economy, to-night. She was thoroughly free trade, and this is a
doctrine that I hold to be bottomed on a complete fallacy. It would
be quite as easy to prove, in my opinion, that liberty can exist
without government, as to show that nations can equally profit by
trade, without consulting their peculiar circumstances. She asked me
if trade did not consist in an exchange of equivalents. I thought
not, in fact, but in an exchange of _apparent_ equivalents. I did
not believe, that the Indian who sold a beaver skin for half a
dollar, in the forest, which, after deducting charges, brought four
or five dollars of profit in the market, obtained any thing more
than an _apparent_ equivalent. He was a loser by his ignorance and
his social facts, while the trader was, in the same proportion, a
gainer. But free trade would permit the Indian to bring his own
peltry down, and pocket the difference himself. True, as a _theory_;
but life is composed of stubborn _facts_, that laugh at theories
of this sort. He cannot come. Could restriction supply a remedy?
Certainly; by appointing a clever agent, for instance, at a salary,
to dispose of their peltry in common for them, and by excluding the
traders from their territory, they might get double or treble the
present prices. Their agent might cheat them. So does the trader. The
buyers would go elsewhere. They cannot; the Indian has a monopoly of
the article. Did I not believe free trade increased commerce, and
indirectly diffused its advantages over the whole world? I made no
doubt that many restrictions were absurd, and in this fact I saw all
the true argument that can be adduced in favour of free trade. Let
us imagine a garden filled with fine fruit, on which the owner sets
a moderate price. He refuses, however, to open his gates but once a
week, and half his fruit is lost in consequence. This is an abuse
of restriction. Convinced of his error, he throws his gates open
altogether, and bids all enter and help themselves; and to render
things equal, he prohibits the use of ladders, or of climbing. A
tall man enters and picks as much as he wants; but the short man
at his side can reach nothing. But free trade would let him take a
ladder. True, if he could carry one; but he can get none, or is too
feeble. Now, knowledge, capital, practice, establishments, skill,
and even natural aptitude, compose the difference in stature between
nations, and the laws must provide the ladders, or the shorter will
go altogether without fruit, or get it at the tall man’s prices. But
competition would regulate this, as other things, and the market
would settle down into a fair system of equivalents. It is easy to
make this out in theory, but difficult to prove it in practice. We
usually expect too much from competition, whose natural tendency,
in trade, is to combination. The thousand interests of life derange
the action of the most ingenious theory. The world has never yet
seen a fair exchange of equivalents in traffic, and I doubt if it
ever will. It is said we can’t buy more than we sell, and that the
balance of trade regulates itself. This will do on paper, but it is
not true in fact. We may sell too low and buy too dear. When England
takes a pound of our cotton at ten cents, and sells it back again
at a dollar, leaving a clear profit of fifty cents, by which her
manufacturers roll in their coaches, while the planter is living from
hand to mouth, we are pretty clearly doing one or the other. But let
natural efforts regulate this, and do not have recourse to laws. When
a strong man gets a weak one down, if the liberation of the latter
depends on his natural efforts, he will never rise.
Here I bade my fair antagonist good night, as I do you.
LETTER XII.
TO WILLIAM JAY, ESQ., BEDFORD, NEW YORK.
Although I had been several times at St. Stephen’s, I never, until
quite lately, got into the House of Lords. A young connexion, who
happens to be travelling in Europe, and myself, have, however, just
made a visit to the Hospital of Incurables. Several members of this
house have offered to procure permission for me, but it has always
been in a way that has rendered the civility any thing but a favour.
It is a marked fault in English manners, that they extend the
factitious system, by which every concession of politeness of this
nature has the appearance of being, sought, to strangers.[16]
I may say the same thing of the House of Commons, into which I have
had a dozen offers of admission beneath the gallery, though but once
in a way that I did not feel it to be a humiliation to accept. The
exception was a case of thoroughly gentlemanlike attention, and I
record it with the greater satisfaction.
As I am writing with the intention to supply comparisons of national
manners, I will relate a recent occurrence that took place at Paris.
A party of American travellers arrived at the door of the Chamber
of Deputies, and, in the absence of all other means of getting in,
they took the bold measure of sending their cards to the president,
with a request to be admitted, and immediately had convenient places
assigned them. I do not say I would imitate this course, but it is
impossible not to admire the courtesy which overlooked the mistake.
There are men who ply about the doors of the two houses of
parliament, to show strangers the way into them; for it is almost as
much an affair of management and bribery to get into St. Stephen’s
chapel, after one is elected, as it is to get the legal return. We
contracted with a man at the outer door to deliver us safe in the
House of Lords, for three shillings sterling, each. The rogue carried
us no farther than the first inner door, however, where he turned us
over to one a step above him in dignity, coolly demanding a shilling
for his pains. Our new guide carried us through a door or two more,
when we reached the real vendor of places. We paid the second guide
another shilling, and the stipulated price went into the hands of the
regular box-office-man.
I am far from complaining of the practice of paying for these
admissions, though the price is too high. Members, you will remember,
can grant admissions. It is quite impossible for every one to be
present, and in a town like London, the half crown may be a very
healthful check, both morally and physically. The legislative body
that has not the power to clear its hall, would become contemptible.
The publicity of congress is only commanded through its journals,
the admission of strangers being purely a matter of favour. Here
the latter are present, only, by a fiction, as indeed they are
sometimes absent; for frequently when ordered to withdraw, they do
not budge. The same principles substantially regulate the proceedings
of congress and of parliament, though there exists one difference
between them, that is founded on a fundamental distinction in the
governments. In congress the vote is taken openly, in parliament it
is not. It is a great pity that, while we admit of this affinity in
forms, we do not always perceive the essential difference that exists
in substance.
You know, already, that the hall of the House of Lords is divided
into three divisions—that around the throne, that which contains
the peers, and that which is set apart for the public. I should
think the latter, which is termed below the bar, might hold two or
three hundred people, standing. There are no seats, and even the
reporters are compelled to write on their knees, or to sit on the
floor. Luckily for them, there is little, in general, to report.[17]
There is also a small area around the fireplace which appears to be
a no-man’s-land, for I heard a commoner ask a peer, lately, whether
it was permitted for the members of the other house to occupy it,
and the answer was an admission of ignorance, though the peer rather
thought it was. The members of the commons, however, usually stand
around the throne. Mr. Wortley, a gentleman I had seen in America,
was standing on the steps of the throne to-night, while his father,
Lord Wharncliffe, made a speech.
We found a thin house, and plenty of space below the bar. The Duke
of Wellington was on the ministerial bench, and not far from him was
my dinner acquaintance, the Bishop of ——, in his lawn sleeves. With
the exception and that of another bishop, who entered in the course
of the evening, besides the chancellor and the other officers of the
house, I saw no one that was not in ordinary attire. All but the
bishop and the latter wore their hats, and they wore their precious
wigs. The chancellor looked like a miller with his head thrust
through his wife’s petticoat. As for my bishop, he appeared fidgety
and out of his place.
Lord Lansdowne and Lord Grey and Lord Holland, were all in their
places, but neither said any thing but the first, who spoke for a
few minutes. When we entered, I do not think there were twenty peers
in their seats, though the number doubled at a later hour. These
twenty were mostly clustered around the table, and their meeting
strongly resembled that of an ordinary committee. The Marquis of
Salisbury, a descendant of Burleigh, was on his feet when we came in,
discussing some point connected with the game-laws. I doubt if his
great ancestor knew half as much of the same subject. The tone was
conversational and quiet, and, altogether, I never was in a public
body that had so little the air of one. I could not divest myself
of the idea of a _conseil de famille_, that had met to consult each
other, in a familiar way, about the disposition of some of their
possessions, while the members of the house who were listening,
resembled the children who were excluded by their years.
Although one so seldom hears the term “my lord” in the world, it was
pretty well bandied among the speakers to-night. They pronounced it
“_my lurds_,” the English uniformly sounding the possessive pronoun
in question more like the Italians than we do, so that it makes “mee
lurds.” I was a good deal puzzled, when I first arrived here, to
account for many abuses of the language, in the middling classes, and
which sometimes are met with in the secondary articles of the public
prints. “Think of _me_ going without a hat,” is a sentence of the
sort I mean. It is intended to say, “Think of _my_ going, &c.;” but,
from a confusion between the sound and the spelling, the personal
pronoun is used, by illiterate people, instead of the possessive.
This species of illiteracy, by the way, extends a good way up English
society.
I take it, the polite way of pronouncing this word is by a sort of
elision—as m’horse, m’dog, m’gun, and that _my_ horse, _my_ dog, _my_
gun, the usual American mode, and _me_ horse, _me_ dog, _me_ gun, the
English counterpart, are equally wrong; the first by an offensive
egotism, and the last from offensive ignorance. I think more noble
peers, however, said “_me_ lurds,” than “m’lurds,” though the formal
tone of public speaking is seldom favourable to simple or accurate
pronunciation. It usually plays the deuce with prosody, unless one
has a naturally easy elocution. The French, in this respect, have
the advantage of us, their language having no emphatic syllables. A
Frenchman will often talk an hour without a true argument or a false
quantity.
Lord Salisbury appeared to have a knowledge of his subject, which,
in itself, was scarcely worthy to occupy the time of the peers of
Great Britain. I do not mean that game is altogether beneath one’s
notice, and still less that the moral enormities to which the English
game-laws have given birth, do not require a remedy; but that local
authority ought to exist to regulate all such minor interests; first,
on account of their relative insignificance, and, secondly, because
the reasoning that may apply to one county, may not fitly apply to
another.
You may perhaps be ignorant that, by the actual law, game cannot be
sold at all in England. My wife was ill lately, and I desired our
landlady to send and get her a bird or two, but the good woman held
up her hands and declared it was impossible, as there was a fine of
fifty pounds for buying or selling game. The law is evaded, however,
hares, it is said, passing from hand to hand constantly in London,
under the name of _lions_!
I remember once, in travelling on our frontiers, to have received
an apology from an inn-keeper, for not having any thing fit to eat,
because he had only venison, wild pigeons, and brook trout. I asked
him what he wanted better. He did not know, “but the gentleman
had quite likely been used to pork!” Absurd as all this seems, I
remember, after serving a season on the great lakes, to have _asked_
for boiled pork and turnips, as a treat. Our physical enjoyments are
mere matters of habit, while the intellectual, alone, are based on a
rock. The worst tendency we have at home, is manifested by a rapacity
for money, which, when obtained, is to be spent in little besides
eating and drinking.
A Lord Carnarvon said a few words, and Lord Wharncliffe made a
speech, but it was all in the same conversational tone. The peers do
not address the chancellor in speaking, but their own body; hence
the constant recurrence of the words “my lurds.” The chancellor does
not occupy a seat at one end of the area, like a speaker, but he is
placed on his woolsack, considerably advanced towards the table.
I should have been at a loss to know the members, but for a plain
tradesman-like looking man at my elbow, who appeared to be familiar
with the house, and who was there to show the lions to a country
friend. I was much amused by this person’s observations, which were
a strange medley of habitual English deference for rank and natural
criticism. “There,” said he, “that is Lord L——, and he looks just
like a journeyman carpenter.” His friend, however, was too much
awe-struck to relish this familiarity.
I was a little disappointed with the _physique_ of the peers, who
are, by no means, a particularly favourable specimen of the English
gentlemen, in this respect. Perhaps I have never seen enough of them
together to form a correct opinion. A Lord A——, whom I met at Paris,
told me that his father had taken the trouble to count the pig-tails
in the House of Lords, at the trial of the late queen, and that he
found they considerably exceeded a hundred. I was aware this body was
somewhat behind the age in certain essentials, but I did not know,
until then, that this peculiarity extended to that precise portion of
the head.
The peers of Great Britain, considered as a political body, are
usurpers in the worst sense of the word. The authority they wield,
and the power by which it is maintained, are the results neither of
frank conquest, nor of legally delegated trusts, but of insidious
innovations effected under the fraudulent pretences of succouring
liberty. They were the principal, and, at that time, the natural
agents of the nation, in rescuing it from the tyranny of the Stuarts,
and profiting by their position, they have gradually perverted
the institutions to their own aggrandisement and benefit. This is
substantially the history of all aristocracies, which commence by
curbing the power of despots, and end by substituting their own.
There exists a radical fault in the theory of the British government,
which supposes three estates, possessed of equal legislative
authority. Such a condition of the body politic is a moral
impossibility. Two would infallibly combine to depose the other, and
then they would quarrel which was to reap the fruits of victory. The
very manner in which the popular rights were originally obtained
in England, go to prove that nothing of the sort entered into the
composition of the government at the commencement. Boroughs were
created by royal charters. Even the peers were emanations of the
royal will, and, much as might be expected, the creatures of the
king’s pleasure.
In the progress of events, the servants became too strong for
their masters. They set aside one dynasty and established another,
under the form of law. Since that time they have been gradually
accumulating force, until all the branches of government are absorbed
in one; not absolutely in its ordinary action, it is true, but in
its fundamental power. Parliament has got to be absolute, and the
strictly legislative part of it, by establishing the doctrine of
ministerial responsibility, has obtained so much control over the
part which is termed the executive, as to hold it completely within
its control.
An Englishman is very apt to affirm that the President of the United
States has more power than the King of England. This he thinks is
establishing the superior liberty of his own country. He is right
enough in his fact, but strangely wrong in the inference. The
government of the United States has no pretension to a trinity
in its elements, though it maintains one in its action; and that
of Great Britain pretends to one in its elements, while it has a
unity in its action. The president has more real power than the
king, because he actually wields the authority attributed to him
in the Constitution, and the king has less real authority than the
president, because he does not exercise the authority attributed to
him by the Constitution, even as the Constitution is now explained,
different as that explanation is from what it was a century since.
Were the King of England to name a ministry that did not please
his parliament, which in substance is pleasing those who hold the
power to make members, that ministry could not stand a week after
parliament assembled. If the two houses of parliament were composed
of men of different interests, or of different social elements, there
would still be something like an apparent balance in the composition
of the state; but they are not. The peers hold so much political
control in the country, as, virtually, to identify the two bodies,
so far as interests are concerned. Without this, there would be no
harmony in the government, for where there are separate bodies of
equal nominal authority in a state, one must openly control the
others, or all must secretly act under the same indirect influence;
not the influence of a common concern in the public good, for rulers
never attend to that, until they have first consulted their own
interests, as far as their powers will conveniently allow. In point
of fact then, the peers of England and the commons of England are
merely modifications of the same social _castes_.
In looking over the list of the members of the House of Commons, I
find one hundred and sixty with those titles which show that they
are actually the sons of peers, and when we remember the extent and
influence of intermarriages, it would not probably exceed the truth
were I to say that more than half the lower house stand, as regards
the upper, either in the relation of son, son-in-law, brother, or
brother-in-law, nephew, or uncle.[18] But nobility is by no means the
test of this government. It is, strictly, a landed, and not a titled
aristocracy. There are seventy-four baronets among the commons, and
these are usually men of large landed estates. If we take the whole
list, we shall not probably find a hundred names that, socially,
belong to any other class than that of the aristocracy, strictly
so called, or that are not so nearly allied to them in interests,
as virtually to make the House of Commons, identical, as a social
caste, with the House of Lords. It is of little moment whether these
bodies are hereditary or elective, so long as both represent the same
set of interests.
The aristocracy of England is checked less by any of the contrivances
of the state, than by the extra-constitutional power of public
opinion. This is a fourth estate in England, and a powerful estate
every where, that, in an age like this perhaps does more than written
compacts to restrain abuses. It has even curbed despotism over more
than half of Europe. As the influence of public opinion will always
bear the impress of the moral civilization of a people, England is
better off, in this particular, than most of her neighbours, and it
is probably one great reason why her aristocracy has not fleeced the
nation more than it has, though I don’t know that it has any thing to
reproach itself with, in the way of neglect, on this score.
The perpetuity of the ascendancy of the English aristocracy is
a question much mooted just now, and I have frequently heard in
private, sturdy and frank opinions on the subject. There are three
prominent facts that, I think, must soon produce essential changes
in this feature of the English system. In carrying out the scheme
of spreading the power of the peers over the commons, as it has
been done by personal wealth, individuals of the body have become
offensively powerful to the majority of their own order. Influence
is getting into too few hands to be agreeable to those, who, having
so much, would wish to share in all. This is one evil, and I think
when reform does occur, as occur it must, that there will be a great
effort to arrest it, when this one point shall have been rectified.
But there is a far more powerful foe to the existing order of things.
The present system is based on property, for, with a king without
authority, the power of the Lords, unsupported by that of the
Commons, would not be worth a straw in this age; and, though land
may not be, the balance of power, as it is connected with money, is
rapidly changing hands in England. There has arisen, within the last
fifty years, a tremendous money-power, that was formerly unknown to
the country. Individuals got rich in the last century, where classes
get rich now; and instead of absorbing the new men, as was once done,
the aristocracy is in danger of being absorbed by them.
It would not be in nature for a large class of men to become
rich without wishing to participate in power. It is a necessity
in money to league itself with authority. Were it not for the
natural antipathy between trade and democracy, the mercantile and
manufacturing classes of England would make common cause with the
people and change the government at once; but the affluent dread
revolutions; the debt of England is a mortgage on the rich; and,
most of all, commerce detests popular rights. It is, in itself, an
aristocracy of wealth. When the hour comes, however, it will be found
struggling to equalize the advantages of money, I think.
The third danger arises from the fictions of the system. No power
on earth can resist the assaults of reason, if constantly exposed
to them, since it is the language of natural truth. Liberty of the
press is incompatible with exclusion in politics, or at least,
with an exclusion that proscribes a majority. Neither throne, nor
senate, can withstand the constant attacks of arguments that address
themselves equally to the sense of right and to the passions of men.
The alternatives are to submit, or to repress.
Now, while the aristocracy has been silently and steadily extending
its net over England, it has always been with the professions of a
monarchy. It was an offence to speak evil of the king, when it was
no offence to speak evil of the aristocrats. The law protected a
fiction, while it overlooked a reality. It is too late to change.
Feeling an indifference to a power that was little more than nominal,
the press has been permitted to deal freely even with the throne, of
late, and England would not bear a law which denied her the privilege
of censuring the aristocrats. The public mind, on this point, appears
to be under the influence of a reaction. The French Revolution
so far quickened the jealousies of the English government, that
prosecutions for sedition were carried to extremes under Mr. Pitt,
and now that the danger is abated, something like a licence on the
other side has followed.