I soon found Leadenhall street, and sure enough, the warmest kind of a
letter, just as I had expected and was so sure of, bidding me come at
once to her home in the country. Delays are dangerous, so I delayed not,
and soon the object of my voyage was accomplished. If I were writing a
novel, and wished to make it a two or three volumed one, I would enter
into the details, but the story I can tell is so simple and well known
that it is better to save time, as the captain saved his coal, by not
using it.
To be sure, after the first greetings were over, and the serious part of
our business was settled, we told to each other the story of our lives
since we parted. Mine I have related. She had objected to marriage,
though she had had a number of offers, for her heart had been given away
and had not returned. During our conversation she quoted these lines
from some author, “A woman may marry this man or that man; her
affections may shift and alter, but she never forgets the man she loved
with all the wonder and idealism and devotion of a girl’s early love.”
One of her suitors was a Mr. Beresford, of a family of rank and wealth.
This was about all he could boast of. Disagreeable in appearance, though
he was polished in all the ways and style of society, with much of the
affectation of a man of the world. He was persistent in his attentions,
and used all his arts of fascination, and was so obtrusive that she
hated the sight of him. She knew that he was heartless, and by instinct
that he was very far from being above reproach. Her parents became angry
with her for throwing away such a chance of marriage into a family of
name and rank. Did I not remember their anger? She defied them at first,
but the incessant worry day and night continued, until from sheer
exhaustion, she yielded by giving her hand but not her heart. There was
a marriage of ceremony, but not of hearts or lives. He had won and there
was no further need of disguise or dissimulation. He taunted her with
never having cared for him; that because she was so proud and haughty he
had only married her to break her in, just as he would have subdued a
spirited horse. He had inherited the profligacy of his ancestors and
maintained the reputation of his family by his vices. He returned at
once to his dissolute life and made her, as she said, wish for her own
death or his. Her parents saw, when it was too late, that they had
driven their daughter to a life worse than death, for the sake of name
and rank. Her only relief was when he was away with his sporting
friends. One day, riding to the hounds, he was thrown from his horse and
killed. He had been drinking heavily and could not sit the horse.
Said she, “I could not shed a tear. That is an awful thing for a wife to
say when she loses her husband, but it was impossible for me to be so
false as to express even a regret, so I refused to see any one. I had
never loved him nor had the least respect for him. It was a marriage
only in form. I put on mourning, but that was a black lie to keep
society tongues from wagging. And now as we are united again I can say
frankly to you that I have often thought of the different life I would
have had but for the interference of my parents.”
Concluding her narrative, she said, with one of her most loving smiles,
“So, Charles, I shall not keep you awake nights talking about the
virtues of my first husband.” This remark was of infinite comfort to me,
for I had often wondered how a man must feel after marrying a widow
whose husband had been noted for his excellent traits. If she was
careful not to mention them, yet he could but think at times that she
was making comparisons between himself and the departed. Another thing
gave me great satisfaction, that I was getting no second hand article of
a heart, as hers had been always and only mine. Yet I could but feel a
tinge of remorse that I had once given part of mine to another, though
under necessity, as I supposed the object of my first and only real love
in life had gone forever from me.
There was love but no love making or giddy flirtation between us, so I
have no foundation for a thrilling story, even if I wished to make one.
Marriage has always seemed to me such a sacred thing as to be a solemn
matter rather than something to be treated in a joking manner. It is
next to birth and death, the most important event in a person’s life,
and I never could understand how a young woman or a man could talk about
their marriage as triflingly as they would about their chances in a
lottery or a game of cards.
No wonder there is so much marital disagreement and unhappiness, when
the married life is entered upon with so much thoughtlessness and
frivolity. I had received an impression from Mr. Percy, when he talked
so sacredly of his affianced, and this never left me. How much I have to
thank him for the good influence he made upon my whole life. I try to
keep my heart grateful and ever mindful of the favors I receive from
others. It seems to me that one of the great sins of humanity is
ingratitude. It may possibly appear greater than it really is, because
people take so little pains to show their gratitude. I have, at
considerable sacrifice at times, granted favors, and those to whom they
were given, took them as a matter of course, very indifferently, thus
injuring themselves, and depriving me of considerable pleasure. But I am
running wild again. This is a habit of mine, as those acquainted with me
well know, and my wife, later in life, often laughed at me, for always
wanting to point a moral, or adorn a tale with some of my practical
remarks. But as there are many worse habits than this, I am content.
I returned to London as light-hearted and happy as if I had won a
kingdom, and I was to be crowned its king. My business was finished, but
I had much to see in that great kaleidoscope of the world. The top of an
omnibus was my point of observation at first. What a collection of
moving things, hurrying, scurrying, joggling and jostling each other,
apparently without any purpose, except to keep going! I thought if I
were able to write a book I would make one on, “What I saw from the top
of an omnibus in London.” All sorts and conditions of men, the staid men
of business, the “crows” in long black gowns, the obsequious shopmen,
the swells, the cabbies, the bewildered countrymen, the beggars ready to
carry your cane to get “a penny for a bite to eat for a poor man,” the
sweepers, the cat’s meat men, and the fellows on the corners crying, “a
penny a shine, sur,” castes, castes, no end of them. One day an
Englishman remarked to me, “You have a great many castes in India?”
“Yes, I replied, about as many as you have in England.” He looked at me
with a stare, as if he thought I was guying him, and then said, “I think
you are about right.”
There is something so peculiar in that stare, a concentration of the
negation of intellect and intelligence in appearance of an Englishman’s
face, when listening; a dull, cold look, as expressionless as the
countenance of a heathen stone idol, that freezes one, and makes him
feel that he is saying something foolish or impudent. Whether it is from
lack of quick comprehension, or considered good form, I do not know. The
English, I should judge, are not a smiling nation. They are as solid and
substantial, even in the expression of their faces, as their heavy meat
and drink can make them. They are slow-witted, and their jokes, except
what they import, are so ponderous that they reminded me of our
perfunctory religious exercises on a cold morning at school, and of our
tasks in reciting the Litany, only that the jokes lacked the response,
“Good Lord deliver us.”
I had purchased some books for light reading in my off hours, and among
them was “Pelham” by Lord Lytton. I was greatly surprised to find this
passage, a severer criticism on his countrymen than I am capable of
making. This was probably written on the view that a man may call
himself a dog, but let another beware of saying it of him. “The English
of the fashionable world make business an enjoyment, and enjoyment a
business; they are born without a smile; they rove about public places
like so many easterly winds—cold, sharp and cutting; or like a group of
fogs on a frosty day, sent out of his hell by Boreas, for the express
purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you ‘how you do,’
you would think they were measuring the length of your coffin. They are
ever, it is true, laboring to be agreeable, but they are like Sisyphus,
the stone they rolled up the hill with so much toil, runs down again,
and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes polite, but
invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial—their cold never.
They are stiff without dignity, and cringing without manners. They offer
you an affront, and call it ‘plain truth,’ they wound your feelings, and
tell you it is merely to ‘speak their minds,’ at the same time, while
they have neglected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have
adopted all its falsehood and deceit. While they profess to abhor
servility, they adulate the peerage; while they tell you they care not a
rush for the minister, they move heaven and earth for an invitation from
the minister’s wife. Then their amusements! The heat, the dust—the
sameness—the slowness of that odious park in the morning, and the same
exquisite scene repeated in the evening on the condensed stage of a rout
room, where one has more heat with less air, and a narrower dungeon,
with diminished possibility of escape! We wander about like the damned
in the story of Vathek, and we pass our lives like the royal philosopher
of Prussia in conjugating the verb, ‘je m’ennuie.’”
I wanted a Sunday in London to hurry about alone without any “sweet
encumbrance.” That I obtained on the promise to her who had already
assumed the right to have a good share of my attention and time, that it
should be the only one I should have alone.
Some one has said that the best form of government is a monarchy, if the
monarch be a perfect one. I had chosen my monarchess, and was not all
disinclined to obey her sweet will.
On this privileged day I took a cab, and went from early morning into
and out of a number of churches. In one of them I lingered longest, for
there was to me a grand tamasha on the boards, so to speak. There were a
number of priests dressed as gorgeously as clowns in a circus. They were
processioning, genuflecting, beating their breasts, and rolling their
eyes, as if in great distress from an inward pain. There were
innumerable candles, though it was broad daylight, an indication of
their religious darkness, or a reflection on the Almighty that He had
not made light enough for them, or else that He was not able to see what
they were doing without the aid of their flickering dips. There was
incense burning, floating everywhere, in the stifling air, that brought
tears, not of contrition, but simply of water, to my eyes. It was a show
worth seeing, yet it made me think of the story of the boy, who, when
making his first flies for fishing, impatiently asked his mother, if God
made everything? “Yes, everything.” “And flies as well?” “Certainly,”
she said. “Then God has horrid fiddling work to do,” replied the boy. I
thought if the Infinite God could be pleased with such a performance,
styled a religious service, then He is interested in horrid fiddling,
trifling matters. But, as I am only a heathen, my opinion may not be
worth the breath spent in giving it.
The contrast to this was in a place really named a “circus,” where there
were a lot of paradings, shoutings and groans accompanied by a band of
base drums, base horns, base viols, base voices and a base crowd. The
people shouted and tooted as if their god was deaf or asleep, or had
gone on a journey. I could not help asking myself, “Is it possible that
God can be pleased with all this noise and confusion?”
The other performance had something æsthetic about it, that while I
could admire it as quite a decent Sunday show, there was nothing to
grate upon my physical senses though much to disturb my religious sense,
but the other was so bombastic and horribly discordant that I delayed
not in leaving it.
Then to other churches. To be really truthful, and that is what I aim at
in all things, even if I tell the truth to mine own hurt, I did not care
so much about my own religious welfare as to see how other people took
theirs. I think it is a feature of human nature that we all are anxious
that everybody else should obey the laws, whether we do or not. Many
people though unjust themselves, dislike injustice in others. Probably
most people go to church more to see that their neighbors are there,
than to repent of their own shortcomings and sins. I think this
statement, however, would not be quite true about that Sunday as only a
few people were present in any of the churches.
Here I wish to observe that it has always appeared very strange to me,
that since Christian people insist so much on the vital importance of
religious duties, they should be so indifferent in the performance of
them. One would naturally suppose then in a Christian city like London,
every mother’s son and daughter would go to church. They perhaps believe
that the priests or the church in some vicarious way can get them
tickets for heaven, so they need not bother themselves to work out their
own salvation. Yet, I cannot help liking to see a man honest, though he
be a Christian, and practice what he professes. This may be a stupid
idea of mine, still I cannot get rid of it.
I was told that one of the Sunday sights was Vanity Fair in Hyde Park,
so after a hasty tiffin I directed my cabby thitherward. He was a jolly
good fellow, rotund as a beer barrel, and red in the face as if he had
lived on boiled lobsters all his life and their complexion had gone into
his. I had liberally tipped him on starting in the morning and remarked
to him that there was nothing like food and drink for either horse or
man, and he agreed heartily with me.
There is nothing so omnipotent in London as shillings, except it be
sovereigns. With them in sight, I think my cab would have driven me to
the devil, if not back again. One day I wished to see the houses of
Parliament. The six foot guards were shooing the people away as if they
were chickens bound to depredate in a garden. I walked up towards one of
these stalwarts, putting on all the dignity I could command, with my
hand in my pocket making a very significant movement of drawing out my
purse, asking, “Do you ever show any one about this place?” He replied,
“Come this way, sur,” and we went behind a big pillar where I dropped
some shillings into his hand. He then took me anywhere and everywhere,
and showed me Lord’s this and that Lord’s gown and wig and told me all I
wished to know. He got the money, and I the money’s worth, so we were
both agreeable. Nothing like shillings, unless it be sovereigns. A man
might as well be without them in London, as to be without rupees when he
has a case in court in India.
I cannot refrain from quoting what the greatest poet of the world says:
“Money—This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed
Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench.”
“Money is more eloquent than all the poets, preachers or philosophers,
and has the only tongue that, strange to no one, needs no dictionary to
explain it to the simplest unlearned soul.”
Columbus in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella says, “Gold is an
excellent thing. With gold one forms treasures. With gold one does
whatever one wishes in this world. Even souls can be got to Paradise by
it.”
“’Tis gold that buys admittance, oft it doth,
and ’tis gold
Which makes the true man kill’d, and saves the thief
Nay, sometimes hangs both thief and true man,
What can it not do and undo?”
The cabbies are a strange caste—a kind of wandering mendicants always on
the go, and high caste enough to look down on all their fares. I rather
liked them, so good-natured when well tipped, but probably like other
humans, the other thing when squeezed and why not? Some one told me this
story. An old timer just returned from India going from a station,
thought his cab was taking him round about to increase the mileage. Not
thinking where he was, he shouted up in his India patois, “Turn sooar ka
batchcha kidhar ko jaoge?” You son of a pig, whither are you going?
Cabby with as much force hurled down, “Tum gaddha ka bhai, ham khub
jante hain.” You brother to a donkey we know very well; showing that he
had also been in India.
We were soon at Vanity Fair and such it really was, a fair of vanity. I
doubt if the sun anywhere else shines on such a scene. It was an after
service aristocratic parade. “Miss Vavasor went to church, as it was the
right thing to do. God was one of the heads of society, and his drawing
rooms had to be attended,” so it seems to be good form as an adjunct to
divine service to have this assembly. It was a big show to me, but I
could not see the reason of it. It was a dumb performance, as very few
appeared to talk,—a kind of pantomime. There may have been lots of fun
in it—as it is said the English take even their pleasures very
sadly—which my lack of education prevented me from seeing. It was
probably a divine dress parade, as all seemed to wear clothes of the
newest kind of cloth and the latest cut, especially the guanty jaunty
young men who paraded back and forth. They may have been hired by some
fashionable tailor to show his latest styles. There were castes, the
high Brahmins on a certain set of chairs and so on, each set by itself.
A profane low-class man outside the ring pointed out to me a dowager
with the wise remark, “She’s taken many a nip by the looks of her mug.”
Another of a duchess, “She’s a rum un.” This was as bad as the cabbie’s
reply when I asked him on the way, “What is that building?” “Buckingham
Palace, sur.” “Who lives there?” I queried. “The old cat,” he answered.
I don’t like such talk. It’s “deucedly vulgar, you know,” and as bad as
swearing. The fact is, I often needed an interpreter. The language and
pronunciation were so peculiar, and yet they would have taken it in high
dudgeon if I had requested them to speak to me in English.
At length the show dissolved or rather moved away as silently as it
came, and without any one saying “To your tents, O Israel.”
The next scene was in another part of the Park, a meeting of strikers or
the victims of “Sweaters” in some trade. The crowds! They came from
every direction. There were also castes in numbers, each with a style of
its own, but all evidently of the lowest grade, most of them in the
cheapest clothes, rags and tatters, a wonderful contrast to the Vanity
Fair party.
There were carts in different places from which speakers bawled out
their grievances and made their demands. The hucksters, with their
baskets and little stands, offered shrimps, winkles, pop, roasted
chestnuts and other cheap stuff, with little success, as the crowd
appeared as anxious to keep their pennies, if they had any, as these
fellows were to get them. There were many strong, robust men, probably
willing to labor, but compelled to idleness, their garments stitched and
patched, yet not sufficient to conceal their nakedness. Such able-bodied
men begging people to buy a pen’worth of something!
I cannot stomach the nakedness of a white person. There is something in
it so leprous-like. I have heard travelers remark that a half-naked
black or dark skinned person, is not at all repugnant compared to one of
a white skin. Naturally I am inclined to a dark skin, and cannot but
think that God knew what He was doing when He gave colored skins to
people living in the tropics where clothes are a burden, that their dark
complexions might take the place of clothes, and they be protectively
colored.
On the same principle nature clothes animals and insects with the colors
of their surroundings. Still, I think, human animals ought to get their
color as well as their being in a legitimate way. I know this reflection
is to mine own detriment.
All this poverty showed this one thing, at least, that the present
organization of society is at fault, or that God had made a failure in
creating these people. It may be, as Alexander Knox says, “The mass of
these people in our towns are spawned upon the world rather than born
into life.” Or as another has said: “Born into the world only to be a
blight to it.”
Their very existence as they are, plainly declares that there is a fault
somewhere by somebody.
This poverty plead for itself. It reminded me of the story of a beggar
sitting silently by the wayside. A passer-by asked, “Why don’t you beg,
man? Why don’t you speak?” “Speak!” said the beggar, “when every rent in
my clothes is a mouth that proclaims my wants with more eloquence than I
could with my tongue!”
Going from Vanity Fair to this crowd, was like going from heaven to
hell, only a short distance apart; the one a picture of the arrogance of
the rich, the other the debasement of the poor. I do not like to compare
the church parade to heaven, as it was only a show, a mock heaven at
best, but there was no hunger there, nor rags, though, no doubt, plenty
of lust, vice and crime under those rich clothes. Yet the outward
contrast was very great.
Should it not be a subject of serious reflection that after six thousand
years of the world’s progress, and nearly two thousand of the teachings
of Christianity, a few people in the world should live in exuberant
luxury, and the great majority in squalid poverty, the world a hell for
millions of poor, in order to create a paradise for the very few rich?
“Famine gnawing at their entrails, and despair feeding at their hearts,
Gropes for its right with horny, callous hands,
And stares around for God with bloodshot eyes.”
“Let us be patient, lads,” said a pious weaver, “surely God Almighty
will help us soon.”
“Don’t talk about your goddlemighty,” said one, “there isn’t any, or he
wouldn’t let us suffer as we do.”
Why all this poverty and misery? There must be an adequate cause for it,
some powerful disorganizing element to produce such a condition of
things.
A tract-man handed me several leaflets, from which I culled the
following:
“The drink bill of Great Britain annually amounts to one hundred and
forty million pounds sterling. This is about five pound sterling per
head of the inhabitants. It is estimated that sixty per cent. of this,
or eighty-four millions, comes out of the wages of the working classes.
There are one million six hundred thousand acres in England cultivated
for barley and fifty thousand for hops. Seventy million bushels of grain
are worse than wasted in manufacturing drink. Allowing forty pounds of
flour to a bushel, and sixty pounds of bread, the total would be one
billion and fifty million, four pound loaves, or one hundred and seventy
loaves for each family of five persons throughout the United Kingdom. In
twenty-five years there have been four million two hundred and
sixty-eight thousand and twenty-two arrests of drunk and disorderlies,
and probably not one in twenty of the drunkards arrested. There are one
million forty thousand, one hundred and three paupers in England and
Wales, or one in nineteen of the whole population, nine-tenths caused by
drink. There are one hundred and forty thousand criminals, mostly owing
to drink, and twenty-five thousand policemen required to keep public
houses in order and protect life and property; forty-three thousand
lunatics in the asylums. In England, one in every one hundred and
seventy of the total population is convicted of drunkenness.”
Lord Chief Justice Coleridge states that nine out of every ten gaols
would be closed but for drink. Justice Fitzgerald says that drunkenness
leads to nineteen-twentieths of the crimes; Mr. Mulhall, that
forty-eight per cent. of the idiocy in England arises from the
drunkenness of the parents, and one-third of the insanity in the United
Kingdom is the effect of drink; Sir James Horner, that seventy-five out
of every hundred of the divorce cases are brought about by drink; Mr.
Gladstone, that drink has caused greater calamities than the three great
historical scourges, war, famine and pestilence.
A distinguished English writer says that, “the poverty of the poor is
the chief cause of the weakness and inefficiency which are the causes of
their poverty, dire poverty and the frequency of public houses act and
react upon one another, poverty increasing public houses, and public
houses increasing poverty.”
A Government report shows that it costs five and three quarter millions
sterling a year for the repression of crime in England, and while they
spend one hundred and forty millions sterling a year for drink, the
British spend only two millions a year on books.
With such facts, showing the waste of food, the unnatural bill of costs
and the inevitable losses caused by the demoralization of the people,
can any one doubt the cause of the squalid poverty of the masses of
Great Britain?
And it is a civilized Christian nation that tolerates and encourages
such things!
Further, it found heathen India sober, and it is doing its best to make
it a nation of drunkards like itself, by means of liquor and opium. An
Archdeacon who has spent thirty years in India makes the statement that
for every convert to Christianity made by the missionaries, the
Government makes one thousand drunkards.
Another item. The United Kingdom has 330 packs of fox hounds, at a
yearly cost of £414,850. The 33,000 riders and 99,000 horses cost
£3,500,000, or the whole hunt maintenance at £4,000,000 a year, to keep
up a cruel, inhuman, degrading sport. Most likely all who uphold this
waste of money and cruelty were confirmed in the church as Christians,
and partake regularly of “holy communion” as followers of Jesus, while
several millions of their fellow beings go naked and hungry. What a grim
satire on profession and practice!
While I hate the opium business in India, I cannot but think that with
such an appalling record as the above, that the people “at home” would
better cleanse their own filthy door-yards before criticising those of
India. Would it not be more consistent, more honest, more commendable,
if the English people would do away with their greatest curse, their
liquor traffic, and look after their paupers, criminals, and the
brutally oppressed innocent victims, the wives and children of
drunkards, and all this damnable encouragement of vice, before they send
out junketing commissions at an enormous expense on the poor, overtaxed
serfs of India, to investigate the opium traffic?
It is so easy and gratifying for some people to meddle with the affairs
of others while they neglect their own, and to condemn those far away,
but quite overlooking their own immediate vices and sins.
While I was in Glasgow a request was made upon the Provost to call a
public meeting to protest against the Tsar of Russia for expelling the
“scurvy Jews” who rob and demoralize his people by their usury and
promotion of drunkenness, and at the time I was astounded at the poverty
and squalor, the numbers of deformed, debauched people, and shocked with
the fights and brawls of drunken barelegged women and brutal men on a
Saturday afternoon on one of the main streets of that city.
Consistency may be a jewel, but it is a very rare one. The people of
Great Britain should get it as quickly as possible. It would be of more
honor and credit to them than that stolen Kohinur.
I spoke to a man near me about the great crowd of poor. He replied,
“This is only a handful, only a few drops. Let the degraded poor of all
London come out and they would more than fill the whole park.” I asked
him about their morality. “Morality,” said he; “they do not know what it
means.” And he told me such tales of misery, vice and crime that would
make, not only angels, but the very devils, weep to know that humanity
had fallen so low.
Are civilization and religion failures, that they cannot provide a
remedy for such ulcers on the social body that must affect the very life
of the nation?
For very shame’s sake the Christians of England should heal their own
sores before they damn the heathen, for I doubt from what I saw and
heard if there is any city in all heathendom so sunken in degradation
and vice as this famous metropolis of a so-called Christian country.
This question is not only for the Christian, the philanthropist, but for
the statesman or politician, if it be true what Mr. John Bright says:
“I believe there is no permanent greatness to a nation except it be
based on morality. I do not care for military pomp or military renown. I
care for the condition of the people among whom I live. There is no man
in England less likely to speak irreverently of the crown and monarchy
of England than I am, but crown, coronets, mitres, military displays,
pomp of war, wide colonies, and a huge empire are in my view, all
trifles light as air, and not worth considering unless with them you can
have a fair share of comfort, contentment and happiness among the great
body of the people. Palaces, baronial halls, castles, great halls, and
stately mansions do not make a nation. The nation in every country
dwells in a cottage.”