CHAPTER XXII., AND LAST.

From the inferior regions now rose the voice of Sergeant Pegden.

“Please, sir, I beg your pardon; but it’s immediate.”

“What’s immediate?” I asked.

“Please, sir,” he replied, “it’s an orderly come from Vittoria; and

brought a letter for you, sir, directed ‘immediate’ on the back of it,

sir.”

“Will you permit me?” I asked M. le Tisanier, raising the trap-door.

“Why, this is perfectly incredible,” said he. “Above, and all around, I

was prepared. It never entered my thoughts that I could be assailed from

the shades below.”

When I had raised the trap-door, there appeared—not Sergeant Pegden,

but—the head of his halbert, and three glistening bayonets, fixed to the

muzzles of three firelocks.

“Ground arms!” I cried. “Sergeant Pegden, show yourself.”

The muskets promptly subsided into the darkness from which they had

emerged, and, with a letter in his hand, the Sergeant slowly rose.

While, partly amused, partly surprised, M. le Tisanier gazed on the

wasted form and pallid visage of the Sergeant, who ascended like a

spectre from the grave, I took the letter and opened it.

It was an order to adopt immediate measures for the removal of my

invalids to the convalescent station at Vittoria, and then to rejoin

forthwith my regiment on the frontiers of France, taking with me, to be

exchanged for Sir Charles Popham of the —— light infantry, my prisoner,

Le Vicomte d’Y, lieutenant of the —— Voltigeurs.

_I._ “M. le Vicomte, I am your most obedient, humble servant.”

_He._ “M. le Capitaine, accept the assurances of my high consideration.”

_I._ “M. le Vicomte, I have intelligence which no doubt will gratify

you. It will be my pleasing duty to attend you to the frontiers, there

to be exchanged.”

_He_ (with nonchalance). “For an Englishman? or for a Spaniard?”

_I._ “Happily, you are considered my prisoner, not a prisoner of the

Spaniards. You will be exchanged for an English officer of the same

military rank.”

_He._ “Very good” (with much dignity). “That is quite satisfactory to my

sense of honour. Were it for a Spaniard, I hardly know whether I could

condescend to accept of the exchange. By the by, since it is as your

prisoner that I am to proceed to the frontiers, I think it best, for

reasons which you will doubtless appreciate, that so long as we are

together I should fully maintain that character. M. le Capitaine, I

offer you my sword.”

_I._ “M. le Vicomte, you have taught me that you can use your sword not

only with courage and address, but with magnanimity. Wear it.”

The arrangements for our departure were soon completed. My sick men were

conveyed to Vittoria. With them went Sergeant Pegden in charge, and the

four French soldiers as prisoners to the English. Then, taking an

affectionate leave of the Padre, we joined a party of British dragoons,

who had been out on a reconnaissance towards Pampeluna, and with them

pursued our route towards the frontiers.

The first day’s march took us across undulating ground, the road

alternately dipping into valleys, and topping the intermediate

elevations. As the Vicomte and I jogged on side by side, I noticed that,

on our reaching the summit of each successive eminence, he cast a

furtive but anxious look backwards, as if watching for some party in the

rear. I also looked back, and perceived that we were followed by a

couple of mules, which bore on their backs two wounded Spaniards.

ש.

THE WONDROUS AGE.

“Oh wondrous Mother Age!”

Wondrous!—such is the title this Age assumes. She wears it written

broadly on her phylactery, trumpets it loudly on quay and bourse, on

platforms and at market-places, blabs it at clubs and reading-rooms,

placards it in railway carriages, puffs it in steam-ships; everything

she buys or sells is docqueted, everything she says or does, engraven

with the epithet—Wondrous! This is the Age of ages—so she says. The

Golden, the Silver, the Brazen, the Iron ages were as nought: it

combines them all, and is grander, richer, stronger in its fusion than

any of these separate stages. Men are now only beginning to live. In

former times they merely dosed or daundered, trifled or philandered,

brawled or rioted, dreamed or philosophised through life, wasting its

golden sands in writing love-songs, and calling that—poetry; in fighting

great battles, and calling that—heroism, chivalry; in sitting by the

midnight lamp, gathering knowledge, which in after years might ripen

into wisdom, and calling that—study; in sitting by hearth or board,

quaffing from the wine-cup, drinking toasts, telling old stories,

singing old songs, and calling that—conviviality, good-fellowship; in

giving alms to beggars, in feeding the hunger of the idle and the

vagabond, and calling that—charity; in uttering strong words, in doing

strong deeds, and calling that—manliness; in upholding nationalities,

and calling that—patriotism. Such are a few delusions in which men were

ever wrapping themselves, until the day of enlightenment dawned, and

this Age burst upon us, with its railways and its steam-ships, its doves

of peace and arks of commerce, its treaties and tariffs, its leagues and

institutes, its unions and schools, its ledgers and invoices, its

cotton-mills and manufactories—proclaiming to the world that the true

purpose of life, the true destiny of man, was to trade, to manufacture,

to make money and circulate it, and, through the medium of cotton bales,

silken freights, cargoes of coal, and sacks of corn, to fulfil the great

mission of peace and goodwill. Knowledge, learning, courage,

perseverance, mind, thought, enterprise, strength, were not to be

utterly repudiated; they were only to be converted to the one purpose,

driven out of the old slow processes of development, touched with the

impulses of the time, and quickened to a more rapid production and

circulation. What boots it that our locomotives go at the rate of forty,

fifty, sixty miles an hour? that our ships cross the Atlantic in eleven

days? that our electric wires carry messages from one end of the land to

the other? that our printing-presses throw forth papers by the hundred

and books by the thousand? Of what use are our political economics, our

statistics, our lectures, our leagues, our steam-power, our mechanical

inventions, our liberalism, if men are to move, talk, think, and

legislate no faster than in bygone days? This must be, and is, the age

of fastness,—of fast travelling, fast talking, fast thinking, fast

reading, fast writing, of fast—no! not fast statesmanship—not fast law.

These remain, like the old vans and coaches in the by-roads of Cornwall

and Wales, to show the world what slow-going was. Men must not now await

the long results of time. They are not to sow in youth that they may

reap in old age—to labour and conceive in patience that they may produce

in strength. The Age will not admit of such stagnation. Its maxim is,

that the greatest production in the shortest time, and at the least

cost, the best markets and the quickest returns, are the only worthy

aims of labour and intellect—the only fit investment for capital of the

brain or the pocket.

Thus the Age is to go on growing stronger, busier, faster, doubling the

power of machinery, multiplying its mills, increasing its exports and

imports, sending forth its freights, machinery, and products as

missionaries to all lands, until, by a loving interchange of cotton and

corn, a sweet intercourse with ledgers and bills of exchange, men are

knit together in a beautiful unity of commerce, and some glorious

consummation be attained, such as the poet sees in his vision—

“When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle’s flags were

furled,

In the parliament of man, the federation of the world,

There the common cause of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”

And what is to be this universal law, according to the Age, if not to

the poet’s meaning? Love? Honour? Charity? Truth? Religion? These are

all old-world principles. We, in our blindness, ever believed that love,

inspired and propagated by religion, was to be the benign influence

which would still the discords, close the schisms, unite the jarring

creeds and warring nationalities, soothe the angry passions, and wither

the petty jealousies, which set man against man, nation against nation,

and bind them in a world-wide brotherhood. We were walking in darkness.

The illumination of this Age throws its light upon us, and we know there

are other means to this great end: that self-interest, the reciprocity

of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, the sweet persuasions of

barter, are ultimately to level nationalities, quench the animosities of

race and creed, and create a sort of commercial millennium, in which

Swede, Russ, and Turk, Hun, Austrian, and Lombard, Dane and German, are

to lie down together under one universal tariff.

Gold—the lust of which has been the bitterest curse of sin, and has ever

and ever, through the long roll of ages, begotten hatred, wrath, envy,

oppression, bloodshed, and division,—is at last to be the peace-maker,

the love-mission of the world. This, however, is a vision of the

future—“a wonder that shall be.” Let us turn to the Age as it stands

before us—wondrous. All ages have had their characteristics. There have

been ages of simplicity, ages of grandeur, ages of heroism, ages of

degeneracy, ages of barbarism, ages of civilisation, ages of intellect,

ages of darkness, ages of superstition, ages of philosophy, ages of

faith, ages of infidelity—ages when men have lived the patriarchal life,

sitting under their own vines and their own fig-trees, tilling the

ground, tending their flocks, worshipping earnestly, enacting justice

severely—ages when they revelled in magnificence and luxury, spread

their splendour over the earth, and set it up in palaces and

monuments—ages in which the strong heart and the strong deed, the bold

thought and the generous impulse, were the master agencies, in which

strong men, brave men, noble men, were recognised as the natural

chiefs—ages in which the earth reeked with the pestilential vapours of

vice and dissoluteness, in which manhood and honour had set in long

nights, and the profligate, the profane, the sybarite, walked abroad

without scorn, and sat in high places without shame—ages when man’s

lordship of creation was manifested only in power over brute life, and

in the tenancy of fen, forest, and mountain—ages, again, when culture,

art, refinement, found a ripe maturity and gorgeous development—ages in

which the light and glory of intellect shone on dark places, and the

voices of the gifted echoed through many lands—ages in which such voices

were silent, and both mind and intellect lay shrouded in thick darkness,

or veiled in twilight—ages when men doubted, speculated, and

rationalised—ages when they accepted superstitions as creeds, lies as

living truths, serpents for fish, stones for bread—ages in which faith

was strong, and earnest men lived in it, strove, fought, died for

it—ages when men, worse than devils, neither believed nor trembled. Our

Age was none of these. It ignored, repudiated, superseded all others. It

is the Age of production, of utility, of circulation—to produce the

utmost, by forced processes, from brain and muscle, man-power and

steam-power, hand and loom, energy and ingenuity, capital and labour;

and to circulate the products with a power which almost commands, and a

rapidity which almost outstrips the elements: this is the great wonder

of the age.

Heroism, chivalry, faith, imagination, romance—these are all at a

discount with it; they are unremunerative, unmarketable, could not be

cashed or negotiated. Everything, every man, is to be measured by

productive capacity or practical uses. “He who makes a blade of corn

grow where a blade of corn ne’er grew before, is of more service to

mankind than fifty warriors.” The wit and politician who wrote this, or

something like it, would have stared to see the present development of

his doctrine—to find production and utility the great tests of progress

and civilisation. And is this progress? Is this civilisation? So says

the Age. We had dreamed that progress was of the mind and heart; that

its stages would be marked by the recognition of justice, the

advancement of the knowledge which leads to wisdom, the increase of

honesty, courage, faith, honour, truthfulness, the growth of love, and

the spread of virtue and godliness, as well as by census tables,

statistical returns, financial budgets, and the stock exchange. We had

dreamed that civilisation meant mental and social development as well as

the existence of wealth; that it must be based on a well-balanced

prosperity, which should include a comparative equality in the happiness

of all classes, giving each man a power of well-being and comfort in his

own sphere—the maintenance of the due proportions in society, and a fair

ratio in the increase of riches and the decrease of crime; that it

involved the moral, intellectual, religious, and social growth of man,

as well as the productiveness of his industry and the development of his

science; that it involves the expansion of courtesy, honour, generosity,

kindliness, and good faith, as well as the diffusion and circulation of

merchandise and gold. Were we dreaming dreams? Are these phantasies? So

says the Age; and we, who are living in the glare of its noontide glory,

must fain accept its interpretations with humble submission, and expand

our faculties to the comprehension of its wonders. But whilst we do

this, we may at least indulge in a retrospect of the past,—note what

this great change has cost us, and compare our losses with our gains.

This has been an age of supercession, and ere we swell the triumph which

shall seat the conqueror on its throne, it may be permitted us to look

back on the smouldering walls of old homes, the trampled fields of old

principles, and the ruined fanes of old faiths, which it has left in its

onward march—to mourn over and bury our dead. And what time more fitting

for such a valedictory survey than this?—now, when the Age has paused in

its career at the grim apparition of war, and the world is undergoing a

partial relapse—now, when heroism is once more a power in the land, when

men are talking, exulting, and watching over brave deeds, more than over

funds, invoices, or railway scrip—when fair women are weeping for the

brave dead, and praying for the living brave—now, when a great battle,

or the fall of a city, stirs a stronger pulsation in the nation than the

rise and fall of stock, or the most stupendous bankruptcies—now, when

old things are becoming new, and men are looking back with tolerance, if

not with affection, on old principles and old faiths. Let us then cast a

glance on the past—our own past—the past of our own generation—think of

what we were, and what we are, and strike the balance.

We have little belief in the days of merry England, or in the “good old

times,” that illusory paradise of dullards and sluggards, who would

rather mourn over a lost Eden than find one in the present, or look for

it in a future; but we do remember when the land had more mirth in it

than now, when it was more romantic and picturesque. We remember it ere

the utilitarian spirit had laid its iron grasp on the hearts of our

people, and spread its iron network over our fields and valleys. We

remember it less wealthy, less prosperous, less cultivated, and we

remember it also as more genial, more joyous, and more beautiful. A

change—a great change, almost a revolution—in our social feelings,

thoughts and habits,—in our aims and pursuits—in the character of the

people and the features of the country—has taken place even in our

memory. Has this change wrought most of good or evil? We admit that it

had become a necessity of progress that men should be shaken out of

their domesticity, their local isolation be more centralised, and become

more cosmopolitan—that their intercommunications should be more rapid,

their diffusion more general: we admit that the increase of population

and labour-power demanded that wealth should no longer be hoarded or

land be wasted, and that every penny, every acre, should be made

productive—that some such changes as have come upon us must needs have

come: but have we not bought them at a price, have we not paid for them

at the cost of many manly attributes—many social virtues—by the loss of

much rural beauty, and many characteristics of our pastoral life? We

quarrel not with steam, the great wonder of the Age—the great means to

the mighty end of utilitarianism. We know all that it has done for

us—all it has brought us. We know that it has accelerated intercourse,

impelled industry, expanded our resources, extended knowledge, equalised

consumption and production, given facilities to enterprise, and

opportunities to labour. Much has it done for our material prosperity;

and we should hail it as an altogether beneficent agent, did we not

think—God knows whether rightly or not—that this shuffling together of

people, this eager competition, this hot-bed production which it has

fostered, was rapidly effacing individuality and simplicity of

character—had overstrode that honest persevering industry which toils on

slowly and patiently to its end, which is content to labour and to

wait—had raised an unrest, a rapid craving for quick results, a

discontent with appointed spheres of action, a restless movement of

classes to tread on each other’s heels, and had decreased their mutual

trust and despondency—did we not know that it had invaded the seclusion

of our valleys, smoked and scorched our woods and copses, tunnelled our

rocks, cut up our meadows, and overlaid the poesy of nature by the

materialism of traffic.

Commerce and manufacture! shall we raise our voices against them? God

forbid! Have they not been the great agents in our prosperity? Have they

not created our wealth, begotten our merchant princes, raised our

shipping, filled our island with products, and circulated our own to the

ends of the earth? Have they not promoted science, encouraged

enterprise? Have they not nourished our colonies, given employment to

our growing millions, made this little spot to swarm like a busy hive,

and placed it as the centre of a wide-spreading civilisation—the heart

of a mighty organisation? Should they, however, beget a thirst for

gold—a mad pursuit for wealth, which will engross and absorb our

thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of generous impulses and noble

principles, hitherto main elements in the happiness and greatness of

nations—will they be all gain? Will not there be a balance then—moral

loss against material gain? Answer for thyself, O wondrous Age!

Neither will we quarrel with model farming. The competition of

production, the opening of markets, the pressure of other classes and

interests, have forced agriculture, for the sake of its very life and

being, to adopt utilitarianism—have compelled it to turn every inch of

ground to account. Utility demanded that hedgerows should be levelled,

the waste patches, knolls, and nooks ploughed up, old pollards and

groups of trees uprooted, and that sheep and oxen, instead of cropping

the pleasant herbage in pleasant sunny meadows, should be cooped and

stalled in narrow spaces, fed by rule and measure, and left to fatten in

darkness; that machinery should supersede the reaper’s and thresher’s

work, and that crops should be stacked and garnered as a matter of

business, and not borne home, as heretofore, with festive rejoicings and

thanksgivings. And if the increasing number of mouths required so many

more bushels of corn, so many more pounds of meat, and they can be

obtained only by such means, then must the picturesque, the poetic, and

the beautiful be sacrificed instantly and ruthlessly, that man may eat

and live. Yes! uproot, overturn, change, overlay them all, if thus, and

thus only, the people may be fed, the poor have bread. The beautiful has

ever yielded to the inroads of necessity or utility, which is a sort of

modified and modernised necessity. Yet may we not mourn over the things

which are gone or going, the things belonging to the outer world of the

poetic, the romantic, and the picturesque? They are associated with

sunny holidays, with the memories of boyhood, and the feelings of youth;

and we must mourn them, though their extirpation be the doom of an

imperious and beneficent necessity. We must fain mourn over those

hedgerows, as we remember them, with their soft, grassy banks—the

nursery of early violets and gregarious primroses—the parterre of more

gaudy daffodils, and the nestling-place of hundreds of tiny flowerets,

whose names we knew not, but whose faces we loved, with their tops

crowned by rich-scented hawthorn, budding hazel, and dark-leaved

sloe—with their bases bordered by luxuriant brambles and flowering

gorse. They were favourite haunts of ours, those hedgerows: there we

sought the early nosegay, there we clutched at the ripe brown clusters

of nuts,—the slip shellers, the _Spolia prima_ of the season—our hoards

were gathered elsewhere: there we stripped the sloe-bushes of their

fruit, under the delusion that, by a long process of hoarding in bran,

they would become luxuries, and would not set the teeth on edge; there,

with net and ferret, or with dog and gun, we commenced our initiation as

sportsmen; there, as Dandie Dinmont would say, we were entered on the

rabbit.

We must mourn, too, for these groves and thickets, which lay in the

intervals of cultivation like the remnants of a conquered race amid the

conquerors. Much, very much, did we love to thread these coverts, in the

schoolboy pursuits of nutting or bird-nesting, or to roam in mere

wantonness through the thick underwood, gathering an immature poetry

from the massed foliage of holly, mountain-ash, alder, and willow—from

the tangled shades of briar, woodbine, convolvulus, and the other

creepers which wreathed their wild luxuriance round stem and boughs, or

trailed it in a rich undergrowth along the ground—from the lights, which

fell soft and mellow through the openings and through the leaves on the

long-tufted grass below, rich with blue-bells, harebells, wild anemone,

and many another wildling;—from the fluttering of wings, the twitterings

and the cooings of birds—from the sweet-scented breaths—from the

solitude, and from the many gentle influences through which nature

inspires the beautiful. These places have glad memories—the gladdest of

all—the memories of the full heart, the free fresh impulses, and of

growing thought. On some such spot, too, we took our first stand as a

sportsman. We see it even now—an opening glade, a plash overhung with

the boughs of a holly bush—behind a knot of alders and some tangled

brushwood. Even now we feel our heart fluttering, and our cheek

flushing, as Flush—the best of cockers—after wagging and bustling about

in a most excited manner, gave one sharp bark, one spring, and,

something rising before us, we fired, and a bird fell. We had killed our

first woodcock. Utilitarianism has waged the war of extermination most

ruthlessly against these spots, and the gorse brakes which shone in

golden patches betwixt the fallow and grass lands. There are few left

now. The fields are spread before us, smooth and bare, and the corn

waves on the ground, erewhile cumbered by old trees and brushwood, which

were of no use, save to grow berries, give a covert to birds, rabbits,

and vermin, and to offer the eye a pleasant spot to rest upon in the

landscape. Away with such uselessness! The world is not large enough for

such waste.

Those old pollards, too—those venerable solitary trees which, with their

grey scarred trunks, and the green twigs shooting from their tops,

evidences of the life still within,—seemed to us always the very symbols

of a hale, vigorous old age, furrowed perchance, or shrunken by time,

but crowned and flowering still with the presence of youth. Is there not

room for them? and wilt thou, oh man! regret also that utilitarianism

has wrought such a similitude betwixt agriculture and manufacture,—has

so imbued both with the self-same economy of space and material, that

the buildings and structures of the one are as stiff, formal, and

red-bricked as the other? Yea, O Age! even so far will our perverseness

carry us. Those old farmhouses, with their low thatched roofs covered

with grass and lichens, their stacks of chimney, the old tree at the

gable-end, the trim little garden and the bee-hives in front, those old

straggling farmyards with their ivy-covered out-houses and linheys,

their pools and scattered groups of trees, were doubtless incommodious

and wasteful, but they had a picturesqueness in our eyes never to be

claimed by their successors. Utility seeks not such effects.

Those brooks which used to meander through pleasant meadows and shady

copses, or ripple gently over rocks and yellow pebbles, and whose waters

are now diverted into straight channels and narrow cuts to irrigate land

or turn wheels, are not they a lost beauty? But there is a gain in

water-power, a saving in labour.

Harvest-homes—merry-makings—rural feasts! The Age repudiates and ignores

them utterly. The land is too poor, life too short, for such follies.

Yet do we look back lovingly on the days when the loud shout of the

reapers announced far and wide the cutting of the first sheaf—when the

last load was carried home, attended by a long procession of men, women,

and boys, all rejoicing with shouts, song, and laughter, in the plenty

which had been gathered in; and when the event was celebrated ever with

feasts and mirth, with open-doored hospitality, and open-handed charity.

Nor has there ever yet been a time in the age of the world when the

fruitfulness of the earth has not been hailed by man with joy and

triumph, or the completion of its riches been calendared by festivity

and thankfulness. Now the goodly sheaves are carted and thrown out

before their garners as so much manure or so many cotton bales. “So much

the better,” says utilitarianism; “there is so much time, so much money

saved.”

And are men’s stomachs, men’s pockets, to be the all in all of

consideration? Are their hearts and fancies not to be fed or cultured?

Is man’s labour to find the dead level of toil, ungladdened by the sound

of rejoicing, unbrightened by hours of mirth? Is he to see no other end

and aim in such toil than the receipt of a few shillings at the week’s

end—the fair day’s wage for the fair day’s work? Is this to be the sole

tie betwixt him and the soil—betwixt him and his labour? Is life to be

stripped of all its poetic and noble inspirations, and be reduced to a

dead materialism? Is man’s soul to become merely the motive power in a

mechanism of profit and loss, utility and production? Is thy

civilisation to take this form, O wondrous Age! If so, the experiment

may be a grand one, a successful one; but the experiences of the past,

and the instincts and sentiments of mankind, are against it. For what do

men most love to look into the past? To seek the useful, or the heroic

and the beautiful? Do they pore over musty tomes, and delve into buried

cities, that they may discover the secret of Tyrian dye and Etruscan

pottery, the system of Phœnician commerce and the sources of Egyptian

wealth; or that their hearts may burn with the heroism of Marathon or

swell with the glories of Alexander, and that the thrilling words of

Pindar, the noble thoughts of Sophocles, the beautiful legends of

Grecian mythology, the grand truths of Grecian history, may be their

own? Do they investigate the records of the middle ages to understand

the monetary schemes of Lombardy and Venice, or that they may read how

men fought, how women loved, and minstrels sang—that they may dwell on

knightly courtesy and knightly chivalry? Utility has, I fear, little of

the study. This may be a human error, but it is a deep-seated and

long-standing one. What a Jeremiad to sing over a fine old hedgerow,

rotten stumps, and barbarous customs! Not so, O Age! It is not things

themselves we mourn, but the feelings, the principles they nurtured or

represented.

Agriculture followed of necessity in the march of utilitarianism. It was

challenged to fight for its own footing—to struggle and compete with its

rivals in the quickness and quantity of production. In this struggle it

gained, maybe, much strength from its alliance with science, and added

to its resources by the applications of art; but it lost much of the

Arcadian character, the pastoral beauty, the simplicity of pleasure and

simplicity of toil, the simple honesty and the generous manliness, which

placed in point of attraction the rural life next to the heroic in men’s

minds, which invested the vocation of the husbandman with the graces and

dignity of a higher order of labour, and wreathed the bare facts of his

toil with the garlands of poesy and sentiment. It was forced to strip

for the race, to throw away all its adornments, its poetry and

sentiments, and descend to the bare remunerative materialism of

husbandry. It can no longer afford

“Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,

Those calm desires that asked but little room,

Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,

Lived in each look, and brightened all the green.”

We doubt whether the consummation, imagined by the poet, has arrived,

when “rural mirth and manners are no more,” but we see that they are

being fast swept into the vortex of the great maelstrom of

utilitarianism and generalisation. Carp we at these changes, then? We

merely, according to our first proposition, balance gains against loss,

crediting so many more cultivated acres, so many more turnips, so much

more corn, against the loss of picturesqueness, the loss of many moral

features and characteristics in a class which has hitherto been no mean

element in our commonwealth. Had the Age, however, done no more than

this, we should not have grudged the sacrifices thrown in the path of

the great Juggernaut of progress. Spite of railroad and factory, there

will still be beauty enow in our land—enow for poet and painter. It will

not lie so much in our daily paths; it will not be such a constant

presence to worker and wayfarer; but it will still be found by its

worshippers. Even utilitarianism cannot nullify nature or denude the

world of its Edens. Still must the corn wave, the grasses grow, the

trees bud. Still will the “stately homes of England” stand beautiful

“amid their tall ancestral trees through all the pleasant land,”—the

cottage homes peep from their coverts. Still will the mountains stand in

their grandeur, the rivers run in their gladness, and the valleys laugh

and sing.

The rural virtues, too, may have only disappeared, to reappear under the

influence of a higher intelligence. At least, we feel that a vocation,

which is carried on in the open air, in constant communion with nature,

must ever maintain a certain healthiness of feeling, a certain manliness

of spirit.

But if this self-same utilitarianism, which has levelled our fields,

turned our rivers, and laid open our valleys, be also levelling and

laying bare our hearts, and frittering the great currents of the soul

into a thousand channels—if it be overthrowing our moral landmarks, and

invading the moral principles, which were once laws in our social

cosmos, what hast thou, O Age, amid all thy wonders, to balance such

work?

First of the levelling. We speak not of the changes or influences of

democracy, for we have a firm belief that the proportions of society are

determined by laws so fixed and true, that any attempt to violate them

will eventually produce reaction; but of the changes which are gradually

levelling and overthrowing the moral distinctions and moral barriers of

our social life, and especially those of age. Where is now our

youth?—where our old age? Where are our boys?—where our old men? We have

men-boys and boy-men. But where are the veritable boys—the boys with

eager hearts, throbbing pulses, buoyant spirits, gay hopes, glowing

fancies, unreasoning beliefs, and ready faith—the boys with the young

thoughts and the young feelings gushing through them like the juices of

young life—the boys who hail their stage of existence joyfully,

gathering its pleasures, battling its sorrows, and venting its impulses;

not striving and straining after an unripe knowledge and a forced

maturity? Where are now our veritable grey-beards—the old men who

calmly, and of course, enter on their stage of life assuming its

dignities, claiming its privileges, and fulfilling its functions;

separating themselves from the turbid action, the toil and strife of the

world, and reposing honourably in the retirement of experience and

council; not clinging to the semblance of foregone periods, not envying

the energies of youth or the prime of manhood, but keeping alive the

memories and feelings of both to ray their declining day with mellow

light—the old men who rejoiced to wear their grey hairs as a crown of

glory, and stood amid their fellows with their hoary heads, their wise

hearts, and their brows engraven with the lines of thought like

“The white almond-trees full of good days.”

Such a man the poet draws—

“Behold a patriarch of years, who leaneth on the staff of religion;

His heart is fresh, quick to feel, a bursting fount of generosity.

He, playful in his wisdom, is gladdened in his children’s gladness;

He, pure in his experience, loveth in his son’s first love.

Lofty aspirations, deep affections, holy hopes are his delight;

His abhorrence is to strip from Life its charitable garment of Idea.

The cold and callous sneerer, who heedeth of the merely practical,

And mocketh at good uses in imaginary things,—that man is his scorn;

The hard unsympathising modern, filled with facts and figures,

Cautious and coarse, and materialised in mind,—that man is his pity.

Passionate thirst for gain never hath burnt within his bosom;

The leaden chains of that dull lust have not bound him prisoner:

The shrewd world laughed at him for honesty, the vain world mouthed at

him for honour;

The false world hated him for truth, the cold world despised him for

affection:

Still he kept his treasure, the warm and noble heart,

And in that happy wise old man survive the child and lover.”

Such men may still exist, scattered like old pollards over the levelled

face of society; but they are not thy products, not the results of thy

materialism, O Age! The youth which opens under thy auspices, and runs

by thy creeds, cannot sow the seeds of such a harvest. The youth formed

under thy influences and action will have no growth, will not know the

natural processes of maturation—“First the blade, then the ear, after

that the full corn in the ear.” Thy youth will be put up and fashioned

like a piece of mechanism, set to work like a steam-engine, moving ever

by the same hard heavy material laws,—so much speed from so much power,

so much knowledge from so much pressure.

Such a morning cannot end in the even we have pictured. “The merely

practical,” “the facts and figures,” “the exacting coarse materialism of

mind,” “the passionate thirst,” will be “the leading chains” which must

bind the old age of the man who lives by thy doctrines and fulfils thy

theories. Affection, feeling, imagination, faith, cannot wreathe or

foliage the hoar trunk, for these will have been long before lopped off

and withered by “that solid falsehood, the material.”

Truly the tendency of thee and thy utilitarianism, O Age! is to

materialise the beginning and end of life—to take from youth its

freshness and romance, from old age its geniality and repose; and better

so, thou sayest, for thus will its space, its strength, and its

energies, be concentrated on the great producing period manhood, and not

expended in boyish frolics and follies—in the maunderings and idleness

of dotage. Why should there be these waste places in life? “Is not youth

the preparation for manhood, and old age its result?” Is it not right,

therefore, that our youth should not be fed on nursery tales, prurient

fancies, fiction, poetry, and high-flown sentiment, but be early imbued

with the solid facts, the useful knowledge, the rules of science, and

the power of calculation, which will fit it to play its part well and

ably in the great battle of utility? And why should old age rest, sink

into placid inaction? If it cannot labour, cannot it scheme and

calculate and speculate, till the brain begin to err, and the mind to

fail in its correctness?—then, indeed, let it be thrown aside like an

old file, or used-up machine, to moulder and decay. It were well said, O

Age! if life had no uses save the practical—if this world were merely

one great warehouse, one great mart, one mass on which trade and

manufacture were to erect their _fulcra_, and were not, as it is,

covered and filled with the beautiful and sublime; if man were a machine

of brain, muscle, and bone, and not endowed with heart and soul, the

divine sparks of vitality; if he were to live by bread alone, or be

judged by his gold,—then, indeed, ’twere well said and well done. But

whilst beauty and sublimity still exist as elements of the physical

cosmos, and heart and soul of the moral; whilst we know the glorious

thoughts and glorious deeds which the study and culture of them has

produced through all time, we cannot but think that they will still be,

as ever, chief agencies in this great world of ours; we cannot but think

that the beautiful and sublime, reflected on heart and soul, should now,

as ever, radiate in the warm impulses, pure worship, and warm imaginings

of youth, and beam round age in the sunset hues of a summer day. What

are their uses, sayest thou? What are spring and autumn to the seasons?

What morn and even to the day? Shall there be no more spring shooting of

leaves—no bursting buds, no fluttering or carollings of spring life?

Shall there be no brown leaves, no fallow, no mellow fruit? Shall there

be no rosy lights of morn, no jocund sounds or pleasant sights of waking

life? Shall there be no gorgeous sunsets, no calm splendour of declining

day? Is life to toil and sit henceforth under summer heat, and abide

ever in the blaze and glare of noonday, rising only in the glimmer of

infancy, and setting in the cold gleam of twilight? Shall the bounding

step, the joyous laugh, the free heart, generous thought, and intuitive

heroism, be no longer the attributes of our youth? Have these no uses?

Do they cast no bright lights on a land, raise no pleasant echoes? Have

they no genial influences, no glad inspirations for the working world?

Shall we no longer see the glorious sight—to us the most sublime

spectacle which human life or the world can offer—the sight of a man

resting in old age from his labours, not estranging himself from the

world, but weaning his thoughts from its cares and turmoil, holding

still by its affections and memories, but gently withdrawing his spirit

from the strife, to prepare it by repose for the great emancipation it

is expecting? Has this no uses? Has it no grand lessons—no sublime

teachings—no infinite suggestions? Does it shed no blessing or holiness

around—nor reflect a ray of its own peacefulness on striving, toiling

men? And are these things nought, and shall they not be? Wilt thou dare,

O Age! to cast thy spell over youth and old age, and thus sacrifice to

thy materialism and utility the periods which God has sanctified to the

highest manifestations of spiritualism—to the purest developments of

innocence, love, truth, and faith—to the richest perfectedness of peace,

purpose, and wisdom?

We have seen somewhat of the system by which thou nurturest thy youth,

and like not it nor its results. We love not the _Lanista_, gladiatorial

training by which heart and imagination are rubbed, starved, and sweated

down—and the mind fed, the intellect exercised, for the merely material

struggle—the combat of facts and realities—the great game of profit and

loss. We love not the training, nor love we those who undergo it. They

have not, in our eyes, the loveliness or the lovableness which we used

to associate with the image of youth. Young without youth, old without

maturity, young in form, old in heart and brain, they stand before us,

keen, sharp, and confident; strong in a knowledge of facts, dates, and

tables—a knowledge unleavened by the touches of imagination, unsoftened

by modesty, unmoved by the freshness and simplicity which give such

beauty to youth, and which sometimes make even the wisdom of manhood bow

to its intuitions, confessing with the German philosopher, that “the

fresh gaze of the child is richer in significance than the forecasting

of the most indubitable seer.”

In what spirit dost thou lead them to the first study—the book of

nature? Dost thou spread it before them as a book of God, that they may

see its great wonders, learn its great lessons, perceive its great

symbols, learn its great poesy, and inhale its great sublime

worship,—not comprehending all at once, but gathering them in, for

future thought and future perception? Is it thus thou presentest nature

to thy children, or not rather as a science and mechanism, the laws,

rules, times and measurements of which they must learn and master,

forgetting or heeding not the great principles which these represent,

the great system of which they are a part? Thy children are taught

accurately the distances between stars and the times of their movements;

they can babble of strata and formation, explain the secrets of tide,

and current, and the law of storms; classify plants, from the hyssop on

the wall to the cedar which groweth on Lebanon, and name scientifically

the shells on the sea-shore; but we seldom hear them talk of the glory

of the heavens or the beauty of the earth, or the wonders of the sea, or

point to them as types and revelations of the Power which made and

moveth in them all. Nature, with her laws and changes, appeareth in thy

schools as the result of mechanic forces and chemical combinations. If

thou teachest more than this, we find it not in thy books, in thy public

teachings, or in the minds of thy pupils! Is it not the same with other

studies? History, science, and poesy are, with thee, so abridged,

extracted, epitomised, and tabulated, that only facts are left for the

memory, not thought for the mind. All the noble examples, the heroic

deeds, the noble thoughts, and great principles which they recorded or

contained, are carefully suppressed or parodied; for what have they to

do with the practical work on which this generation is about to enter?

Thus with their catechisms and manuals, thy pupils, learning without

reverence, thinking without feeling, knowing without believing,

unencumbered by modesty, unchecked by impulse, enthusiasm, or

imagination, can rush at once into the arena, ready and confident. And

in choosing this system of training and education, thou art wise in thy

generation—wise as the serpent—for by what other couldst thou hope to

raise men, who, eschewing nobleness, and aspiring not to greatness—who,

rejecting antecedents and abandoning individuality, shall swell the

throng of money-getters, buyers, sellers, producers, contractors,

speculators, and other zealots of utility, and thus elevate thee to the

height of practical glory, thus make thee still more wondrous!

Such men thou wilt have, such men thy system must make; but to quote

more eloquent words and thoughts than our own, “If we read history with

any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that the checks and balances

of profit and loss have never been the grand agents with men; that they

have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any

commutable prospect of profit and loss, for any visible finite object,

but always for some invisible and infinite one.”

Ages, in which self-interest has been the one pervading principle, this

world has seen before: such an age was that of Louis XV., only that then

pleasure, not profit, was the prevailing object; lust, not mammon, the

presiding deity. Such an era is being now enacted across the Atlantic.

There self-interest, in the shape of mammon, is running its race boldly

and fiercely, unstayed by old traditions, old memories, or old

institutions, and is exhibiting to the world, in all its glory and

success, the reign of the practical, the triumph of utility. Let thy

admirers, followers, pupils, study these well, ere they rush on their

onward career.

We, personally, stand aghast at thy offspring. They terrify us by their

unripe shrewdness and “Smallweed” wisdom. Though verging on the period

of the sere and yellow leaf, we ever loved the companionship of boys,

and were considered rather a good fellow by them. We could discuss the

shape of a bat, the colour of a fly, the merits of a pony, or the

distinction of prison bar and prison base, pretty well, and at a push

could even talk respectably of the stories of old Virgil, the marches of

Xenophon, or the facetiæ of Horace. This was all well. But one does not

now dare to touch one of these young prodigies without a fear that he

will forthwith shoot an arrow from his quiver of facts and dates, by

deliberately asking, how far Saturn is from the Earth, or at what rate

sound travels, or what is the population of China, or the date of the

Council of Nice.

Our flesh quakes even now, and a cold perspiration comes over us, at the

thought of the intellectual contests we shall have to undergo with our

firstborn. That child-man haunts us like a phantom. The vision sits upon

us like a nightmare. We believe him to be our lawfully-begotten

offspring, but he will be thy child, O Age; child of thy nurture, of thy

circumstances, thy influences. Thou wilt be the she-wolf who will suckle

him! We see him grown formal, knowing, and conceited, battering us with

questions from his catechisms, ’ologies, tables, and measures. We are

not yet resolved how to meet this coming contest; whether to read up

covertly for the emergency, or to follow an expedient once successfully

adopted by a patriarch of our experience—that of affecting to despise

and pooh-pooh all elementary knowledge as beneath and unworthy of him.

Yes; we see this our offspring, and we know him chiefly by negatives,

chiefly by contrast with boys of our own youth. We know that he will be

more proper, discreet, and decorous than ourselves or our

contemporaries. We know that he will not be misled by impulse or

sympathy; that his mind will never be led from Euclid or Greek grammar,

by the ringing of some old rhyme in his brain, or the memory of some old

joke, or the thought of the green fields and green woods on which the

sun is shining without; that his pulse will not beat quick at reading of

the heroic three hundred at Thermopylæ; that he will perhaps vote the

Horatii and Camillus humbugs; pronounce the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_

an idle tale, and the _Arabian Nights_ a collection of fooleries; that

he will never believe in ghosts, and will smile scornfully at the

mention of fairies and pixies; that he will never risk a flogging for

the sake of _Robinson Crusoe_ or _Roderick Random_; that _Childe Harold_

and _Don Juan_, so sedulously kept from us, may safely be left within

his reach; that he will never secrete the family tinder-box, or tear

leaves from his father’s logbook to make bonfires on the 5th of

November; that he will never give, except a _quid pro quo_; or play,

except with a calculation of gain or loss. Will he ever know a boy’s

love? Yes, perhaps, but he will pursue it calmly and discreetly, like a

man and a gentleman; will approach his inamorata without diffidence, and

talk to her without hesitation. Not such was our boy’s love; not thus

did we go through that ordeal of beating pulse and rushing thought. To

our recollection, we never spoke six words to the object of our

adoration, and never entered her presence without blushing or

stammering; but the sight of her flaxen curls and blue eyes at the

window would set our brain in a whirl, and a smile or bob of the curls

would cause such a beating of the heart that we forthwith set off at

topmost speed, and were only stopped by loss of breath or wind. After

all such interviews, the said curls and eyes, and certain frilled

trousers with which our deity was generally invested, would come dancing

in on every mote and sunbeam, drawing off eye and thought from slate or

book; and the memory of the many occasions on which we ate cane on

account of such distractions, still causes a tingling in the regions

devoted to flagellation.

Will he be a sportsman? Probably, but scientifically and

unenthusiastically. We think not that he will ever mingle with his sport

that love of wood and fell, stream and river, rock and waterfall, cloud

and sunshine, leaf and spray, without which rod and gun would be to us

as vain and idle implements. We know that he will never sleep in barn or

outhouse to be early by the side of the stream or cover; that he will

never invest pocket-money in flies, until their fitness for the season

or stream has been well tested; that he will never, in anticipation of a

raid on hare or rabbit, collect and lock up all the curs and mongrels in

the neighbourhood, thereby delighting his parents by a midnight

serenade. Will he delight in feasts and revelry? Yes; but staidly and

soberly, dressed in fitting costume, conducting himself decorously, and

talking on most proper topics. He will never, methinks, taste the luxury

of banqueting on potatoes and sausages roasted in the cinders of a

bonfire, or rejoice in the irregular joviality of harvest-home, village

feast, or dancing in a barn. Wretch that we are! the shadows of such

things cling lovingly to the skirts of our memory. One occasion we

remember especially. It was the custom of our _locale_, that every

village should have a day appointed for a feast, and on this all doors

were opened, all friends welcomed from far and near. On such a day we

crossed accidentally the threshold of a yeoman friend, and were dragged

forthwith to a board literally groaning under the weight of a piece of

beef of nameless form, a kid-pie made in a milk-pan, a plum-pudding

ditto, with other delicacies of the like light kind. After trying our

digestion, and working our wicked will on them, we adjourned to the

barn, and there, claimed as a partner by a cherry-cheeked daughter of

our host, we had to confront the struggle of a country-dance or jig,

which or what we know not now, and knew not then. It was a fair trial to

dance each other down. A bumpkin at our elbow looked on us with

invidious rivalry, and commenced at once most outrageous operations with

heel and toe. Our partner rushed recklessly on her fate. We felt

misgivings as to our own powers. The limbs grew weak, the breath faint.

We looked at the Cherry-cheeks; a few oily drops were trickling down

them. We felt encouraged. Presently the steps of our bumpkin fell more

fitfully and irregularly. Again we looked at the Cherry-cheeks; the

moisture was streaming down now in copious rivulets. Bumpkin at last

went off in a convulsive fling, and Cherry-cheeks, with a groan and a

sigh, confessed herself beaten. We stood conqueror on the field. It was

our first and last saltatory triumph. We have never before or since

gained éclat in the mazy. Blush not for thy parent, child of our love,

but throw thy mantle decently over his delinquencies! No such escapades

will ever disturb the regular mechanism of the life which thou and thy

comrades will lead!

Thus we trace him onwards by negatives from a youth without enthusiasm

to a manhood without generosity or nobleness—a perfect machine, with the

parts well adjusted and balanced, regulated to a certain power, fitted

to work for certain ends by certain means—the end profit, the means the

quickest and cheapest which can be found. As such a man, he will be a

richer and shrewder one than his forefathers, and gain more

distinction—perhaps become a railway director, have pieces of plate

presented to him at public dinners, die a millionaire or a beggar, and

be regarded hereafter, according to success, as a great man or a

swindler. Such, O Age! is the distinction, and the reverse, which thou

offerest to thy children!

Yes; so bigoted are we, that we would not exchange the memory of days

spent on green banks, with the water rippling by and the bright sky

above us—of nights passed with an old friend—of hours of loving commune

with the gifted thoughts and gifted tongues of other days—the memory of

the wild impulses, fervid thoughts, high hopes, bounding sympathies, and

genial joys of our past—a past which we hope to carry on as an evergreen

crown for our old age—even to play for such a high stake, and win.

We cannot test thee so well by old age, for the old men now standing in

this generation are not wholly of thy begetting; but, judging by the law

of consequences, we can foretell that material youth and material

manhood must lead to a material old age; that souls long steeped in

reekings from the presses of Profit, and bound for years in the chains

of Utilitarianism, cannot readily escape from their pollution and

bondage; and we can see also, even now, the dark shadow of the present

passing over the spirits of men who began their career in a past. Old

age is not, as of yore, a privileged period. Men no longer recognise and

value it as a distinction, nor aspire to it as to an order having

certain dignities, privileges, and immunities, like the old men at Rome,

who were granted exemption from the heavy burden of state duty, and

served her by their home patriotism and counsel. Men love not now to be

considered or to become old; they fight against this stage of life by

devices and subterfuges, and strive to stave off or disguise its

approaches. Nor are they so much to blame. The relations of age are

changed; it holds not the same consideration or position as in former

days, receives not reverence and deference as its due homage, nor is

accorded by common consent an exemption from attack, a freedom of

warning and counsel. The practical workers of to-day would as soon think

of bowing to the hoary head or wise heart of a man past his labours, as

to the remains of a decayed steam-engine or broken-down spinning-jenny.

The diseased faculties of old age are to them as the _disjecta membra_

of worn-out mechanism. It is this non-estimation, this non-appreciation,

which drives men to ignore and repudiate the signs and masks of a period

which brings only disability and disqualification, and makes them cling

by every falsehood, outward and inward, to the semblance of youth—very

martyrs to sham and pretence.

It was not always thus. Within our own experience, men at a certain time

of life assumed a change of dress, habits, and bearing—not relinquishing

their vocations and amusements, but withdrawing quietly from the

_mêleé_, and becoming quiet actors or spectators; thus signifying that

they were no longer challengers or combatants, but rather judges and

umpires in the great tussle of life. We remember with what respect we

used to regard these as men set apart—a sort of lay priesthood—an

everyday social house of peers—a higher court of council and appeal. How

deeply we felt their rebukes and praises; with what reverence we

received their oracles, whether as old sportsmen, old soldiers, old

scholars, or old pastors. These men are becoming few, for such feeling

in regard to them is dying out or extinct. Your young utilitarian would

show no more mercy to a grey-haired veteran, than the barbarians did to

the senatorial band of Rome, but would indifferently hurl Cocker at his

head, or joust at him with his statics.

How many classes of these old men, familiar to this generation, are

disappearing! We will not touch on the old gentleman, the old yeoman,

and others; their portraits have been drawn most truly already, and are

impressed on most of our memories; but we must mourn over them with a

filial sorrow, believing, O Age! that the high honour, dignity, worth,

courage, and integrity by which they tempered society, were of more use

to it than the artificial refinement, multiplied conveniences, rabid

production, and forced knowledge which thou callest civilisation—that

the moral virtues which they represented were more precious to a people,

and more glorious to a nation, than the products and wonders of thy

mechanism! If thou has bereft us of these, it will be hard to strike the

balance!

One class we miss entirely—the old clergymen. Taunt us not, O Age! with

the fox-hunting, hard-drinking, hard-riding parsons of the last

generation. We knew them too, and knew many whose burden of

delinquencies in regard to horse, hound, gun, and wine-cup, leavened as

they often were by kindly charities and loving sympathies, will perhaps

sit as lightly as that of many a well-oiled, smooth-going machine of

capital, who sets the moral tone for our time. We speak not of these,

but of the mild evangelists—the gentle brothers whose benevolent faces

still beam on our memory; whose gentle words, unmixed with the gall of

controversy or the fearfulness of commination, fell often sweetly on our

hearts. These lived ere this age discovered that the gospel of Christ

required a new development, and the religion of God a new adaptation to

the purposes and destinies of man. In many of the quiet sequestered

villages of England, pastors who were content to preach and live as

their Master had preached and lived, delivering His promises and

commands gently and lovingly, and following faithfully His behest in

visiting the sick, and comforting the afflicted—many such it was our lot

to see and hear. A servant of our household often took us, in our

childhood, as the companion of her Sunday holiday. This woman was most

erratic in her devotions, and wandered indiscriminately from fold to

fold—now sitting under the Established Church, now under Wesleyan,

Brionite, or Ranter. Many a field-preaching and conventicle meeting have

we attended in consequence, much to the scandal of an orthodox aunt. As

she loved, however, to mingle creature-comforts with her religious

exercises, we more often visited some friendly yeoman, and went with him

and his family to the village church. Pleasant is the memory of many of

these Sabbaths; the walk through a quiet lane, or by a shady wood-path;

the entry through the sequestered churchyard, with its grass-green

graves, ‘neath which the forefathers of the hamlet slept; the church,

simple and unadorned, where

“The golden sun

Poured in a dusty beam,

Like the celestial ladder seen

By Jacob in his dream.

And ever and anon the wind,

Sweet-scented with the hay,

Turned o’er the hymn-book’s fluttering leaves

That in the window lay;”

—the minister, reverend and benignant, earnest in entreaty, meek in

rebuke—all these are pleasant memories. We knew these pastors better

afterward, but this was often our first acquaintance. Oft have we asked

for them since. Their places now know them no more. In their pulpits and

by their altars, stand men who would impose religion on their fellows as

a ceremonial, or inflict it as a penance.

Where, too, are the companions, the fellow-workers of these old pastors,

the old-fashioned sisters of charity; those dear old ladies who, with

hearts warmed and opened by the affections of their own social life,

went forth from their hearths to the homes of the poor, dropping here a

word of comfort, here of admonition, here an alms, here a book, and

leaving ever behind them a sense of true sympathy and kindly interest?

They knew not—so dark was their age—that a regular organisation,

discipline, and uniform, a prescribed drill and manuals, were necessary

to the perfection of their mission. Their charity was a natural feeling,

not an instituted effort; their admonition a friendly appeal, not a

systematised summons to reform and penitence; their kindness, an

intuition unset to rule; their books, the selection of their own

reading, not the licensed and revised issue of repositories and

societies. They were the ducts by which many an unseen stream of

benevolence flowed into poor houses. Strange to say, too, though unaided

by tea-drinkings, public meetings, bazaars, societies, public lists of

subscribers, and all the recognised mechanism of modern charity, they

had always the wherewithal to give; and almsgiving, as they gave,

brought no pain or mortification, injured no sense of self-dependence,

and left no moral degradation. They did good in their time—a time when

individual endeavour did the work of institutions and corporations, but

have passed away now, and are superseded by a very different caste.

Their successors march upon us, a stern, zealous, resolute, and to us

rather a grim sisterhood—the trained-bands of morality and charity. They

are an order having outward and inward forms. The outward sign seems to

be sad-coloured raiment; and when we see a young lady dismiss the bows

from her bonnet, and adopt a grey shawl, we know that she is about to

rush on her vocation as a district visitor. They have rules and codes,

an appointed task, and appointed order; and, when duly organised and

drilled, advance on some benighted town or village, each cohort

attacking a quarter with the stern determination to trample down and

drive out poverty, vice, and uncleanliness wherever they may be found.

They are a moral police, detective and repressive, each on a separate

beat, rushing down courts and through alleys in pursuit of want and

immorality. They may fulfil their work, these sisters, and we wish them

good speed; but we believe that they must first clothe their charity

with more love, and learn especially, what their predecessors knew so

well, how to speak to the poor.

We loved those good old sisters and their work. One, whom we remember

well—thanks be to God—still walks this earth, doing her beautiful

mission of love and charity. How or when she began this mission we know

not. It was no sudden adoption, no result of sudden conviction or

disappointed hope. We never remember her except as engaged in this

genial task. It grew with her growth, as the natural ripening of early

sympathies and early feelings. Bred, as gentles often were in those

barbarous times, to regard the poor as their lowly friends, and to keep

up a kindly intercourse with them, she had come to know their characters

and their little histories, to understand their peculiar ways, and to

learn to address them in the language by which alone the poor are

moved,—the language of the heart. Thus, as time went on, the kindly

greetings and kindly interest expanded easily into the higher offices of

comfort, instruction, and relief. The transition was natural, and the

people wondered not to see one whom they had known, loved, and revered

so long, moving among them as a ministering angel of good, chasing

darkness from the hours of the bedridden by her pleasant converse,

uplifting the soul of some stricken sufferer by her cheering presence,

bringing relief to the indigent, or dropping on the ears of some blind

or aged Christian the precious words of Gospel writ. Great, too, was she

in the nursery and by fireside, as we knew full well, and as another

generation is now experiencing. What rhymes she knew, and what stories

she told, and how she told them! and how have her love and pleasantness

followed us from infancy up to manhood! By the by, what story-tellers

there were in those days! The art seems lost at present. People compose

their talk now, and the faculty of easy telling a natural narrative is

getting rare indeed. Patient and gentle, thus for many years she pursued

her loving mission, without the parade of circumstances or ostentation

of duty, and without a murmur; though, in later years, she became the

channel of all indiscriminate benevolence, and the director of all

general charities. No outward humility of garb or look distinguished

this our sister. She went forth even on her errands—lady as she

was—apparelled after the fashion of her order. Nay, it must be confessed

that she rather loved a handsome cloak or bonnet, nor thought them

unbeseeming her mission; for she could not understand, nor can we, why

acts of charity should be done, like deeds of penitence, in serge and

sackcloth. One of her functions was a great mystery to us. Ever and anon

mention was made of a certain bag, in connection with certain women. We

used to wonder, in our small way, what this could mean; and discovered

at last that she was manager of a Lying-in Society, which distributed

bags containing all the requisites for ladies expecting that interesting

event, and that the bag in the gift of our house was in yearly

requisition for a matron, whose habit it was regularly to increase an

already swarming brood of white-headed, freckle-faced urchins, who, as

soon as they could crawl, seized on gutter and dunghill as their natural

heritage.

Her labours were not, however, confined to the homes of the poor, but

extended to a field from which most would have shrunk—the prison. Even

there, amid the reprobate and the vile, she carried her teachings and

her charity, and strove, by earnestness and tenderness, to reclaim and

raise her fallen sisters. Many was the rebuff she met with—many the

scoff from profligate lips; but still she was neither daunted nor

deterred. Vice had for her no pollution, no repulsion; still she

persevered; and though her words were often spoken in pain, yet may they

often have brought comfort to some sin-laden heart, or awoke contrition

in some first sinner. As instances of her failures and disappointments,

she used often to tell, with a playful humour, slightly dashed by

sorrow, how a woman, who had frequently been a tenant of the jail, and

had always left in a feigned state of repentance, on her coming, for the

sixteenth time, greeted her with, “Well, ma’am, I must surely be

converted this time.” Perhaps the mild teachings and sweet truths, so

often told, may, after many days, have been as bread cast on the waters,

even to this hardened heart.

Gentle sister! loving heart! thou didst thy mission in love. There be

those coming after thee who will employ threat, rebuke, and discipline,

where thou wert wont to use persuasion, and strive to force or torture

mankind into goodness by forms and penitential processes. They may

succeed; but we believe, as thou didst, that God’s work is to be done by

gentle influences; that God’s messages should fall on the heart softly

as evening dew; that God’s truths should shine on the understanding like

the summer sunshine; that God’s promises should be wafted on the soul

with the gentleness and fragrance of a south wind. Sweetly does the

memory of thy good deeds rest on many a heart, and sweetly, doubtless,

has their incense risen to Heaven.

There were other old ladies, too, who had no mission save that of their

gentle degree, whom we regard as goodly relics of a past—the old

gentlewomen who sat and moved in a certain state and stateliness, and

surrounded themselves with a dignity which won deference from those who

approached them. We associate these with high-backed chairs, in

wainscoted parlours, hung with dark portraits, with old folio

picture-bibles; with pleasaunces and laurelled walks—with avenues and

parterres—with peacocks and Blenheim spaniels—with gold-headed canes,

ebony cabinets, and wondrous coiffures. We defend not those headdresses;

they stand in evidence against us, in back numbers of the _Ladies’

Magazine_. But we remember sitting with great pride at our first play,

between two turbans—one yellow, one pink—and recollect regarding the

large gold-faced watches which hung pendent from the girdles of our

patronesses, as an almost Aladdin realisation of wealth and splendour.

Lovely were these gentlewomen often, in the richness and mellowness of

their decline, illustrating, by their serenity and peaceful repose, the

beauty and holiness of grey hairs—not mocking old age in a caricature of

youth, nor scaring young hearts by the skeleton image of their own life.

There were old women, too, whom we regret—old servants, old

nurses—garrulous, chattering, snuffy old gossips! O Age! they were

pleasant old women withal; told pleasant stories; had an unprofitable

habit, when their functions ceased, of regarding those whom their care

had brought into the world with a sort of foster affection, and had a

pleasant way of bringing back, by story and anecdote, the image of our

infancy. These reminiscences were not, however, always gratifying to

stripling pride. We remember once, when standing six feet without our

boots, and arrayed in our first London suit, being rather humbled at

hearing of a period when we hadn’t a shirt to our backs, and might have

been squeezed into a quart pot.

We have done with the old age of the past; let it sleep its sleep.

We could instance much more fully, O Age! the levelling tendencies of

thy materialism. But if it be true—and surely there must be proof before

us—that thy doctrines are shading the brightness of youth, and mumming

the majesty of old age, then do we know enough to be certified that

those are not all gain! Ring out the table of thy exports, exult over

the lists of thy shipping, the number of thy markets, the increase of

population, the multiplication of comforts and conveniences, the

rapidity of thy communications, the spread of thy education! Yet still

would we say, Woe to the land whose youth is not as a vision of

gladness! woe to the land where old age is not reverend or revered! Such

a land may know a material prosperity, a commercial greatness which

shall dazzle the world—may produce men, able in counting-house and on

bourse—men ready in speech and debate; but it will not, we think,

possess the elements which produce the great qualities—the Heroic—the

Poetic—the Moral—the Truthful—on which hitherto have been built the

grand structures of the world’s glory. Nor do we think that it would

retain virtue enough to continue a line of merchant princes, such as

England has ever rejoiced to number among her great men.

PUBLIC LECTURES—MR WARREN ON LABOUR.[1]

A social phenomenon of much interest has recently arisen in Great

Britain, and it is one which as yet has no counterpart in other

countries. We allude to the practice, now become systematic, of the

delivery of public addresses and lectures by the leading men of the

nation. We do not refer to the ordinary lectures contracted for by

literary institutions, through which the grown-up public supply

themselves with important knowledge not obtainable by them in youth at

our universities, and for the study of which indeed the brief curriculum

of youth has no spare time. The phenomenon to which we allude is

something beyond this; it is not stipendiary in character and regular in

appearance, but gratis and desultory. It is a spontaneous step taken by

men of standing in the world of politics or literature, with the view of

adding to the knowledge, improving the social condition, or influencing

the political sentiments of their fellow-countrymen. A century ago the

only medium of publishing facts and propagating opinions, was the

excellent but limited one of books; the last half-century has seen the

mighty engine of the Press attain to full power, diffusing views and

statements with less accuracy and impartiality than books, but with

infinitely greater speed and wider range. As newspapers are commercial

adventures, they naturally seek, as their first object, to enunciate

views acceptable to the class to whom they address themselves; and

hence, whenever any party in the country happens to attain a great

preponderance over its rivals, that preponderance is followed by an

increase of newspapers in that interest, which in turn tends to augment

the preponderance, it may be, even into a tyranny. And accordingly, at

times when party-spirit runs high, the side which chances to possess a

virtual monopoly of the newspaper press has it in its power, by bold

assertion and frequent iteration, to make any misrepresentation or false

charges against an antagonist pass generally current as truth, and at

the same time keep from view the real principles by which the opposite

party are animated. We cannot but regard the recent great development

which the practice of making public addresses has obtained amongst us as

in some degree a reaction against this natural one-sidedness of the

newspaper press, and, on the whole, as the happiest remedy for it that

can be devised. For by this means, without the aid of the restricted

arena of Parliament, public men of all ranks and parties become the

defenders of their own actions, the exponents of their own policy; and,

moreover, to a great extent, can thus make the newspapers record at

least all sides of the question.

On the whole, we regard the rise of this social phenomenon with much

satisfaction. It is the best safeguard, and an ever-living protest,

against that worst of all tyrannies, the tyranny of Public Opinion. As

yet even America, where it is most needed, has hardly begun to develop

the practice; and this not from want of toleration (though the tyranny

of the majority be more pressing there than here), but rather from a

want of the class from which the chief public speakers of England

proceed. American society is not old enough, or rich enough, to have yet

given birth to the two classes of public men and literary men, which

give such bloom and power to the British commonwealth, and which,

mutually aiding and correcting one another, together form a vast and

distinguished caste, whose services go directly to instruct, elevate,

and guide the general community. In America, the development of Mind as

a separate profession, has as yet made but little progress, because the

general community is still not rich enough to support a separate

literary class of much extent; and their public men, though many of them

distinguished by elevated talents, belong in the aggregate to a class

entirely dependent for support upon industrial pursuits, the personal

direction of which they cannot afford to abandon without pecuniary

compensation, and to which they immediately return as soon as released

from their legislatorial duties. In Great Britain, on the other hand,

our public men are men of substance, who can afford to devote their time

wholly to the service of the country, and who in very many cases are

trained from their youth to statesmanship as a profession. Such men are

proud of their noble profession; to them, their character as legislators

and administrators is all in all; and they lose no opportunity of

righting themselves with, and impressing their individual views upon the

country at large. Hence the frequent public addresses delivered by our

leading statesmen during the Parliamentary recess; and even when

Parliament is sitting, not seldom do our public men seek a congenial

audience out of doors, to which they may make a profession of sentiments

which perhaps would be very coldly received from their place in the

House. Of late it has been the Peelites and Cobdenites who have stood

most in need of this appeal against public opinion; and the studious

efforts which some of the leaders of these parties have made to prevent

themselves being forgotten, and as protests against the sweeping censure

which their indignant country has passed upon them, have not been

entirely free of the ludicrous. But this makes no difference. We are

proud of a country where opinion is thus free, and where men have the

manliness to speak their opinions even when unpopular. It is a noble

privilege to our public men, a corrective to the press, a benefit to the

community. While it exists, no social or political disease is incurable,

and by such aids and renovating influences, we trust, Great Britain is

yet destined to flourish and progress for ages to come. The tyranny of

the multitude is as odious to England as the oppression of a Czar; and

as long as this is the case, the noble inheritance of British freedom is

secure; for we shall never react into an autocracy until we have first

suffered from the still worse tyranny of the multitude.

But politics furnish hardly a half of that public oratory which nowadays

is ever welling forth, like springs of thought, over the length and

breadth of the land. The other half belongs in nearly equal proportions

to Literature and to practical and patriotic Philanthropy. It is most

gratifying to see, as we so often do, the nobility of Britain stepping

from their baronial halls to the rural meeting or the provincial

athenæum, there to advocate the cause of moral and intellectual

improvement,—in words, it may sometimes be, not overcharged with

eloquence, but still influential and productive of much good from the

position and personal character of the speakers. The place becomes

hallowed where good and kindly words have been spoken; and these public

addresses have unquestionably contributed with other causes to give a

higher tone to many convivial meetings and social gatherings, formerly

remarkable for little else than deep drinking and empty laughter. The

people still look up to our nobles as their natural leaders, and they

may well do so,—for the great body of the aristocracy comport themselves

in a manner worthy of their exalted station; and we doubt not the recent

eulogium and prophecy of Count Montalembert will prove well-founded,

that the nobles of England, ever improving themselves, and still keeping

in the van, will continue to rivet to themselves the respect and regards

of the British nation.

It must be confessed, however, that our nobles and statesmen appear to

greater advantage when advocating the cause of social elevation and

moral or sanitary reform, than in addresses of a purely literary

character. A good man engaged in a good work disarms criticism and

attracts esteem; but when the work essayed is purely literary, the case

is otherwise; and in not a few instances addresses of this kind,

volunteered by men of position in the country, have fallen far short of

the reputation or public position of the speakers. For example, it seems

to us that the dignity of statesmanship must suffer an eclipse in public

estimation, when one who has played so important a part in imperial

politics as Lord John Russell delivers himself of a lecture so

altogether trashy as that which he lately pronounced in Exeter Hall. It

was a voluntary performance made by his lordship to keep himself before

the public eye; but he merely pilloried himself. He has so long regarded

himself as the great champion of civil and religious liberty in this

country, and has been so flattered by his followers, that he has arrived

at a condition in which he is manifestly incapable of measuring his own

powers. In the course of the last twelvemonth his lordship has been in

the Cabinet and out of it—he has gone to negotiate at Vienna and to

lecture at Exeter Hall—he tries everything, and fails in all. In those

stirring times, when public questions of the most pressing moment must

be answered, and problems of the most complicated kind require to be

solved, it was natural to expect that a statesman of Lord John Russell’s

standing, if he did court a public appearance, would at least grapple

with a question of the day; instead of which, he treated his audience to

a piece of “antiquated imbecility,”—as shallow in thought as it was

worthless in style,—wherein the “old saws” were schoolboy commonplaces,

and the “modern instances” came no nearer to us than the days of

Galileo! As a contemporary journal remarked,—“for any sympathy of his

readers, or for any practical effect upon their wills, he might as well

have discoursed to them of the patience of Job or the justice of

Aristides.”

Such exceptions, however, ought not to affect an estimate of the general

system or practice, which we regard as fraught with much good. It is

observable that men of mark who have special relations to any place, to

any town or district, frequently seek to make their literary or

oratorical powers a graceful means of cementing the connection which

subsists between them and the place in question. It is to a kindly

desire of this kind that we owe the lecture or address whose title we

have made a text for the preceding remarks, and which we desire to

commend to the notice of all address-givers as in many respects a model

of this class of compositions. It is well considered,—a tribute of

respect to which every assembly is entitled; the rare but fascinating

charm of style is felt throughout; and its spirit is not more genial and

sympathetic, than its counsels are calculated to be of deep practical

influence in the affairs of life.

In choosing Labour for his theme, Mr Warren addressed himself to a

subject which he knew must interest every unit in the crowded audience

around him. The establishment of the rights of labour is the first-fruit

of freedom, and the maintenance of these rights is the first necessity

of a commonwealth. “Labour,” says Adam Smith, “was the first price, the

original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold

or by silver, but _by labour_, that all the wealth of the world was

originally purchased.” And, as that clear-sighted writer adds, “the

property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original

foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and

inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and

dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing his strength

and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his

neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a

manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of both the workman, and

those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from

working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from

employing whom they think proper.” “Labour,” almost simultaneously

remarked the great and good Turgot, “is the _poor man’s property_: no

property is more sacred; and no time nor authority can sanction the

violation of his right freely to dispose of this, his only resource.”

Words these, as Mr Warren remarks, worthy to be recorded in letters of

gold. In Britain, Labour, like Opinion, is FREE. And so profoundly

cherished by our nation is the principle of freedom in labour, that even

in our colonies we have struck the fetters of bondage from the Negroes,

by an act, we will not say prudent in the manner of its accomplishment,

but noble in the highest degree from the spirit which dictated it.

But things were not always so in England. In the early stages of society

everywhere, the only law is the law of the strongest, and might makes

right. Even in the classic States of Greece and Rome, where civilisation

of a certain kind reached great eminence, the proportion of free men to

slaves was infinitesimal only; and in Russia at the present day, the

vast majority of the nation are still kept in a state of serfdom.

England too had a period—now happily past by six or seven centuries—when

a similar state of things prevailed. The working-classes of England then

groaned in the state of slavery called villeinage,—a _villein_ being as

absolutely the property of his feudal lord as a dog or a hog; unable to

acquire any property for himself, whatever he earned belonging to his

lord,—held to belong to the land and sold with it,—torn at will from his

family,—his children slaves like himself; and if a male and female slave

of different masters married, their masters claimed any children that

might be born, who were divided between them! The thirteenth century had

ended before any considerable proportion of these villeins had risen

into the condition of hired labourers. And the first time we hear of

these on a grand scale is in the year 1348; on which occasion, the great

plague having terribly reduced their numbers, the legislature sternly

interposed, “to deny the poor,” in the indignant language of Mr Hallam,

“that transient amelioration of their lot which the progress of

population, or other analogous circumstances, would, without any

interference, very rapidly take away.” “These poor creatures,” says Mr

Warren, “were naturally anxious to be better paid for their labour, when

it had become so greatly increased in value; and the legislature, in the

time of Edward III., passed acts peremptorily fixing, with great

precision, the rates at which artisans should be obliged to work, on

pain of punishment by fine and imprisonment. This was the famous Statute

of Labourers, passed just five centuries ago (1352), and which applied

exclusively to those whose means of living was by the labour of their

hands—by the sweat of their brow.”

How different the case in England now! What an advance have the virtues

of justice, mercy, and wisdom made amongst us during these last five

centuries! Freedom, whether personal or political, is no longer an empty

boast,—a privilege reserved for a wealthy or high-born minority. Its

only limits are where the liberty of the individual trenches upon the

liberty of his fellows, or the good of the commonwealth. As regards the

rights of labour, of which Mr Warren so ably treats, a British labourer

may work to any master, for any number of hours a-day he pleases, and

may even contract to work for a particular master for his whole

lifetime.[2] But as regards women and children the case is different,

and, acting not in accordance with mere theory, but the dictates of

experience and philanthropy, the British Legislature have found it

necessary to put restrictions upon female and juvenile labour,—these

portions of the community being in certain cases too weak and dependent

to look after their own interests. In factory-works this is especially

the case. The mighty machinery in these establishments requires simply

to be tended, so that a considerable portion of the work can be done by

mere children. And hence it happens that premature and improvident

marriages are frequent among the mill-workers, who, instead of thinking

of supporting their children, look forward to children as a means of

supporting themselves! A most cruel and unnatural state of things, fatal

to the children, and pernicious to the community, which thus witnesses

within its own bosom the growth of a class utterly degenerate in body

and totally uneducated in mind. Acting upon these considerations, the

British Legislature in 1833 passed the first Factory Act, which bore in

its preamble “that it was necessary that the hours of labour, of

children and young persons, employed in mills and factories, should be

regulated, inasmuch as there are great numbers of children and young

persons now employed in them, and their hours of labour are longer than

is desirable, due regard being had to their health and means of

education.” By that statute many excellent regulations were made to

mitigate the evil. And again, in the years 1844, 1847, 1850, and 1853,

other acts were passed, says Mr Warren, “further restricting the hours

of labour of women, young persons, and children, in print-works, mills,

and factories; carefully providing for their education, fixing the time

for beginning and ending work, so as to prevent their toiling

unnecessarily and at unseasonable hours; securing their holidays and

periods for recreation, fixing their meal-times; providing for the

cleanliness and ventilation of the scenes of their toil; guarding them

as far as possible against exposure to danger from machinery; and

subjecting mills and factories to constant and systematic inspection and

regulation by medical men and government officers, whose business it is

to see that the benevolent care of the Legislature is not defeated, or

in any way evaded. Again, no woman or girl, of any age, and no boy under

the age of ten years, is now allowed to work on any pretence whatever in

any mine or colliery; and no boy can be apprenticed to such work under

that age, nor for more than eight years. No young person under

twenty-one years of age is allowed to enter any flue or chimney, either

to sweep it or extinguish fire; and no boy under sixteen can be

apprenticed to a chimney sweeper; and even if he be, the moment he

wishes it, a magistrate will discharge him from his articles.” Such

legislation, undeniably, requires to be very prudently proceeded with;

for, while taking care of the employed, we must at the same time respect

the freedom of the employer, otherwise manufacturing capital will flee

our shores, and the state of the working-classes will be rendered worse

than before.

The question, indeed, at issue between Labour and Capital is one of

exceeding difficulty, yet it is one which every year is pressing itself

more urgently upon the consideration of the country. The present laws

relating to this matter are unquestionably a great improvement upon what

they were thirty years ago. Down to the year 1824, two or three

working-men could not meet together, though never so quietly, to settle

what wages they would work for, and during what hours, without

committing an offence in the eye of the law, and being punished for it;

while the masters, at the same time, were at full liberty to meet, and

agree to give their men no more than a particular sum! That was neither

freedom nor justice; and the late Mr Hume only spoke the truth when,

stigmatising the principle, he said,—“The law prevented the labouring

classes of the community from combining together against their

employers, who, though few in number, were powerful in wealth, and might

combine against _them_, and determine not to give them more than a

certain sum for their labour. The workmen could not, however, consult

together about the rate they ought to fix on that labour, without

rendering themselves liable to fine and imprisonment, and a thousand

other inconveniences which the law had reserved for them.” This legal

inequality has been removed, but how much remains to be done need be

told only to such as shut their eyes to the ever-recurring strikes and

misery which desolate our manufacturing districts. Labour is free,—and

each man wants to get as much for it as he can; but unfortunately

another man as naturally wants to get it for as little as he can. There

is no love, no sympathy, not even a common understanding of each other’s

affairs; each party forms a league against the other,—and so the

heartless suicidal strife goes on. Masters and men—it is hard to say

which party is the more to blame. If improvidence on the part of the

work-people often tempt them into, and aggravate their position in

strikes, by leaving them no little surplus wherewith to meet “hard

times,”—turn to our last month’s article on the Lancashire strikes, and

see if there be not also an improvidence and gambling spirit on the part

of the master-manufacturers, by which the wages and employment of their

men are needlessly placed in jeopardy.

Masters and men combine against each other—that is the barbarous order

of the day. Men who fancy that war with foreign nations can be wholly

abolished by means of arbitration, yet wage an internecine contest with

their own brother-countrymen,—a war which, so far from even

acknowledging the principle of arbitration, is regularly carried on

until one or other of the parties sinks exhausted in the combat! It is

not long ago since the combinations of the workmen on strike were of the

most savage and atrocious character.[3] Of late they have become less

envenomed in spirit; but still the tyranny which trades-unions exercise

over individual members of the trade is as glaring as could be practised

by Governments even the most despotic. The law attempts to remedy this,

but, alas! with little effect. “If,” says the late Chief-Justice Tindal,

expounding the existing statutes upon this point, “there be one right,

which beyond all others the labourer ought to be able to call his own,

it is the right of the exertion of his own personal strength and skill,

in the full enjoyment of his own free will, altogether unshackled by the

control or dictates of his fellow-workmen; yet strange to say, this very

right which the discontented workman claims for himself to its fullest

extent, he does, by a blind perversity and unaccountable selfishness,

entirely refuse to his fellows who differ in opinion from himself! It is

unnecessary to say that a course of proceeding so utterly unreasonable

in itself, so injurious to society, so detrimental to the interests of

trade, and so oppressive against the rights of the poor man, must be a

gross and flagrant violation of the law, and when the guilt is

established, must be visited by a proper measure of punishment.” But the

masters also may now be made to feel the restraining power of the law;

and at this moment one of our highest tribunals, a Court of Error, is

occupied with a question of no small importance and difficulty, arising

from an attempt of eighteen Lancashire mill-owners to enter into a

counter-combination. Their men having combined to support each other in

forcing their masters to yield to their terms, the masters entered into

a bond to each other not to open their mills for twelve months, except

on terms agreed to by a majority; and the question was brought before

the Court of Queen’s Bench, whether such an agreement was or was not one

in restraint of trade, and consequently consistent or inconsistent with

the public good. “The Court differed,” says Mr Warren; “but the majority

held that the agreement was illegal, as unduly restraining the freedom

of trade, holding ‘that if particular masters might thus combine, so

might all the masters in the kingdom:’ and, on the other hand, all the

men in the kingdom might combine themselves into a sort of Labour

Parliament.” The case, it is understood, will not be held settled on

either side until it has been taken to the House of Lords, and decided

by the Court of last appeal in the kingdom.

The principle or object kept in view by the Legislature in framing the

present statutes seems to have been, as Chief-Justice Tindal once

observed, “that if the workmen, on the one hand, refused to work, or the

master, on the other, refused to employ, as such a state of things could

not continue long, it might fairly be expected that the party must

ultimately give way whose pretensions were not founded on reason or

justice—the masters if they offered too little, the workmen if they

demanded too much.” But, says Mr Warren, “this leaves each party to

decide on the reason and justice of its pretensions, and the

unreasonableness and injustice of those of its opponent. And it is more

likely that the Legislature said to itself,—‘It will always be a

question of time; the weakest will go to the wall first, though not till

after it has greatly hurt the stronger.’” They just left each side to do

its worst, and worry or be worried to death by its opponent, without the

State interfering so long as this work of social murder went on

_peaceably_!

Truly, this is sad work! And yet legislation, we fear, though it may in

some degree curb, will never reach the root of the evil. The only cure,

we feel persuaded, will be found in social, not legislative reform.

Better information on the part of the working-classes will do something

to the attainment of this most desirable end; and Mr Warren, while

paying a just tribute to the “keen mother-wit and right honest heart” of

the English working-classes, says,—

“If many years’ observation and reflection entitle me to make a

recommendation, it would be, that the working-classes would find it of

the highest value to acquire, in a general way, as they could with a

little effort,—as by plain and good lectures in this very place,—some

knowledge of the circumstances which determine the rate of wages. That

is a question, in its higher and remoter branches, of extreme

difficulty; but its elementary principles are pretty well agreed upon

now, and directly touch the only capital of the poor man—his labour,

and teach him how to set a true and not a chimerical and exaggerated

value on it, at times when the keenest dispute has arisen on that very

subject. Oh, what incalculable benefits might arise from a knowledge,

by the acute working-classes, of the leading principles agreed upon by

great thinkers, statesmen, and economists of every hue of opinion, as

those regulating the relation between employers and employed, and

establishing, not a conflict of interest, but an absolute identity!”

Yet it is not Ignorance, but Selfishness—that passion the most abiding

of our nature—that is the prime mover in these dire contests between the

employers and employed; and along with every effort for the education of

our working-classes, we should strive also still more assiduously to

cultivate their moral nature and make mutual charity and forbearance

more prevalent both among high and low. Very beautifully, and no less

wisely and earnestly, does Mr Warren speak on this subject. Inculcating

forbearance between master and man in hard-times, he says:—