ENGLISH VEHICLES.—A FEUDAL CASTLE AND MODERN ARISTOCRATIC
MANSION.—ARISTOCRACY IN 1850.—PRIMOGENITURE.—DEMOCRATIC TENDENCY
OF POLITICAL SENTIMENTS.—DISPOSITION TOWARDS THE UNITED
STATES.—COMBATIVENESS.—SLAVERY.
J. and C., after a tramp among the mountains of Wales, which they have
much enjoyed, reached the village nearest to where I was visiting last
night. This morning a party was made with us to visit —— Castle. We
were driven in a “Welsh car,” which is much the same kind of vehicle as
the two-wheeled hackney cabs that a few years ago filled the streets of
New York, and then suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Two-wheeled
vehicles are “all the go” in England. They are excessively heavy and
cumbrous compared with ours, the wheels much less in diameter, and they
must run much harder, and yet, over these magnificent roads, they can
load them much more heavily.
The castle is on high ground, in the midst of the finest park and
largest trees we have seen. The moat is filled up, and there are a few
large modern windows in the upper part, otherwise it differs but little
probably from what it appeared in the time of the crusaders. The whole
structure is in the form of a square on the ground, with four low round
towers at the corners, and a spacious court-yard in the centre. The
entrance is by a great arched gateway, over which the old _portcullis_
still hangs.
[Sidenote: _ARISTOCRATIC LUXURY._]
We were kindly shown through all its parts, including much not
ordinarily exhibited to strangers, and I confess that I was not more
interested in those parts which were its peculiar features as a feudal
stronghold, than in those that displayed the sumptuous taste, luxury,
and splendour of a modern aristocratic mansion. The state apartments
were truly palatial, and their garniture of paintings, sculpture,
bijoutry, furniture, and upholstery, magnificent and delightful to the
eye, beyond any conception I had previously had of such things. Let
no one say it will be soon reproduced, if it is not already excelled,
in the mansions of our merchant-princes in America. Excelled it may
be, but no such effect can be reproduced or furnished at once to the
order of taste and wealth, for it is the result of generations of
taste and wealth. There was in all, never a marvellous thing, or one
that demanded especial attention, or that proclaimed in itself great
costliness; and while nothing seemed new, though much was modern, most
of the old things were of such materials, and so fashioned, that age
was of no account, and not a word was said by them of fleeting time.
The tone of all—yes, the _tone_—musical to all who entered, was, Be
quiet and comfortable, move slowly and enjoy what is nearest to you
without straining your eyes or your admiration;—nothing to excite
curiosity or astonishment, only quiet esthetic contemplation and calm
satisfaction.
I liked it, liked to be in it, and thought that if I had come honestly
to the inheritance of it, I could abandon myself to a few months living
in the way of it with a good deal of heart. But in the first breath of
this day-dreaming I was interrupted by the question, Is it right and
best that this should be for the few, the very few of us, when for many
of the rest of us there must be but bare walls, tile floors and every
thing besides harshly screaming, scrabble for life? This question,
again, was immediately shoved aside unanswered by another, whether in
this nineteenth century of the carpenter’s son, and first of vulgar,
whistling, snorting, roaring locomotives, new-world steamers, and
submarine electric telegraphs; penny newspapers, state free-schools,
and mechanic’s lyceums, this still soft atmosphere of elegant longevity
was exactly the most favourable for the production of thorough, sound,
influential manhood, and especially for the growth of the right sort of
legislators and lawgivers for the people.
It seems certainly that it would be hard for a man whose mind has been
mainly formed and habited in the midst of this abundance of quiet,
and beauty, and pleasantness, to rightly understand and judiciously
work for the wants of those whose “native air” is as different from
this as is that of another planet. Especially hard must it be to look
with perfect honesty and appreciating candour upon principles, ideas,
measures that are utterly discordant with, and threaten to interrupt,
this costly nursery song to which his philosophy, religion, and habits
have been studiously harmonized.
Hard, by the way, very hard sometimes, must be the trial of a younger
son in one of these families. One son only is the real son, to
sympathize with and make his own, his father’s interests, arrangements,
and hopes; the others are but hangers-on for a time, and while so must
grow accustomed to all this beauty and splendour—must be _enhomed_ to
it, and then they are thrust out and return only as inferiors or as
guests.
[Sidenote: _DEMOCRATIC TENDENCY._]
Strange! I find this monstrous primogeniture seems natural and
Heaven-inspired law to Englishmen. I can conceive how, in its
origin, it might have been so—in the patriarchal state, where it was
the general direction of the common inheritance, rather than the
inheritance itself, that was taken by the eldest of each succeeding
generation; but in modern civilized society, with its constant
re-familization, and in England especially, where immediate isolated
domiciliation of every newly-wedded pair is deemed essential to harmony
and happiness, it seems to me more naturally abhorrent and wrong than
polygamy or chattel-slavery.
Doubtless, if you take it up as a matter to be reasoned upon, there
is much to be said for it, as there is for slavery, or, among the
Turks, for extra wiveing, I suppose;—and first, I fully appreciate
that without it, could in no way be sustained such noble buildings
and grounds—national banner-bearers of dignity—schools of art and
systematic encouragement of art, and perhaps I should add, systematic,
enterprising agricultural improvements, such as this of five thousand
acres thorough-drained _in the best manner_, by the conviction of its
profit in one man’s brain instead of fifty men’s, as it must be with
us. And finally, it may be that for some few, there is sustained by it
a local home, a family nucleus, more permanently than it can be with us.
But there is every thing to be said against it, too, that there is
against an aristocratical government and society, for the customs
of primogeniture and entail are in fact the basis of aristocracy.
And between an aristocratical government and society, with all its
dignities, and amenities, and refinements, and a democracy with all
its dangers, and annoyances, and humiliations, I do not believe that
any man that has had fair observation of our two countries, and who
is not utterly faithless in God and man, a thorough coward, or whose
judgment is not shamefully warped by prejudice, habit, or selfishness,
can hesitate a moment. I think that few Englishmen, few even of the
English nobility, and no English statesman, would advise us to return
to their system. I think that most of them would be sorry to believe
that England herself would fail of being a democratic nation a hundred
years hence.
* * * * *
This opinion has been strengthened by the further acquaintance I have
had with Englishmen. I have little doubt that the majority of those
who ultimately control the British government, do wish and purpose, as
fast as it may be expedient, to extend the elective franchise until it
shall become universal male adult suffrage. That they do not do this as
fast as _we_ should think expedient, is probably to be explained by the
fact that they have not yet experienced, and cannot see with sufficient
faith, how very rapidly, in God’s providence, the self-governing
strength and discernment of a man is stimulated and increased by the
freedom to exercise it. And yet one would think that it was on this
that they depended alone, so entirely indifferent are they in general
to the educational preparation of their subject class to enter the
sovereign class.
It may be proper for me here to record my observation of the general
disposition of the English people towards our nation, which I confess
I did not find to be exactly what I had anticipated, and which I think
must be generally much misconceived in the United States.
[Sidenote: _FEELING TOWARDS THE UNITED STATES._]
There is a certain class of the English, conservative whigs more than
tories, as I met them, that look upon the United States people as a
nation of vulgar, blustering, impertinent, rowdy radicals; very much as
a certain set with us look upon the young mechanics and butcher-boys of
the town—troublesome, dangerous, and very “low,” but who are necessary
to put out fires, and whose votes are of value at elections, and whom
it therefore _pays_ to make some occasional show of respect to, and it
is best to keep on civil terms with. A considerable number of snobbish,
pretending, awkwardly positioned, sub-aristocratic, super-sensible
people, that swear by the Times, and have taken their cue from
Trollope, follow in their wake. But the great mass of the educated
classes regard us very differently; not with unqualified respect and
unalloyed admiration, but much as we of the Atlantic States regard our
own California—a wild, dare-devil, younger brother, with some most
dangerous and reprehensible habits, and some most noble qualities, a
capital fellow, in fact, if he would but have done sowing his wild oats.
This may be well enough understood in the United States, but further,
there is not in the English people, so far as I have seen them, rich
or poor, learned or ignorant, high or low, the slighest soreness or
rancorous feeling on account of our separation from them, or our war
of separation. Of our success as a republic many of their aristocratic
politicians are no doubt jealous; and many having naval and military
tastes, do not feel quite satisfied to hear our everlasting boasting
about the last war, and would like to have another round or two with us
to satisfy themselves that they know how to fight a ship, if they don’t
know how to build her, as well as we. There is also a party of “aged
women of both sexes,” that worship the ghost of that old fool, “the
good king George,” who, I suppose, look upon us with unaffected horror,
as they do equally upon their own dissenters and liberals. Yet it never
happened to me, though I met and conversed freely with all classes,
except the noble, while I was in England, to encounter the first man
who did not think that we did exactly right, or who was sorry that we
succeeded as we did in declaring and maintaining our independence.
The truth is that, _at that time_, the great mass of thinking men in
England were much of that opinion. Our war was with king George and his
cabinet, not with the people of England, and if they did reluctantly
sustain the foolish measures of the king, it was precisely as our
Whigs, who were opposed to the measures that led to the war with
Mexico, sustained, with money and with blood, that war when it did
come. It is a remarkable thing, that I have noticed that there are many
men in England who were born at the time of, or shortly subsequent to
our revolutionary war, who are named after the American heroes of that
war, Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin.
This and other circumstances, early in my visit to England, made me
reflect that the hostile feeling of the people had never been deeply
engaged against us, while it soon became also evident that very much
less of so much hostility as they once had towards us, had descended to
the present, than we are in the habit of calculating for.
The reason of the great difference in this respect of the _popular
feeling_ in the two countries is evident, though it often extremely
puzzles and offends a liberal Englishman who has been in the habit of
looking with the greatest feeling of fraternity towards the people of
the United States, to find himself when he comes among them expected in
all his opinions and feelings to be either a traitor to his own country
or an enemy of ours. It is easily explained however.
[Sidenote: _THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION._]
There is a love of hostility in our nature that wants some object to
direct itself towards. Seventy years ago, and forty years ago, that
object to us as a nation was the kingdom of Great Britain. No other
object until within a few years has been offered to us to weaken that
traditional hostility. All our military and naval glory, the most
blazing, though by no means the most valuable, jewels of our national
pride, have been our victories in war with Great Britain. Almost our
only national holidays have been in a great part exultations over
our successful hostilities with Great Britain. “The enemy” and “the
British,” came to me from my fighting grandfather as synonymous terms.
When I was a child I never saw an Englishman but I was on my guard
against him as a spy, and would look behind the fences to see that
there was no ambuscade of red-coats. I made secret coverts about the
house, so that when they came to sack and burn it, and take our women
and children and household goods into captivity, I could lay in wait
to rescue them. In our school-boy games the beaten party was always
called “British” (the term “_Britisher_,” I never saw except in a
British book or heard except in England). If a law was odious it was
termed a British law; if a man was odious he was called an “old Tory;”
and it has been with us a common piece of blackguardism till within a
short time, if not now, to speak of those of an opposing party as under
British influence.
The war had been with us a war of the people; not a woman as she sipped
her tea but imbibed hatred to the taxing British, and suckled her
offspring with its nourishment; not a man of spunk in the country but
was hand to hand fighting with the British, and teaching his sons never
to yield to them.
In England, on the other hand, comparatively few of the people knew or
cared at all about the war; even the soldiers engaged in it were in
considerable numbers mere hirelings from another people, whom the true
English would have rather seen whipped than not, so far as they had
any _national_ feeling about it. Their hostile feeling was even then
more directed towards France than towards America; and now, I do not
believe there is one in a thousand of the people of England that has
the slightest feeling of hostility towards us, descending or inherited,
from that time. It was much so again in the later war. England was at
war with half the world in those days, and if a general disposition
of enmity towards us had been at all aroused in the course of it, all
recollection of it was lost in the fiercer wars with other nations
that immediately followed. I doubt if one-half the voters of England
could tell the name of a single ship engaged in the war of 1812;
whether it was General Hull or Commodore Hull that was heroized in it;
whether, in the assault upon New Orleans or Washington, it was that
their forces were successful; or whether, finally, they carried or lost
the diplomatic point for which their soldiers and sailors had been set
to fighting.
Even if the people of England could remember us equally among other
important nations as their enemy, it would be a very different feeling
towards us that it would lead to, from the remembrance of us as their
_old and only_ enemy; so that not only was our original share of the
hostile feeling of the people of England a very small one, being
principally confined to the king and his sycophants, and the idolaters
of the divine right, but the pugnacious element in the nature of an
Englishman, of our day, is directed by much more vivid remembrances
towards France, or Spain, or Germany, than towards us.
[Sidenote: _THE RADICALS AND SLAVERY._]
Nothing can be more friendly than the general disposition of the
English people at present towards us. The liberals, especially,
have great respect for us, and look upon us as their allies against
the world of injustice, oppression, and bigotry. (Just now the
free-traders, however, seem to be a little miffed with us because we
have not gone over _stock and fluke_ all at once to perfect reciprocity
with them, and the Tories are consequently our greatest flatterers.)
The uneducated, common people in general know no difference between
America and Russia, but the more intelligent of the working classes are
often very fairly informed with regard to our country, and are our most
sincere admirers and friends. All the more sober and religious people
have a great horror of our slavery and of the occasional Lynch-law
performances on our western border, of which they always get the first
and darkest reports, and none of the corrections and extenuating
circumstances that come in later and cooler despatches. On slavery they
are usually greatly misinformed, and view it only as an unmitigated and
wholly inexcusable wrong, injustice, and barbarous tyranny for which
all Americans are equally responsible, and all equally condemnable, and
with regard to which all are to be held responsible, and everlastingly
to be scolded at (except a few martyrs, called abolitionists, that
obtain a precarious livelihood through their contributions). The
Chartists and Radicals, too, are generally _down_ very hard upon an
American about slavery, and are commonly grossly misinformed about
it. I wish our Southern brethren would send a few lecturers upon the
subject to England; the abolitionists have it all their own way there
now, and take advantage of it to give the ignorant people ideas about
our country which it is very desirable should be contradicted. I wish
especially that they could make them comprehend how it is that we at
the north have nothing to do with their peculiar institution, and are
not to be expected to carry pistols and bowie-knives and fight every
body that chooses to attack it all over the world. This is no more nor
less than a great many people in some parts of England seem to expect,
when they are told that one is an American, and it comes sometimes to
be a regular bore to a traveller to have to disappoint them. There
is, in truth, a hundred times more hard feeling in England towards
America from this cause, than from all others, and it is unfortunately
strongest with the most earnestly republican and radically democratic
of her citizens.
Within this year or two there has been much more interest with
regard to America among all classes in England than previously, more
hope and more fear of us than ever before. The works of our best
authors—Irving, Emerson, Bancroft, Bryant, Channing, Cooper, Hawthorne,
and Whittier—are, many of them, as well known and as generally read
in England as in America. The introduction of American provisions,
cutting under the native products, has brought even the farmers to
scowlingly glance at us, and as, just at this time, most of them are
forced to be thinking of emigration for themselves or their children,
they are generally disposed to honestly inquire about us. Among
all making inquiries of me, I never found one to whom our form of
government was an objection. Finally, the present of food which, in
the famine, we sent to Ireland—a most mean portion out of our plenty
and superabundance to dole out to an actual STARVING neighbour, a most
unworthy expression of our Christian charity and brotherly regard for
her, it has always seemed to me, but such as it was—obtained for us not
only in Ireland, but all through Great Britain, a strange degree of a
sort of affectionate respect, not altogether unmingled with jealousy
and soreness because they cannot pay it back.
Altogether, considering the exceedingly queer company English
travellers seem usually to keep when in the United States, and the
atrocious caricatures in which, with few exceptions, they have
represented our manners and customs to their countrymen, I was
surprised at the general respect and the degree of correct appreciation
of us that I commonly found. There is no country not covered by a
British flag in the world, that the British of 1850 have any thing like
the degree of sympathy with, and affection for, that they have for the
United States.
On the other hand, it is happily evident, that since our war with
Mexico has given us a new military glory, it has also diverted our
national combativeness, in a degree, from our old enemy, and that since
the English liberals in so many ways, if not very valuable, at least
as much so as ours, have shown their sympathy and desire to assist our
common brethren struggling for freedom on the Continent; since the
lynching of the Butcher of Austria by the beer-men of Bankside, and the
general exultation of the British people over it; since the general
intercommunication between the countries has been made so much more
frequent and speedy, and cheaper than it used to be, the disposition of
our people towards the British has been much less suspicious, guarded,
and quarrelsome than it very naturally, if not very reasonably, was,
until within a few years.
[Sidenote: _OCEAN PENNY POSTAGE._]
God grant that every tie grow constantly tighter that binds us together
to peace, and to mutual assistance and co-labour—for justice, for
freedom, for the salvation of the world. If there is any body who does
not heartily say Amen to this, I commend him to Elihu Burritt; and all
who do, I call upon, from him, to go to work for OCEAN PENNY POSTAGE—so
shall our prayer not fail. (_See Appendix, B._)