in the course of our researches."
The Major did not move; he was earnestly regarding the carcase of
the pig, that steamed hissing above the embers.
"Queer idea that of the cinnamon fire," said he. "I wonder how the
meat tastes."
Owen did not hear him, having walked forward.
"Have you got a knife about you, Frank?" said the Major. "Do you
know I have a curious desire to ascertain the flavour. It may be a
feature in cookery worth knowing."
Owen had not a knife, nor had any of the men, but one of them
suggested that the Major's sword would answer the purpose.
"To be sure," said the Major. "A good idea! I don't see why
swords shouldn't be turned into carving-knives as well as into
pruning-hooks." So saying, he drew it from the sheath, and,
straddling across the fire, detached a crisp brown mouthful from the
pig's ribs, and putting a little salt on it, he conveyed it to his
mouth.
"Excellent!" cried the Major. "I give you my word of honour, Owen,
'tis excellent! The cinnamon gives it a sort of a ----"
Here a second and larger mouthful interrupted the criticism.
"It must be very near lunch-time," said the Major, pausing, sword
in hand, when he had swallowed it; then, pretending to look at his
watch--"Bless me, it only wants half-an-hour of it. Do you think
this business will take you long, Owen?"
"About a couple of hours," said Owen.
"Ah, why, there you see," returned the Major, "we shan't get home
till long past lunch-time. I really don't see why we shouldn't take
a snack now. Nothing can be better than that pig. I only wish the
woman had dressed my dinner half as well. Corporal Hodson, would you
oblige me with a piece of that biscuit near you?" And, detaching a
large fragment of pork, he placed it on the biscuit, and sprinkling
it with pepper and salt, which condiments had not been forgotten in
the gastronomic arrangements of Mr Bags, he proceeded to follow Owen
into the interior of the cave, taking huge bites as he went.
The path slopes at first steeply downward from the mouth to the
interior of the cavern, where it becomes more level. Light being
admitted only at the entrance, the gloom of the interior is almost
impenetrable to the eye. The men had brought torches to assist them
in their work, and, a suitable spot having been selected, these were
stuck on different points and abutments of the rocky wall, when the
party proceeded to unload the mules at the entrance, conveying their
burdens into the cave.
In the midst of the bustle and noise attending the operation, the
little dog given by Esther to Carlota, which had that morning
followed the Major, to whom it had speedily attached itself, began
barking and howling dismally in a dark recess behind one of the
great natural pillars before spoken of. As the noise continued,
intermixed with piteous whinings, one of the men took a torch from
the wall, and stepped forward into the darkness, to see what ailed
the animal. Presently he cried out that "there was a man there."
My grandfather, who was next him, immediately followed, and five
paces brought him to the spot. The soldier who held the torch was
stooping, and holding it over a figure that lay on the ground on its
back. In the unshaven, blood-stained countenance, my grandfather, at
first, had some difficulty in recognising Lazaro the Jew. Some fiery
splashes of pitch from the torch dropping at the moment on his bare
throat, produced no movement, though, had he been living, they must
have scorched him to the quick.
On the body was nothing but the shirt he wore the night of his
flight from the hospital, but his legs were wrapt in a woman's
dress. Across his breast, on her face, lay Esther, in her white
under-garments--for the gown that wrapt the Jew's legs was hers. The
glare of the torch was bright and red on the two prostrate figures,
and on the staring appalled countenance of the man who held it--the
group forming a glowing spot in the vast, sombre, vaulted space,
where dim gleams of light were caught and repeated on projecting
masses of rock, more and more faintly, till all was bounded by
darkness.
Years afterwards my grandfather would sometimes complain of having
been revisited, in dreams of the night, by that ghastly piece of
Rembrandt painting.
The rest quickly flocked to the spot, and Esther was lifted and
found to breathe, though the Jew was stiff and cold. Some diluted
spirit, from the cellar of Bags, being poured down her throat she
revived a little, when my grandfather caused two of the men to bear
her carefully to his house; and the body of the Jew being wrapt in a
piece of canvass, was placed on a mule and conveyed to the hospital
for interment.
Medical aid restored Esther to consciousness, and she told how they
came to be found in the cave.
Her father, on leaving the hospital, had fled by chance, as she
thought, to this cave, for he did not reach it by the usual path,
but climbed, in his delirious fear, up the face of the rock, and she
had followed him as well as she could, keeping his white figure in
sight. They had both lain exhausted in the cave till morning, when,
finding that her father slept, she was on the point of leaving him
to seek assistance. But, unhappily, before she could quit the place,
Bags and his associates entered from their plundering expedition
into the town, and, frightened at their drunken language, and
recognising in Bags the man who had robbed her, she had crept back
to her concealment. The party of marauders never quitted the cavern
from the moment of establishing themselves in it. They spent the
day in eating, drinking, singing songs, and sometimes quarrelling.
Twice, at night, she ventured forth; but she always found one of
them asleep across the entrance, so that she could not pass without
waking him, and once one of them started up, and seemed about to
pursue her--doubtless Bags, on the occasion when he thought he saw
a ghost. Nevertheless, she had mustered courage twice to take some
fragments of food that were lying near the fire, leaving each time a
piece of money in payment; and she had also taken a lighted candle,
the better to ascertain her father's situation. He had never spoken
to her since the first night of their coming, and, during all those
dark and weary hours, (for they were three nights and two days in
the cavern,) she had remained by him listening to his incoherent
mutterings and moans. The candle had showed her that he had lost
much blood, from the wound in his forehead breaking out afresh, as
well as from the other received in the hospital, though the latter
was but a flesh wound. These she had bandaged with shreds of her
dress, and had tried to give him some of the nourishment she had
procured, but could force nothing on him except some water. Some
hours, however--how long she did not know, but it was during the
night--before Owen's party found her, the Jew had become sensible.
He told her he was dying; and, unconscious of where he was, desired
her to fetch a light. This she had procured in the same way as
before, lighting the candle at the embers of the fire round which
Bags and his friends reposed. Then the Jew, who seemed to imagine
himself still in the hospital, bid her say whom, among those she
knew in Gibraltar, she would wish to have charge of her when he was
no more; and, on her mentioning Carlota, had desired her to take pen
and paper and write his will as he should dictate it. Pen she had
none, but she had a pencil and a scrap of paper in her pocket, and
with these she wrote, leaning over to catch the whispered syllables
that he with difficulty articulated.
From this paper it would appear that the Jew had some fatherly
feelings for Esther concealed beneath his harsh deportment towards
her. I can describe the will, for I have often seen it. It is
written on a piece of crumpled writing-paper, about the size of a
bank-note, very stained and dirty. It is written in Spanish; and
in it the Jew entreats "the Señora, the wife of Sr. Don Flinder,
English officer, to take charge of his orphan child, in requital
whereof he leaves her the half of whatsoever property he dies
possessed of, the other half to be disposed of for the benefit of
his daughter." Then follows a second paragraph, inserted at Esther's
own desire, to the effect that, should she not survive, the whole
was to be inherited by the aforesaid Señora. It is dated "Abril
1781," and signed in a faint, straggling hand, quite different from
the clear writing of the rest--"JOSÉ LAZARO."
Esther would now have gone, at all hazards, to obtain assistance,
but the Jew clutched her arm, and would not permit her to quit him.
He breathed his last shortly after, and Esther remembered nothing
more till she came to herself in the Major's house. The paper was
found in her bosom.
Some days after this event my grandfather went with Owen into the
town, during a temporary lull in the enemy's firing, to visit the
house of Lazaro, in order to ascertain whether anything valuable
was left that might be converted to Esther's benefit. They had
some difficulty in finding the exact locality, owing to the utter
destruction of all the landmarks. The place was a mass of ruins.
Some provisions and goods had been left by the plunderers, but so
mixed with rubbish, and overflowed with the contents of the casks
of liquor and molasses, as to be of no value even in these times of
dearth.
Owen, poking about among the wreck, observed an open space in the
middle of one of the shattered walls, as if something had been built
into it. With the assistance of my grandfather's cane, he succeeded
in dislodging the surrounding masonry, already loosened by shot, and
they discovered it to be a recess made in the thickness of the wall,
and closed by a small iron door. At the bottom was lying a small
box, also of iron, which they raised, not without difficulty, for
its weight was extraordinary in proportion to its dimensions. This
being conveyed to my grandfather's, and opened, was found to contain
more than six hundred doubloons, (a sum in value about two thousand
pounds,) and many bills of exchange and promissory notes, mostly
those of officers. The latest was that of Von Dessel. These the
Major, by Esther's desire, returned to the persons whose signatures
they bore.
Esther never completely recovered from the effects of her sojourn
in the cave, but remained always pale and of weak health. My
grandfather took good care of her inheritance for her, and on
leaving Gibraltar, at the conclusion of the siege, invested the
whole of it safely for her benefit, placing her, at the same time,
in the family of some respectable persons of her own religion. She
afterwards married a wealthy Hebrew; and, in whatever part of
the world the Major chanced to be serving, so long as she lived,
valuable presents would constantly arrive from Gibraltar--mantillas
and ornaments of jewellery for Carlota, and butts of delicious
sherry for my grandfather. These, however, ceased with her death,
about twenty years afterwards.
This is, I believe, the most connected and interesting episode to
be found in the Major's note-book; and it is, I think, the last
specimen I shall offer of these new "Tales of my Grandfather."
As a child I used to listen, with interest ever new, to the tale
of the young Jewess, which the narrator had often heard from the
lips of Carlota and her husband. St Michael's Cave took rank in my
mind with those other subterranean abodes where Cassim, the brother
of Ali Baba, who forgot the word "_Open Sesame_," was murdered by
the Forty Thieves; where Aladdin was shut by the magician in the
enchanted garden; and where Robinson Crusoe discovered the dying
he-goat. And when, at the conclusion of the tale, the scrap of
paper containing the Jew's will was produced from a certain desk,
and carefully unfolded, I seemed to be connected by some awful and
mysterious link with these departed actors in the scenes I had so
breathlessly listened to.
LIFE AMONGST THE LOGGERS.
_Forest Life and Forest Trees._ By JOHN S. SPRINGER. New York:
Harper. London: Sampson Low. 1851.
The northern and elder States of the great American Union have
ceased to be associated in our minds with those ideas of wild
and romantic adventure which are inseparably connected with some
of their younger brethren far west and south. There is nothing
suggestive of romance in such names as New York, Maine, and
Pennsylvania: cotton bales, keen traders and repudiated debts,
drab coats, wooden clocks, and counterfeit nutmegs, compose the
equivocal and unpoetical visions they conjure up to European
imaginations. But drop we our eyes down the map to lawless Arkansas,
feverish Louisiana, and debateable Texas, or westwards to the still
newer State of California, and a host of stirring and picturesque
associations throng upon our memory. Strange scenes and a motley
array pass before us. Bands of hunters and trappers, scarce more
civilised than the Indians with whom they war, or gentler than the
buffalo which yields them sport and food; predatory armies, for
Mexico bound, keen for spoil and regardless of right; caravans of
adventurous gold-seekers braving the perilous passage of the Rocky
Mountains; hardy squatters, axe in hand, hewing themselves a home
in the heart of the wilderness; innumerable traits of courage and
endurance--incredible sufferings and countless crimes--make up a
picture-gallery unrivalled of its kind. In those districts, not
a league of prairie, not a mountain or stream, not a _bayou_ or
_barranca_, but has derived recent and vivid interest from the
animated sketches of Sealsfield, Ruxton, Wise, and a host of other
graphic and vigorous delineators.
As if to vindicate the claims to interest of the northern American
provinces, a Down-easter, Springer by name, who hails from the State
of Maine, has exhibited, in a curious little volume, the adventurous
side of life in _his_ part of the Union. At a first glance, there
would appear to be few created things whose history was likely to be
less interesting than that of a Yankee pine-log. Get astride it with
Springer, and paddle up the Penobscot, clearing rapids and other
impediments as best you may on so unpromising a float--and, before
reaching the place where it grew, you shall marvel at the skill
and daring expended, and at the risks run to procure it. Springer,
who was reared amongst the pine forests, which his axe afterwards
helped to thin, is an enthusiastic woodsman, and feels "kinder
jealous" that whilst the habits and adventures of many classes of
his countrymen have occupied skilful writers and public attention,
no chronicler should have been found for the deeds and perils of
that numerous class to which he for some years belonged. To supply
this deficiency, he himself, although more used to handle axe than
goose-quill, has written a plain and unpretending account of scenes
and incidents which he shared in and witnessed. The freshness of
the subject, and the honest earnestness of the man, would atone for
clumsier treatment than it has met with at his hands.
The second title of Mr Springer's book gives a clearer idea of
its contents than the primary one. The volume comprises, says the
title-page, "Winter camp-life, among the Loggers, and wild-wood
adventure, with descriptions of lumbering operations on the various
rivers of Maine and New Brunswick." It is divided into three parts;
the first and shortest being a dissertation on forest trees, with
particular reference to those of America; the second, entitled
"The Pine Tree, or Forest Life," giving an account of wood-cutting
operations; the third, "River Life," detailing the progress of
the timber from the forest to the "boom," or depôt. The chief
interest of the book begins with the second chapter of the second
part, wherein is described the commencement of the labours of a
gang of "loggers," or woodcutters. In the hunt after timber, as
after certain animals, the first thing to be done is to mark the
whereabout of your game preparatory to starting in its pursuit. On
the eve of the chase the keeper reconnoitres the retreat of the
wild-boar. Before a party of loggers proceed to establish a camp
and pass the winter woodcutting, they send out scouts to ascertain
where timber is plenty. Thirty years since, this was scarcely
necessary--the pine, that forest king of the northern States,
abounded on every side. Fifty years hence--so it is estimated by
those best qualified to judge--the vast pine forests, through which
the Penobscot flows, will be on the eve of extinction. Now is the
intermediate stage. A man cannot, as he formerly could, step from
his house to his day's work; but research and labour still command
a rich timber harvest. Exploring expeditions may be made at any
period of the year, but autumn is the favourite season. They consist
generally of only two or three men, accustomed to the business,
who, provided with the necessary provisions, with a coffee-pot and
a blanket, axe, rifle, and ammunition, embark on skiff or _bateau_,
and pole and paddle their way two hundred miles or more up the
Penobscot or the St Croix, and their numerous tributaries. On
reaching the district it is proposed to explore, the boat is hauled
ashore and turned bottom upwards, the load of stores is divided
amongst the party, and they strike into the forest, rousing, on
their passage, the stately moose, the timid deer, the roaming black
bear, and many an inferior denizen of the lonesome wilderness. They
now begin "prospecting." Often the thickness of the forest and the
uneven surface of the country prevent their obtaining a sufficiently
extensive view, and compel them to climb trees in order to look
around them.
"When an ascent is to be made, the spruce tree is generally
selected, principally for the superior facilities which its
numerous limbs afford the climber. To gain the first limbs of
this tree, which are from twenty to forty feet from the ground,
a smaller tree is undercut and lodged against it, clambering
up which the top of the spruce is reached. Sometimes, when a
very elevated position is desired, the spruce tree is lodged
against the trunk of some lofty pine, up which we ascend to
a height twice that of the surrounding forest. From such a
tree-top, like a mariner at the mast-head upon the look-out for
whales, (and indeed the pine is the whale of the forest,) large
'clumps' and 'veins' of pine are discovered, whose towering
tops may be seen for miles around. Such views fill the bosom of
timber-hunters with an _intense interest_. They are the object
of his search--his treasure, his Eldorado; and they are beheld
with peculiar and thrilling emotions. To detail the process more
minutely, we should observe, that the man in the tree-top points
out the direction in which the pines are seen; or, if hid from
the view of those below by the surrounding foliage, he breaks a
small limb, and throws it in the direction in which they appear,
whilst a man at the base marks the direction indicated by the
falling limb by means of a compass which he holds in his hand,
the compass being quite as necessary in the wilderness as on the
pathless ocean. In fair weather the sun serves as an important
guide; and in cloudy weather the close observation of an
experienced woodman will enable him to steer a tolerably correct
course by the moss which grows on the trunks of most hardwood
trees, the north sides of which are covered with a much larger
share than the other portions of the trunk. This Indian compass,
however, is not very convenient or safe, particularly in passing
through swampy lands, which are of frequent occurrence."
Two reflections are suggested by the paragraph we have just copied.
The substance of one of them is noted in the Preface. "This volume,"
says the modest and sensible Springer, "makes no pretensions to
literary merit; sooner would it claim kindred with the wild and
uncultivated scenes of which it is but a simple relation." The
second reflection is, that our wood-cutter is an enthusiast in
his craft; for wood-cutting in Maine _is_ a craft, and no common
log-chopping. To Springer, a towering grove of timber is as exciting
a sight as is to the hunter that of a herd of antlered deer or
shaggy buffalo. The pine especially is the object of his love and
admiration. He abounds in anecdotes and arguments to prove its
good qualities, and labours hard to establish its superiority to
the oak. Reared amongst the noble pines of Maine, he says, even as
a child, he could never hear, without feelings of jealousy, the
oak extolled as monarch of the forest. Admitting it to excel in
strength, he vaunts, upon the other hand, the superior grandeur and
girth of the pine, its value in building, the breadth of its planks,
their clearness, beauty, and freedom from knots, the numerous uses
to which it is applicable, its excellence as fuel, its perfect
adaptation to all the joiner's purposes. He extols in turn each of
its varieties; the red pine, remarkable for its tall trunk, which
sometimes rises eighty feet from the ground before putting out a
limb; the pitch pine, inferior in size, but preferable to any other
wood for generating steam in engines; the white pine, superior
to all in value and dimensions. He tells us of pines, of which
he has read or heard, of extraordinary grandeur and diameter: of
one, two hundred and sixty-four feet long; and of another which,
at three feet from the ground, was fifty-seven feet nine inches in
circumference. These extraordinary specimens were cut some years
ago. Trees of such dimensions are now rare.
"I have worked in the forests among this timber several years,"
says Springer, "have cut many hundreds of trees, and seen many
thousands, but I never found one larger than one I felled on a
little stream which empties into Jackson Lake, near the head of
Baskahegan stream, in eastern Maine. This was a pumpkin pine,
(a variety of the white pine.) Its trunk was as straight and
handsomely grown as a moulded candle, and measured six feet in
diameter four feet from the ground, without the aid of spur
roots. It was about nine rods in length, or one hundred and
forty-four feet, about sixty-five feet of which was free of
limbs, and retained its diameter remarkably well. I was employed
about one hour and a quarter in felling it. The afternoon was
beautiful; everything was calm, and to me the circumstances
were deeply interesting. After chopping an hour or so, the
mighty giant, the growth of centuries, which had withstood the
hurricane, and raised itself in peerless majesty above all
around, began to tremble under the strokes of a mere insect, as
I might appear in comparison with it. My heart palpitated as I
occasionally raised my eye to its pinnacle to catch the first
indications of its fall. It came down at length with a crash,
which seemed to shake a hundred acres, whilst the loud echo rang
through the forest, dying away amongst the distant hills. It had
a hollow in the butt about the size of a barrel, and the surface
of the stump was sufficiently spacious to allow a yoke of oxen
to stand upon it. It made five logs, and loaded a six-ox team
three times. The butt-log was so large, that the stream did not
float it in the spring; and when the drive was taken down, we
were obliged to leave it behind, much to our regret and loss. At
the boom, that log would have been worth fifty dollars."
The pine tracts ascertained, the quality of the trees examined,
the distance the timber will have to be hauled duly calculated,
and the ground inspected, through which logging roads must be
cut, the exploring party retrace their steps to the place where
they left their boat. Foot-sore with their forest roamings, they
gladly look forward to the quick, gliding passage down stream. A
grievous disappointment sometimes awaits them. In the fall of the
year, the black bear is seized with a violent longing for pitch and
resinous substances, and frequently strips fir trees of their bark
for the sake of the exudations. Occasionally he stumbles over a
timber-hunter's _bateau_, and tears it to pieces in the course of
the rough process he employs to extract the tar from its planks. If
it is injured beyond possibility of repair, the unlucky pioneers
have to perform their homeward journey on foot, unless indeed they
are so fortunate as to fall in with some Indian trapper, whose canoe
they can charter for a portion of the way. Once at home, the next
step is to obtain permits from the State or proprietors, securing,
at a stipulated price of so much per thousand feet, the exclusive
right to cut timber within certain bounds. Then comes haymaking--a
most important part of the loggers' duty; for on nothing does the
success of the wood-cutting campaign depend more than on the good
working condition of the sturdy teams of oxen which drag the logs
from the snow-covered forest to the river's brink. Hard by the
forest extensive strips of meadow-land are commonly found, covered
with a heavy growth of grass, and thither large bands of men repair
to make and stalk the hay for the ensuing winter's consumption. The
labour of haymaking in these upland meadows of Maine is rendered
intolerably painful by the assaults of flies and mosquitoes, and
especially by the insidious attacks of millions of midges, so small
as to be scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, and which get
between the clothes and the skin, causing a smarting and irritation
so great as to impede the progress of the work. The torment of
these insect attacks is hardly compensated by the pastimes and
adventures incidental to the occupation. Now and then a shot is to
be had at a stray deer; the streams swarm with beautiful trout and
pickerel; skirmishes with black bears are of frequent occurrence.
Mr Springer's volume abounds with stories of encounters with bears,
wolves, and "Indian devils"--a formidable species of catamount,
of which the Indians stand in particular dread. Although the bear
rarely shows himself pugnacious unless assailed, his meddlesome,
thievish propensities render him particularly obnoxious to the
hay-makers and wood-cutters; and when they meet him, they never can
abstain from the aggressive, however civilly Bruin may be disposed
to pass them by.
"On one occasion," says Mr Springer, "two men, crossing a small
lake in skiff, on their return from putting up hay, discovered
a bear swimming from a point of land for the opposite shore. As
usual in such cases, temptation silenced prudence--they changed
their course, and gave chase. The craft being light, they gained
fast upon the bear, who exerted himself to the utmost to gain
the shore; but, finding himself an unequal match in the race,
he turned upon his pursuers, and swam to meet them. One of the
men, a short, thick-set, dare-devil fellow, seized an axe, and,
the moment the bear came up, inflicted a blow upon his head. It
seemed to make but a slight impression, and before it could be
repeated the bear clambered into the boat. He instantly grappled
the man who struck him, firmly setting his teeth in his thigh;
then, settling back upon his haunches, he raised his victim in
the air, and shook him as a dog would a wood-chuck. The man at
the helm stood for a moment in amazement, without knowing how to
act, and fearing that the bear might spring overboard and drown
his companion; but, recollecting the effect of a blow upon the
end of a bear's snout, he struck him with a short setting-pole.
The bear dropped his victim into the bottom of the boat, sallied
and fell overboard, and swam again for the shore. The man bled
freely from the bite, and, as the wound proved too serious to
allow a renewal of the encounter, they made for the shore.
But one thing saved them from being upset: the water proved
sufficiently shoal to admit of the bear's getting bottom, from
which he sprang into the boat. Had the water been deep, the
consequences might have been more serious."
From its first to its last stage, the logger's occupation is one
of severe toil and frequent peril. When the pioneer's duty is
accomplished, and when the hay is made, there is still hard work to
be done before he can begin to level the forest giants. No kind of
labour, Mr Springer assures us, tests a man's physical abilities
and powers of endurance more than boating supplies up river. The
wood-cutters come to a fall, and have to land their implements and
provisions, and to carry them past it. Their boats, too, must be
carried, and that over rocks and fallen trees, through thickets and
pathless swamps. Then they come to rapids, up which they have to
pole their heavy-laden bateaux. For this work, prodigious skill,
nerve, and strength are requisite. Then come the long portages from
lake to lake, and the danger of being swamped, when traversing
these, by sudden gusts of wind lashing the lake, in a few minutes'
time, into foaming waves, in which the deeply-loaded boats could not
for a moment live.
"Our frail skiff was about eighteen feet long, and four feet
across the top of the gunwale amidships, tapering to a point at
either end, constructed of thin slips of pine boards, nailed
to some half-dozen pair of slender knees, about two inches in
diameter. On board were fifteen hundred pounds of provisions,
with seven men, which pressed her into the water nearly to the
gunwale; three inches from the position of a level, and she
would fill with water."
In such an overburthened cockle-shell as this did Mr Springer once
find himself in company with a drunken man, who was only withheld
from capsizing the boat by the threat of having his skull split
with a paddle; for an inordinate addiction to rum is the loggers'
chief vice, a vice palliated by the hardship and exposure they
endure. Drinking, however, is on the decline amongst them of late
years, since "it has been fully demonstrated that men can endure the
chilling hardships of river-driving quite as well, and indeed far
better, without the stimulus of ardent spirits, and perform more and
better-directed labour." Black pepper tea is drunk on cold nights
when camping in the open air, and is found a warming and comfortable
beverage. Both in drink and diet the loggers look more to strength
than to delicacy. Salt pork, ship bread, and molasses, compose the
staple of their consumption. The drippings from a slice of pork,
roasted before the fire, are allowed to fall on the bread, which is
then dignified by the name of buttered toast. Sometimes the salt
pork is eaten raw, dipped in molasses,--a mixture unequalled for
nastiness, we should imagine, excepting by that of oysters and brown
sugar. "The recital may cause," says honest Springer in his comical
English, "in delicate and pampered stomachs some qualms, yet we can
assure the uninitiated that, from these gross samples, the hungry
woodsman makes many a delicious meal." An assurance which gives us
a most exalted idea of the appetite and digestion of the loggers of
Maine.
Once in the forest with their stores, the woodmen carefully select
a suitable spot, clear the ground, build their "camp" and "hovel,"
and commence their winter's work. The "camp" and "hovel" are two
log-houses, the former being for the men, the latter for the oxen.
In some respects the beasts are better treated than their masters,
for their hovel is floored with small poles, a luxury unknown in
the camp, where the men sleep on branches strewn upon the bare
earth. "Having completed our winter residences, next in order comes
the business of looking out and cutting the 'main' and some of
the principal 'branch roads.' These roads, like the veins in the
human body, ramify the wilderness to all the principal 'clumps' and
'groves' of pine embraced in the permit." Mr Springer expatiates on
the graceful curves of the roads, whose inequalities soon become
filled with snow, and their surface hard-beaten and glassy, polished
by the sled and logs which are continually passing over it, whilst
overhead the trees interlace their spreading branches. "Along this
roadside, on the way to the landing, runs a serpentine path for the
'knight of the goad,' whose deviations are marked now outside this
tree, then behind that 'windfall,' now again intercepting the main
road, skipping along like a dog at one's side." The teamster, if
he does his duty, works harder than any man in camp. Under a good
teamster, the oxen receive care almost as tender as though they were
race-horses with thousands depending on their health and condition.
With proper attention and management, they should be in as good
flesh in the spring as when they began hauling early in winter.
"The last thing at night before 'turning in,' the teamster
lights his lantern and repairs to the ox-hovel. In the morning,
by peep of day, and often before, his visits are repeated, to
hay and provender, and card, and yoke up. While the rest of the
hands are sitting or lounging around the liberal fire, shifting
for their comfort, after exposure to the winter frosts through
the day, he must repeatedly go out to look after the comfort
of the sturdy, faithful ox. And then, for an hour or two in
the morning again, whilst all, save the cook, are closing up
the sweet and unbroken slumbers of the night, so welcome and
necessary to the labourer, he is out amid the early frost with,
I had almost said, the care of a mother, to see if 'old Turk' is
not loose, whether 'Bright' favours the near fore-foot, (which
felt a little hot the day before,) as he stands up on the hard
floor, and then to inspect 'Swan's' provender-trough, to see
if he has eaten his meal, for it was carefully noted that at
the 'watering-place' last night he drank but little; whilst at
the further end of the 'tie-up' he thinks he hears a little
clattering noise, and presently 'little Star' is having his
shins gently rapped, as a token of his master's wish to raise
his foot to see if some nail has not given way in the loosened
shoe; and this not for once, but every day, with numberless
other cares connected with his charge."
The oxen are taken out to the forest by the last detachment of
wood-cutters, when winter fairly sets in. This is the hardest trip
of any. Both man and beast experience much inconvenience from the
cold. Often, when driving a boat up rapids, ice forms upon the
poles in the men's hands, which are already so cold and stiff that
they can scarcely retain their grasp; yet an instant's cessation of
exertion would be fraught with imminent peril to life and goods.
The oxen, attached to long lightly-loaded sleds, are driven over
rough miry tracks. "In crossing large streams, we unyoke the oxen
and swim them over. If we have no boat, a raft is constructed, upon
which our effects are transported, when we reyoke and pursue our
route as before. Our cattle are often very reluctant to enter the
water whilst the anchor-ice runs, and the cold has already begun
to congeal its surface." Lakes are crossed upon the ice, which not
unfrequently breaks in. Mr Springer gives an account of a journey he
made, when this misfortune happened, and ten oxen at one time were
struggling in the chilling waters of Baskahegan Lake. They were all
got out, he tells us, although rescue under such circumstances would
appear almost hopeless.
"Standing upon the edge of the ice, a man was placed by the side
of each ox to keep his head out of the water. We unyoked one at
a time, and throwing a rope round the roots of his horns, the
warp was carried forward and attached to the little oxen, (a
pair that had not broken in,) whose services on this occasion
were very necessary. A strong man was placed on the ice at the
edge, so that, lifting the ox by his horns, he was able to
press the ice down and raise his shoulder up on the edge, when
the warp-oxen would pull them out. For half-an-hour we had a
lively time of it, and in an almost incredibly short time we had
them all safely out, and drove them back upon the point nearly
a mile. It was now very dark. We left our sleds in the water
with the hay, pulling out a few armsful, which we carried to
the shore to rub the oxen down with. Poor fellows! they seemed
nearly chilled to death, and shook as if they would fall to
pieces."
So great is the labour of taking oxen to the forest every
Fall--often to a distance of two hundred miles into the
interior--that the wood-cutters sometimes leave them, when they go
down stream in the spring to get their own living in the wilderness,
and hunt them up again in autumn. They thrive finely in the
interval, and get very wild and difficult to catch; but when at last
subjugated, they evidently recognise their masters, and are pleased
to see them. Occasionally they disappear in the course of the
summer, and are heard of no more; they are then supposed to have got
"mired or cast," or to have been devoured by wolves--or by bears,
which also are known to attack oxen.
"An individual who owned a very fine 'six-ox team' turned them
into the woods to brouse, in a new region of country. Late in
the evening, his attention was arrested by the bellowing of
one of them. It continued for an hour or two, then ceased
altogether. The night was very dark, and as the ox was supposed
to be more than a mile distant, it was thought not advisable
to venture in search of him until morning. As soon as daylight
appeared, the owner started, in company with another man, to
investigate the cause of the uproar. Passing on about a mile,
he found one of his best oxen prostrate, and, on examination,
there was found a hole eaten into the thickest part of his hind
quarter nearly as large as a hat; not less than six or eight
pounds of flesh were gone. He had bled profusely. The ground
was torn up for rods around where the encounter occurred; the
tracks indicated the assailant to be a very large bear, who had
probably worried the ox out, and then satiated his ravenous
appetite, feasting upon him while yet alive. A road was bushed
out to the spot where the poor creature lay, and he was got upon
a sled and hauled home by a yoke of his companions, where the
wound was dressed. It never, however, entirely healed, though
it was so far improved as to allow of its being fattened, after
which he was slaughtered for food."
In cold weather in those forests the bears and wolves are
exceedingly audacious. The latter have a curious habit of
accompanying the teams on their journeys between the forest and the
river to which they drag the logs. This has only occurred of late
years, and the manner in which they thus volunteer their services as
assistant drivers is exceedingly curious.
"Three teams," says Springer, "in the winter of 1844, all in
the same neighbourhood, were beset with these ravenous animals.
They were of unusually large size, manifesting a most singular
boldness, and even familiarity, without the usual appearance of
ferocity so characteristic of the animal. Sometimes one, and in
another instance three, in a most unwelcome manner, volunteered
their attendance, accompanying the teamster a long distance on
his way. They would even jump on the log and ride, and approach
very near the oxen. One of them actually jumped upon the sled,
and down between the bars, while the sled was in motion. Some of
the teamsters were much alarmed, keeping close to the oxen, and
driving on as fast as possible. Others, more courageous, would
run forward and strike at them with their goad-sticks; but the
wolves sprang out of the way in an instant. But, although they
seemed to act without a motive, there was something so cool and
impudent in their conduct that it was trying to the nerves--even
more so than an active encounter. For some time after this,
firearms were a constant part of the teamster's equipage."
The distant howling and screaming of the wolves, compared by an old
Yankee hunter to the screeching of forty pair of old cart-wheels,
is particularly ominous and disagreeable. Springer has collected a
number of curious anecdotes concerning them. One night a pack of the
prowling marauders were seen trailing down Mattawamkeag River on the
ice. The dwellers in a log-house hard by soaked some meat in poison
and threw it out. Next morning the meat was gone, and six wolves lay
dead, all within sight of each other. "Every one of them had dug a
hole down through the snow into the frozen earth, in which they had
thrust their noses, either for water to quench the burning thirst
produced by the poison, or to snuff some antidote to the fatal
drug. A bounty was obtained on each of ten dollars, besides their
hides, making a fair job of it, as well as ridding the neighbourhood
of an annoying enemy." Several of Mr Springer's logging and
lumbering friends have contributed to his book the results of their
experience, and narratives of their adventures, some of which he
gives in their own words. Amongst these is an ill-written, but yet a
very exciting, account of a wolf-chase, or we should perhaps rather
say a man-chase, the wolves in this instance being the pursuers,
and Springer's neighbour the pursued. The person in question was
passionately fond of skating, and one night he left a friend's
house to skate a short distance up the frozen Kennebeck, which
flowed before the door. It was a bright still evening; the new moon
silvered the frosty pines. After gliding a couple of miles up the
river, the skater turned off into a little tributary stream, over
which fir and hemlock twined their evergreen branches. The archway
beneath was dark, but he fearlessly entered it, unsuspicious of
peril, with a joyous laugh and hurra--an involuntary expression of
exhilaration, elicited by the bracing crispness of the atmosphere,
and glow of pleasant exercise. What followed is worth extracting.
"All of a sudden a sound arose, it seemed from
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