[19] 'To horsewhip,' etc. Let it not be said that this is any slander of
ours; would that we could pronounce it a slander! But those who (like
ourselves) have visited Ireland extensively know that the parish priest
uses a horsewhip, in many circumstances, as his professional _insigne_.
[20] Look at Lord Waterford's case, in the very month of November, 1843.
Is there a county in all England that would have tamely witnessed his
expulsion from amongst them by fire, and by sword and by poison?
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.--This article on O'Connell, written in the end
of 1843, is printed, not on account of any political reference it
might be presumed to have, but only because of its historical and
literary interest. Apart from the light it may throw on De
Quincey's leanings, as, in certain respects, distinctly in the
direction of patriotic Toryism of the most rampant type, it may be
of value as suggesting how essentially, in not a few points, the
Irish question to-day remains precisely as it was in the time of
O'Connell; and how the Tories of to-day are apt to view it from
precisely the same plane as those of 1843. It might also be cited
as another proof not only of De Quincey's very keen interest in all
the leading questions of the time, but as an illustration of the
John Bull warmth and heat which he, the dreamer, the recluse, the
lover of abstract problems, could bring into such discussions.
Here, at all events, his views were definite enough, and stated
with a bold precision of English plainness that would have pleased
the most pronouncedly Tory or Unionist newspaper editors of that
day.
_XVI. FRANCE PAST AND FRANCE PRESENT._
To speak in the simplicity of truth, caring not for party or partisan,
is not the France of this day, the France which has issued from that
great furnace of the Revolution, a better, happier, more hopeful France
than the France of 1788? Allowing for any evil, present or reversionary,
in the political aspects of France, that may yet give cause for anxiety,
can a wise man deny that from the France of 1840, under Louis Philippe
of Orleans, ascends to heaven a report of far happier days from the sons
and daughters of poverty than from the France of Louis XVI.? Personally
that sixteenth Louis was a good king, sorrowing for the abuses in the
land, and willing (at least, after affliction had sharpened his
reflecting conscience), had that choice been allowed him, to have
redeemed them by any personal sacrifice. But that was not possible.
Centuries of misrule are not ransomed by an individual ruin; and had it
been possible that the dark genius of his family, the same who once
tolled funeral knells in the ears of the first Bourbon, and called him
out as a martyr hurrying to meet his own sacrifice--could we suppose
this gloomy representative of his family destinies to have met him in
some solitary apartment of the Tuileries or Versailles, some twilight
gallery of ancestral portraits, he could have met him with the purpose
of raising the curtain from before the long series of his household
woes--from him the king would have learned that no personal ransom could
be accepted for misgovernment so ancient. Leviathan is not so tamed.
Arrears so vast imply a corresponding accountability, corresponding by
its amount, corresponding by its personal subjects. Crown and
people--all had erred; all must suffer. Blood must flow, tears must be
shed through a generation; rivers of lustration must be thrown through
that Augean accumulation of guilt.
And exactly there, it is supposed, lay the error of Burke; the compass
of the penalty, the arch which it traversed, must bear some proportion
to that of the evil which had produced it.
When I referred to the dark genius of the family who once tolled funeral
knells in the ears of the first Bourbon, I meant, of course, the first
who sat upon the throne of France, viz., Henri Quatre. The allusion is
to the last hours of Henry's life, to the remarkable prophecies which
foreran his death, to their remarkable fulfilment, and (what is more
remarkable than all beside) to his self-surrender, in the spirit of an
unresisting victim, to a bloody fate which he regarded as inexorably
doomed. This king was not the good prince whom the French hold out to
us; not even the accomplished, the chivalrous, the elevated prince to
whom history points for one of her models. French and ultra-French must
have been the ideal of the good or the noble to which he could have
approximated in the estimate of the most thoughtless. He had that sort
of military courage which was, and is, more common than weeds. In all
else he was a low-minded man, vulgar in his thoughts, most unprincely in
his habits. He was even worse than that: wicked, brutal, sensually
cruel. And his wicked minister, Sully, than whom a more servile mind
never existed, illustrates in one passage his own character and his
master's by the apology which he offers for Henry's having notoriously
left many illegitimate children to perish of hunger, together with their
too-confiding mothers. What? That in the pressure of business he really
forgot them. Famine mocked at last the deadliest offence. His own
innocent children, up and down France, because they were illegitimate,
their too-confiding mothers, because they were weak and friendless by
having for his sake forfeited the favour of God and man, this amiable
king had left to perish of hunger. They _did_ perish; mother and infant.
A cry ascended against the king. Even in sensual France such atrocities
could not utterly sink to the ground. But what says the apologetic
minister? Astonished that anybody could think of abridging a king's
license in such particulars, he brushes away the whole charge as so much
ungentlemanly impertinence, disdaining any further plea than the
pressure of business, which so naturally accounted for the royal
inattention or forgetfulness in these little affairs. Observe that this
pressure of business never was such that the king could not find time
for pursuing these intrigues and multiplying these reversions of woe.
What enormities! A king (at all times of Navarre, and for half his life
of France) suffers his children to die of hunger, consigns their mothers
to the same fate, but aggravated by remorse and by the spectacle of
their perishing infants! These clamours could not penetrate to the
Louvre, but they penetrated to a higher court, and were written in books
from which there is no erasure allowed. So much for the vaunted
'generosity' of Henry IV. As to another feature of the chivalrous
character, elegance of manners, let the reader consult the report of an
English ambassador, a man of honour and a gentleman, Sir George Carew.
It was published about the middle of the last century by the
indefatigable Birch, to whom our historic literature is so much
indebted, and it proves sufficiently that this idol of Frenchmen allowed
himself in habits so coarse as to disgust the most creeping of his own
courtiers; such that even the blackguards of a manly nation would revolt
from them as foul and self-dishonouring. Deep and permanent is the
mischief wrought in a nation by false models; and corresponding is the
impression, immortal the benefit, from good ones. The English people
have been the better for their Alfred, that pathetic ideal of a good
king, through a space of now nearly a thousand years. The French are the
worse to this hour in consequence of Francis I. and Henry IV. And note
this, that even the spurious merit of the two French models can be
sustained only by disguises, by suppressions, by elaborate varnishings;
whereas the English prince is offered to our admiration with a
Scriptural simplicity and a Scriptural fidelity, not as some gay legend
of romance, some Telemachus of Fénelon, but as one who had erred,
suffered, and had been purified; as a shepherd that had gone astray, and
saw that through his transgressions the flock also had been scattered.
_XVII. ROME'S RECRUITS AND ENGLAND'S RECRUITS._
Two facts on which a sound estimate of the Roman corn-trade depends are
these: first, the very important one, that it was not Rome in the sense
of the Italian peninsula which relied upon foreign corn, but in the
narrowest sense Rome the city; as respected what we now call Lombardy,
Florence, Genoa, etc., Rome did not disturb the ancient agriculture. The
other fact offers, perhaps, a still more important consideration. Rome
was latterly a most populous city--we are disposed to agree with
Lipsius, that it was four times as populous as most moderns esteem--most
certainly it bore a higher ratio to the total Italy than any other
capital (even London) has since borne to the territory over which it
presided. Consequently it will be argued that in such a ratio must the
foreign importations of Rome, even in the limited sense of Rome the
city, have operated more destructively upon the domestic agriculture.
Grant that not Italy, but Rome, was the main importer of foreign grain,
still, if Rome to all Italy were as one to four in population, which
there is good reason to believe it was, then even upon that distinction
it will be insisted that the Roman importation crushed one-fourth of the
native agriculture. Now, this we deny. Some part of the African and
Egyptian grain was but a substitution for the Sardinian, and so far made
no difference to Italy in ploughs, but only in _denarii_. But the main
consideration of all is, that the Italian grain was not withdrawn from
the vast population of Rome--this is _not_ the logic of the case--no; on
the contrary, the vast population of Rome arose and supervened as a
consequence upon the opening of the foreign Alexandrian corn trade. It
was not Rome that quirted the home agriculture. Rome, in the full sense,
never would have existed without foreign supplies. If, therefore, Rome,
by means of foreign grain, rose from four hundred thousand heads to four
millions, then it follows that (except as to the original demand for the
four hundred thousand) not one plough was disused in Italy that ever had
been used. Whilst, even with regard to the original demand of the four
hundred thousand, by so much of the Egyptian grain as had been a mere
substitution for Sardinian no effect whatever could have followed to
Italian agriculture.
Here, therefore, we see the many limitations which arise to the modern
doctrine upon the destructive agricultural consequences of the Roman
corn trade. Rome may have prevented the Italian agriculture from
expanding, but she could not have caused it to decline.[21] Now, let us
see how far this Roman corn trade affected the Roman recruiting service.
It is alleged that agriculture declined under the foreign corn trade,
and that for this reason ploughmen declined. But if we have shown cause
for doubting whether agriculture declined, or only did not increase,
then we are at liberty to infer that ploughmen did not decline, but only
did not increase. Even of the real and not imaginary ploughmen at any
time possessed by Italy, too many in the south were slaves, and
therefore ineligible for the legionary service, except in desperate
intestine struggles like the Social war or the Servile. Rome could not
lose for her recruiting service any ploughmen but those whom she had
really possessed; nor out of those whom really she possessed any that
were slaves; nor out of those whom (not being slaves) she _might_ have
used for soldiers could it be said that she was liable to any absolute
loss except as to those whom ordinarily she _did_ use as soldiers, and
preferred to use in circumstances of free choice.
These points premised, we go on to say that no craze current amongst
learned men has more deeply disturbed the truth of history than the
notion that 'Marsi' and 'Peligni,' or other big-boned Italian rustics,
ever by choice constituted the general or even the favourite recruiting
fund of the Roman republic. In thousands of books we have seen it
asserted or assumed that the Romans triumphed so extensively chiefly
because their armies were composed of Roman or kindred blood. This is
false. Not the material, but the military system, of the Romans was the
true key to their astonishing successes. In the time of Hannibal a Roman
consul relied chiefly, it is true, upon Italian recruits, because he
could seldom look for men of other blood. And it is possible enough that
the same man, Fabius or Marcellus, if he had been sent abroad as a
proconsul, might find his choice even then in what formerly had been his
necessity. In some respects it is probable that the Italian rustic of
true Italian blood was at that period the best raw material[22] easily
procured for the legionary soldier. But circumstances altered; as the
range of war expanded to the East it became far too costly to recruit in
Italy; nor, if it had been less costly, could Italy have supplied the
waste. Above all, with the advantages of the Roman military system, no
particular physical material was required for making good soldiers. For
these reasons it was that, after the Levant was permanently occupied by
the Romans, where any legion had been originally stationed _there_ it
continued to be stationed, and _there_ it was recruited, and, unless in
some rare emergency of a critical war arising at a distance, _there_ it
was so continually recruited, that in the lapse of a generation it
contained hardly any Roman or Italian blood in its composition, like the
Attic ship which had been repaired with cedar until it retained no
fragment of its original oak. Thus, the legion stationed at Antioch
became entirely Syrian; that stationed at Alexandria, Grecian, Jewish,
and, in a separate sense, Alexandrine. Cæsar, it is notorious, raised
one entire legion of Gauls (distinguished by the cognizance upon the
helmet of the _lark_, whence commonly called the legion of the
_Alauda_). But he recruited all his legions in Gaul. In Spain the armies
of Assanius and Petreius, who surrendered to Cæsar under a convention,
consisted chiefly of Spaniards (not _Hispanienses_, or Romans born in
Spain, but _Hispani_, Spaniards by blood); at Pharsalia a large part of
Cæsar's army were Gauls, and of Pompey's it is well known that many even
amongst the legions contained no Europeans at all, but (as Cæsar
seasonably reminded his army) consisted of vagabonds from every part of
the East. From all this we argue that _S.P.Q.R._ did not depend latterly
upon native recruiting. And, in fact, they did not need to do so; their
system and discipline would have made good soldiers out of mop-handles,
if (like Lucian's magical mop-handles) they could only have learned to
march and to fill buckets with water at the word of command.
We see, too, the secret power and also the secret political wisdom of
Christianity in another instance. Those public largesses of grain,
which, in old Rome, commenced upon principles of ambition and of
factious encouragement to partisans, in the new Rome of Constantinople
were propagated for ages under the novel motive of Christian charity to
paupers. This practice has been condemned by the whole chorus of
historians who fancy that from this cause the domestic agriculture
languished, and that a bounty was given upon pauperism. But these are
reveries of literary men. That particular section of rural industry
which languished in Italy, did so by a reaction from _rent_ in the
severe modern sense. The grain imported from Sardinia, from Africa the
province, and from Egypt, was grown upon soils less costly, because with
equal cost more productive. The effect upon Italy from bringing back
any considerable portion of this provincial corn-growth[23] to her
domestic districts would have been suddenly to develop rent upon a large
series of evils, and to load the provincial grain as well as the
home-grown--the cheap provincial as well as the dear home-grown--with
the whole difference of these new costs. Neither is the policy of the
case at all analogous to our own at the moment. In three circumstances
it differs essentially:
First, provinces are not foreigners; colonies are not enemies. An exotic
corn-trade could not for Rome do the two great injuries which assuredly
it would do for England; it could not transfer the machinery of opulence
to a hostile and rival state; it could not invest a jealous competitor
with power suddenly to cut off supplies that had grown into a necessity,
and thus to create in one month a famine or an insurrection. Egypt had
neither the power nor any prospect of the power to act as an independent
state towards Rome; the transfer to Egypt of the Roman agriculture,
supposing it to have been greater than it really was, could have
operated but like a transfer from Norfolk to Yorkshire.
Secondly, as respected Italy, the foreign grain _did not enter the same
markets as the native_. Either one or the other would have lost its
advantage, and the natural bounty which it enjoyed from circumstances,
by doing so. Consequently the evils of an artificial scale, where grain
raised under one set of circumstances fixes or modifies the price for
grain raised under a different set of circumstances, were unknown in the
Italian markets. But these evils by a special machinery, viz., the
machinery of good and bad seasons, are aggravated for a modern state
intensely, whenever she depends too much upon alien stores; and
specifically they are aggravated by the fact that both grains _enter the
same market_, so that the one by too high a price is encouraged
unreasonably, the other by the same price (too low for opposite
circumstances) is depressed ruinously as regards coming years; whence in
the end two sets of disturbances--one set frequently from the _present_
seasons, and a second set from the way in which these are made to act
upon the _future_ markets.
Thirdly, the Roman corn-trade did not of necessity affect her military
service injuriously, and for this reason, that rural economy did not of
necessity languish because agriculture languished locally; some other
culture, as of vineyards, _oliveta_, orchards, pastures, replaced the
declining culture of grain; if ploughmen were fewer, other labourers
were more. It is forgotten, besides, that the decline of Italian
agriculture, never more than local, was exceedingly gradual; for two
hundred and fifty years before the Christian era Italy never _had_
depended exclusively upon herself. Sardinia and Sicily, at her own
doors, were her granaries; consequently the change never _had_ been that
abrupt change which modern writers imagine.
But let us indulge in the luxury of confirming what we have said by the
light of contrast. Suppose the circumstances changed, suppose them
reversed, and then all those evil consequence sought to take effect
which in the case of Rome we have denied. Now, it happened that they
_were_ reversed; not, indeed, for Rome, who had been herself ruined as
metropolis of the West before the effects of a foreign corn-dependence
could unfold themselves, but for her daughter and rival in the East.
Early in the seventh century, near to the very crisis of the Hegira
(which dates from the Christian year 622), Constantinople, Eastern Rome,
suddenly became acquainted with the panic of famine. In one hour perhaps
this change fell upon the imperial city, and, but for the imperial
granaries, not the panic of famine, but famine itself, would have
surprised the imperial city; for the suddenness of the calamity would
have allowed no means of searching out or raising up a relief to it. At
that time the greatest man who ever occupied the chair of the Eastern
Cæsars, viz., Heraclius,[24] was at the head of affairs. But the
perplexity was such that no man could face it. On the one hand
Constantine, the founder of this junior Rome, had settled upon the
houses of the city a claim for a weekly _dimensum_ of grain. Upon this
they relied; so that doubly the Government stood pledged--first, for the
importation of corn that should be sufficient; secondly, for its
distribution upon terms as near to those of Constantine as possible.
But, on the other hand, Persia (the one great stationary enemy of the
empire) had in the year 618 suddenly overrun Egypt; grain became
deficient on the banks of the Nile--had it even been plentiful, to so
detested an enemy it would have been denied--and thus, without a month's
warning, the supply, which had not failed since the inauguration of the
city in 330, ceased in one week. The people of this mighty city were
pressed by the heaviest of afflictions. The emperor, under false
expectations, was tempted into making engagements which he could not
keep; the Government, at a period which otherwise and for many years to
come was one of awful crisis, became partially insolvent; the shepherd
was dishonoured, the flocks were ruined; and had that Persian armament
which about ten years later laid siege to Constantinople then stood at
her gates, the Cross would have been trampled on by the fire-worshipping
idolater, and the barbarous Avar would have desolated the walls of the
glorified Cæsar who first saw Christ marching in the van of Roman
armies. Such an iliad of woes would have expanded itself _seriatim_, and
by a long procession, from the one original mischief of depending for
daily bread upon those who might suddenly become enemies or tools of
enemies. England! read in the distress of that great Cæsar,[25] who may
with propriety be called the earliest (as he was the most prosperous) of
Crusaders, read in the internal struggle of his heart--too conscious
that dishonour had settled upon his purple--read in the degradations
which he traversed as some fiery furnace (yet not unsinged), the
inevitable curses which await nations who sacrifice, for a momentary
convenience of bread, sacrifice for a loaf, the charter of their
supremacy! This is literally to fulfil the Scriptural case of selling a
birthright for a mess of pottage.