choose to attend the prayer-meeting. No effort was made to induce any to
stay--the contrary rather. I was surprised to see that three-fourths (I
think) staid; though this was partly explained afterwards by the fact
that by staying they had hopes of a night's lodging here and none
elsewhere. That prayer-meeting was the most impressive and salutary
religious service I have attended for many years. Four or five prayers
were made by different teachers in succession--all chaste, appropriate,
excellent, fervent, affecting. A Hymn was sung before and after each by
the congregation--and well sung. Brief and cogent addresses were made by
the superintendent and (I believe) an American visitor. Then the School
was dismissed, and the pupils who had tickets permitting them to sleep
in the dormitory below filed off in regular order to their several
berths. The residue left the premises. We visiters were next permitted
to go down and see those who staid--of course only the ladies being
allowed to look into the apartment of the women. O the sadness of that
sight! There in the men's room were perhaps a hundred men and boys,
sitting up in their rags in little compartments of naked boards, each
about half-way between a bread-tray and a hog-trough, which, planted
close to each other, were to be their resting-places for the night, as
they had been for several previous nights. And this is a very recent and
very blessed addition to the School, made by the munificence of some
noble woman, who gave $500 expressly to fit up some kind of a
sleeping-room, so that those who had attended the School should not
_all_ be turned out (as a part still necessarily are) to wander or lie
all night in the always cold, damp streets. There are not many hogs in
America who are not better lodged than these poor human brethren and
sisters, who now united, at the suggestion of the superintendent, in a
hymn of praise to God for all His mercies. Doubtless, many did so with
an eye to the shelter and hope of food (for each one who is permitted to
stay here has a bath and six ounces of bread allowed him in the
morning); yet when I contrasted this with the more formal and stately
worship I had attended at Westminster Abbey in the morning, the
preponderance was decidedly not in favor of the latter.
It seemed to me a profanation--an insult heaped on injury--an
unjustifiable prying into the saddest secrets of the great prison-house
of human woe--for us visiters to be standing here; and, though I
apologised for it with a sovereign, which grain of sand will, I am sure,
be wisely applied to the mitigation of this mountain of misery, I was
yet in haste to be gone. Yet I leaned over the rail and made some
inquiry of a ragged and forlorn youth of nineteen or twenty who sat next
us in his trough, waiting for our departure before he lay down to such
rest as that place could afford him. He replied that he had no parents
nor friends who could help him--had never been taught any trade--always
did any work he could get--sometimes earned six-pence to a shilling per
day by odd jobs, but could get no work lately--had no money, of
course--and had eaten nothing that day but the six ounces of bread given
him on rising here in the morning--and had only the like six ounces in
prospect between him and starvation. That hundreds so situated should
unite with seeming fervor in praise to God shames the more polished
devotion of the favored and comfortable; and if these famishing,
hopeless outcasts were to pilfer every day of their lives (as most of
them did, and perhaps some of them still do), I should pity even more
than I blamed them.
The next night gave me a clearer idea of
BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY.
The Annual meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was
held on Monday evening, in Freemasons' Hall--a very fine one. There were
about One Thousand persons present--perhaps less, certainly not more. I
think JOSEPH STURGE, Esq., was Chairman, but I did not arrive till after
the organization, and did not learn the officers' names. At all events,
Mr. Sturge had presented the great practical question to the Meeting--"What
can we Britons do to hasten the overthrow of Slavery?"--and Rev. H. H.
GARNETT (colored) of our State was speaking upon it when I entered. He
named me commendingly to the audience, and the Chairman thereupon invited
me to exchange my back seat for one on the platform, which I took. Mr.
Garnett proceeded to commend the course of British action against Slavery
which is popular here, and had already been shadowed forth in the set
resolves afterward read to the meeting. The British were told that they
could most effectually war against Slavery by refusing the courtesies of
social intercourse to slaveholders--by refusing to hear or recognise
pro-slavery clergymen--by refusing to consume the products of Slave Labor,
&c. Another colored American--a Rev. Mr. CRUMMILL, if I have his name
right,--followed in the same vein, but urged more especially the duty of
aiding the Free Colored population of the United-States to educate and
intellectually develop their children. Mr. S. M. PETO, M. P. followed in
confirmation of the views already expressed by Mr. Garnett, insisting that
he could not as a Christian treat the slaveholder otherwise than as a
tyrant and robber. And then a very witty negro from Boston (Rev. Mr.
Heuston, I understood his name), spoke quite at length in unmeasured
glorification of Great Britain, as the land of _true_ freedom and
equality, where simple Manhood is respected without regard to Color, and
where alone he had ever been treated by all as a man and a brother.
By this time I was very ready to accept the Chairman's invitation to say
a few words. For, while all that the speakers had uttered with regard to
Slavery was true enough, it was most manifest that, whatever effect the
course of action they urged might have in America, it could have no
other than a baneful influence on the cause of Political Reform in this
country. True, it did not always say in so many words that the Social
and Political institutions of Great Britain are perfect, but it never
intimated the contrary, while it generally implied and often distinctly
affirmed this. The effect, therefore, of such inculcations, is not only
to stimulate and aggravate the Phariseeism to which all men are
naturally addicted, but actually to impede and arrest the progress of
Reform in this Country by implying that nothing here needs reforming.
And as this doctrine of "Stand by thyself for I am holier than thou,"
was of course received with general applause by a British audience, the
vices of speaker and hearer reaected on each other; and, judging from the
specimens I had that evening, I must regard American, and especially
Afric-American lecturers against Slavery in this country as among the
most effective upholders of all the enormous Political abuses and wrongs
which are here so prevalent.
When the stand was accorded me, therefore, I proceeded, not by any means
to apologize for American Slavery, not to suggest the natural obstacles
to its extinction, but to point out, as freely as the audience would
bear, some modes of effective hostility to it in addition to those
already commended. Premising the fact that Slavery in America now
justifies itself mainly on the grounds that the class who live by rude
manual toil always are and must be degraded and ill-requited--that there
is more debasement and wretchedness on their part in the Free States and
in Great Britain itself than there is in the Slave States--and that,
moreover, Free laborers will not work in tropical climates, so that
these must be cultivated by slaves or not at all--I suggested and
briefly urged on British Abolitionists the following course of action:
1. Energetic and systematic exertions to increase the reward of Labor
and the comfort and consideration of the depressed Laboring Class here
at home; and to diffuse and cherish respect for Man as Man, without
regard to class, color or vocation.
2. Determined efforts for the eradication of those Social evils and
miseries _here_ which are appealed to and relied on by slaveholders and
their champions everywhere as justifying the continuance of Slavery; And
3. The colonization of our Slave States by thousands of intelligent,
moral, industrious Free Laborers, who will silently and practically
dispel the wide-spread delusion which affirms that the Southern States
must be cultivated and their great staples produced by Slave Labor or
not at all.
I think I did not speak more than fifteen minutes, and I was heard
patiently to the end, but my remarks were received with no such
"thunders of applause" as had been accorded to the more politic efforts
of the colored gentlemen. There was in fact repeatedly evinced a
prevalent apprehension that I _would_ say something which it would be
incumbent on the audience to resent; but I did not. And I have a faint
hope that some of the remarks thus called forth will be remembered and
reflected on. I am sure there is great need of it, and that
denunciations of Slavery addressed by London to Charleston and Mobile
will be far more effective after the extreme of destitution and misery
uncovered by the Ragged Schools shall have been banished forever from
this island--nay, after the great body of those who here denounce
Slavery so unsparingly shall have earnestly, unselfishly, thoroughly
_tried_ so to banish it.
X.
POLITICAL ECONOMY, AS STUDIED AT THE WORLD'S EXHIBITION.
LONDON, Tuesday, May 27, 1851.
To say, as some do, that the English hate the Americans, is to do the
former injustice. Even if we leave out of the account the British
millions who subsist by rude manual toil, and who certainly regard our
country, so far as they think of it at all, with an emotion very
different from hatred, there is evinced by the more fortunate classes a
very general though not unqualified admiration of the rapidity of our
progress, the vastness of our resources, and the extraordinary physical
energy developed in our brief, impetuous career. Dense as is the
ignorance which widely prevails in Europe with regard to American
history and geography, it is still very generally understood that we
were, only seventy years since, but Three Millions of widely scattered
Colonists, doubtfully contending, on a narrow belt of partially cleared
sea-coast, with the mother country on one side and the savages on the
other, for a Political existence; and that now we are a nation of
Twenty-three Millions, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and
from the cane-producing Tropic to the shores of Lake Superior where snow
lies half the year--from Nantucket and the Chesapeake to the affluents
of Hudson's Bay and the spacious harbors and sheltered roadsteads of
Nootka Sound. And this vast extent of country, the Briton remarks with
pride, we have not merely overrun, as the Spanish so rapidly traversed
South America, but have really appropriated and in good degree
assimilated, so that the far shores of the Pacific, which have but for
three or four years felt the tread of the Anglo-American, are now dotted
with energetic and thriving marts of Commerce, into whose lap gold mines
are pouring their lavish treasures, while a profusion of steamers, ships
and smaller watercraft link them closely with each other, with the
Atlantic States and the Old World, while their numerous daily journals
are aiding to diffuse the English language through the isles of the
immense Pacific, and their "merchant princes" are coolly discussing the
advantages of establishing a direct communication by lines of steamships
with China and opening the wealth of Japan to the commerce of the
civilized world. All this is marked with something of wonder but more of
pride by the ruling classes in Great Britain--the pride of a father
whose son has beaten him and run away, but who nevertheless hears with
interest and gratification that the unfilial reprobate is conquering
fame and fortune, and who with beaming eye observes to a neighbor, "A
wild boy that of mine, sir, but blood will tell!" If the United States
were attacked by any power or alliance strong enough to threaten their
subjugation, the sympathy felt for them in these islands would be
intense and all but universal.
And yet there is another side of the picture, which in fairness must
also be presented. The favored classes in Great Britain, while they
heartily admire the American energy and its fruits, do and must
nevertheless _dread the contagion of our example_; and this dread must
increase and be diffused as the rapidly increasing power, population and
wealth of our country commend it more and more to the attention of the
world. While we were some sixty days distant, and heard of mainly in
connection with Indian fights or massacres, fatal steamboat explosions
or insolvent banks, this contagion was not imminent and did not
seriously alarm; but, now that New-York is but ten days from London, and
New-Orleans (by Telegraph) scarcely more, the case is bravely altered,
and it becomes daily more and more palpable that the United States and
Great Britain cannot both remain as they are. If we in America can have
a succession of capable and reputable Chief Magistrates for L5,000 a
year, of Chief Justices for L1,000, and of Cabinets at a gross cost of
less than L10,000, it is manifest that John Bull, who, loyal as he is,
has a strong instinct of thrift and a pride in getting the worth of his
money, will not long be content to pay a hundred times as much for his
Chief Executive and ten times as much for his Judiciary and Ministry as
we do. It is a question, therefore, of the deepest practical interest to
the British Nation whether the Americans do really enjoy the advantages
of peace, order and security for the rights of person and property
through instrumentalities so cheap, and so dependent on moral force
only, as those devised and established by Washington and his
compatriots. If we have these with a Civil List of less than L1,000,000
sterling, an Army of less than Ten Thousand men, and a Navy (why won't
it die and get decently buried?) of a dozen or two active vessels, why
should John tax and sweat himself as he does to maintain a Political
establishment which costs him over $150,000,000 a year beside the
interest on his enormous National Debt? If we, without any Church
endowed by law, have as ample and widely diffused provision for Divine
worship and Religious instruction as he has, why should he pay tithes to
endow Lord Bishops with incomes of L10,000 to L80,000 per annum?--These
and similar questions are beginning to be widely pondered here: they
refuse to be longer drowned by the blare of trumpets and the resonant
melody of "God save the Queen!" I know nobody who objects to that last
quoted sentiment, but there are many here, and the number is increasing,
who think there is an urgent and practical need of salvation also for
the People--salvation from heavy exactions, unjust burthens and galling
distinctions. And, as the interest of the Many in the reform of abuses
and the removal of impositions becomes daily more obvious and palpable,
so does the instinctive grasp of the Few to keep what they have and get
what they can become likewise more muscular and positive. And this
instinct absolutely demands a perversion or suppression of the truth
with regard to America--with regard especially to the prevalence of
order, justice and tranquillity within her borders. And not this only:
it is important to this class that it be made to appear that, while
Republican institutions may possibly answer for a time in a rude and
semi-barbarous community of scattered grain-growers and herdsmen, they
are utterly incompatible with a dense population, with general
refinement, the upbuilding of Manufactures and the prevalence of the
arts of civilized life.
Here, then, is the cue to the cry so early and generally raised, so
often and invidiously renewed by the London daily press, of surprise at
the meagerness of our country's share in the Great Exhibition. Had any
other young nation of Twenty Millions, located three to five thousand
miles off, sent a collection so large and so creditable to its
industrial proficiency and inventive power, it would have been warmly
commended by these same journals; but it is deemed desirable to make an
impression on the public mind of Europe adverse to American skill and
attainment in the Arts, and hence these representations and sneers.
Yet, gentlemen! what would you have? For years you have been devoting
your energies to the task of convincing our people that they should be
content to grow Food and Cotton and send them hither in exchange for
Wares and Fabrics, especially those of the finer and costlier varieties.
You have written reams of essays intended to prove that this course of
Industry and Trade is dictated by Nature, by Providence, by Public
good; and that only narrow and short-sighted selfishness would seek to
overrule it. Well: here are American samples of all the staples you say
our Country _ought_ to produce and be content with, in undeniable
abundance and excellence--Cotton, Wool, Wheat, Flour, Indian Corn, Hams,
Beef, &c., &c., yet these you run over with a glance of cool contempt,
and say we have nothing in the Exhibition! Is this kind or politic
treatment of the supporters of your policy in the States? If a seeming
approximation to your Utopia should subject them to such compliments,
what may they expect from its perfect consummation? Let all our States
become as purely Agricultural as the Carolinas or the lower valley of
the Mississippi, and what would then be your estimation of us? If a
half-way obedience to your counsels exposes us to such disparagement,
what might we fairly expect from a thorough submission?
The vital truth, everywhere demonstrable, is nowhere so palpable as
here--that a diversification of Industrial pursuits is essential not
only to the prosperity and thrift, but also to the education and
intellectual activity of a People. A community which witnesses from year
to year the processes of Agricultural labor only, lacks a stimulus to
mental cultivation of inestimable value. If Europe were to say to
America, "Sit still, and we will send you from year to year all the
Wares and Fabrics you need for nothing, on the simple condition that you
will not attempt to produce any yourselves," it would be most unwise and
suicidal to accept the offer. For we need not more the Wares and Fabrics
than the skill which fashions and the taste which beautifies them. We
need that multiform capacity and facility of hand and brain which only
experience in the Arts can bestow and diffuse. The National Industry is
the People's University; to confine it to a few and those the ruder
branches is to stunt and stagnate the popular mind--is to arrest the
march of improvement in Agriculture itself. Hence, nearly or quite all
the modern improvements in Cultivation have been made in immediate
proximity to a dense Manufacturing population; hence Belgium is now a
garden, while Ireland (except the manufacturing North) is to a great
extent stagnant and decaying. Other causes doubtless conspire, as in
England contrasted with Italy and Spain, to produce these results, but
they do not unsettle the general truth that Industry advances through a
symmetric and many-sided development or does not advance at all.
We have yet much to learn in the Arts, but the first lesson of all is a
well-founded confidence in our own artisans, our own capacities, with a
patriotic resolution to encourage the former and develop the latter. And
this confidence is abundantly justified even by what is exhibited here.
While our show of products is much less than it might and less even than
it should have been, those who have really studied it draw thence hope
and courage. No other nation exhibits within a similar compass so great
a diversity of excellence--no other exhibits so large a proportion of
inventions and valuable improvements. Even in the vast apartment devoted
to British Machinery, the number and importance of the American
inventions exhibited (some of them adapted to new uses or improved upon
in this country; others merely incorporated with British improvements),
is very striking. I doubt whether England during the last half century
has borrowed so many inventions from all the world beside--I am sure she
has not from all except France--as she has from the United States. And
yet we are blessed with the presence of sundry Americans here who,
without having examined our contributions, without knowing anything more
about them than they have gleaned from _The Times_ and _Punch_, aided by
a hurried walk through the department, are busily proclaiming that this
show makes them ashamed of their country!
Here is the great source of our weakness--a want of proper pride in and
devotion to our own Industrial interests. Every sort of patriotism is
abundant in America but that which is most essential--that which aids to
develop and strengthen the Nation's productive energies. No other people
buy Foreign fabrics extensively in preference to the equally cheap and
more substantial products of their own looms, yet ours do it habitually.
I had testimony after testimony from American merchants on the voyage
over, as well as before and since, that foreign fabrics habitually sell
in our markets for ten to twenty per cent. more than is asked for
equally good American products, while thousands of pieces of the latter
are readily sold on the strength of fabricated Foreign marks at prices
which they would not command to customers who would not buy them, if
their origin were known. This is certainly disgraceful to the
seller--what is it to the buyer? The mercantile interest naturally leans
toward the more distant production--the margin for profit is larger
where an article is brought across an ocean, while the cost of a home
made article is so notorious that there is little chance of putting on a
large profit. Give American producers the prices now readily paid
throughout our country for Foreign fabrics and they will grow rich by
manufacturing articles in no respect inferior to the former. But with
only a share of the American market, and this mainly for the coarsest
and cheapest goods, while the purchasers of the more costly and
fanciful, on which the larger profits are made, must have "Fabrique de
Paris" or some such label affixed to render them current, our
manufacturers have no fair chance. While fools could be found to buy
"Cashmere Shawls," costing fifty to a hundred dollars, for five hundred
to a thousand, under the absurd delusion that they came from Eastern
Asia, the fabrication and the profits were European; let an American
begin to make just such Shawls and the secret is out, so the price sinks
at once to the neighborhood of the cost of production. So with De
Laines, Counterpanes, Brussels Carpetings and fabrics generally; and yet
Americans will talk as though the encouragement given by protective
Duties to home Manufacturers were given at the expense of our consumers.
Vainly are they challenged from day to day to name one single article
whereof the production has been transplanted from Europe to America
through Protection, which has not thereby been materially cheapened to
the American consumer; it suits them better to assume that the duty is a
tax on the consumer than to examine the case and admit the truth. But
delusion cannot be eternal.
That our Country would at some future day work its way gradually out of
its present semi-Colonial dependence on European tastes, European
fashions, European fabrication, even though all Legislative
encouragement were withheld, I firmly believe. The genius, the activity,
the energy, the enterprise of our people conspire to assure it. So the
thief, the burglar, the forger, are certain to suffer for their misdeeds
though all the penalties of human laws were repealed, and yet I consider
state prisons and houses of correction salutary if not indispensable. It
is difficult for even an ingenious and inventive race to make
improvements in an art or process which has no existence among them.
Whitney's Cotton-Gin presupposed the growth of Cotton; Fulton's
steamboat the existence of internal commerce and navigation; without
Lowell, Bigelow might have invented a new trap for muskrats but not
looms for weaving Carpets, Ginghams, Coach-Lace, &c. I deeply feel that
our Country owes to mankind the duty of so sustaining her Manufacturing
Industry that further and more signal triumphs of her inventive genius
may yet be evolved and realised, not merely in the domain of Fabrics but
in that of Wares and Metals also, and especially in that of the chief
metal, Iron. Had Iron enjoyed for twenty years such a measure of
Protection among us as Plain Cottons obtained from 1816 through Mr.
Calhoun's minimum of six cents per square yard, we should, in all
probability, have been producing Iron by this time as cheaply as drills
and sheetings--that is, as cheaply (quality considered) as any nation on
the globe--as cheaply as we produce School-Books, Newspapers, and nearly
every article whereof the American maker is shielded by circumstances
from Foreign competition. Had the Tariff of 1842 but stood unaltered
till this time, who believes that even the greenest and silliest
American could have fancied himself blushing for the meagerness of his
country's share in the Great Exhibition?
XI.
ROYAL SUNSHINE.
LONDON, Thursday, May 29, 1851.