The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians. History does not
allow us to fix the limits of the application of these names with any
accuracy; but from the residence of a portion of these people in France,
and from some effect of that powerful soil on their blood and manners,
the Norman has come popularly to represent in England the aristocratic,
and the Saxon the democratic principle. And though, I doubt not, the
nobles are of both tribes, and the workers of both, yet we are forced to
use the names a little mythically, one to represent the worker, and the
other the enjoyer.
The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the dominant races
tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician, the Celt, and the Goth had
already got in. The Roman came, but in the very day when his fortune
culminated. He looked in the eyes of a new people that was to supplant
his own. He disembarked his legions, erected his camps and
towers,--presently he heard bad news from Italy, and worse and worse,
every year: at last, he made a handsome compliment of roads and walls,
and departed. But the Saxon seriously settled in the land, builded,
tilled, fished, and traded, with German truth and adhesiveness. The
Dane came, and divided with him. Last of all, the Norman, or
French-Dane, arrived, and formally conquered, harried, and ruled the
kingdom. A century later, it came out, that the Saxon had the most
bottom and longevity, had managed to make the victor speak the language
and accept the law and usage of the victim; forced the baron to dictate
Saxon terms to Norman kings; and, step by step, got all the essential
securities of civil liberty invented and confirmed. The genius of the
race and the genius of the place conspired to this effect. The island
is lucrative to free labor, but not worth possession on other terms.
The race was so intellectual, that a feudal or military tenure could not
last longer than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes, so thoroughly
beaten in the war, that the name of English and villein were synonymous,
yet so vivacious as to extort charters from the kings, stood on the
strong personality of these people. Sense and economy must rule in a
world which is made of sense and economy, and the banker, with his seven
per cent, drives the earl out of his castle. A nobility of soldiers
cannot keep down a commonalty of shrewd scientific persons. What
signifies a pedigree of a hundred links, against a cotton-spinner with
steam in his mill; or, against a company of broad-shouldered Liverpool
merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunel are contriving locomotives and
a tubular bridge?
These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have the taste for toil, a
distaste for pleasure or repose, and the telescopic appreciation of
distant gain. They are the wealth-makers,--and by dint of mental
faculty which has its own conditions. The Saxon works after liking, or,
only for himself; and to set him at work, and to begin to draw his
monstrous values out of barren Britain, all dishonor, fret, and barrier
must be removed, and then his energies begin to play.
The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls,--a kind of goblin
men, with vast power of work and skilful production,--divine stevedores,
carpenters, reapers, smiths, and masons, swift to reward every kindness
done them, with gifts of gold and silver. In all English history, this
dream comes to pass. Certain Trolls or working brains, under the names
of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton, Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale,
Newton, Gibbon, Brindley, Watt, Wedgwood, dwell in the troll-mounts of
Britain, and turn the sweat of their face to power and renown.
If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed on this spell-bound
island with impunity. The enchantments of barren shingle and rough
weather transformed every adventurer into a laborer. Each vagabond that
arrived bent his neck to the yoke of gain, or found the air too tense
for him. The strong survived, the weaker went to the ground. Even the
pleasure-hunters and sots of England are of a tougher texture. A hard
temperament had been formed by Saxon and Saxon-Dane, and such of these
French or Normans as could reach it, were naturalized in every sense.
All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in England must be looked
at as growths or irresistible offshoots of the expanding mind of the
race. A man of that brain thinks and acts thus; and his neighbor, being
afflicted with the same kind of brain, though he is rich, and called a
baron, or a duke, thinks the same thing, and is ready to allow the
justice of the thought and act in his retainer or tenant, though sorely
against his baronial or ducal will.
The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of mastiffs, so
fierce, that when their teeth were set, you must cut their heads off to
part them. The man was like his dog. The people have that nervous
bilious temperament, which is known by medical men to resist every means
employed to make its possessor subservient to the will of others. The
English game is main force to main force, the planting of foot to foot,
fair play and open field,--a rough tug without trick or dodging, till
one or both come to pieces. King Ethelwald spoke the language of his
race, when he planted himself at Wimborne, and said, 'he would do one of
two things, or there live, or there lie.' They hate craft and subtlety.
They neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate; and, when they have
pounded each other to a poultice, they will shake hands and be friends
for the remainder of their lives.
You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at country fairs, at the
hustings, and in parliament. No artifice, no breach of truth and plain
dealing,--not so much as secret ballot, is suffered in the island. In
parliament, the tactics of the opposition is to resist every step of the
government, by a pitiless attack; and in a bargain, no prospect of
advantage is so dear to the merchant, as the thought of being tricked is
mortifying.
Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and James, who won the sea-fight
of Scanderoon, was a model Englishman in his day. "His person was
handsome and gigantic, he had so graceful elocution and noble address,
that, had he been dropt out of the clouds in any part of the world, he
would have made himself respected: he was skilled in six tongues, and
master of arts and arms."[4] Sir Kenelm wrote a book, "Of Bodies and of
Souls," in which he propounds, that "syllogisms do breed or rather are
all the variety of man's life. They are the steps by which we walk in
all our businesses. Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such
chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving from this work, lie doth as
deficient from the nature of man: and, if he do aught beyond this, by
breaking out into divers sorts of exterior actions, he findeth,
nevertheless, in this linked sequel of simple discourses, the art, the
cause, the rule, the bounds, and the model of it."[5]
[4] Antony Wood.
[5] Man's Soule, p. 29.
There spoke the genius of the English people. There is a necessity on
them to be logical. They would hardly greet the good that did not
logically fall,--as if it excluded their own merit, or shook their
understandings. They are jealous of minds that have much facility of
association, from an instinctive fear that the seeing many relations to
their thought might impair this serial continuity and lucrative
concentration. They are impatient of genius, or of minds addicted to
contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought,
however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their wonted rule.
Neither do they reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism. For
they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt
to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, carpenters,
and chemists, following the sequence of nature, and one on which words
make no impression. Their mind is not dazzled by its own means, but
locked and bolted to results. They love men, who, like Samuel Johnson,
a doctor in the schools, would jump out of his syllogism the instant his
major proposition was in danger, to save that, at all hazards. Their
practical vision is spacious, and they can hold many threads without
entangling them. All the steps they orderly take; but with the high
logic of never confounding the minor and major proposition; keeping
their eye on their aim, in all the complicity and delay incident to the
several series of means they employ. There is room in their minds for
this and that,--a science of degrees. In the courts, the independence
of the judges and the loyalty of the suitors are equally excellent. In
Parliament, they have hit on that capital invention of freedom, a
constitutional opposition. And when courts and Parliament are both
deaf, the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon of
defence from year to year is the obstinate reproduction of the
grievance, with calculations and estimates. But, meantime, he is drawing
numbers and money to his opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails,
right of revolution is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are bound
to see their measure carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat.
Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice enters, not so
apparent in other races,--a belief in the existence of two sides, and
the resolution to see fair play. There is on every question an appeal
from the assertion of the parties to the proof of what is asserted.
They are impious in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust
before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer in the
ring, is it a candidate on the hustings,--the universe of Englishmen
will suspend their judgment, until the trial can be had. They are not
to be led by a phrase, they want a working plan, a working machine, a
working constitution, and will sit out the trial, and abide by the
issue, and reject all preconceived theories. In politics they put blunt
questions, which must be answered; who is to pay the taxes? what will
you do for trade? what for corn? what for the spinner?
This singular fairness and its results strike the French with surprise.
Philip de Commines says: "Now, in my opinion, among all the
sovereignties I know in the world, that in which the public good is best
attended to, and the least violence exercised on the people, is that of
England." Life is safe, and personal rights; and what is freedom,
without security? whilst, in France, 'fraternity,' 'equality,' and
'indivisible unity' are names for assassination. Montesquieu said:
"England is the freest country in the world. If a man in England had as
many enemies as hairs on his head, no harm would happen to him."
Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their realistic logic
or coupling of means to ends, have given them the leadership of the
modern world. Montesquieu said, "No people have true common-sense but
those who are born in England." This common-sense is a perception of
all the conditions of our earthly existence, of laws that can be stated,
and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only by practice,
in which allowance for friction is made. They are impious in their
scepticism of theory, and in high departments they are cramped and
sterile. But the unconditional surrender to facts, and the choice of
means to reach their ends, are as admirable as with ants and bees.
The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love the lever,
the screw, and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall,
wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and the wind to bear their
freight-ships. More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among
their crown-jewels, they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than a
man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose
axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam
and galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the
coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters,
colliers, wool-combers, and tanners in Europe. They apply themselves to
agriculture, to draining, to resisting encroachments of sea, wind,
travelling sands, cold and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufacture of
indispensable staples,--salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery,
and brick,--to bees and silk-worms; and by their steady combinations
they succeed. A manufacturer sits down to dinner in a suit of clothes
which was wool on a sheep's back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman
on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mushrooms, and
pineapples, all the growth of his estate. They are neat husbands for
ordering all their tools pertaining to house and field. All are well
kept. There is no want and no waste. They study use and fitness in
their building, in the order of their dwellings, and in their dress.
The Frenchman invented the ruffle, the Englishman added the shirt. The
Englishman wears a sensible coat buttoned to the chin, of rough but
solid and lasting texture. If he is a lord, he dresses a little worse
than a commoner. They have diffused the taste for plain substantial
hats, shoes, and coats through Europe. They think him the best dressed
man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or
remember to describe it.
They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts and
manufactures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its shape, thought and
long experience of workmen. They put the expense in the right place,
as, in their sea-steamers, in the solidity of the machinery and the
strength of the boat. The admirable equipment of their arctic ships
carries London to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts, warm and
ventilate houses. And they have impressed their directness and
practical habit on modern civilization.
In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks who ought not to
break; and, that, if he do not make trade everything, it will make him
nothing; and acts on this belief. The spirit of system, attention to
details, and the subordination of details, or, the not driving things
too finely (which is charged on the Germans), constitute that despatch
of business, which makes the mercantile power of England.
In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of the opinion of
Civilis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus reports as holding "that the
gods are on the side of the strongest";--a sentence which Bonaparte
unconsciously translated, when he said, "that he had noticed, that
Providence always favored the heaviest battalion." Their military
science propounds that if the weight of the advancing column is greater
than that of the resisting, the latter is destroyed. Therefore
Wellington, when he came to the army in Spain, had every man weighed,
first with accoutrements, and then without; believing that the force of
an army depended on the weight and power of the individual soldiers, in
spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons, that more
care is taken of the health and comfort of English troops than of any
other troops in the world; and that hence the English can put more men
into the ranks, on the day of action, on the field of battle, than any
other army. Before the bombardment of the Danish forts in the Baltic,
Nelson spent day after day, himself in the boats, on the exhausting
service of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's celebrated manoeuvre
of breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson's feat of _doubling_, or
stationing his ships one on the outer bow, and another on the outer
quarter of each of the enemy's, were only translations into naval
tactics of Bonaparte's rule of concentration. Lord Collingwood was
accustomed to tell his men, that, if they could fire three well-directed
broadsides in five minutes, no vessel could resist them; and, from
constant practice, they came to do it in three minutes and a half.
But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely most on the
simplest means; and do not like ponderous and difficult tactics, but
delight to bring the affair hand to hand, where the victory lies with
the strength, courage, and endurance of the individual combatants. They
adopt every improvement in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they
fundamentally believe that the best stratagem in naval war is to lay
your ship close alongside of the enemy's ship, and bring all your guns
to bear on him, until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old
fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither in nor out of England.
It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sentiment, and never
any whim that they will shed their blood for; but usually property, and
right measured by property, that breeds revolution. They have no Indian
taste for a tomahawk-dance, no French taste for a badge or a
proclamation. The Englishman is peaceably minding his business and
earning his day's wages. But if you offer to lay hand on his day's
wages, on his cow, or his right in common, or his shop, he will fight to
the Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, _habeas-corpus_, star-chamber,
ship-money, Popery, Plymouth colony, American Revolution, are all
questions involving a yeoman's right to his dinner, and, except as
touching that, would not have lashed the British nation to rage and
revolt.
Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order, and of
calculation, it must be owned they are capable of larger views; but the
indulgence is expensive to them, costs great crises, or accumulations of
mental power. In common, the horse works best with blinders. Nothing is
more in the line of English thought, than our unvarnished Connecticut
question, "Pray, sir, how do you get your living when you are at home?"
The questions of freedom, of taxation, of privilege, are money
questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer and fleshpots, they are hard
of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy minds need to be flagellated
by war and trade and politics and persecution. They cannot well read a
principle, except by the light of fagots and of burning towns.
Tacitus says of the Germans, "powerful only in sudden efforts, they are
impatient of toil and labor." This highly destined race, if it had not
somewhere added the chamber of patience to its brain, would not have
built London. I know not from which of the tribes and temperaments that
went to the composition of the people this tenacity was supplied, but
they clinch every nail they drive. They have no running for luck, and no
immoderate speed. They spend largely on their fabric, and await the
slow return. Their leather lies tanning seven years in the vat. At
Rogers's mills, in Sheffield, where I was shown the process of making a
razor and a penknife, I was told there is no luck in making good steel;
that they make no mistakes, every blade in the hundred and in the
thousand is good. And that is characteristic of all their work,--no
more is attempted than is done.
When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he is told that "nobody
is permitted to remain here, unless he understand some art, and excel in
it all other men." The same question is still put to the posterity of
Thor. A nation of laborers, every man is trained to some one art or
detail, and aims at perfection in that: not content unless he has
something in which he thinks he surpasses all other men. He would
rather not do anything at all, than not do it well. I suppose no people
have such thoroughness: from the highest to the lowest, every man
meaning to be master of his art.
"To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the end of a speech in
debate: "no," said an Englishman, "but to set your shoulder at the
wheel,--to advance the business." Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak
in popular assemblies, confining himself to the House of Commons, where
a measure can be carried by a speech. The business of the House of
Commons is conducted by a few persons, but these are hard-worked. Sir
Robert Peel "knew the Blue Books by heart." His colleagues and rivals
carry Hansard in their heads. The high civil and legal offices are not
beds of ease, but posts which exact frightful amounts of mental labor.
Many of the great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, are
soon worked to death. They are excellent judges in England of a good
worker, and when they find one, like Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir
William Coventry, Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel,
or Russell, there is nothing too good or too high for him.
They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public aim. Private
persons exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian researches, the same
pertinacity as the nation showed in the coalitions in which it yoked
Europe against the Empire of Bonaparte, one after the other defeated,
and still renewed, until the sixth hurled him from his seat.
Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his father, who had made
the catalogue of the stars of the northern hemisphere, expatriated
himself for years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of
the southern heaven, came home, and redacted it in eight years more;--a
work whose value does not begin until thirty years have elapsed, and
thenceforward a record to all ages of the highest import. The Admiralty
sent out the Arctic expeditions year after year, in search of Sir John
Franklin, until, at last, they have threaded their way through polar
pack and Behring's Straits, and solved the geographical problem. Lord
Elgin, at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek remains, set up his
scaffoldings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five years' labor to
collect them, got his marbles on shipboard. The ship struck a rock, and
went to the bottom. He had them all fished up, by divers, at a vast
expense, and brought to London; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and
Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were to be his applauders.
In the same spirit, were the excavation and research by Sir Charles
Fellowes, for the Xanthian monument; and of Layard, for his Nineveh
sculptures.
The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended
into every man's mind, though he live in Van Dieman's Land or Capetown.
Faithful performance of what is undertaken to be performed, they honor
in themselves, and exact in others, as certificate of equality with
themselves. The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day
by day. The commercial relations of the world are so intimately drawn
to London, that every dollar on earth contributes to the strength of the
English government. And if all the wealth in the planet should perish
by war or deluge, they know themselves competent to replace it.
They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-going qualities;
their descent from Odin's smiths, by their hereditary skill in working
in iron; their British birth, by husbandry and immense wheat harvests;
and justified their occupancy of the centre of habitable land, by their
supreme ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, builded,
forged, spun, and woven. They have made the island a thoroughfare; and
London a shop, a law-court, a record-office, and scientific bureau,
inviting to strangers; a sanctuary to refugees of every political and
religious opinion; and such a city, that almost every active man, in any
nation, finds himself, at one time or other, forced to visit it.
In every path of practical activity, they have gone even with the best.
There is no secret of war, in which they have not shown mastery. The
steam-chamber of Watt, the locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of
Roberts, perform the labor of the world. There is no department of
literature, of science, or of useful art, in which they have not
produced a first-rate book. It is England, whose opinion is waited for
on the merit of a new invention, an improved science. And in the
complications of the trade and politics of their vast empire, they have
been equal to every exigency, with counsel and with conduct. Is it their
luck, or is it in the chambers of their brain,--it is their commercial
advantage, that whatever light appears in better method or happy
invention, breaks out _in their race_. They are a family to which a
destiny attaches, and the Banshee has sworn that a male heir shall never
be wanting. They have a wealth of men to fill important posts, and the
vigilance of party criticism insures the selection of a competent
person.
A proof of the energy of the British people is the highly artificial
construction of the whole fabric. The climate and geography, I said,
were factitious, as if the hands of man had arranged the conditions.
The same character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon said, "Rome was a
state not subject to paradoxes"; but England subsists by antagonisms and
contradictions. The foundations of its greatness are the rolling waves;
and, from first to last, it is a museum of anomalies. This foggy and
rainy country furnishes the world with astronomical observations. Its
short rivers do not afford water-power, but the land shakes under the
thunder of the mills. There is no gold-mine of any importance, but
there is more gold in England than in all other countries. It is too far
north for the culture of the vine, but the wines of all countries are in
its docks. The French Comte de Lauraguais said, "no fruit ripens in
England but a baked apple"; but oranges and pineapples are as cheap in
London as in the Mediterranean. The Mark-Lane Express, or the
Custom-House Returns bear out to the letter the vaunt of Pope,--
"Let India boast her palms, nor envy we
The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree,
While, by our oaks, those precious loads are borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn."
The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of artificial
breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and cows and horses to
order, and breeds in which everything was omitted but what is
economical. The cow is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his surloin.
Stall-feeding makes sperm-mills of the cattle, and converts the stable
to a chemical factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds, too much fished,
or obstructed by factories, are artificially filled with the eggs of
salmon, turbot, and herring.
Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are unhealthy
and too barren to pay rent. By cylindrical tiles, and gutta-percha
tubes, five millions of acres of bad land have been drained and put on
equality with the best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate too,
which was already believed to have become, milder and drier by the
enormous consumption of coal, is so far reached by this new action, that
fogs and storms are said to disappear. In due course, all England will
be drained, and rise a second time out of the waters. The latest step
was to call in the aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is almost an
Englishman. I do not know but they will send him to Parliament, next,
to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans, and now he must
pump, grind, dig, and plough for the farmer. The markets created by the
manufacturing population have erected agriculture into a great thriving
and spending industry. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to
the value of the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than the
natural resources. No man can afford to walk, when the parliamentary
train carries him for a penny a mile. Gas-burners are cheaper than
daylight in numberless floors in the cities. All the houses in London
buy their water. The English trade does not exist for the exportation of
native products, but on its manufactures, or the making well everything
which is ill made elsewhere. They make ponchos for the Mexican,
bandannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, beads for the Indian,
laces for the Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for kings.
The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and Italy to be
placed within the reach of every manufacturing population. They caused
to be translated from foreign languages and illustrated by elaborate
drawings, the most approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. They
have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a grace to the products
of their looms, their potteries, and their foundries.[6]
[6] See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66, New York, 1853.
The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social system. Their
law is a network of fictions. Their property, a scrip or certificate of
right to interest on money that no man ever saw. Their social classes
are made by statute. Their ratios of power and representation are
historical and legal. The last reform-bill took away political power
from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst Birmingham and
Manchester, whose mills paid for the wars of Europe, had no
representative. Purity in the elective Parliament is secured by the
purchase of seats.[7] Foreign power is kept by armed colonies; power at
home, by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better than the
free laborer; the thief better than the pauper; and the transported
felon better than the one under imprisonment. The crimes are
factitious, as smuggling, poaching, non-conformity, heresy, and treason.
Better, they say in England, kill a man than a hare. The sovereignty of
the seas is maintained by the impressment of seamen. "The impressment
of seamen," said Lord Eldon, "is the life of our navy." Solvency is
maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "if you will
not lend me the money, how can I pay you?" For the administration of
justice, Sir Samuel Romilly's expedient for clearing the arrears of
business in Chancery, was, the chancellor's staying away entirely from
his court. Their system of education is factitious. The Universities
galvanize dead languages into a semblance of life. Their church is
artificial. The manners and customs of society are artificial;--made-up
men with made-up manners;--and thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we
have a nation whose existence is a work of art;--a cold, barren, almost
arctic isle, being made the most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land
in the whole earth.
[7] Sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that the only
independent mode of entering Parliament was to buy a seat, and he
bought Horsham.
Man in England submits to be a product of political economy. On a bleak
moor, a mill is built, a banking-house is opened, and men come in, as
water in a sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a
Birmingham button. The rapid doubling of the population dates from
Watt's steam-engine. A landlord, who owns a province, says, "the
tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep." He unroofs the houses,
and ships the population to America. The nation is accustomed to the
instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim of their economists,
"that the greater part in value of the wealth now existing in England
has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months."
Meantime, three or four days' rain will reduce hundreds to starving in
London.
One secret of their power is their mutual good understanding. Not only
good minds are born among them, but all the people have good minds.
Every nation has yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many
tribes, only one. But the intellectual organization of the English
admits a communicableness of knowledge and ideas among them all. An
electric touch by any of their national ideas, melts them into one
family, and brings the hoards of power which their individuality is
always hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the smallness of the
country, or is it the pride and affection of race,--they have
solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each other.
Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more lasting than the
cloth. They embrace their cause with more tenacity than their life.
Though not military, yet every common subject by the poll is fit to make
a soldier of. These private reserved mute family-men can adopt a public
end with all their heat, and this strength of affection makes the
romance of their heroes. The difference of rank does not divide the
national heart. The Danish poet Oehlenschlager complains, that who
writes in Danish writes to two hundred readers. In Germany, there is
one speech for the learned, and another for the masses, to that extent,
that, it is said, no sentiment or phrase from the works of any great
German writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But in England,
the language of the noble is the language of the poor. In Parliament,
in pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers rise to thought and passion,
the language becomes idiomatic; the people in the street best understand
the best words. And their language seems drawn from the Bible, the
common law, and the works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young,
Cowper, Burns, and Scott. The island has produced two or three of the
greatest men that ever existed, but they were not solitary in their own
time. Men quickly embodied what Newton found out, in Greenwich
observatories, and practical navigation. The boys knew all that Hutton
knew of strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels; and
these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what is invented or
known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, or in art, or in
literature, and antiquities. A great ability, not amassed on a few
giants, but poured into the general mind, so that each of them could at
a pinch stand in the shoes of the other; and they are more bound in
character than differenced in ability or in rank. The laborer is a
possible lord. The lord is a possible basket-maker. Every man carries
the English system in his brain, knows what is confided to him, and does
therein the best he can. The chancellor carries England on his mace,
the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith on his hammer, the
cook in the bowl of his spoon; the postilion cracks his whip for
England, and the sailor times his oars to "God save the King!" The very
felons have their pride in each other's English stanchness. In politics
and in war, they hold together as by hooks of steel. The charm in
Nelson's history is, the unselfish greatness; the assurance of being
supported to the uttermost by those whom he supports to the uttermost.
Whilst they are some ages ahead of the rest of the world in the art of
living; whilst in some directions they do not represent the modern
spirit, but constitute it,--this vanguard of civility and power they
coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lock-step, foot after foot, file after
file of heroes, ten thousand deep.