CHAPTER II._Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 425, March, 1851

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCXXV. MARCH, 1851. VOL. LXIX.

CONTENTS.

THE DANGERS OF THE COUNTRY, 257

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. PART VII., 282

LEGENDS OF THE MONASTIC ORDERS, AS REPRESENTED IN THE

FINE ARTS, 305

LAVENGRO, 322

THE ARTS IN PORTUGAL, 338

SOUTHEY, 349

THE MINISTRY AND THE AGRICULTURAL INTEREST, 368

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. CCCCXXV. MARCH, 1851. VOL. LXIX.

THE DANGERS OF THE COUNTRY.

NO. II.--OUR INTERNAL DANGERS.

"The apparent contradiction," says the _Edinburgh Review_, "between the

vast amount of unrelieved misery in the country, and the vast amount of

energetic benevolence now existing in this country, which strikes so

many with despair, inspires us, on the contrary, with the most sanguine

hopes; because, in that benevolence, we see ample means of remedying

nearly all our social evils,--means heretofore impotent solely because

misapplied. We agree with the Socialists in holding that the world

can never have been intended to be, and will not long remain, what it

is. It cannot be that the same intellect which has wrung from nature

her most hidden secrets, which has triumphed over the most gigantic

material obstructions, which has 'exhausted worlds and then imagined

new;' which has discovered and described laws operating in regions of

space separate from us by a distance so vast that human imagination

cannot figure it and arithmetical language can hardly express it,

should not, when fairly applied to social and administrative science,

be competent to rectify our errors and to smoothe our path--unless,

indeed, society take refuge in the dreary creed, which shall never be

ours, that the problem before us is insoluble, and the wretchedness

around us inherent and incurable."[1]

[1] _Edinburgh Review_, January 1851, p. 23.

We entirely concur in these eloquent and just observations, though the

honest and candid admissions they contain sound rather strange when

coming from a journal which has, for nearly half-a-century, been the

most strenuous, and not the least able, supporter of the system which

has terminated in these woful results. We concur with this author in

thinking, that it never was intended by Providence that things in this

country should be as they now are; and that it is impossible they can

long continue so. Sooner or later, if the premonitory symptoms of

our diseased state continue to be disregarded by our rulers, and the

influential part of the nation who now determine our policy, as they

have been for a great number of years back, some terrible catastrophe

will arise, like that in Ireland by the failure of the potato crop

in 1846, which, amidst an appalling and perhaps unprecedented amount

of human suffering, is in course of rectifying many of the social

evils under which that ill-starred country has so long laboured. We

narrowly escaped such a catastrophe on occasion of the great monetary

crisis of October 1847, by far the most serious and widespread which

Great Britain has ever known; and so much was the nation in its vital

resources weakened by that calamity, and so wearing-out and grievous

are the causes of evil still operating amongst us, that it is much

to be feared that the catastrophe we anticipate will not be deferred

beyond the next of the periodical monetary crises with which the

country is now so regularly afflicted.

What renders our present social condition so alarming and depressing

to the contemplative mind is, that the evils which are so widespread

through society have only increased with the advance of the nation

in general industry, accumulated capital, and mechanical power; and

at a time when universal and unprecedented exertions have been made

both for the religious and moral education of the working-classes, the

improvement of their habits, and the extension of their information.

The most superficial observer must be aware what astonishing progress

we have made since 1815. Our exports and imports have tripled--our

shipping doubled[2]--our population advanced fully 50 per cent. Our

agriculture has kept pace with this astonishing increase, insomuch

that, down to the commencement of five bad years in succession, in

1836, followed by Free Trade in 1842 and 1846, our imports of wheat

and flour had sunk to a _hundredth-part_ of the food of our people.

At no former period, in England's or the world's history, were such

efforts made by energetic and philanthropic individuals to stem the

progress of public and private disaster, or such noble and even heroic

sacrifices made by the State to assuage, where it was most aggravated,

the intensity of private suffering. At one period Government gave

£20,000,000 to compensate the planters in the West Indies for Negro

Emancipation; at another £10,000,000, to relieve the effects of famine

and Irish improvidence. The efforts made in the cause of education,

religious instruction, church accommodation, the relief of pauperism,

the elevation of the standard of comfort, and the improvement of the

habits of the poor, have been innumerable, systematic, and unwearied.

[2]

|------| | | |

| 1822 | 42,236,533 | 29,432,376 | 2,519,044 |

| 1823 | 43,803,472 | 34,591,260 | 2,506,760 |

| 1824 | 48,785,551 | 36,056,551 | 2,559,587 |

| | | | |

| 1836 | 65,926,702 | 44,586,741 | 3,002,875 |

| 1837 | 69,939,389 | 45,952,551 | 3,149,152 |

| 1838 | 73,831,550 | 49,362,811 | 3,149,168 |

| | | | |

| 1846 | 132,286,345 | 75,953,875 | 6,091,052 |

| 1847 | 126,157,919 | 90,921,866 | 7,196,033 |

| 1848 | 132,904,407 | 93,547,134 | 5,579,461 |

| 1849 | 164,539,504 | 105,874,607 | 6,071,269 |

--_Parliamentary Tables._

In Scotland, a new great sect of Presbyterians has grown up more suited

than the Establishment to the inclinations of a large part of the

people, and they have, in three years, built and provided for _eight

hundred_ new places of worship, at a cost of above £1,500,000. In

Glasgow alone, _thirty-two_ have been erected, at a cost of £107,000!

besides _fifteen_, erected a few years before, by subscription of

persons connected with the Establishment. The prodigious efforts

made by the dignitaries and pastors of the Church of England, to

extend the sphere and increase the utility of their Establishment,

are known to all the world, and have extorted the reluctant applause

even of the most inveterate of their opponents. All other religious

persuasions have done the same: Roman Catholics, Methodists, Wesleyans,

Dissenters of all sorts, have vied with each other in zeal and efforts

to extend their respective adherents, and augment the number and

respectability of their places of worship. Education has shared in the

general movement; and although Government has yet done little, the

number of voluntary schools established in most parts of the country

almost exceeds belief. At the same time, the average poor-rates of

England have for the last ten years been about £6,000,000. Scotland

has got a more efficient one than the cautious administration of the

old law had permitted, which already expends about £500,000 yearly

on the relief of indigence: and Ireland has got a new one, which at

its greatest distress expended above £2,000,000 in a year, and still

dispenses upwards of £1,500,000 annually. Yet, in the midst of all

this prodigious increase of national industry, religious zeal, and

philanthropic activity, the condition of the greater part of our

working classes has been daily getting worse, and was never perhaps, as

a whole, so bad as in this year, when, in consequence of Continental

pacification, Bank discounts at 2½ per cent, and a great influx

of Californian gold, prices of manufactured articles have risen 20

per cent, and the great manufacturing towns are in a state of general

prosperity. Ample evidence of all this will be brought forward in the

sequel of this essay.

Notwithstanding all this, we do not despair either of the human race

or of the fortunes and social condition of this country. We are firm

believers in the doctrine, derived equally from natural and revealed

religion, that the greater part of the evils, individual and social,

of this life are derived from the effects of human selfishness,

folly, or wickedness, and that it is sin which has brought death to

nations not less than individuals. Barring some calamities which are

obviously beyond the reach of human remedy--such as sickness, the

death of relations or friends, and external disasters, as famine or

pestilence--there is scarcely an ill which now afflicts mankind which

may not be distinctly traced to human selfishness or folly in the

present or some preceding generation. That God will visit the sins of

the fathers upon the children is indeed as loudly proclaimed in the

history of man as ever it was among the thunders of Mount Sinai. But,

assuming this to be the principle of the Divine government of mankind,

we are confident we are within bounds when we say that four-fifths,

perhaps nine-tenths, of the social and private evils which now afflict

humanity, are the direct consequences of selfishness or folly in this

or some recently preceding generation. Every attentive observer of the

fate of individuals or families around him must see that this is the

case in private life; and a very little attention alone is required

to convince one that to the same cause is to be ascribed four-fifths

of the social evils, great as they are, which all feel to be now so

overwhelming.

We propose, first, to establish the fact that, amidst all the boasted

and really astonishing increase of our national industry, the suffering

and misery of the working-classes has constantly, on an average of

years, gone on increasing; and then to consider to what causes this

most alarming and disheartening state of things is to be ascribed. To

prove the first, it is sufficient to refer to three authentic sources

of information--the records of emigration, of crime, and of pauperism,

for the last twenty-eight years.

From the table given below, it appears that while, in the year 1826,

immediately following the dreadful monetary crisis of December

1825,--by far the severest which had _then_ been felt--the total

emigration from the British Islands was under twenty-one thousand; in

the year 1849, being the fourth year of Free Trade, and in its last six

months one of great commercial activity, it had reached _the enormous

and unprecedented amount of_ THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND! In twenty-five

years of almost ceaseless Liberal government, and carrying out the

principles, social and political, of the Political Economists, the

number of persons driven into exile had increased _fifteen-fold_. So

extraordinary and decisive a proof of the progressive increase of

suffering in a people is perhaps not to be found in the whole annals of

mankind. The emigration-returns for 1850 have not yet been made up, but

that they will exhibit a result not less striking and woful than the

preceding years may be judged of by the facts, that the emigration from

Liverpool, which in 1849 was 154,400, had risen in 1850 to 174,260;

and that the emigrants who landed at New York alone, in 1850, were

212,796--of whom 116,552 were Irish, and 28,125 English subjects, the

remainder being chiefly Scotch and Germans.[3]

[3] _Times_, Jan. 21, 1851.

We say, and say advisedly, that this prodigious flood of emigrants

were, for the most part, _driven into exile_ by suffering, not tempted

into it by hope, and that its progressive increase is the most decisive

proof of the enhanced misery and suffering of the working classes. The

slightest consideration of the last column of the table below[4] must

demonstrate this. Every known and deplored year of suffering has been

immediately followed by a great increase in the number of emigrants

in the next, or some subsequent years. Thus, in the year 1825, the

total emigration was only 14,891; but the monetary crisis of December

in that year raised it to 20,900 in the next year. In the year 1830,

the last of the Duke of Wellington's administration, the emigration

was 56,907; but in the two next years, being those of Reform agitation

and consequent penury, these numbers were almost doubled: they rose

to 83,160 in 1831, and to 103,140 in 1832. With the fine harvests and

consequent prosperity of 1833 and 1834, they sank to 44,478; but the

bad seasons of 1838, 1839, and 1840 made them rapidly rise again, until

they became,

1840, 90,743

1841, 118,592

1842, 128,342

[4] EMIGRATION FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM DURING THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

FROM 1825 TO 1849.

|------+------------| |-------------+--------+----------|

| 1825 | 8,741 | 5,551 | 485 | 114 | 14,891 |

| 1826 | 12,818 | 7,063 | 903 | 116 | 20,900 |

| 1827 | 12,648 | 14,526 | 715 | 114 | 28,003 |

| 1828 | 12,084 | 12,817 | 1,056 | 135 | 26,092 |

| 1829 | 13,307 | 15,678 | 2,016 | 197 | 31,198 |

| 1830 | 30,574 | 24,887 | 1,242 | 204 | 56,907 |

| 1831 | 58,067 | 23,418 | 1,561 | 114 | 83,160 |

| 1832 | 66,339 | 32,872 | 3,733 | 196 | 103,140 |

| 1833 | 28,808 | 29,109 | 4,093 | 517 | 62,527 |

| 1834 | 40,060 | 33,074 | 2,800 | 288 | 76,222 |

| 1835 | 15,573 | 26,720 | 1,860 | 325 | 44,478 |

| 1836 | 34,226 | 37,774 | 3,124 | 293 | 75,417 |

| 1837 | 29,884 | 36,770 | 5,054 | 326 | 72,034 |

| 1838 | 4,577 | 14,332 | 14,021 | 292 | 33,222 |

| 1839 | 12,658 | 33,536 | 15,786 | 227 | 62,207 |

| 1840 | 32,293 | 40,642 | 15,850 | 1,958 | 90,743 |

| 1841 | 38,164 | 45,017 | 32,626 | 2,786 | 118,592 |

| 1842 | 54,123 | 63,852 | 8,534 | 1,835 | 128,344 |

| 1843 | 23,518 | 28,335 | 3,478 | 1,881 | 57,212 |

| 1844 | 22,924 | 43,660 | 2,229 | 1,873 | 70,686 |

| 1845 | 31,803 | 58,538 | 830 | 2,330 | 93,501 |

| 1846 | 43,439 | 82,239 | 2,347 | 1,826 | 129,851 |

| 1847 | 109,680 | 142,154 | 4,949 | 1,487 | 258,270 |

| 1848 | 31,065 | 188,233 | 23,904 | 4,887 | 248,089 |

| 1849 | 41,367 | 219,450 | 32,091 | 6,590 | 299,498 |

|------+------------| |-------------+--------+----------|

| | 808,740 | 1,260,247 | 185,286 | 30,911 |2,285,184 |

Average annual emigration from the United Kingdom for the last

twenty-five years, 91,407.

The Railway Mania and artificial excitement of 1843 and 1844 brought

down these numbers to _one half_--they were 57,212 and 70,686 in these

two years successively. But the Currency Laws of 1844 and 1845, and

Free Trade of 1846, soon more than _quadrupled_ these numbers; and they

have _never since receded_, but, on the contrary, rapidly increased

ever since. The numbers were:--

Currency Acts, 1845, 93,501

Free Trade, 1846, 129,851

Irish Famine, 1847, 258,270

Free Trade, 1848, 248,089

Free Trade, 1849, 299,498

More convincing proof that emigration is, for the most part, the result

of general distress, and that the intensity and wide spread of that

distress is to be measured by its increase, cannot possibly be imagined.

In the next place, the criminal records for the same period, since

1822, demonstrate, in a manner equally decisive, that amidst all our

advances in civilisation, wealth, and productive industry, the causes

producing an increase of crime have been equally active; and that,

abreast of the distress which drove such prodigious and increasing

multitudes into exile, have advanced the social evils which have, in an

equal ratio, multiplied the criminals among those who remain at home.

From the table quoted below, it appears that, since the year 1822,

serious crime, over the whole empire, has advanced fully 300 per cent;

while the numbers of the people, during the same period, have not

increased more than 30 per cent, which of itself is a very great and

most surprising increase for an old state. It has advanced from 27,000

to 75,000. In other words, serious crime, during the last twenty-five

years, has advanced TEN TIMES as fast as the numbers of the people.[5]

[5] TABLE showing the commitments for Serious Crime in England,

Scotland, and Ireland, from 1822 to 1849, both inclusive:--

+------+---------+---------+---------+--------+

|------+---------+---------+---------+--------|

| 1822 | 12,241 | 1,691 | 13,251 | 27,183 |

| 1823 | 12,263 | 1,733 | 14,632 | 28,628 |

| 1824 | 13,698 | 1,802 | 15,258 | 30,748 |

| 1825 | 14,437 | 1,876 | 15,515 | 31,828 |

| 1826 | 16,164 | 1,999 | 16,318 | 34,481 |

| 1827 | 17,924 | 2,116 | 18,031 | 30,071 |

| 1828 | 16,564 | 2,024 | 14,683 | 33,273 |

| 1829 | 18,675 | 2,063 | 15,271 | 36,009 |

| 1830 | 18,107 | 2,329 | 15,794 | 36,230 |

| 1831 | 19,647 | 2,451 | 16,192 | 38,290 |

| 1832 | 20,829 | 2,431 | 16,056 | 39,316 |

| 1833 | 20,072 | 2,564 | 17,819 | 40,453 |

| 1834 | 22,451 | 2,691 | 24,381 | 49,523 |

| 1835 | 20,731 | 2,867 | 21,205 | 44,803 |

| 1836 | 20,984 | 2,922 | 23,891 | 47,797 |

| 1837 | 23,612 | 3,126 | 14,804 | 41,452 |

| 1838 | 23,094 | 3,418 | 15,723 | 42,635 |

| 1839 | 24,443 | 3,409 | 26,392 | 54,244 |

| 1840 | 27,187 | 3,872 | 23,883 | 54,892 |

| 1841 | 27,760 | 3,562 | 20,796 | 52,118 |

| 1842 | 31,389 | 4,189 | 21,186 | 56,684 |

| 1843 | 29,591 | 3,615 | 20,126 | 53,332 |

| 1844 | 26,542 | 3,575 | 19,448 | 49,565 |

| 1845 | 24,303 | 3,537 | 16,696 | 44,536 |

| 1846 | 25,107 | 4,069 | 18,492 | 47,668 |

| 1847 | 28,883 | 4,635 | 31,209 | 64,677 |

| 1848 | 30,349 | 4,909 | 38,522 | 73,780 |

| 1849 | 27,806 | 4,357 | 41,982 | 74,162 |

The same table is equally valuable in another point of view, as

demonstrating, that it is to a general and progressive increase of

_distress_ that this deplorable result is to be ascribed. Every year of

great and general suffering has been immediately followed in the next

and the succeeding ones by a sudden start in crime, which has again

as regularly receded, when a returning gleam of prosperity has for a

time illuminated the prospects of the working-classes in the community.

Thus, the dreadful monetary crisis of December 1825 was followed next

year by a considerable increase of commitments: they rose from 31,828

to 38,071. The numbers again fell to 33,273 and 36,009 in 1829 and

1830, which were years of comparative comfort. The Reform agitation,

and consequent distress of 1831 and 1832, raised them again to 49,523

in 1834; while the Joint-stock mania and fine harvests of 1835 lowered

it to 44,803. The bad harvests, great importation, and consequent

monetary crisis of 1839 and 1840 raised them most materially; they

amounted to 54,244 and 54,892 in those years respectively. The fine

harvests and Railway mania of 1844 and 1845 lowered them to 49,565 and

44,536; but the Irish famine and Free-trade measures of 1846, followed,

as they necessarily were, by the dreadful monetary crisis of October

1847, raised them again to an unprecedented amount, from which they

have never since receded. In 1848, they were 73,780; in 1849, 74,162;

of which, last year, no less than 41,980 were in Ireland, being nearly

4000 more than 1848--albeit the harvest of 1849 was very fine, and the

preceding year had been the year of the Irish rebellion, and when that

country might be presumed to be still labouring under the effects of

the famine of autumn 1846.

The poor's rate from 1822 to 1849[6] affords an equally conclusive

proof of the steady increase of pauperism--varying, of course, like the

crime and emigration, with the prosperity and suffering of particular

years, but exhibiting on the whole a great and most portentous

increase. This appears even when it is measured in money; but still

more strikingly and convincingly when measured in grain--the true test

both of its amount and its weight, as by far the greatest part of it

is laid out in the purchase of food for the paupers, and the price of

that food is an index to the ability of the land to bear it. It is to

be recollected that the new Poor Law, which was introduced to check the

rapid and alarming increase in the poor's rates of England and Wales,

was passed in 1834, and came into full operation in 1835, and has since

continued unaltered. It certainly effected a great reduction at first;

but that it was not lasting, and was speedily altered by the Free-Trade

measures, is decisively proved by the following table, furnished by Mr

Porter. The in-door and out-door paupers of England since 1840 have

stood thus to 1848:--

1840, 1,199,529

1841, 1,299,048

1842, 1,427,187

1843, 1,539,490

1844, 1,477,561

1845, 1,470,970

1846, 1,332,089

1847, 1,720,350

1848, 1,626,201

--_Progress of the Nation_, 3d Ed. p. 94.

[6] TABLE showing the Poor's Rates of England and Wales, with their

Population, and the amount in Quarters of Grain in every year, from

1822 to 1849, both inclusive:--

|-------+--------------| |-----------+-------------|

| | | | _s._ _d._ | |

|1822 | £6,358,702 | 12,318,310 | 43 3 | 2,940,440 |

|1823 | 5,772,958 | 12,508,956 | 51 9 | 2,231,091 |

|1824 | 5,736,898 | 12,699,098 | 62 0 | 1,850,612 |

|1825 | 5,786,989 | 12,881,906 | 66 6 | 1,740,447 |

|1826 | 5,928,501 | 13,056,931 | 55 11 | 2,983,221 |

|1827 | 6,441,088 | 13,242,019 | 56 9 | 2,269,987 |

|1828 | 6,298,000 | 13,441,913 | 60 5 | 2,084,855 |

|1829 | 6,332,410 | 13,620,701 | 66 3 | 1,911,671 |

|1830 | 6,829,042 | 13,811,467 | 64 3 | 2,125,772 |

|1831 | 6,798,888 | 13,897,187 | 66 4 | 2,049,916 |

|1832 | 7,036,968 | 14,105,645 | 58 8 | 2,398,966 |

|1833 | 6,790,799 | 14,317,229 | 52 11 | 2,566,601 |

|1834 | 6,317,255 | 14,531,957 | 46 2 | 2,736,717 |

|1835[7]| 5,526,418 | 14,703,002 | 44 2 | 2,502,528 |

|1836 | 4,717,630 | 14,904,456 | 39 5 | 2,393,723 |

|1837 | 4,044,741 | 15,105,909 | 52 6 | 1,540,853 |

|1838 | 4,123,604 | 15,307,363 | 55 3 | 1,492,684 |

|1839 | 4,421,712 | 15,508,816 | 69 4 | 1,275,494 |

|1840 | 4,576,965 | 15,710,270 | 68 5 | 1,336,340 |

|1841 | 4,760,929 | 15,911,725 | 65 3 | 1,459,288 |

|1842 | 4,911,498 | 16,141,808 | 64 0 | 1,534,843 |

|1843 | 5,208,027 | 16,371,892 | 54 4 | 1,917,665 |

|1844 | 4,976,093 | 16,601,975 | 51 5 | 1,935,595 |

|1845 | 5,039,708 | 16,824,341 | 50 10 | 1,976,354 |

|1846 | 4,954,204 | 17,032,471 | 54 8 | 1,801,528 |

|1847 | 5,298,787 | 17,426,321 | 69 9 | 1,513,939 |

|1848 | 6,180,764 | 17,649,622 | 50 6 | 2,423,436 |

|1849 | 5,792,963 | 17,862,431 | 44 3 | 2,633,166 |

|1850 | | | 40 2 | |

_Poor's-Rate Report_, 1849; and PORTER, 90, 3d ed.--The five last

years' prices are not from Mr Porter's work, where they are obviously

wrong, but from _Parl. Pap._ 1850, No. 460.

[7] New Poor-Law came into operation.

These are the results exhibited in England and Wales. The poor's

rates since 1837 have doubled in real weight, and we need not say

that they are calculated to awaken the most alarming reflections; the

more especially when it is recollected that the year 1849 was one

of reviving, and, during its last six months, of boasted commercial

prosperity. But the matter becomes much more serious, and the picture

of the social condition of the island much more correct and striking,

when the simultaneous measures, adopted during the last five years in

Scotland and Ireland, are taken into consideration.

We need not tell our readers that, prior to 1844, Ireland had no

poor law at all; and that although Scotland had a most humane and

admirable poor law on its statute-book, yet its operation had been

so much frittered away and nullified, by the unhappy decision of the

Court of Session, which gave no control to the _local_ courts over

the decisions of the heritors and kirk-sessions (church-wardens of

parishes), thereby in effect rendering them judges without control in

their own cause, that it, practically speaking, amounted to almost

nothing. But as the evils of that state of things had become apparent,

and had been demonstrated _luce meridianâ clarius_, by Dr Alison and

other distinguished philanthropists, an efficient statute was passed in

1845, which corrected this evil, and has since produced the following

results, which may well attract the notice of the most inconsiderate,

from the rapid increase which pauperism exhibits, and the extraordinary

magnitude it has already attained in Scotland--

|------+-------------+----------------------+--------------------|

|1840 | £202,812 | | |

|1841 | 218,481 | | |

|1844 | 258,814 | | |

|1845 | 306,044 | 63,070 or 1 in 42 | 62,070 or 1 in 42 |

|1846 | 435,367 | 69,432 -- 1 -- 38 | 69,432 -- 1 -- 38 |

|1847 | 533,073 | 146,370 -- 1 -- 17.8 | 74,161 -- 1 -- 35.3|

|1848 | 583,613 | 227,647 -- 1 -- 11.5 | 77,732 -- 1 -- 33.7|

|1849 | | 202,120 -- 1 -- 12.96| 82,357 -- 1 -- 31.8|

--_Poor-Law Report, Scotland_, Aug. 1849.

In the year 1850, a year of unusual commercial prosperity, the sums

assessed for the relief of the poor in Glasgow alone, irrespective of

buildings and other expenses connected with them, was £87,637, and with

these expenses £121,000.[8]

[8] DR YOUNG'S _Report_, Jan. 1851

In Ireland, the growth of the Poor Law, from its first introduction,

has been still more rapid and alarming, as might have been anticipated

from the greater mass of indigence and destitution with which it there

had to contend. The sums raised for relief of the poor in that country,

the _nominal_ rental of which is £13,000,000, has stood thus for the

last three years--

|--------+-----------+-----------+---------------+---------|

| 1846 | £359,870 | £350,667 | | |

| 1847 | 585,507 | 717,713 | 75,376 | |

| 1848 | 1,559,248 | 1,732,597 | 150,000 | 833,889 |

| 1849 | 1,648,337 | 2,177,651 | 203,199 | 666,224 |

| 1850 | 1,561,846 | 1,274,125 | 264,048[9] | 141,077 |

--_Third Annual Report, Ireland_, p. 7.

[9] On 22d June, 1850.

On 3d July 1847, no less than _3,020,712 persons were fed by

the public in Ireland_, being about 40 per cent on the whole

population--certainly, at that date, under 8,000,000. Well may the

_Edinburgh Review_ say, in reference to this astonishing subject--

"The collection in the year 1847-8 is remarkable: three times

the amount of the collections of 1846-7, five times the amount

of the collections of 1845-6. A tax unknown in Ireland ten

years before was levied in the Year 1848 to the extent of

_one-ninth_ of the rateable property of the country, and that

in a period of unprecedented depression and embarrassment. In

the same year the expenditure had risen _150 per cent_ above

that of 1847, _and 500 per cent above the expenditure of 1846_.

The expenditure in 1848-9 exceeds that of 1847 by the large sum

of £445,054."[10]

[10] _Edinburgh Review_, Jan. 1851.

The diminished expenditure of 1850 is mainly owing to the reduction

in the price of provisions in that year, which has caused the cost

of an in-door pauper to decline from 2s. 2d., which it was in April

1847, to 1s. 2d., _or nearly a half_, to which it fell in autumn 1849,

which it has never since exceeded. Measured by quarters of grain, the

poor's-rate of Ireland, in 1850, was fully twice as heavy as it was in

1848, when the effects of the disastrous famine of 1846 were still felt.

After these broad and decisive facts, drawn from so many official

sources, and all conspiring to one result, it may seem unnecessary

to go further, or load these pages, for which matter abundant to

overflowing still remains, with any farther proof or illustration of

a thing unhappily too apparent. But as our present system is mainly

calculated for the interests of our great manufacturing cities, and, at

all events, has been brought about by their influence, and is strictly

in conformity with their demands, we cannot resist the insertion of an

extract from an eloquent speech of a most able, humane, and zealous

minister of the Free Church in Glasgow on the moral and religious state

of the working-classes in that vast and rapidly-increasing city, which

now has little short of 400,000 inhabitants within its bounds.

"I know," said Dr Paterson, "that many congregations, not

of the Free Church, both feel and manifest an anxious and

enlightened concern in this cause. I do not attempt to describe

their efforts, simply because I am not in a position to do them

justice. I hail them, however, as fellow-labourers. I rejoice

to know that they are in the field to some extent already, and

I shall rejoice still more to see their exertions multiplying

side by side with our own. Certain I am that nothing short _of

a levy en masse of whatever there is of living Christianity in

the city_, in all the branches of the Church of Christ which

it contains, will suffice to make head against the _augmenting

ignorance and ungodliness, and Popery and infidelity, with

which we have to deal_. My other observation is for the members

of our own church. Some of them will, perhaps, be startled

by this movement, simply because it in adding another to our

already numerous schemes--and because it may aggravate the

difficulty we already feel of carrying them on. Here, they

may say, is the beginning of new demands upon both our money

and our time. To such a complaint I have no other answer to

make but one--but it is one that seems to me to be decisive.

My answer is, that this movement, whatever it may cost, is a

matter of life and death. If we _do not destroy this evil, it

will destroy us_."

These are certainly strong expressions, but they come from one well

acquainted, from personal visitation in his parish, which is one of the

most densely peopled in Glasgow, and second to none in zeal and ability

to combat the enormous mass of destitution, crime, sensuality, and

civilised heathenism with which he has to deal. And that he does not

exaggerate the evil, and speaks from accurate information, not vague

imagination, is evident from the details which he gives.

"I begin with the Old Wynd, which is the western boundary of

the parish, and of which only the one side, therefore, is

in the Tron parish. That one side contains 102 families and

504 individuals. Among that population there are possessed

in all only 11 church sittings, or little more than 2 to the

100. Of the 102 families, only 14 profess to be in the habit

of going to any place of worship. In the New Wynd, there

are 350 families and 1976 individuals, possessing in all 66

church sittings, or little more than 3 to the 100. Of the 350

families, only 67 profess to be in the habit of attending any

place of worship. Lastly, the Back Wynd contains 137 families

and 752 individuals, who possess in all only 6 church sittings,

or less than 1 to the 100! Of these 137 families, only 13

profess to attend any place of worship. Here, then, in these

three Wynds, constituting but a section of the parish, we

have a population of 3232 individuals, with only 83 church

sittings, or little more than an average of 2½ to the 100.

Of the 589 families of which that population consists, the

enormous number of _495 families, by their own confession, are

living in habitual and total estrangement from the house of

God_. In these appalling circumstances, it will not surprise

the presbytery to learn, that in the whole of the three Wynds

there were found no more than 117 Bibles--in other words, that

scarcely _one_ family in _five_ were possessed of a copy of the

Word of God."

Again he says--

"During the first ten of the last thirty years--that is, from

1821 to 1831--the population increased at the rate of about

5000 a-year. During the second ten of these years--that is,

from 1831 to 1841--it increased at the rate of 8000 a-year.

During the third ten of these years--that is, from 1841 to

1851--it is believed, on good grounds, that the increase will

average 12,000 a-year. Let any man consider these facts, and

then, if he has courage to look forward at all, let him try _to

picture to himself the state of Glasgow when another thirty

years shall have run their course_. If the same ratio of

increase holds on--and I know of no good reason for doubting

that it will--we shall have in thirty years a population nearly

equal in numbers to that of Paris; and most assuredly, if the

Christian churches do not speedily arouse themselves, it will

be by that time like Paris in more respects than one. We may

have the numbers of the French capital, but we shall have

_their infidelity, their Popery, their licentiousness, and

their lawlessness too_. If our efforts did not keep pace with

a population growing at the rate of 5000 a-year, how are such

efforts to do alongside of a population growing at the rate of

from 12,000 to 15,000 a-year? If in the race of the last thirty

years we fell at least twenty years behind, how tremendously

and how ruinously shall we be distanced in the next thirty

years to come! 'If thou hast run with the footmen, and they

have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses! And

if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied

thee, then how wilt thou do in the swellings of Jordan!'"

We select this as a picture of our great manufacturing towns, in which

the greatest and most unbounded prosperity, so far as mere production

goes, has prevailed, generally speaking, for the last thirty years; in

which the custom-house duties have increased, since 1812, from £3000

a-year to £660,000, and the river dues from £4500 to £66,000 in the

same period; but in which the sums expended in poor-rates and pauper

burials were, in round numbers,--

Poor Rates. Pauper Burials.

1848 £180,000 4042

1849 132,000 3577

1850 120,000[11] 2381

Indicating the deplorable destitution of multitudes in the midst of

this growing wealth and unparalleled increase of manufacturing and

commercial greatness. In the last year, out of 10,461 burials, no less

than 2381, or nearly _a fourth_, were at the public expense.[12]

[11] Including buildings £87,000; for poor alone.

[12] Dr STRANG'S _Report_, 1851.

Of the wretched condition of a large class of the operatives of

Glasgow--that employed in making clothes for the rest of the

community--the following striking account has been given in a recent

interesting publication on the "Sweating System," by a merchant tailor

of the city:--

"The _out-door_ or sweating system, by which the great

proportion of their work is produced, has had a fearful

debasing effect on journeymen tailors. Work is given out to a

person denominated a "middle-man." He alone comes into contact

with the employer. He employs others to work under him, in his

own house. The workmen have no respect for him, as they have

for an ordinary employer; nor has he the slightest influence

over them, in enforcing proper conduct or prudent habits. On

the contrary, his influence tends only to their hurt. _He

engages them to work at the lowest possible prices_--making

all the profit he can out of them. He ordinarily sets them

down to work in a small, dirty room, in some unhealthy part of

the city. They are allowed to work at irregular hours. Sunday,

in innumerable instances brings no rest to the tailor under

the sweating system; he must serve his slave-driver on that

day too, even if he should go idle on the other days of the

week. _No use of churches or ministers to him; his calling is

to produce so-called cheap clothes for the million_--Sunday

or Monday being alike necessary for such a laudable pursuit,

though his soul should perish. Small matter that: only let

_the cheap system flourish, and thereby increase the riches of

the people_, and then full compensation has been made, though

moral degradation, loss of all self-respect, and tattered rags,

be the lot of the unhappy victim, sunk by it to the lowest

possible degree."[13]

[13] _Modern System of Low-priced Goods_, p. 2, 3.

Such is the effect of the cheapening and competition system, in one

of our greatest manufacturing towns, in a year of great and unusual

commercial prosperity. That the condition of the vast multitude engaged

in the making of clothes in the metropolis is not better, may be judged

of by the fact that there are in London 20,000 journeymen tailors, of

whom 14,000 can barely earn a miserable subsistence by working fourteen

hours a-day, Sunday included; and that Mr Sidney Herbert himself, a

great Free-Trader, has been lately endeavouring to get subscriptions

for the needlewomen of London, on the statement that there are there

33,000 females of that class, who only earn on an average 4½d.

a day, by working fourteen hours. And the writer of this Essay has

ascertained, by going over the returns of the census of 1841 for

Glasgow, (Occupations of the People,) that there were in Glasgow in

that year above 50,000 women engaged in factories or needle-work, and

whose average earnings certainly do not, even in this year of boasted

commercial prosperity, exceed 7s. or 8s. a week. _Their number is

now, beyond all question, above 60,000_, and their wages not higher.

Such is the cheapening and competition system in the greatest marts

of manufacturing industry, and in a year when provisions were cheap,

exports great, and the system devised for its special encouragement in

full and unrestrained activity.

Facts of this kind give too much reason to believe that the picture

drawn in a late work of romance, but evidently taken by a well-informed

observer in London, is too well founded in fact:--

"Every working tailor must come to this at last, on the present

system; and we are lucky in having been spared so long. You

all know where this will end--in the same misery as 15,000 out

of 20,000 of our class are enduring now. We shall become the

slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middle-men, and

sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We

shall have to fare as the rest have--ever decreasing prices of

labour, ever increasing profits, made out of that labour by

the contractors who will employ us--arbitrary fines, inflicted

at the caprice of hirelings--the competition of women, and

children, and starving Irish--our hours of work will increase

one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half. And

in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement

in wages, but even more penury, slavery, misery, as we are

pressed on by those who are sucked by fifties--almost by

hundreds--yearly out of the honourable trade in which we were

brought up, into the infernal system of contract work, which is

devouring our trade, and many others, body and soul. Our wives

will be forced to sit up night and day to help us--our children

must labour from the cradle, without chance of going to school,

hardly of breathing the fresh air of heaven--our boys, as

they grow up, must turn beggars or paupers--our daughters,

as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earnings by

prostitution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what

one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there

will be no hope for us. There is no use appealing to Government

or Parliament."[14]

[14] _Alton Locke_, vol. i. p. 149-50.

We shall only add to these copious extracts and documents one

illustrative of the state to which the West Highlands of Scotland have

been brought by Free Trade in black cattle and barilla, the staple of

their industry:--

Price of the Estate, £163,779.

| | Expenditure on

Years.| Receipts. | Estate.

1847 |£4,134 0 0 |£7,305 0 0

1848 | 1,781 0 0 | 4,253 0 0

1849 | 1,109 0 0 | 1,294 0 0

1850 | 1,345 0 0 | 1,126 0 0

--_Inverness Courier._

Couple this with the facts that, in 1850, in the face of average prices

of wheat at about 40s. a quarter, the importation of all sorts of

grain into Great Britain and Ireland was about 9,500,000 quarters--of

course displacing domestic industry employed previous to 1846 in this

production; so that the acres under wheat cultivation in Ireland have

sunk from 1,048,000 in 1847, to 664,000 in 1849; and there will be no

difficulty in explaining the immense influx of the destitute from the

country into the great towns--augmenting thus the enormous mass of

destitution, pauperism, and wretchedness, with which they are already

overwhelmed.

* * * * *

Such is a picture, however brief and imperfect, of the social

condition of our population, after twenty years of Liberal government,

self-direction, and increasing popularisation, enhanced, during the

last five years, by the blessings of Free Trade and a restricted and

fluctuating currency. The question remains the most momentous on

which public attention can now be engaged. Is this state of things

_unavoidable_, or are there any means by which, under Providence, it

may be removed or alleviated? Part of it is unavoidable, and by no

human wisdom could be averted. But by far the greater part is directly

owing to the selfish and shortsighted legislation of man, and might at

once be removed by a wise, just, and equal system of government.

There is an unavoidable tendency, in all old and wealthy states,

for riches to concentrate in the highest ranks, and numbers to

become excessive in the lowest. This arises from the different set

of principles which, at the opposite ends of the chain of society,

regulate human conduct in the direction of life. Prudence, and

the desire of elevation, are predominant at the one extremity;

recklessness, and the thirst for gratification, at the other. Life is

spent in the one in striving to gain, and endeavouring to rise; in the

other, in seeking indulgence, and struggling with its consequences.

Marriage is contracted in the former, generally speaking, from

prudential or ambitious motives; in the latter, from the influence of

passion, or the necessity of a home. In the former, fortune marries

fortune, or rank is allied to rank; in the latter, poverty is linked

to poverty, and destitution engenders destitution. These opposite set

of principles come, in the progress of time, to exercise a great

and decisive influence on the comparative numbers and circumstances

of the affluent and the destitute classes. The former can rarely, if

ever, maintain their own numbers; the latter are constantly increasing

in numbers, with scarcely any other limit on their multiplication

but the experienced impossibility of rearing a family. Fortunes run

into fortunes by intermarriage, the effects of continued saving,

and the dying out of the direct line of descendants among the rich.

Poverty is allied to poverty by the recklessness invariably produced

by destitution among the poor. Hence the rich, in an old and wealthy

community, have a tendency to get richer, and the poor poorer; and

the increase of wealth only increases this tendency, and renders it

more decided with every addition made to the national fortunes. This

tendency is altogether irrespective of primogeniture, entails, or any

other device to retain property in a particular class of society. It

exists as strongly in the mercantile class, whose fortunes are for the

most part equally divided, as in the landed, where the estate descends

in general to the eldest son; and was as conspicuous in former days in

Imperial Rome, when primogeniture was unknown, and is now complained

of as as great a grievance in Republican France, where the portions of

children are fixed by law, as it is in Great Britain, where the feudal

institutions still prevail among those connected with real estates.

In the next place, this tendency in old and opulent communities has

been much enhanced, in the case of Great Britain, by the extraordinary

combination of circumstances--some natural, some political--which

have, in a very great degree, augmented its manufacturing and

commercial industry. It would appear to be a general law of nature,

in the application of which the progress of society makes no or very

little change--that machinery and the division of labour can add

scarcely anything to the powers of human industry in the cultivation

of the soil--but that they can work prodigies in the manufactories

or trades which minister to human luxury or enjoyment. The proof of

this is decisive. England, grey in years, and overloaded with debt,

can undersell the inhabitants of Hindostan in cotton manufactures,

formed in Manchester out of cotton grown on the banks of the Ganges

or the Mississippi; but she is undersold in grain, and to a ruinous

extent, by the Polish or American cultivators, with grain raised on

the banks of the Vistula or the Ohio. It is the steam-engine and the

division of labour which have worked this prodigy. They enable a girl

or a child, with the aid of machinery, to do the work of a hundred

men. They substitute the inanimate spindle for human hands. But there

is no steam-engine in agriculture. The spade and the hoe are its

spindles, and they must be worked by human hands. Garden cultivation,

exclusively done by man, is the perfection of husbandry. By a lasting

law of nature, the first and best employment of man is reserved, and

for ever reserved, for the human race. Thus it could not be avoided

that in Great Britain, so advantageously situated for foreign commerce,

possessing the elements of great naval strength in its forests, and

the materials in the bowels of the earth from which manufacturing

greatness was to arise, should come, in process of time, to find its

manufacturing bear an extraordinary and scarce paralleled proportion to

its agricultural population.

Consequent on this was another circumstance, scarcely less important in

its effects than the former, which materially enhanced the tendency to

excess of numbers in the manufacturing portions of the community. This

was the encouragement given to the employment of _women and children

in preference to men_ in most manufacturing establishments--partly

from the greater cheapness of their labour, partly from their being

better adapted than the latter for many of the operations connected

with machines, and partly from their being more manageable, and less

addicted to strikes and other violent insurrections, for the purpose

of forcing up wages. Great is the effect of this tendency, which

daily becomes more marked as prices decline, competition increases,

and political associations among workmen become more frequent

and formidable by the general popularising of institutions. The

steam-engine thus is generally found to be the sole moving power in

factories; spindles and spinning-jennies the hands by which their

work is performed; women and children the attendants on their labour.

There is no doubt that this precocious forcing of youth, and general

employment of young women in factories, is often a great resource to

families in indigent circumstances, and enables the children and young

women of the poor to bring in, early in life, as much as enables their

parents, without privation, often to live in idleness. But what effect

_must_ it have upon the principle of population, and the vital point

for the welfare of the working-classes--the proportion between the

demand for and the supply of labour? When young children of either

sex are sure, in ordinary circumstances, of finding employment in

factories, what an extraordinary impulse is given to population around

them, under circumstances when the lasting demand for labour in society

cannot find them employment! The boys and girls find employment in the

factories for six or eight years; so far all is well: but what comes

of these boys and girls when they become men and women, fathers and

mothers of children, legitimate and illegitimate, and their place in

the factories is filled by a new race of infants and girls, destined

in a few years more to be supplanted, in their turn, by a similar

inroad of juvenile and precocious labour? It is evident that this is an

important and alarming feature in manufacturing communities; and, where

they have existed long, and are widely extended, it has a tendency to

induce, after a time, an alarming disproportion between the demand

for, and the supply of _full-grown labour_ over the entire community.

And to this we are in a great degree to ascribe the singular fact, so

well and painfully known to all persons practically acquainted with

such localities, that while manufacturing towns are the places where

the greatest market exists for juvenile or infant labour--to obtain

which the poor flock from all quarters with ceaseless alacrity--they

are at the same time the places where destitution in general prevails

to the greatest and most distressing extent, and it is most difficult

for full-grown men and women to obtain permanent situations or wages,

on which they can maintain themselves in comfort. Their only resource,

often, is to trust, in their turn, to the employment of their children

for the wages necessary to support the family. Juvenile labour

becomes profitable--a family is not felt as a burden, but rather as

an advantage _at first_; and a forced and unnatural impulse is given

to population by the very circumstances, in the community, which are

abridging the means of desirable subsistence to the persons brought

into existence.

Lastly the close proximity of Ireland, and the improvident habits

and rapid increase of its inhabitants, has for above half a century

had a most important effect in augmenting, in a degree altogether

disproportioned to the extension in the demand for labour, the

numbers of the working classes in the community in Great Britain.

Without stopping to inquire into the causes of the calamity, it may

be sufficient to refer to the fact, unhappily too well and generally

known to require any illustration, that the numbers of labourers of the

very humblest class in Ireland has been long excessive; and that any

accidental failure in the usual means of subsistence never fails to

impel multitudes in quest of work or charity, upon the more industrious

and consequently opulent realm of Britain. Great as has been the

emigration, varying from 200,000 to 250,000 a-year from Ireland, during

the last two years to Transatlantic regions, it has certainly been

equalled, if not exceeded, by the simultaneous influx of Irish hordes

into the western provinces of Britain. It is well known[15] that,

during the whole of 1848, the inundation into Glasgow was at the rate

of above 1000 a-week on an average; and into Liverpool generally above

double the number. The census now in course of preparation will furnish

many most valuable returns on this subject, and prove to what extent

English has suffered by the competition of Irish labour. In the mean

time, it seems sufficient to refer to this well-known social evil, as

one of the causes which has powerfully contributed to increase the

competition among the working-classes, and enhance the disproportion

between the demand for, and the supply of, labour, which with few and

brief exceptions has been felt as so distressing in Great Britain for

the last thirty years.

[15] It was ascertained, from an accurate return obtained by the

Magistrates of Glasgow, that the number of persons who arrived at that

city by the Clyde, or the Ayrshire railway, in four months preceding

10th April 1848, was 42,860.

Powerful as these causes of evil undoubtedly were, they were not beyond

the reach of remedy by human means--nay, circumstances simultaneously

existed which, if duly taken advantage of, might have converted them

into a source of blessings. They had enormously augmented the powers of

productive industry in the British Empire; and in the wealth, dominion,

and influence thereby acquired, the means had been opened up of giving

full employment to the multitudes displaced by its boundless machinery

and extended manufacturing skill. Great Britain and Ireland enjoyed one

immense advantage--their territory was not merely capable of yielding

food for the whole present inhabitants, numerous and rapidly increasing

as they were, but for double or triple the number. The proof of this

is decisive. Although the two islands had added above a half to their

numbers between 1790 and 1835, the importation of foreign grain had

been continually diminishing; and in the five years ending with 1835,

they had come to be on an average only 398,000 quarters of grain and

flour in a year--being not _a hundredth_ part of the whole subsistence

of the people. Further, agriculture in Great Britain, from the great

attention paid to it, and the extended capital and skill employed in

its prosecution, had come to be more and more worked by manual labour,

and was rapidly approaching--at least, in the richer districts of the

country--_the horticultural system_, in which at once the greatest

produce is obtained from the soil, and the greatest amount of human

labour is employed in its cultivation; and in which the greatest

manufacturing states of former days, Florence and Flanders, had, on the

decay of their manufacturing industry, found a never-failing resource

for a denser population than now exists in Great Britain.

But, more than all, England possessed, in her immense and

rapidly-increasing colonies in every quarter of the globe, at once

an inexhaustible vent and place of deposit for its surplus home

population, the safest and most rapidly-increasing market for its

manufacturing industry, and the most certain means, in the keeping up

the communication between the different parts of so vast a dominion,

of maintaining and extending its maritime superiority. This was a

resource unknown to any former state, and apparently reserved for the

Anglo-Saxon race, whom such mighty destinies awaited in the progress

of mankind. The forests of Canada, the steppes of Australia, the hills

of New Zealand, the savannahs of the Cape, seemed spread out by nature

to receive the numerous and sturdy children of the Anglo-Saxon race,

whom the natural progress of opulence, the division of labour, the

extension of machinery, and the substitution of female and juvenile for

male labour, were depriving of employment in their native seats. In

the colonies, manual labour was as much in demand as it was redundant

in the parent state. No machinery or manufactures existed there to

displace the arm of the labourer's industry; the felling of the forest,

the draining of the morass, the cultivation of the wild, chained the

great majority of the human race to agricultural employments, for

generations and centuries to come. Even the redundant number and rapid

increase of the Celtic population in Ireland could not keep pace with

the demand for agricultural labour in our Transatlantic dominions. The

undue preponderance of the female sex, felt as so great and consuming

an evil in all old and wealthy cities, might be rendered the greatest

possible blessing to the infant colonies, in which the greatest social

evil always experienced is the excessive numbers of the male sex. All

that was required was the removal of them from the overburdened heart

to the famishing extremities of the empire; and this, while it relieved

the labour, promised to afford ample employment to the national navy.

The magnitude of this traffic may be judged of by the fact that the

212,000 emigrants who arrived at New York in the year 1850 were brought

in 2000 vessels. At the same time the rapid growth of the colonies,

under such a system, would have furnished a steady market for the most

extensive manufacturing industry at home, and that in a class of men

descended from ourselves, imbued with our habits, actuated by feeling

our wants, and chained by circumstances, for centuries to come, to the

exclusive consumption of our manufactures. What the magnitude of this

market might have been may be judged of by the fact that, in the year

1850, Australia and New Zealand, with a population which had not yet

reached 250,000 souls, took off in the year 1850 £2,080,364 of our

manufactures, being at the rate of £8 a-head; while Russia, with a

population of 66,000,000, only took off £1,572,593 worth, being not 6d.

a-head.[16]

[16] Parliamentary Return, 1851.

The social evils which at first sight appear so alarming, therefore,

in consequence of the extension of our manufacturing population, and

the vast increase of our wealth, were in reality not only easily

susceptible of remedy, but they might, by a wise and paternal policy,

alive equally to the interests _represented and unrepresented_ of

all parts of the empire, have been converted into so many sources

of increasing prosperity and durable social happiness. All that was

required was to adopt a policy conducive alike to the interests of

_all_ parts of our varied dominions, but giving no one an undue

advantage over the other; legislating for India as if the seat of

empire were Calcutta, for Canada as if it were Quebec, for the West

Indies as if it were Kingston. "Non alia Romæ alia Athenæ," should have

been our maxim. Equal justice to all would have secured equal social

happiness to all. The distress and want of employment consequent on

the extension of machinery, and the growth of opulence in the heart

of the empire, would have become the great moving power which would

have overcome the attachments of home and country, and impelled the

multitudes whom our transmarine dominions required into those distant

but still British settlements, where ample room was to be found for

their comfort and increase, and where their rapidly increasing numbers

would have operated with powerful effect, and in a geometrical ratio,

on the industry and happiness of the parent state. Protection to

native industry at home and abroad was all that was required to bless

and hold together the mighty fabric. So various and extensive were

the British dominions, that they would soon have arrived at the point

of being independent of all the rest of the world. The materials for

our fabrics, the food for our people, were to be had in abundance in

the different parts of our own dominions. We had no reason to fear

the hostility or the stopping of supplies from any foreign power. The

trade of almost the whole globe was to Great Britain a home trade, and

brought with it its blessings and its double return, at each end of the

chain.

These great and magnificent objects, which are as clearly pointed out

by Providence as the mission of the British nation--and which the

peculiar character of the Anglo-Saxon race so evidently qualified

it to discharge--as if it had been declared in thunders from Mount

Sinai, were in a great degree attained, though in an indirect way,

under the old constitution of England; and accordingly, while it

lasted, and was undisturbed in its action by local influences in the

heart of the empire, distress was comparatively unknown at home, and

disaffection was unheard of in our distant settlements. The proof of

this is decisive. The tables already given in the former part of this

paper demonstrate when distress at home and sedition abroad seriously

set in, when emigration advanced with the steps of a giant, and crime

began to increase ten times as fast as the numbers of the people--and

the poor-rates, despite all attempts to check them by fresh laws,

threatened to swallow all but the fortunes of the _millionnaires_ in

the kingdom. _It was after 1819 that all this took place._ Previous to

this, or at least previous to 1816, when the approaching great monetary

change of that year was intimated to the Bank, and the contraction of

the currency really began, distress at home was comparatively unknown,

and the most unbounded loyalty existed in our colonial settlements in

every part of the world. But from that date our policy at home and

abroad underwent a total change. Everything was changed with the change

in the ruling influences in the state. The words of the Christian

bishop who converted Clovis were acted upon to the letter--"Brulez ce

que vous avez adoré; adorez ce que vous avez brulé." The moneyed came

to supplant the territorial aristocracy, the interests of realised

capital to prevail over those of industry and wealth in the course

of formation. The Reform Bill confirmed and perpetuated this change,

by giving the moneyed class a decided majority of votes in the House

of Commons, and the House of Commons the practical government of the

country. From that moment suffering marked us for her own. Misery

spread in the heart of the empire; many of its most flourishing

settlements abroad went to ruin; and such disaffection prevailed in

all, that Government, foreseeing the dissolution of the empire, has

already taken steps to conceal the fall of the fabric by voluntarily

taking it to pieces.

Without going into details, unhappily too well known to all to require

any lengthened illustration, it may be sufficient to refer to three

circumstances which have not only immensely aggravated the internal

distress and external disaffection of the empire, but interrupted and

neutralised the influence of all those causes of relief provided for

us by nature, and which, under a just and equal policy, would have

entirely averted them.

The first of these, and perhaps the most disastrous in its effects

upon the internal prosperity of the empire, was the great contraction

of the currency which took place by the bill of 1819. By that bill the

bank and bankers' notes, which at the close of the war had amounted,

in Great Britain and Ireland, to about £60,000,000 in round numbers,

were suddenly reduced to £32,000,000, which was the limit formally

imposed, by the acts of 1844 and 1845, on the circulation issuable

on securities in the country. We know the effect of these changes:

the _Times_ has told us what it has been. It rendered the sovereign

worth two sovereigns; the fortune of £500,000 worth £1,000,000; the

debt of £800,000,000 worth £1,600,000,000; the taxes of £50,000,000

worth £100,000,000 annually. As a necessary consequence, it reduced

the average price of wheat from 90s. to 40s.; and the entire wages

of labour and remuneration of industry, throughout the country,

_to one-half_ of their former amount. The prodigious effect of

this change upon the real amount of the national burdens, and the

remuneration of the industry which was to sustain it, may be judged

of by the invaluable table quoted on the next page, which is stated

to be taken from Mr Porter's valuable work on the _Progress of the

Nation_, published in 1847, and furnished by that gentleman with his

wonted courtesy to the _Midland Counties Herald_, to the end of 1850.

Its import will be found to be correctly condensed in the following

statement, by that able writer Gemini, contained in the same paper of

January 30:--

S. D.

"The average price of wheat

from 1800 to the close of the

war, was, 90 7

The average price of wheat from

the passing of the Corn Law

of 1815 to 1827, each inclusive, 67 2

The average price of wheat from

the passing of the Corn Law

of 1828 to 1841, each inclusive, 58 10

The average price of wheat from

the passing of the Corn Law

of 1842 to 1849, each inclusive, 53 6

The average price of 1850 40 2

During the war the average quantity of wheat required to

be sold to pay one million of taxation amounted to 220,791

quarters. The quantity required to be sold to pay one million

of taxation, according to the prices of 1850, amounts to

497,925 quarters, or 56,343 quarters more than _double_ the

quantity required to be sold during the war. The enormous

increase in the burdensomeness of taxation may be thus clearly

estimated."

Comment is unnecessary, illustration superfluous, on such a result.

------+-------------+--------+-------------+--------------+---------+

------+-------------+--------+-------------+--------------+---------+

| £ | S. D. | qrs. | qrs. bus. | S. D. |

| | | | | |

1800 | 34,145,584 |113 10 | 5,999,224 | 52 5 | ... |

1801 | 34,113,146 |119 6 | 5,709,313 | 50 1 | ... |

1802 | 36,368,149 | 69 10 | 10,415,698 | 85 7 | ... |

1803 | 38,609,392 | 58 10 | 13,125,005 | 101 7 | ... |

1804 | 46,176,492 | 62 3 | 14,835,820 | 96 5 | ... |

1805 | 50,897,706 | 89 9 | 11,342,107 | 66 6 | ... |

1806 | 55,796,086 | 79 1 | 14,110,706 | 75 6 | 84 8 |

1807 | 59,339,321 | 75 4 | 15,753,802 | 79 5 | 79 2 |

1808 | 62,998,191 | 81 4 | 15,491,358 | 73 5 | 73 7 |

1809 | 63,719,400 | 97 4 | 13,093,027 | 61 5 | 77 8 |

1810 | 67,144,542 |106 5 | 12,619,177 | 56 3 | 84 5 |

1811 | 65,173,545 | 95 3 | 13,684,383 | 62 7 | 89 2 |

1812 | 65,037,850 |126 6 | 10,282,604 | 47 4 | 94 5 |

1813 | 68,748,363 |109 9 | 12,528,175 | 54 3 | 98 10 |

1814 | 71,134,503 | 74 4 | 19,139,328 | 80 6 | 98 8 |

1815 | 72,210,512 | 65 7 | 22,020,994 | 91 4 | 96 5 |

1816 | 62,264,546 | 78 6 | 15,863,578 | 76 3 | 93 7 |

1817 | 52,055,913 | 96 11 | 10,742,406 | 61 7 | 92 4 |

1818 | 53,747,795 | 86 3 | 12,463,256 | 69 4 | 91 6 |

1819 | 52,648,847 | 74 6 | 14,133,918 | 80 4 | 83 4 |

1820 | 54,282,958 | 67 10 | 16,004,803 | 88 5 | 77 8 |

1821 | 55,834,192 | 56 1 | 19,911,153 | 106 7 | 75 1 |

1822 | 55,663,650 | 44 7 | 24,970,609 | 134 7 | 72 1 |

1823 | 57,672,999 | 53 4 | 21,627,374 | 112 4 | 68 6 |

1824 | 59,362,403 | 63 11 | 18,574,937 | 93 7 | 63 9 |

1825 | 57,273,869 | 68 6 | 16,722,297 | 87 4 | 61 2 |

1826 | 54,894,989 | 58 8 | 18,714,200 | 102 2 | 58 11 |

1827 | 54,932,518 | 58 6 | 18,780,348 | 102 4 | 57 7 |

1828 | 55,187,142 | 60 5 | 18,268,847 | 99 2 | 58 3 |

1829 | 50,786,682 | 66 3 | 15,331,828 | 90 4 | 61 4 |

1830 | 50,056,616 | 64 3 | 15,581,825 | 93 4 | 62 11 |

1831 | 46,424,440 | 66 4 | 13,997,318 | 90 4 | 63 3 |

1832 | 46,988,755 | 58 8 | 16,018,893 | 102 2 | 61 10 |

1833 | 46,271,326 | 52 11 | 17,488,375 | 113 3 | 61 0 |

1834 | 46,425,263 | 46 2 | 20,112,027 | 130 0 | 59 3 |

1835 | 45,893,369 | 39 4 | 23,335,611 | 152 4 | 56 3 |

1836 | 48,591,180 | 48 6 | 20,037,600 | 123 6 | 53 8 |

1837 | 46,475,194 | 55 10 | 16,647,830 | 107 3 | 52 6 |

1838 | 47,333,460 | 64 7 | 14,658,103 | 92 7 | 52 3 |

1839 | 47,844,899 | 70 8 | 13,541,009 | 84 7 | 54 0 |

1840 | 47,567,565 | 66 4 | 14,341,979 | 90 3 | 55 11 |

1841 | 48,084,360 | 64 4 | 14,948,505 | 93 2 | 58 6 |

1842 | 46,965,631 | 57 3 | 16,407,207 | 104 6 | 61 0 |

1843 | 52,582,817 | 50 1 | 20,998,129 | 119 6 | 61 3 |

1844 | 54,003,754 | 51 3 | 21,074,635 | 117 0 | 60 7 |

1845 | 53,060,354 | 50 10 | 20,876,204 | 118 0 | 58 8 |

1846 | 53,790,138 | 54 8 | 19,679,318 | 109 6 | 56 4 |

1847 | 51,546,265 | 69 9 | 14,780,291 | 86 0 | 56 10 |

1848 | 53,388,717 | 50 6 | 21,144,046 | 118 7 | 54 10 |

1849 | 52,951,749 | 44 3 | 23,932,993 | 135 4 | 53 0 |

1850 | ...... | 40 2 | ...... | 149 3 | 51 6 |

------+-------------+--------+-------------+--------------+---------+

--_Midland Counties Herald_, January 31, 1851. The prices of wheat here

given are the _average_ prices of the year.

In the next place, prodigious as was the addition which this great

change made to the burdens, public and private, of the nation, the

change was attended with an alteration at times still more hurtful,

and, in the end, not less pernicious. This was the compelling the bank

to pay _all_ their notes in gold, the restraining them from issuing

paper beyond £14,000,000 bond on securities, and compelling them to

take all gold brought to them, whatever its market value was, at the

fixed price of £3, 17s. 10½d. the ounce. This at once aggravated

speculation to a most fearful degree in periods of prosperity, for

it left the bank no way of indemnifying itself for the purchase and

retention of £15,000,000 or £16,000,000 worth of treasure but by

pushing its business in all directions, and lowering its discounts

so as to accomplish that object; and it led to a rapid and ruinous

contraction of the currency the moment that exchanges became adverse,

and a drain set in upon the bank, either from the necessities of

foreign war in the neighbouring states, the mutation of commerce, or

the occurrence of a large importation of grain to supply the wants of

our own country. Incalculable as the distress which those alternations

of impulse and depression have brought upon this great manufacturing

community, and immeasurable the multitudes whom they have sunk, never

more to rise, into the lowest and most destitute classes of society,

their effect has by no means been confined to the periods during

which they actually lasted. Their baneful influence has extended to

subsequent times, and produced a continuous and almost unbroken stream

of distress; for, long ere the victims of one monetary crisis have

sunk into the grave, or been driven into exile, another storm arises

which precipitates fresh multitudes, especially in the manufacturing

towns, into the abyss of ruin. The whole, or nearly the whole, of this

terrific and continued suffering is to be ascribed to the monstrous

principles adopted in our monetary system--that of compelling the

banks to foster and encourage speculation in periods of prosperity,

and suddenly contract their issues and starve the body politic, when a

demand for the precious metals carries them in considerable quantities

out of the country. A memorable instance of the working of that

system is to be found in the Railway mania of 1845 and 1846, flowing

directly from the Acts of 1844 and 1845, which landed the nation in

an extra expenditure of nearly £300,000,000 on domestic undertakings,

at a time when commerce of every kind was in a state of the highest

activity, followed by the dreadful crash of October 1847, which, by

suddenly contracting the currency and ruining credit, threw millions

out of employment, and strained the real capital of the nation to the

very uttermost, to complete a part only of the undertakings which the

Currency Laws had given birth to. And the example of the years 1809

and 1810--when the whole metallic currency was drained out of the

country by the demands for the war in the Peninsula and Germany, but no

distress was experienced, and the national strength was put forth with

unparalleled vigour, and, as it proved, decisive effect--proves how

easily such a crisis might be averted by the extended issue of a paper

currency not liable to be withdrawn, when most required, by a public

run for gold.

In the third place, to crown the whole, and as if to put the keystone

in the arch of public distress, Free-Trade in every department was

forced upon the country by Sir Robert Peel and his successors in

1846, 1847, and 1849, under the dictation of the Manchester school,

and to promote the interest of master-manufacturers by lowering the

wages of labour and of realised capital, by cheapening the price of

everything else, and raising the value of money. We see the effects

of this already evinced in every department to which the system has

applied; and we see the commencement only of the general ruin with

which it is fraught. In agriculture, Great Britain and Ireland, which

were, practically speaking, in ordinary seasons self-supporting, have

come already to import from _nine to ten millions_ of foreign grain

for the support of the inhabitants, besides sheep and cattle in an

equal proportion. At least fifteen millions yearly is sent out of the

country, for the most part in hard cash, to buy food, which formerly

was nearly all spent in it, and enriched all classes of its people.

The exchangeable value of what remains has been lowered by at least

£75,000,000 annually, and of course so much taken away from the means

of supporting domestic labour, and paying the national defences and

the interest of public and private debt. The West Indies, formerly the

right arm of the naval strength of England, and no small source of its

riches, have been _totally ruined_; and, as a necessary consequence,

the exports of our manufactures to those once splendid settlements,

which, prior to the commencement of the new measures in 1834, had

reached £3,500,000 a-year, had sunk in 1850 to £1,821,146! Canada has

been so much impoverished by the withdrawing of all protection to

colonial industry, which has annihilated its intercolonial trade with

the West Indies, and seriously injured its export trade in grain and

wood to this country, that the British exports to that country, which

in 1839 amounted to £3,047,000, had sunk in 1850, notwithstanding

the subsequent addition of above 50 per cent to its population, to

£2,280,386.

EXPORTS TO

Canada. West Indies.

1839 L.3,047,671 L.3,986,598

1840 2,847,970 3,574,970

1841 2,947,061 3,504,004

1850 2,280,386 1,821,146

In Ireland from four to five hundred thousand acres have gone out of

the cultivation of wheat alone; although the calamitous failure of the

potato crop in 1846, and the subsequent doubts as to the success of

that prolific esculent, should have tended to an _increase_ of cereal

crops as the only thing that could be relied on, and undoubtedly would

have done so, but for the blasting influence of Free Trade, which

deprived the farmer of all hope of a profitable return for agricultural

expenditure. As a necessary consequence, above 200,000 cultivators

have disappeared from the soil of the Emerald Isle in the four last

years; about 250,000 of them or their families are immured, idle and

miserable, in the Irish workhouses, and above 40,000 in its prisons;

while above 200,000 persons from that island alone, and 300,000 from

the two islands, are annually driven into exile! Lastly, as if Free

Trade had not worked sufficient mischief on the land, it has invaded

the sea also; no longer can the Englishman say--

"His march is on the mountain wave

His home is on the deep."

The ocean is fast becoming the home for other people, to the exclusion

of its ancient lords. One single year of Free Trade in shipping,

following the repeal of the Navigation Laws, has occasioned, under the

most favourable circumstances for testing the tendency of the change,

so great a diminution in British and increase in foreign shipping in

all our harbours, that it is evident the time is rapidly approaching,

if the present system is continued, when we must renounce all thought

of maintaining naval superiority, and trust to the tender mercies of

our enemies and rivals for a respite from the evils of blockade and

famine.[17]

[17] The following Returns from three seaports alone--London,

Liverpool, and Dublin--in 1849 and 1850, will show how rapidly this

ruinous process is going on:--

| | | |

| | 1849. | 1850. |

| British, | 6,917 | 1,444,311 | 6,497 | 1,376,233 |

| Foreign, | 3,040 | 443,923 | 3,413 | 527,174 |

| |--------+-----------+--------+-----------|

| Foreign, | | 56,500 | | 124,800 |

| |--------+-----------+--------+-----------|

| British, | 351 | 63,263 | 279 | 44,146 |

| Foreign, | 125 | 27,774 | 183 | 39,250 |

+------------------+--------------------+--------------------+

| |Decrease of British.|Increase of Foreign.|

| | | |

| I. LONDON, | 420 | 78,078 | 373 | 83,251 |

| |--------+-----------+--------+-----------|

| II. LIVERPOOL, | | | | 78,300 |

| |--------+-----------+--------+-----------|

|III. DUBLIN, | 72 | 19,117 | 58 | 11,476 |

| |--------+-----------+--------+-----------|

| Total, | | | | 173,027 |

The vast emigration of 300,000 annually which is now going on from the

United Kingdom, might reasonably be expected to have alleviated, in a

great degree, this most calamitous decrease in the staple branches of

industry in our people; and so it would have, certainly, had a wise

and paternal Government taken it under its own direction, and sent

the parties abroad who really were likely to want employment, and

whose removal would at once prove a relief to the country from which

they were sent, and a blessing to that for which they were destined.

But this is so far from being the case, that there is perhaps no one

circumstance in our social condition which has done more of late years

to aggravate the want of employment, and enhance the distress among

the working-classes, than _the very magnitude of this emigration_.

The dogma of Free Trade has involved even the humble cabins of the

emigrant's ship: there, as elsewhere, it has spread nothing but misery

and desolation. The reason is, that it has been left to the unaided,

undirected efforts of the emigrants themselves.

Government was too glad of an excuse not to interfere: the constantly

destitute condition of the Treasury, and the ceaseless clamour

against taxation, in consequence of the wasting away of the national

resources under the action of Free Trade and a contracted currency,

made them too happy of any excuse for avoiding any payments from the

public Treasury, even on behalf of the most suffering and destitute

of the community. This excuse was found in the plausible plea, that

any advances on their part would interfere with the free exercise of

individual enterprise--a plea somewhat similar to what it would be if

all laws for the protection of paupers, minors, and lunatics, were

swept away, lest the free action of the creditors on their estates

should be disturbed. The consequence has been that the whole, or nearly

the whole, of the immense stream of emigration which general distress

has now caused to flow from the British Islands, has been sustained

by the efforts of private individuals, and left to the tender mercies

of the owners or freighters of emigrant ships. The result is well

known. Frightful disasters, from imperfect manning and equipment, have

occurred to several of these misery-laden vessels. A helpless multitude

is thrown ashore at New York and Montreal, destitute alike of food,

clothing, or the means of getting on to the frontier, where its labour

could be of value; and the competition for employment at home has been

increased to a frightful degree by the removal of so large a proportion

of such of the tenantry or middle class as were possessed of little

capitals; and had the means either of maintaining themselves or giving

employment to others. At least L.3,000,000 yearly goes abroad with the

emigrant ships, and that is drawn almost entirely from the lower class

of farmers, the very men who employ the poor. The class who have gone

away was for the most part that which should have remained, for it had

the means of doing, something in the world, and employing others;

that which was left at home, was that which should have been removed,

because they were the destitute who could neither find employment

in these islands, nor do anything on their own account from want of

funds. Hence above a million and a-half of persons in Great Britain,

and above seven hundred thousand in Ireland, on an average of years,

are constantly maintained by the poor-rates, for the most part in

utter idleness, although the half of them are able-bodied, and their

labour--if they could only be forwarded to the frontier of civilisation

in America--would be of incalculable service to our own colonies or the

United States.

The very magnitude of the trade employed in the exportation of the

emigrants, and the importation of food for those who remain, has gone

far to conceal the ruinous effects of Free Trade. Between the carrying

out of emigrants, and the bringing in of grain--the exportation of

our strength, and the importation of our weakness--our chief seaports

may continue for some time to drive a gainful traffic. The _Liverpool

Times_ observes:--

"The number of emigrant vessels which sailed from Liverpool

during the last year, was 568. Of these vessels, many are

from 1500 to 2000 tons burden, and a few of them even reach

3000 tons. They are amongst the finest vessels that ever were

built, are well commanded, well-manned, fitted out in excellent

style, and present a wonderful improvement in all respects,

when compared with the same class of vessels even half a dozen

years ago. Taking the average passage-money of each passenger

in these vessels at £6, the conveying of emigrants yields a

revenue of upwards of £1,000,000 sterling to the shipping which

belongs to or frequents this port, independent of the great

amount of money which the passage of such an immense multitude

of persons through the town must cause to be spent in it. In

fact, the passage and conveyance of emigrants has become one of

the greatest trades of Liverpool."--_Liverpool Times_, Jan. 10,

1851.

The number of emigrants from the Mersey and the Clyde, since the days

of Free Trade began, have been prodigious, and rapidly increasing. They

have stood thus:--

Year. Liverpool. Clyde.

1847 134,524 7,728

1848 131,121 10,035

1849 153,902 14,968

1850 174,187 14,203

It was precisely the same in the declining days of the Roman

empire--the great seaport towns continued to flourish when all other

interests in the state were rapidly sinking; and when the plains in

the interior were desolate, or tenanted only by the ox or the buffalo,

the great cities were still the abodes of vast realised wealth and

unbounded private luxury. We are rapidly following in the same path.

The realised capital of Great Britain was estimated in 1814 at

L.1,200,000,000; in 1841, Mr Porter estimated it at L.2,000,000,000;

the capital subject to legacy duty in Great Britain, on an average of

forty-one years, from 1797 to 1841, was L.26,000,000; in the single

year 1840 it was L.40,500,000. The increase of realised capital among

the rich has been nearly as great as that of pauperism, misery, and

consequent emigration among the poor--the well-known and oft-observed

premonitory symptoms of the decline of nations.

* * * * *

It is in the midst of these numerous and overwhelming evils, the

result mainly of theoretical innovation and class government in the

country--when above two millions of paupers in the two islands are

painfully supported by public assessment; when three hundred thousand

are annually driven into exile, and a hundred and fifty thousand more

are constantly supported in jails, one-half of whom are committed

for serious crimes;[18] when all classes, excepting those engaged in

the export trade of human beings and the import of human food, are

languishing from the decline of domestic employment, and the constantly

increasing influx of foreign goods, both rude and manufactured--that

we are assured by one benevolent set of philanthropists that all will

be right, if we only give the starving working-classes model houses,

rented at L.8 each, to live in; by another, that ragged schools for

their destitute children will set all in order; by a third, that a

schoolmaster in every wynd is alone required to remove all the evils

under which we labour; by a fourth, that cold baths and wash-houses

to lave their emaciated limbs, are the great thing; by a fifth, that

church extension is the only effectual remedy, and that, till there is

a minister for every seven hundred inhabitants, it is in vain to hope

for any social amelioration. We respect the motives which actuate each

and all of these benevolent labourers in the great vineyard of human

suffering; we acknowledge that each within a limited sphere does some

good, and extricates a certain number of individuals or families out

of the abyss of degradation or suffering in which they are immersed.

As to anything like national relief, or alleviation of distress in any

sensible degree, from their united efforts, when the great causes of

evil which have been mentioned continue in undiminished activity, it is

as chimerical as to expect by the schoolmaster or the washing-woman to

arrest the ravages of the plague or the cholera.

[18] Including the police committals, much more numerous than those for

trial.

Two circumstances of general operation, and overwhelming importance,

render all these various and partial remedies, while the great

causes which depress the demand for labour and deprive the people of

employment continue in operation, entirely nugatory and ineffectual, in

a general view, to arrest our social evils.

The first of these is, that these remedies, one and all of them, are

calculated for the elevation and intellectual or moral improvement of

the people, but have no tendency to improve their circumstances, or

diminish the load of pauperism, destitution, and misery with which

they are overwhelmed. Until the latter is done, however, all the

efforts made for the attainment of the former, how benevolent and

praiseworthy soever, will have no general effect, and, in a national

point of view, may be regarded as almost equal to nothing. The reason

is that, generally speaking, the human race are governed, in the first

instance, almost entirely by their physical sufferings or comforts, and

that intellectual or moral improvement cannot be either thought of or

attended to till a certain degree of ease as to the imperious demands

of physical nature has been attained. In every age, doubtless, there

are some persons of both sexes who will heroically struggle against the

utmost physical privation, and pursue the path of virtue, or sedulously

improve their minds, under circumstances the most adverse, and with

facilities the most inconsiderable. But these are the exceptions, not

the rule. The number of such persons is so inconsiderable, compared

to the immense mass who are governed by their physical sensations,

that remedies addressed to the intellect of man, without reference

to the improvement of his circumstances, can never operate generally

upon society. Even the most intellectual and powerful minds must give

way under a certain amount of physical want or necessity. Take Newton

and Milton, Bacon and Descartes, Cervantes and Cicero, and make them

walk thirty miles in a wintry day, and come in to a wretched hovel at

night, and see what they will desire. Rely upon it, it will be neither

philosophy nor poetry, but warmth and food. A good fire and a good

supper would attract them from all the works which have rendered their

names immortal. Can we expect the great body of mankind to be less

under the influence of the imperious demands of our common physical

nature than the most gifted of the human race? What do the people

constantly ask for? It is neither cold baths nor warm baths, ragged

schools nor normal schools, churches nor chapels, model houses nor

mechanics' institutes--"It is a fair day's wage for a fair day's work."

We would all do the same in their circumstances. Give them _that_, the

one thing needful alike for social happiness and moral improvement, and

you make a mighty step in social amelioration and elevation; because

you lay _the foundation_ on which it all rests, and on which it must,

in a general point of view, all depend--without it, all the rest will

be found to be as much thrown away as the seed cast on the arid desert.

In the next place, the intellectual cultivation and elevation which

is regarded by so large a political party, and so numerous a body

of benevolent individuals, as the panacea for all our social evils,

never has affected, and never can affect, more than a limited class

in society. We may indeed teach all, or nearly all, to read; but can

we make them all read books, or still more, read books that will do

them any good, when they leave school, and become their own masters,

and are involved in the cares, oppressed with the labours, and exposed

to the temptations of the world? Did any man ever find a fifth of

his acquaintance of any rank, from the House of Peers and the Bar

downwards, who were really and practically directed in manhood and

womanhood by intellectual pleasures or pursuits? Habit, early training,

easy circumstances, absence of temptation, a fortunate marriage, or

the like, are the real circumstances which retain the great body of

the human race of every rank in the right path. They are neither

positively bad, nor positively good: they are characters of imperfect

goodness, and mainly swayed by their physical circumstances. If you

come to a crisis with them, when the selfish or generous feelings must

be acted upon, nine-tenths of them will be swayed by the former. The

disciples of Rousseau will contest these propositions: we would only

recommend them to look around them, and see whether or not they are

demonstrated by every day's experience in every rank of life. We wish

it were otherwise; but we must take mankind as they are, and legislate

for them on their _average_ capacity, without supposing that they are

generally to be influenced by the intellectual appliances adapted only

to a small fraction of their number. And, accordingly, upon looking at

the statistical tables given in the commencement of this Essay, it will

be found that, while emigration, crime, and pauperism, have advanced

rapidly, despite all the efforts of philanthropy and religion, which

are _permanent_, but affect only a part of society, they exhibit the

most remarkable fluctuations, according to the prosperity or distress

of _particular_ years, because the causes _then_ in operation affected

the _whole_ of mankind.

The only way, therefore, in which the physical circumstances of the

great body of mankind can be ameliorated, or room can be afforded for

the moral and intellectual elevation of such of them as have received

from nature minds susceptible of such training, is by restoring

_the equilibrium between the demand for labour and the numbers of

the people_, which our late measures have done so much to subvert.

By that means, and that means _alone_, can the innumerable social

evils under which we labour be alleviated. Without it, all the other

remedies devised by philanthropy, pursued with zeal, cherished by

hope, will prove ineffectual. How that is to be done must be evident

to every person of common understanding. The demand for labour must

be increased, the supply of labour must be diminished. The first can

only be done, by a moderate degree of Protection to Native Industry, at

present beat down to the dust in every department by the competition

of foreign states, where money is more scarce and taxation lighter,

and consequently production is less expensive. The second can only be

attained by a systematic emigration, conducted at the public expense,

and drawing of annually an hundred or an hundred and fifty thousand

of the _most destitute_ of the community, who have not the means of

transport for themselves, and, if not so removed, will permanently

encumber our streets, our jails, our workhouses.

But money is required for these things; and where, it will be asked, is

money to be found in this already overtaxed and suffering community?

The answer is, the money-question is the easiest of all; for it

will be attained in abundance by the very means requisite to attain

the other objects. Protection, even on the most moderate scale, to

Native Industry, is not to be attained without the imposition of

import-duties; and that will at once produce the funds requisite

for the attainment of all these objects. Laid on the importation of

all goods, rude or manufactured, they would yield such a revenue as

would enable us to take off the Income Tax, and thereby let loose

L.5,500,000 a-year, now absorbed by it, for the encouragement of

domestic industry. Agriculture, manufactures of all sorts, would take

a renewed start from the exclusion, to a certain degree, of foreign

competition. Domestic industry would cease to languish, because the

ruinous competition of foreigners working at a third of our wages would

be checked. By these means an ample fund would be raised to enable us

to transport, at the public expense, and comfortably settle in their

new habitations, some hundred thousand annually of the most destitute

class of our people--that class who cannot get away themselves, and,

as they are thrown out of employment by Free Trade, now encumber our

hospitals, jails, and workhouses. We would convert them from paupers

into healthful and sturdy emigrants, doubling in numbers, with constant

additions from the parent state, every ten years; and consuming L.8

a-head worth of our manufactures. Property in the colonies would double

in value every five years, from the joint effect of domestic labour,

and the prolific stream of external immigration; and every acre cleared

in these fertile wilds would cause a wheel to revolve, or a spindle to

move, or a family to be blessed, in the parent state.

We can affix no limits in imagination to what the British Empire

might become, or the amount of social and general happiness it might

contain, with the physical advantages which nature has given it, and

the character which race, and consequent institutions, have impressed

upon its inhabitants. In the centre of the Empire stands the parent

state, teeming with energy, overflowing with inhabitants, with coal

and ironstone in its bosom capable of putting in motion manufactories

for the supply of half the globe. In the extremities are colonies

in every quarter of the earth, possessing waste lands of boundless

extent and inexhaustible fertility, producing every luxury which the

heart of man can desire, and one only of which could furnish the whole

staple required for its greatest fabrics.[19] With such providential

wisdom were the various parts of this immense empire fitted for each

other; so marvellously was the surplus, whether in animated beings

or rude produce, of one part adapted to the deficiencies and wants

of another, that nothing but a just and equal system of government,

alive to the wants, and solicitous for the interests, of every part

of its vast dominion, was requisite to render it the most united,

prosperous, growing, and powerful state that ever existed on the

face of the earth. The Roman Empire, while spread around the shores

of the Mediterranean Sea, affords but a faint image of what it might

have been. _The ocean was its inland lake_; the British navy its

internal means of communication; the foreign trade of the whole

earth its home trade. We obtained the empire of the seas precisely

to enable us to carry out this magnificent destiny; the victory of

Trafalgar presented it to our grasp. But a just and equal system of

government was essential to the existence and duration of so immense a

dominion; a sense of fair administration, a consciousness of protected

interests, would alone hold it together for any length of time. The

simple precept of the gospel, "to do to others as we would they should

do unto us," would, if duly carried into practice, have for ever

kept united the mighty fabric, and caused it to embrace in peace and

happiness half the globe. This object was practically attained by the

virtual representation of all classes, interests, and colonies, under

the old constitution; and thence the steady growth, vast extent, and

unvarying loyalty during many a severe contest, of this multifarious

dominion. The new constitution, by vesting the government in the

representatives of our manufacturing towns, and thence introducing the

rule of class interests, is visibly and rapidly destroying it. The only

remedy practicable--and even that is so only for a short season--is

the _extension to the colonies of a direct share in the Imperial

Parliament_; but that is far too just and wise a measure to permit the

hope that it will ever be embraced by the class interest who now rule

the state.

[19] "At present the native consumption of cotton in India is estimated

at from 1,000,000,000 lb. to 3,000,000,000 lb. annually; while the

export to Great Britain is only 60,000,000 lb., and to all the world

only 150,000,000 lb. In this state of things, the rough production that

suits the home market will, of course, only be carried on; while, if

sufficient means of conveyance existed to render the cotton that is now

grown in the interior, at 1¼d. per lb., remunerative for export,

increased care in its preparation would be manifested, as was the

case in the United States, just in proportion to the increased reward

that would result. In developing these views, Mr Chapman undertakes

to demonstrate, by well-arranged facts and tables, that the export of

cotton from India to England has risen exactly as the difficulties or

expense of its transmission have been diminished; and also that costs

and impediments still remain which are sufficient to account for the

smallness of the quantity we continue to receive."--_Times_, Jan. 1851.

Notwithstanding all the obvious advantages of the course of policy

which we have recommended--though it would at once furnish the

means, as we have shown in a former paper, of obviating our external

dangers and maintaining our national independence, and at the same

time relieve our internal distresses and extend and consolidate our

colonial dependencies--we have scarcely any hope that it will be

adopted. The Free-traders have got such a hold of the burghs--to which

the Reform Bill gave a decided majority in the House of Commons--and

their leaders so perseveringly pursue their own _immediate_ interest,

without the slightest regard to the ruin they are bringing upon all

other interests of the state, that the hope of any change of policy--at

least till some terrible external disaster has opened the eyes of

the nation to a sense of the impending calamities brought on them by

their rulers--may be regarded as hopeless, without a general national

effort. The imposition of a moderate import duty upon the produce,

whether rude or manufactured, of all other nations, but with an entire

exemption to our own colonies, is obviously the first step in the right

direction, and would go far to alleviate our distresses, and at the

same time replenish the public Treasury and avert our external dangers.

In taking it, we should only be following the example of America,

Prussia, and nearly all other nations, who levy a duty of 30 per cent

on our manufactures, and thereby make us pay half of their taxes. But

it is to be feared the mania of Free Trade will prevail over a wise and

expedient policy, calculated equally to advance the interests of all

classes in the state. We do not say, therefore, that any such system

will be adopted; but this we do say, and with these words we nail our

colours to the mast,--PROTECTION MUST BE RESTORED, OR THE BRITISH

EMPIRE WILL BE DESTROYED.

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.

BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

BOOK IV.--INITIAL CHAPTER:--COMPRISING MR CAXTON'S OPINIONS ON THE

MATRIMONIAL STATE, SUPPORTED BY LEARNED AUTHORITIES.

"It was no bad idea of yours, Pisistratus," said my father graciously,

"to depict the heightened affections and the serious intention's of

Signior Riccabocca by a single stroke--_He left off his spectacles!_

Good."

"Yet," quoth my uncle, "I think Shakspeare represents a lover as

falling into slovenly habits, neglecting his person, and suffering his

hose to be ungartered, rather than paying that attention to his outer

man which induces Signior Riccabocca to leave off his spectacles, and

look as handsome as nature will permit him."

"There are different degrees and many phases of the passion," replied

my father. "Shakspeare is speaking of an ill-treated, pining, wobegone

lover, much aggrieved by the cruelty of his mistress--a lover who has

found it of no avail to smarten himself up, and has fallen despondently

into the opposite extreme. Whereas Signior Riccabocca has nothing to

complain of in the barbarity of Miss Jemima."

"Indeed he has not!" cried Blanche,

tossing her head--"forward creature!"

"Yes, my dear," said my mother, trying her best to look stately, "I am

decidedly of opinion that, in that respect, Pisistratus has lowered the

dignity of the sex. Not intentionally," added my mother mildly, and

afraid she had said something too bitter; "but it is very hard for a

man to describe us women."

The Captain nodded approvingly; Mr Squills smiled; my father quietly

resumed the thread of his discourse.

"To continue," quoth he. "Riccabocca has no reason to despair of

success in his suit, nor any object in moving his mistress to

compassion. He may, therefore, very properly tie up his garters and

leave off his spectacles. What do you say, Mr Squills?--for, after all,

since love-making cannot fail to be a great constitutional derangement,

the experience of a medical man must be the best to consult."

"Mr Caxton," replied Squills, obviously flattered, "you are quite

right: when a man makes love, the organs of self-esteem and desire of

applause are greatly stimulated, and therefore, of course, he sets

himself off to the best advantage. It is only, as you observe, when,

like Shakspeare's lover, he has given up making love as a bad job,

and has received that severe hit on the ganglions which the cruelty

of a mistress inflicts, that he neglects his personal appearance: he

neglects it, not because he is in love, but because his nervous system

is depressed. That was the cause, if you remember, with poor Major

Prim. He wore his wig all awry when Susan Smart jilted him; but I set

it all right for him."

"By shaming Miss Smart into repentance, or getting him a new

sweetheart?" asked my uncle.

"Pooh!" answered Squills, "by quinine and cold bathing."

"We may therefore grant," renewed my father, "that, as a general rule,

the process of courtship tends to the spruceness, and even foppery,

of the individual engaged in the experiment, as Voltaire has very

prettily proved somewhere. Nay, the Mexicans, indeed, were of opinion

that the lady at least ought to continue those cares of her person

even after marriage. There is extant, in Sahagun's _History of New

Spain_, the advice of an Aztec or Mexican mother to her daughter,

in which she says--'That your husband may not take you in dislike,

adorn yourself, wash yourself, and let your garments be clean.' It

is true that the good lady adds,--'Do it in moderation; since, if

every day you are washing yourself and your clothes, the world will

say that you are over-delicate; and particular people will call

you--TAPETZON TINEMÁXOCH!' What those words precisely mean," added my

father modestly, "I cannot say, since I never had the opportunity to

acquire the ancient Aztec language--but something very opprobrious and

horrible, no doubt."

"I daresay a philosopher like Signior Riccabocca," said my uncle,

"was not himself very _Tapetzon tine_--what d'ye call it?--and a good

healthy English wife, like that poor affectionate Jemima, was thrown

away upon him."

"Roland," said my father, "you don't like foreigners: a respectable

prejudice, and quite natural in a man who has been trying his best to

hew them in pieces, and blow them up into splinters. But you don't like

philosophers either--and for that dislike you have no equally good

reason."

"I only implied that they were not much addicted to soap and water,"

said my uncle.

"A notable mistake. Many great philosophers have been very great

beaux. Aristotle was a notorious fop. Buffon put on his best laced

ruffles when he sat down to write, which implies that he washed his

hands first. Pythagoras insists greatly on the holiness of frequent

ablutions; and Horace--who, in his own way, was as good a philosopher

as any the Romans produced--takes care to let us know what a neat,

well-dressed, dapper little gentleman he was. But I don't think you

ever read the 'Apology of Apuleius?'"

"Not I--what is it about?" asked the Captain.

"About a great many things. It is that Sage's vindication from several

malignant charges--amongst others, and principally indeed, that of

being much too refined and effeminate for a philosopher. Nothing

can exceed the rhetorical skill with which he excuses himself for

using--tooth-powder. 'Ought a philosopher,' he exclaims, 'to allow

anything unclean about him, especially in the mouth--the mouth, which

is the vestibule of the soul, the gate of discourse, the portico of

thought! Ah, but Æmilianus [the accuser of Apuleius] never opens

_his_ mouth but for slander and calumny--tooth-powder would indeed be

unbecoming to _him_! Or, if he use any, it will not be my good Arabian

tooth-powder but charcoal and cinders. Ay, his teeth should be as foul

as his language! And yet even the crocodile likes to have his teeth

cleaned; insects get into them, and, horrible reptile though he be,

he opens his jaws inoffensively to a faithful dentistical bird, who

volunteers his beak for a toothpick.'"

My father was now warm in the subject he had started, and soared

miles away from Riccabocca and "My Novel." "And observe," he

exclaimed--"observe with what gravity this eminent Platonist pleads

guilty to the charge of having a mirror. 'Why, what,' he exclaims,

'more worthy of the regards of a human creature than his own image,'

(_nihil respectabilius homini quam formam suam!_) Is not that one of

our children the most dear to us who is called 'the picture of his

father?' But take what pains you will with a picture, it can never be

so like you as the face in your mirror! Think it discreditable to look

with proper attention on one's-self in the glass! Did not Socrates

recommend such attention to his disciples--did he not make a great

moral agent of the speculum? The handsome, in admiring their beauty

therein, were admonished that handsome is who handsome does; and the

more the ugly stared at themselves, the more they became naturally

anxious to hide the disgrace of their features in the loveliness of

their merits. Was not Demosthenes always at his speculum? Did he not

rehearse his causes before it as before a master in the art? He learned

his eloquence from Plato, his dialectics from Eubulides; but as for his

delivery--there, he came to the mirror!'

"Therefore," concluded Mr Caxton, returning unexpectedly to the

subject--"therefore it is no reason to suppose that Dr Riccabocca is

averse to cleanliness and decent care of the person, because he is a

philosopher; and, all things considered, he never showed himself more a

philosopher than when he left off his spectacles and looked his best."

"Well," said my mother kindly, "I only hope it may turn out happily.

But I should have been better pleased if Pisistratus had not made Dr

Riccabocca so reluctant a wooer."

"Very true," said the Captain; "the Italian does not shine as a lover.

Throw a little more fire into him, Pisistratus--something gallant and

chivalrous."

"Fire--gallantry--chivalry!" cried my father, who had taken Riccabocca

under his special protection--"why, don't you see that the man

is described as a philosopher?--and I should like to know when a

philosopher ever plunged into matrimony without considerable misgivings

and cold shivers. Indeed, it seems that--perhaps before he was a

philosopher--Riccabocca _had_ tried the experiment, and knew what it

was. Why, even that plain-speaking, sensible, practical man, Metellus

Numidicus, who was not even a philosopher, but only a Roman Censor,

thus expressed himself in an exhortation to the People to perpetrate

matrimony--'If, O Quirites, we could do without wives, we should

all dispense with that subject of care, (_eâ molestiâ careremus_;)

but since nature has so managed it, that we cannot live with women

comfortably, nor without them at all, let us rather provide for the

human race than our own temporary felicity.'"

Here the ladies set up a cry of such indignation, that both Roland and

myself endeavoured to appease their wrath by hasty assurances that we

utterly repudiated that damnable doctrine of Metellus Numidicus.

My father, wholly unmoved, as soon as a sullen silence was established,

recommenced--"Do not think, ladies," said he, "that you were without

advocates at that day: there were many Romans gallant enough to blame

the Censor for a mode of expressing himself which they held to be

equally impolite and injudicious. 'Surely,' said they, with some

plausibility, 'if Numidicus wished men to marry, he need not have

referred so peremptorily to the disquietudes of the connection, and

thus have made them more inclined to turn away from matrimony than

given them a relish for it.' But against these critics one honest man

(whose name of Titus Castricius should not be forgotten by Posterity)

maintained that Metellus Numidicus could not have spoken more properly;

'For remark,' said he, 'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician.

It becomes rhetoricians to adorn, and disguise, and make the best of

things; but Metellus, _sanctus vir_--a holy and blameless man, grave

and sincere to whit, and addressing the Roman people in the solemn

capacity of Censor--was bound to speak the plain truth, especially as

he was treating of a subject on which the observation of every day, and

the experience of every life, could not leave the least doubt upon the

mind of his audience.' Still Riccabocca, having decided to marry, has

no doubt prepared himself to bear all the concomitant evils--as becomes

a professed sage; and I own I admire the art with which Pisistratus has

drawn the precise woman likely to suit a philosopher."

Pisistratus bows, and looks round complacently; but recoils from two

very peevish and discontented faces feminine.

MR CAXTON (completing his sentence,)--"Not only as regards mildness

of temper and other household qualifications, but as regards the very

_person_ of the object of his choice. For you evidently remembered,

Pisistratus, the reply of Bias, when asked his opinion on marriage:

[Greek: Êtoi kalên hexeis, ê aischran; kai ei kalên, hexeis koinên; ei

dê aischran, hexeis poinên.]"

Pisistratus tries to look as if he had the opinion of Bias by heart,

and nods acquiescingly.

MR CAXTON.--"That is, my dears, 'the woman you would marry is either

handsome or ugly: if handsome, she is koiné, viz. you don't have her

to yourself; if ugly, she is poiné--that is, a fury.' But, as it is

observed in Aulus Gellius, (whence I borrow this citation,) there is

a wide interval between handsome and ugly. And thus Ennius, in his

tragedy of _Menalippus_, uses an admirable expression to designate

women of the proper degree of matrimonial comeliness, such as a

philosopher would select. He calls this degree _stata forma_--a

rational, mediocre sort of beauty, which is not liable to be either

koiné or poiné. And Favorinus, who was a remarkably sensible man, and

came from Provence--the male inhabitants of which district have always

valued themselves on their knowledge of love and ladies--calls this

said _stata forma_ the beauty of wives--the uxorial beauty. Ennius

says, that women of a _stata forma_ are almost always safe and modest.

Now Jemima, you observe, is described as possessing this _stata forma_;

and it is the nicety of your observation in this respect, which I

like the most in the whole of your description of a philosopher's

matrimonial courtship, Pisistratus, (excepting only the stroke of the

spectacles,) for it shows that you had properly considered the opinion

of Bias, and mastered all the counter logic suggested in Book v.

chapter xi., of Aulus Gellius."

"For all that," said Blanche, half-archly, half-demurely, with a smile

in the eye, and a pout of the lip, "I don't remember that Pisistratus,

in the days when he wished to be most complimentary, ever assured me

that I had a _stata forma_--a rational, mediocre sort of beauty."

"And I think," observed my uncle, "that when he comes to his real

heroine, whoever that may be, he will not trouble his head much about

either Bias or Aulus Gellius."

CHAPTER II.

Matrimony is certainly a great change in life. One is astonished not

to find a notable alteration in one's friend, even if he or she have

been only wedded a week. In the instance of Dr and Mrs Riccabocca

the change was peculiarly visible. To speak first of the lady, as in

chivalry bound, Mrs Riccabocca had entirely renounced that melancholy

which had characterised Miss Jemima: she became even sprightly and

gay, and looked all the better and prettier for the alteration. She

did not scruple to confess honestly to Mrs Dale, that she was now of

opinion that the world was very far from approaching its end. But,

in the meanwhile, she did not neglect the duty which the belief she

had abandoned serves to inculcate--"She set her house in order."

The cold and penurious elegance that had characterised the Casino

disappeared like enchantment--that is, the elegance remained, but the

cold and penury fled before the smile of woman. Like Puss-in-Boots

after the nuptials of his master, Jackeymo only now caught minnows and

sticklebacks for his own amusement. Jackeymo looked much plumper, and

so did Riccabocca. In a word, the fair Jemima became an excellent wife.

Riccabocca secretly thought her extravagant, but, like a wise man,

declined to look at the house bills, and ate his joint in unreproachful

silence.

Indeed, there was so much unaffected kindness in the nature of Mrs

Riccabocca--beneath the quiet of her manner there beat so genially

the heart of the Hazeldeans--that she fairly justified the favourable

anticipations of Mrs Dale. And though the Doctor did not noisily

boast of his felicity, nor, as some new married folks do, thrust it

insultingly under the _nimis unctis naribus_--the turned-up noses of

your surly old married folks, nor force it gaudily and glaringly on

the envious eyes of the single, you might still see that he was a

more cheerful and light-hearted man than before. His smile was less

ironical, his politeness less distant. He did not study Machiavelli so

intensely,--and he did not return to the spectacles; which last was an

excellent sign. Moreover, the humanising influence of the tidy English

wife might be seen in the improvement of his outward or artificial

man. His clothes seemed to fit him better; indeed, the clothes were

new. Mrs Dale no longer remarked that the buttons were off the

wrist-bands, which was a great satisfaction to her. But the sage still

remained faithful to the pipe, the cloak, and the red silk umbrella.

Mrs Riccabocca had (to her credit be it spoken) used all becoming and

wifelike arts against these three remnants of the old bachelor Adam,

but in vain. "_Anima mia_--soul of mine," said the Doctor tenderly, "I

hold the cloak, the umbrella, and the pipe, as the sole relics that

remain to me of my native country. Respect and spare them."

Mrs Riccabocca was touched, and had the good sense to perceive that

man, let him be ever so much married, retains certain signs of his

ancient independence--certain tokens of his old identity, which a

wife, the most despotic, will do well to concede. She conceded the

cloak, she submitted to the umbrella, she concealed her abhorrence of

the pipe. After all, considering the natural villany of our sex, she

confessed to herself that she might have been worse off. But, through

all the calm and cheerfulness of Riccabocca, a nervous perturbation

was sufficiently perceptible;--it commenced after the second week of

marriage--it went on increasing, till one bright sunny afternoon, as

he was standing on his terrace gazing down upon the road, at which

Jackeymo was placed,--lo, a stage-coach stopped! The Doctor made a

bound, and put both hands to his heart as if he had been shot; he then

leapt over the balustrade, and his wife from her window beheld him

flying down the hill, with his long hair streaming in the wind, till

the trees hid him from her sight.

"Ah," thought she with a natural pang of conjugal jealousy, "henceforth

I am only second in his home. He has gone to welcome his child!" And at

that reflection Mrs Riccabocca shed tears.

But so naturally amiable was she, that she hastened to curb her

emotion, and efface as well as she could the trace of a stepmother's

grief. When this was done, and a silent self-rebuking prayer murmured

over, the good woman descended the stairs with alacrity, and, summoning

up her best smiles, emerged on the terrace.

She was repaid; for scarcely had she come into the open air, when two

little arms were thrown round her, and the sweetest voice that ever

came from a child's lips, sighed out in broken English, "Good mamma,

love me a little."

"Love you? with my whole heart!" cried the stepmother, with all a

mother's honest passion. And she clasped the child to her breast.

"God bless you, my wife!" said Riccabocca, in a husky tone.

"Please take this too," added Jackeymo in Italian, as well as his sobs

would let him--and he broke off a great bough full of blossoms from his

favourite orange-tree, and thrust it into his mistress's hand. She had

not the slightest notion what he meant by it!

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 425, March, 1851 · 第 1 / 13 章