There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In
America, there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits the evidences of
large property, as if, after all, it needed apology. But the Englishman
has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A
coarse logic rules throughout all English souls;--if you have merit, can
you not show it by your good clothes, and coach, and horses? How can a
man be a gentleman without a pipe of wine? Haydon says, "There is a
fierce resolution to make every man live according to the means he
possesses." There is a mixture of religion in it. They are under the
Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days shall be
long in the land, they shall have sous and daughters, flocks and herds,
wine and oil. In exact proportion is the reproach of poverty. They do
not wish to be represented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has
lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart. The last term
of insult is, "a beggar." Nelson said, "The want of fortune is a crime
which I can never get over." Sydney Smith said, "Poverty is infamous in
England." And one of their recent writers speaks, in reference to a
private and scholastic life, of "the grave moral deterioration which
follows an empty exchequer." You shall find this sentiment, if not so
frankly put, yet deeply implied, in the novels and romances of the
present century, and not only in these, but in biography, and in the
votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preaching, and in the
table-talk.
I was lately turning over Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, and looking
naturally for another standard in a chronicle of the scholars of Oxford
for two hundred years. But I found the two disgraces in that, as in
most English books, are, first, disloyalty to Church and State, and,
second, to be born poor, or to come to poverty. A natural fruit of
England is the brutal political economy. Malthus finds no cover laid at
nature's table for the laborer's son. In 1809, the majority in
Parliament expressed itself by the language of Mr. Fuller in the House
of Commons, "If you do not like the country, damn you, you can leave
it." When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish officers
to bind children apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles from
their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, "though, in the higher
ranks, to cultivate family affections was a good thing, 't was not so
among the lower orders. Better take them away from those who might
deprave them. And it was highly injurious to trade to stop binding to
manufacturers, as it must raise the price of labor, and of manufactured
goods."
The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only by the
respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of art of the Saxon, as he
is a wealth-maker, and his passion for independence. The Englishman
believes that every man must take care of himself, and has himself to
thank, if he do not mend his condition. To pay their debts is their
national point of honor. From the Exchequer and the East India House to
the huckster's shop, everything prospers, because it is solvent. The
British armies are solvent, and pay for what they take. The British
empire is solvent; for, in spite of the huge national debt, the
valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst they
complained that they were taxed within an inch of their lives, and, by
dint of enormous taxes, were subsidizing all the continent against
France, the English were growing rich every year faster than any people
ever grew before. It is their maxim, that the weight of taxes must be
calculated, not by what is taken, but by what is left. Solvency is in
the ideas and mechanism of an Englishman. The Crystal Palace is not
considered honest until it pays; no matter how much convenience, beauty,
or _eclat_, it must be self-supporting. They are contented with slower
steamers, as long as they know that swifter boats lose money. They
proceed logically by the double method of labor and thrift. Every
household exhibits an exact economy, and nothing of that uncalculated
headlong expenditure which families use in America. If they cannot pay,
they do not buy; for they have no presumption of better fortunes next
year, as our people have; and they say without shame, I cannot afford
it. Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second-class cars, or in
the second cabin. An economist, or a man who can proportion his means
and his ambition, or bring the year round with expenditure which
expresses his character, without embarrassing one day of his future, is
already a master of life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his
son, "that one ought never to devote more than two thirds of his income
to the ordinary expenses of life, since the extraordinary will be
certain to absorb the other third."
The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability, government
becomes a manufacturing corporation, and every house a mill. The
headlong bias to utility will let no talent lie in a napkin,--if
possible, will teach spiders to weave silk stockings. An Englishman,
while he eats and drinks no more, or not much more than another man,
labors three times as many hours in the course of a year, as an other
European; or, his life as a workman is three lives. He works fast.
Everything in England is at a quick pace. They have reinforced their
own productivity, by the creation of that marvellous machinery which
differences this age from any other age.
'T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of the
machine-shop. Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained the
precession of the equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform of
the calendar; measured the length of the year, invented gunpowder; and
announced (as if looking from his lofty cell, over five centuries, into
ours) "that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than
a whole galley of rowers could do; nor would they need anything but a
pilot to steer them. Carriages also might be constructed to move with
an incredible speed, without the aid of any animal. Finally, it would
not be impossible to make machines, which, by means of a suit of wings,
should fly in the air in the manner of birds." But the secret slept
with Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet fulfilled his words.
Two centuries ago, the sawing of timber was done by hand; the
carriage-wheels ran on wooden axles; the land was tilled by wooden
ploughs. And it was to little purpose that they had pit-coal or that
looms were improved, unless Watt and Stephenson had taught them to work
force-pumps and power-looms by steam. The great strides were all taken
within the last hundred years. The life of Sir Robert Peel, in his day
the model Englishman, very properly has, for a frontispiece, a drawing
of the spinning-jenny, which wove the web of his fortunes. Hargreaves
invented the spinning-jenny, and died in a workhouse. Arkwright
improved the invention; and the machine dispensed with the work of
ninety-nine men: that is, one spinner could do as much work as one
hundred had done before. The loom was improved further. But the men
would sometimes strike for wages, and combine against the masters, and,
about 1829-30, much fear was felt, lest the trade would be drawn away by
these interruptions, and the emigration of the spinners, to Belgium and
the United States. Iron and steel are very obedient. Whether it were
not possible to make a spinner that would not rebel, nor mutter, nor
scowl, nor strike for wages, nor emigrate? At the solicitation of the
masters, after a mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts of
Manchester undertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of the
quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a few trials, he succeeded, and,
in 1830, procured a patent for his self-acting mule; a creation, the
delight of mill-owners, and "destined," they said, "to restore order
among the industrious classes"; a machine requiring only a child's hand
to piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed domestic
spinning, so Roberts destroyed the factory spinner. The power of
machinery in Great Britain, in mills, has been computed to be equal to
600,000,000 men, one man being able by the aid of steam to do the work
which required two hundred and fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago.
The production has been commensurate. England already had this
laborious race, rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and favorable
climate. Eight hundred years ago, commerce had made it rich, and it was
recorded, "England is the richest of all the northern nations." The
Norman historians recite, that "in 1067, William carried with him into
Normandy, from England, more gold and silver than had ever before been
seen in Gaul." But when, to this labor and trade and these native
resources was added this goblin of steam, with his myriad arms, never
tired, working night and day everlastingly, the amassing of property has
run out of all figures. It makes the motor of the last ninety years.
The steam-pipe has added to her population and wealth the equivalent of
four or five Englands. Forty thousand ships are entered in Lloyd's
lists. The yield of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 quarters in the
time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854. A thousand million pounds
sterling are said to compose the floating money of commerce. In 1848,
Lord John Russell stated that the people of this country had laid out
L300,000,000 of capital in railways, in the last four years. But a
better measure than these sounding figures is the estimate, that there
is wealth enough in England to support the entire population in idleness
for one year.
The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, roads,
locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar to a millionth of an
inch. Steam twines huge cannon into wreaths, as easily as it braids
straw, and vies with the volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It
can clothe shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that will
cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it can plant forests, and bring rain
after three thousand years. Already it is ruddering the balloon, and
the next war will be fought in the air. But another machine more potent
in England than steam is the Bank.
It votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated, and cities rise;
it refuses loans, and emigration empties the country; trade sinks;
revolutions break out; kings are dethroned. By these new agents our
social system is moulded. By dint of steam and of money, war and
commerce are changed. Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the
patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and
live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will
live under. Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a limp-band
that will hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now, that a telegraph line
runs through France and Europe, from London, every message it transmits
makes stronger by one thread the band which war will have to cut.
The introduction of these elements gives new resources to existing
proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that the state depends on the
House of Lords, but the engineer sees, that every stroke of the
steam-piston gives value to the duke's land, fills it with tenants;
doubles, quadruples, centuples the duke's capital, and creates new
measures and new necessities for the culture of his children. Of
course, it draws the nobility into the competition as stockholders in
the mine, the canal, the railway, in the application of steam to
agriculture, and sometimes into trade. But it also introduces large
classes into the same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms
itself with these magnificent powers; new men prove an overmatch for the
land-owner, and the mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor, who
once forged his bolts in icy Hecla, and built galleys by lonely fiords,
in England, has advanced with the times, has shorn his beard, enters
Parliament, sits down at a desk in the India House, and lends Miollnir
to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.
The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years is a main
fact in modern history. The wealth of London determines prices all over
the globe. All things precious, or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating,
are sucked into this commerce and floated to London. Some English
private fortunes reach, and some exceed, a million of dollars a year. A
hundred thousand palaces adorn the island. All that can feed the senses
and passions, all that can succor the talent, or arm the hands of the
intelligent middle class who never spare in what they buy for their own
consumption; all that can aid science, gratify taste, or soothe comfort,
is in open market. Whatever is excellent and beautiful in civil, rural,
or ecclesiastic architecture; in fountain, garden, or grounds; the
English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy at home. The
taste and science of thirty peaceful generations; the gardens which
Evelyn planted; the temples and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and
Christopher Wren built; the wood that Gibbons carved; the taste of
foreign and domestic artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton,
are in the vast auction, and the hereditary principle heaps on the owner
of to-day the benefit of ages of owners. The present possessors are to
the full as absolute as any of their fathers, in choosing and procuring
what they like. This comfort and splendor, the breadth of lake and
mountain, tillage, pasture, and park, sumptuous castle and modern
villa,--all consist with perfect order. They have no revolutions; no
horse-guards dictating to the crown; no Parisian _poissardes_ and
barricades; no mob; but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, wine, and
ale, and beer, and gin, and sleep.
With this power of creation, and this passion for independence, property
has reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the national
life-blood. The laws are framed to give property the securest possible
basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the
cunningest heads in a profession which never admits a fool. The rights
of property nothing but felony and treason can override. The house is a
castle which the king cannot enter. The Bank is a strong-box to which
the king has no key. Whatever surly sweetness possession can give, is
tasted in England to the dregs. Vested rights are awful things, and
absolute possession gives the smallest freeholder identity of interest
with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked garden gates announce
the absolute will of the owner to be alone. Every whim of exaggerated
egotism is put into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with costly
deliberation and detail.
An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes to establish some
claim to put her park paling a rod forward into his grounds, so as to
get a coachway, and save her a mile to the avenue. Instantly he
transforms his paling into stone masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma,
and all Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or compound for an inch of
the land. They delight in a freak as the proof of their sovereign
freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice
of incomparable prospect, built a house like a long barn, which had not
a window on the prospect side. Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole,
Fonthill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks; and Newstead Abbey became
one in the hands of Lord Byron.
But the proudest result of this creation has been the great and refined
forces it has put at the disposal of the private citizen. In the social
world, an Englishman to-day has the best lot. He is a king in a plain
coat. He goes with the most powerful protection, keeps the best
company, is armed by the best education, is seconded by wealth; and his
English name and accidents are like a flourish of trumpets announcing
him. This, with his quiet style of manners, gives him the power of a
sovereign, without the inconveniences which belong to that rank. I much
prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better class, to
that of any potentate in Europe,--whether for travel, or for opportunity
of society, or for access to means of science or study, or for mere
comfort and easy healthy relation to people at home.
Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a mighty mass, and made
good in whatever details we care to explore. The cause and spring of it
is the wealth of temperament in the people. The wonder of Britain is
this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men
as themselves; each is a captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of
men is represented again in the faculty of each individual,--that he has
waste strength, power to spare. The English are so rich, and seem to
have established a taproot in the bowels of the planet, because they are
constitutionally fertile and creative.
But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them
rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a
new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own
anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the
work of the world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user.
What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power. There should
be temperance in making cloth, as well as in eating. A man should not
be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. The robust rural
Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester stockinger, to the
imbecile Manchester spinner,--far on the way to be spiders and needles.
The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him
of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a
buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of
industry, whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when, the fashion
of shoestrings supersedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen,
or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are enclosed by landlords.
Then society is admonished of the mischief of the division of labor, and
that the best political economy is care and culture of men; for, in
these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals,
capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their
talent to new labor. Then again come in new calamities. England is
aghast at the disclosure of her fraud in the adulteration of food, of
drugs, and of almost every fabric in her mills and shops; finding that
milk will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread satisfy, nor pepper
bite the tongue, nor glue stick. In true England all is false and
forged. This too is the reaction of machinery, but of the larger
machinery of commerce. 'T is not, I suppose, want of probity, so much
as the tyranny of trade, which necessitates a perpetual competition of
underselling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of the fabric.
The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, and flies away
with the aeronaut. Steam from the first hissed and screamed to warn
him; it was dreadful with its explosion, and crushed the engineer. The
machinist has wrought and watched, engineers and firemen without number
have been sacrificed in learning to tame and guide the monster. But
harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his
paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Robinson,
and their Parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false
principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were
enriching the country which they were impoverishing. They congratulated
each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find a merchant who
knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise or fall, or who
knows the mischief of paper-money. In the culmination of national
prosperity, in the annexation of countries; building of ships, depots,
towns; in the influx of tons of gold and silver; amid the chuckle of
chancellors and financiers, it was found that bread rose to famine
prices, that the yeoman was forced to sell his cow and pig, his tools,
and his acre of land; and the dreadful barometer of the poor-rates was
touching the point of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in the solvent
classes, and forcing an exodus of farmers and mechanics. What befalls
from the violence of financial crises, befalls daily in the violence of
artificial legislation.
Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous, and augmenting.
But the question recurs, does she take the step beyond, namely, to the
wise use, in view of the supreme wealth of nations? We estimate the
wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.
And, in view of these injuries, some compensation has been attempted in
England. A part of the money earned returns to the brain to buy
schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, and artists with;
and a part to repair the wrongs of this intemperate weaving, by
hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics' Institutes, public grounds, and
other charities and amenities. But the antidotes are frightfully
inadequate, and the evil requires a deeper cure, which time and a
simpler social organization must supply. At present, she does not rule
her wealth. She is simply a good England, but no divinity, or wise and
instructed soul. She too is in the stream of fate, one victim more in a
common catastrophe.
But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness to be held
as the chief offender. England must be held responsible for the
despotism of expense. Her prosperity, the splendor which so much
manhood and talent and perseverance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the
very argument of materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of base
wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and wisdom, when mean gain has
arrived at the conquest of letters and arts; when English success has
grown out of the very renunciation of principles, and the dedication to
outsides. A civility of trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of
sensation takes place, and the putting as many impediments as we can,
between the man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them have the
manliness to resist it successfully. Hence, it has come, that not the
aims of a manly life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous
expense, is that which is to be considered by a youth in England,
emerging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a misfortune.
And it is a consolation in the death of the young, that a source of
expense is closed.