Dear Mr. Editor,--The name of your magazine shall not deter me from
sending you my slight reflections But you have been across, and will
agree with me that it is the great misfortune of this earth that so much
salt-water is still lying around between its various countries. The
steam-condenser is supposed to diminish its bulk by shortening the
transit from one point to another; but a delicate conscience must aver
that there is a good deal left. The ocean is chiefly remarkable as the
element out of which the dry land came. It is only when the land and sea
combine to frame the mighty coast-line of a continent, and to fringe it
with weed which the tide uncovers twice a day, that the mind is saluted
with health and beauty. The fine instinct of Mr. Thoreau furnished him
with a truth, without the trouble of a single game at pitch and toss
with the mysterious element; for he says,--
"The middle sea contains no crimson dulse,
Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view,
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse,
And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew."
On the broad Atlantic there is no smell of the sea. That comes from the
brown rocks whence iodine is exhaled to brace the nerves and the fancy,
while summer woods chasten all the air. At best, the ocean is austere
and unsympathetic; and a sensible, that is, a sensitive, stomach
understands it to be demoralized by the monstrous krakens which are
viciously brooding in its depths. (If the pronoun "it," in the last
sentence, should refer to stomach, the sense will still be clear.) In
fact, this water has been left over from the making of the earth: like
the Dodo and the Moa, it should have evaporated. How pleasant it is to
be assured by Sir Charles Lyell that the land is still rising in so many
quarters of the globe! for we may anticipate that millennial epoch when
there shall be "no more sea."
However, the old impression which great spaces used to make upon the
imagination gives way to the new sensation of annihilating spaces. It
would be more correct now to speak of differences than of distances. The
difference between one country and another is all that now makes the
distance between them. For man is now overcoming space faster than he is
obliterating national peculiarities. And when one goes abroad, the
universal humanity in whose interest all material and political
triumphs are gained is not felt by him so soon as the specific
divergence which makes the character of lands and people. Oaks and elms,
hawthorn and beeches, are on either side the ocean; but you measure the
voyage by their unlikeness to each other, and wonder how soon you have
got so far. The strawberry ripens with a different flavor and texture.
The sun is less racy in all the common garden-stuff whose names we know.
Pears and peaches we are disappointed in recognizing; they seem as if
ripened by the sun's proxy, the moon; and our boys would hardly pick up
the apples in the fields. But England undulates with grass that seems to
fix the fluent color of the greenest waves on either hand. And our
eagle-eyed blue sky droops its lid over the island, as the moisture
gathers, with a more equable compassion than we know for all shrubs and
blades and grazing cattle.
Both the pain and the tonic in being absent from your home and country
are administered by difference. In gulping that three thousand miles the
taste is austere, but the stimulus is wholesome. We learn to appreciate,
but also to correct, the fare we have at home.
The difference is twofold between England and America. England differs,
first, in the inveterate way in which the people hold on to all that
they have inherited; second, in the gradual, but equally inveterate, way
in which they labor to improve their inheritance. The future is gained
by the same temper in which the past is held; so that, if the past is
secure, the future is also: none the less because the past seems so
irrevocably built, but rather in consequence of that, because it betrays
the method of the builders.
These two characteristics, apparently irreconcilable, are really
organic, and come of position, climate, diet, and slowly amalgamated
races of men. Herne's oak in Windsor Forest and the monarchy in Windsor
Castle grew on the same terms. Branch after branch the oak has fallen,
till on the last day of the summer of 1863 the wind brought the
shattered remnant to the ground. Whether the monarchy decay like this or
not, it has served to shelter a great people; and the English people is
still vital with its slow robustness, and is good for depositing its
annual rings these thousand years.
Let us look a little more closely at this apparent contradiction.
The superficial view of England breeds a kind of hopelessness in the
mind of the observer. He says to himself,--"All these stereotyped habits
and opinions, these ways of thinking, writing, building, living, and
dying, seem irrepealable; and the worst fault of their comparative
excellence is, that they appear determined not to yield another inch to
improvement." The Englishman says that America is forever bullying with
her restlessness and innovation. The American might at first say that
England bullied by never budging,--bullied the future, and every
rational or humane suggestion, by planting a portly attitude to
challenge the New Jerusalem in an overbearing chest voice, through which
the timid clarion of the angels is not heard.
If an observer knows anything of the history of England, he cannot deny
that vast changes have been made in every department of life: domestic
habits, social economics, the courts of law, the Church, the liberty of
the press and of speech, in short, all the roads, whether material or
mental, by which mankind travels to its ultimate purpose, have been
graded, widened, solidly equipped and built. A thousand years have
converted three or four races into one people,--and all that time and
weather have made upon it such strong imprints that you cannot see the
difference between a pyramid and a cathedral sooner than you can the
distinctive nationality of England. But for that very reason you despair
of it, just as you do of a cathedral which cannot be adapted to the
wants of a new religious age. At the same time that you venerate the
history of England, and are thankful for the great expansion which she
gave to human rights, you almost quarrel with it, because at first it
seems like an old stratum with its men and women imbedded; its
institutions, once so softly and lightly deposited, now become a tough
clay; its structures, once so curiously devised for living tenants, now
crusts and shells; its tracks of warm and bleeding feet now set in a
stiff soil that will take no future impression.
All this is due to the first glance you get at the hard, realistic
England of to-day. You have noticed a machine clutch its raw material
and twist and turn it through its relentless bowels. That is the way the
habits of England seize you when you land, and begin to appropriate your
personality. This is the first offence of England in the eyes of an
American, whose favorite phrase, "the largest liberty," is too
synonymous with the absence of any settled habits. Prescribed ways of
doing everything are the scum which a traveller first gathers in
England. Perhaps he thinks that he has caught the English nationality in
his skimmer; and as he rather contemptuously examines these topmost and
handiest traits, he grumbles to himself that these are the habits of a
very old nation, that lives on an island, and keeps up a fleet, not to
bridge, but to widen narrow seas. Such respect for routine and
observance can nowhere else be perceived. An American is so little
prepared for this that he is disposed to quarrel with it even in
railway-stations, where it is most excellent. But it penetrates all
forms and institutions; the Established Church itself is a specimen of
complete arranging and engineering; the worshippers are classified,
ticketed, and despatched safely rolling on the broad gauge of the
Liturgy, in confidence of being set down at last where the conductors
have contracted to take them. How accurately everybody in England knows
his own place!--and he accepts it, however humble, with a determined
feeling that it is inevitable. The audience is so packed that everybody
remains quiet. The demeanor of the servants is as settled and
universally deferential as Westminster Abbey is Gothic. Mr. Lindsay or
Mr. Roebuck might forget to revile America, or Lord Palmerston,
England's right hand, forget his cunning, as soon as a servant might
forget his place. A thousand years have settled him in it; and you are
supposed by him to have had the benefit of as many years in determining
your own position and relation to him. You are electrified when a waiter
first touches his hat to you; it is as if he had discharged something
into you by the gesture, which is likely to exhaust him, and you expect
to have to offer him a chair. But his deference is an integral part of
the stability of England. When he forgets it, look for a panic in the
Exchange, the collapse of credit, and the assassination of the Queen.
This mutual deference in a country that is so strictly apportioned into
castes becomes an unconscious toadyism, which is saved from being very
repulsive only by the frank and childlike ways of the people. If it is
carried too far, they are the first to see it. The "Times" could not
report a case of murder without remarking, as it described the direction
of the fatal shot, "What was a very singular fact, a part of the charge,
after crossing the apartment, entered a picture of her Majesty the Queen
on the opposite wall";--that is, in committing the murder, the charge of
powder went too far; it ought to have stuck to its business, instead of
violating one of the chief proprieties of a limited monarchy. But when
the Queen went down to Greenwich summer before last to embark for
Belgium, an over-zealous official issued an order that no person should
be admitted into the yard of the dock, no workman should cross the yard
while she was in it, and no one should look out of a window until she
had gone. This was his British sense of the behavior due to a Queen who
was in mourning for her husband, and might dislike to be observed. But
the whole press derided this order, and subjected it to indignant
criticism; the officer was styled flunky and tyrant, and the Queen
herself was obliged to rebuke and disavow it.
In doing everything in England, there is so little excitement, because
it is felt to be irregular. The temper of the people is well kept by the
smooth and even island air; the moist southwestern winds come and soothe
with calm lips the check. The thermometer, like everything else, knows
its place; and when once it succeeded in passing through twenty degrees
in the course of a day, the oldest inhabitant of London grew anxious; it
was feared that stocks, too, would fall. The thunderstorms understand
propriety, and simply growl, like the dissatisfied Englishman. Vivid
effects, sharp contrasts, violent exertions, cannot be sustained in that
insular atmosphere. It seems as if London, like a lover of the weed,
were pacified by its own smoke. I saw two huge wagons turn from opposite
quarters into a narrow lane. The drivers kept their horses moving till
the heads of the leaders touched; then they sat still and looked at each
other. Both were determined that it was a point of honor to stay where
they were. After a few words of rather substantial English had passed
between them, both subsided into a dogged equanimity. A crowd gathered
instantly, but with as little tumult as ants make; it regarded the
occurrence as a milder form of pugilism, and watched the result with
interest. A policeman passed blandly from one wagon to the other,
represented the necessities of the public traffic, hoped they would
settle it shortly, urged the matter as an intimate friend of the
parties, till at length the man who was conscious that he turned into
the lane the last gathered up his reins and backed out of it. It was a
little index of the popular disposition; and I expected that as soon as
the country became convinced that it had driven rashly into our civil
strait, it would deliberately back out of it. And this it is now slowly
engaged in doing.
The two great parties of the Church and Liberalism are blocking each
other in the same manner; but in this case Liberalism has turned into
the great thoroughfare of the world's movement, and finds the Church,
like a disabled omnibus, disputing the passage by simply lying across
it. Dr. Temple and one hundred liberal Fellows of Oxford sent up to
Parliament a petition which prayed for the abolition of the subscription
test. At Oxford two subscriptions are required as a qualification for
academic degrees: one to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and one to the third
article of the thirty-sixth Canon. Liberal clergymen and members of the
Church of England find this test odious, because it constrains the
conscience to accept ancient formulas of belief without the benefit of
private interpretation. The conservatives desire to maintain the test,
thinking that it will be a barrier to the tide of private interpretation
which is just now mounting so high. The petitioners perceive that no
test can prevent a man from having his own thoughts; that it is
therefore obsolete; that it drives out of the Church the best
men,--those, namely, who think with independent vigor, and whose
activity would put a new soul into the old Establishment. When this
petition came up for debate in the House of Commons, the conservative
speakers accused the petitioners of wishing to set up a new school of
theological belief and criticism. Mr. Gladstone made a speech, full of
grace and an even vigor, to the effect that he could not conceive of
religion disconnected from definite statements such as those which the
Church possessed; the idea was to his mind as absurd as to conceive of
manifestations of life without a body. Mr. Goschen, the new member from
London, made his maiden speech on this occasion. It was very earnest and
liberal, and reminded one of American styles of speaking, being less
even and conversational than the style which Englishmen admire. His
opinion was, that all tests should be abolished, and that inclusion was
safer than exclusion: meaning that the Church ought to keep herself so
organized as to absorb the best vitality of every generation, instead of
turning it out to become cold and hostile. The phrase which he used is
the very essence of a republican policy. It represents the tendency of
the people of England, as distinguished from its ministers and the
traditions of its government. That phrase will one day be safely driven
clear through the highway where the omnibus is now lying; but for the
present, the abolition of tests and church-rates, the recognition of
every shade of dissent, and the graver political reformation which waits
behind all these are held in check by the _vis inertiae_ of an
Establishment that lies across the road.
During the exciting anti-church-rate contests of 1840, the Church party
in Rochdale, which had been defeated in an attempt to levy a church-rate
where for several years none had been collected, held a meeting to try
the matter over again. It was adjourned from the church to the
graveyard. The vicar, as chairman, occupied one tombstone, and John
Bright stood upon another to make one of his strong defences of the
rights of Voluntaryism. In the course of the discussion, the vicar's
warden rendered an account of the dilapidations of the building which
the proposed rate was to repair, and stated, with great simplicity, that
"the foundations were giving way,"--a significant remark, which the
meeting, though held in a grave place, received with shouts of laughter.
Such a statement may well be taken as symbolical of the condition of the
Establishment, when liberal criticism, represented by Colenso, Stanley,
Jowett, Baden Powell, and a respectable minority, is silently crumbling
the underpinning, while the full service is intoned above and the
pampered ceremonial swells the aisles.
If the opponents of liberal thinking ever bring an action against a
prominent dissenter from their views, the Privy Council gets rid of the
case by deciding it upon the purely technical position of the
Church,--as in the case of Dr. Williams, whose offence was the
publication of his Essay on Bunsen, and Mr. Wilson, whose essay was
entitled "Seances Historiques de Geneve--The National Church." The
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decide that they have no power
to define what is true and what is false doctrine, but only what has
been established to be the law of the Church upon the true and legal
construction of her Articles and Formularies.
I. The Church does not require her clergy to believe in the inspiration
of _all_ portions of the Scriptures.
II. Nor that the Atonement operates by _substitution_ of Christ's
suffering for our sins.
III. Nor that the phrase "everlasting fire," in the Athanasian Creed, is
to be received as a final and hopeless statement.
As a specimen of the popular element which is at work among the
uneducated classes to make the people itself of England its real church,
it is worth while to observe what Mr. Spurgeon is doing. His chapel
stands on the southern side of the Thames, between the Victoria and
Surrey Theatres, where the British subject is served with the domestic
and nautical drama. On those stages the language struts and aspirates,
and the effects are borrowed from Vauxhall and Cremorne for plays which
are constructed to hold the greatest possible amount of cockneyism and
grotesqueness, with the principal object of showing how villany and
murder are uniformly overcome by virtue, whose kettle sings upon the hob
above a pile of buttered muffins at last; and the pit, which came in for
a shilling, pays the extra tribute of a tear. These shop-keepers of the
Surrey side sit on Sunday beneath Mr. Spurgeon's platform, whose early
preaching betrayed the proximity of the theatres, but was for that very
reason admirably seasoned to attract his listeners. If he ever did slide
down the rail of his pulpit-stairs, as reported, in order to dramatize
the swift descent of the soul into iniquity, and then painfully climb up
again to show its difficult return, the action was received, doubtless,
in its full ethical import, and shook the suburban heart. His blunt and
ordinary language, sinning frequently against taste, and stooping
sometimes to be coarse, was the very vehicle to take his hearers up at
the pit-door, theatrical or theological, and send them in wholesomer
directions. It was a fortunate--his co-religionists would say
providential--adaptation of an earnest and religious man to the field of
his labor. For, as time passed, the phrases and demeanor of his
preaching improved,--their absurdities have, no doubt, been caricatured
by the London press,--and the temper of the man was more plainly
observed to be sincere, fervent, and devoted to a certain set of
religious preconceptions. The want of culture and of general
intelligence was not so lamentable in such a neighborhood. He led, by
many lengths, the Victoria and Surrey stage. If he had more deeply
reflected upon the subjects which he handled like a simple-hearted boy,
he would have failed to keep four thousand men and women warm in the
hollow of his hand from Sunday to Sunday, for a dozen years, and to
organize their whole moral and religious activity in forms that are
admirably adapted to carry on the work of popular dissent.
His audience represents the district, and is an advertisement of the
kind of spiritual instruction which it needs and gets. Not many large
heads sit in the pews; narrowness, unreflecting earnestness, and healthy
desires are imprinted upon the faces upturned towards his clear and
level delivery. He is never exactly vapid, and he never soars. His
theology is full of British beer; but the common-sense of his points and
illustrations relative to morals and piety is a lucid interval by which
the hearers profit. They follow his textual allusions in their little
Bibles, and devoutly receive the crude and amusing interpretations as
utterances of the highest exegetical skill. But their faces shine when
the discourse moralizes; it seems to take them by the button, so
friendly it is,--but it looks them closely in the eye, without heat and
distant zeal, with great, manly expostulation, rather, and half-humorous
argument, that sometimes make the tears stand upon the lids. The florid
countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions
glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry
people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. His clear
voice, well fuelled by a full, though rather flabby frame, rolls into
all the galleries and corners of the vast building without effort; his
gestures are even and well balanced; and you are, in fact, surprised to
see how good a natural orator he is. You went to hear him, expecting to
find some justification for the stories which impute to him a low and
egotistic presence, and a delivery that depends upon broadness for its
effects. But he appears unpretending, in spite of the satisfied look
which he casts around the congregation when he first steps to the
railing of the platform. He is evidently conscious that he owns the
building and the audience; but, content with that, he makes no attempt
to put them in his pocket; on the contrary, he almost instantly becomes
seriously engaged in transferring into them his lesson for the day. His
style of extemporaneous speaking is conversational,--the better English
suspect all other styles,--and this of itself shows what improvement has
taken place in the Surrey region. If at first he indulged in rant, he
has now subsided into an even vein; he puts things plumply, and tells
his feelings gravely, and makes his points without quackery. So it is
plain that when he gives notice of a contribution for his college, in
which young men are trained for the ministry, and states simply, in
justification, that one hundred and fifty have already left it, and are
now engaged in preaching the dissenting word, he is to be regarded as
one of the decided influences which are now at work to bring the people
up to self-consciousness, self-respect, and political importance.
It is very characteristic that the National Church is called an
Establishment,--in other words, something that stays where it was put
some time ago. The thing which ought to move first, and move
continually through all the avenues of the public life, to keep them
clear of the obstructions of ignorance and superstition, and prevent the
great travel and intercourse of thought from stagnating, is the thing in
England which is most unwilling to stir. Already a fearful accumulation
of passengers and vehicles, whose patience is nearly exhausted, is
anxious to be let through in time to keep appointment with the world's
grave business. Young thoughts are hurrying to be indorsed; mature paper
dreads to be protested; the hour of the world's liberal exchange is
about to strike. Depend upon it, at the critical moment, when the
pressure in the rear becomes the most emphatic, the people in the
omnibus will have to get out and assist the passengers in drawing it to
one side, where it will remain a long time unmolested.
But the first thing which you say concerning the men and institutions of
England is, that they are established. In America some things are
finished before they are done; but there are no tottering
trestle-bridges in the routes of English enterprise to let the
travellers through. When a business firm becomes fairly built up, it
lasts a hundred years or more. Shop-signs are not taken down except by
the weather; new fronts grow so slowly along the ancient streets that
they appear to be deposited by secretion, like corals and shells. I took
a book to a printer, and found he was the grandson of the man who
published "Junius" in 1769, doing business in the same dingy court and
office, with the old regularity and deliberation. When I said, that, for
want of time, I should have to risk formidable errata and print at the
rate of sixty-four pages a day, he plainly suspected me of derangement
and of a desire to impart my condition to his machinery. On repeating it
with calmness, he set it down for Yankee braggadocio, and assured me
that not an author in England could print at that rate. Then he went to
work. They detest being hurried, but their latent momentum is very
great. Limited suffrage and many administrative abuses will feel it
soon, as similar things have felt it before.
But you are deceived at first, and anticipate deterioration rather than
improvement for the people of England. The city of London, with its two
and a half millions of inhabitants, looks like a huge stone that has
been pried over a sweet well; nobody need expect to draw water there any
more; fresh ones must be dug, we say, in America, in Russia, to reach
primitive human nature again, and set it free to make the wilderness
blossom. London looks as if it had slowly grown from the soil and the
climate, like a lichen that clings closely to its rocky site. The heavy,
many-storied buildings of Portland stone are blackened by the smoke till
they appear more like quarries then habitations; the swarms of human
beings look ephemeral as moths. The finest architecture becomes in a few
years indistinguishable, and delicate ornamentation is as much
superfluous as among the weather-stained cliffs and boulders of the
coast. Monumental inscriptions are smutted and half-obliterated, but the
scurf protects the monument. Under the huge pile of St. Paul's the
ceaseless traffic of human passions passes as through a defile of the
hills. When the lights spring forth towards evening, and sparkle on the
great dull masses, it seems as if the buildings had been there forever,
and forever would be, endowed with some elemental process which puts
forth the lighting. Newgate itself, without windows towards the street,
a huge angle of dead walls, with heavy iron fetters suspended over the
gateways, and statues so blackened in their niches as to dispel the
illusion that they ever did or could suggest humanity, is a settled
gloom in the midst of the city, like the thought of a discouraged and
defeated man. It has a terrible suggestion that crime is established in
London,--immutable methods of being guilty and of being condemned--all
old, old, and irrepealable.
From Primrose Hill, beyond Regent's Park, and towards the open country,
the profile of the city can be seen at one view, as it emerges from the
smoke, is heavily described athwart it, and plunges into it again, like
a great, silent feature of the earth itself, lifted in an atmosphere
whose density seems to be a part of the antiquity. Hidden in that smoke
the streets roll night and day, like great arteries, to feed, replace,
repair, business, pleasure, and misery, but to change it no more than
the blood changes the tricks of an old brain or the settled beating of a
stubborn heart.
These are some of the physical aspects which seduce a traveller into the
impression that the vigor and glory of England have culminated, and
would fall apart sooner than take on new forms or yield to the moulding
power of popular ideas.
The impression is deepened by the feeling of hostility to American
institutions, and by the special dislike of the North, which the past
four years have betrayed. The commercial and ruling classes had been
skilfully prepared, by applications of Southern sentiment, for the
declaration of neutrality, which was supposed to contain the triple
chance of destroying a dangerous republic, of securing unlimited
supplies of cotton by free-trade, and of erecting in the South an
oligarchic form of government. Under the circumstances, they felt that
neutrality was a kind of merit in them, and a magnanimity which the
declining North ought to have hailed with enthusiasm, as it showed that
England scorned to take a more deadly advantage of our perilous
position. This anti-Northern feeling is, and always has been, confined
to the Tory classes, in and out of the Government, to the rich and their
dependants, to the confirmed High-Churchmen. Even an American resident,
if he was wealthy, and liked the Church of England, and had settled down
into a British country-seat with British ways of living, would be sure
to misrepresent the North, to be pleased at its defeats and annoyed by
its successes, partly from commercial and partly from pro-slavery
considerations. The America which he remembered, and regretted that he
could not still be proud of, was the America where Pierce and Buchanan
were Presidents, where Jefferson Davis and John B. Floyd were
Secretaries of War. He had, in short, become a Tory; for Toryism is
regard for usages at the expense of men. He and the English Tory desired
the triumph of Slavery, because it was the best thing for the negro, and
the quietest thing for trade and government. The only difference between
them is, that he would own slaves, if he had an opportunity, while the
Englishman would not, partly because his own servants are so excellent.
But both of them would subscribe to the Boston "Courier." The English
Tory hates to have the poor classes of London use the railways on the
Lord's Day, to go and find God's beauty in the Crystal Palace and the
daisy-haunted fields. One of the most striking spectacles in London is
found on Sunday, by standing on some bridge that spans the Thames, to
watch the little river-steamers, black with human beings, that shoot
like big water-bugs from the piers every five minutes, and fussily elbow
their way down-stream to various places of resort. On that day people
cluster like bees all over the omnibuses, till the vehicle looks like a
mere ball of humanity stuck together, rolling down to some
excursion-train. This is a bitter sight to an old-fashioned
Churchman.[A] The American Tory will hate _any_ day that releases the
poor and the oppressed into God's glorious liberty. One of the most
worthy and offensive men you can meet in London is the American Tory of
this description: worthy, because honest and clean and free from vice;
offensive, because totally destitute of republican principle. If
stripped of his wealth, he might become a rich man's invaluable flunky,
and carry the decorous prayer-book to church, bringing up the rear of
the family with formalism. Toryism has a profound respect for external
godliness, and remembers that the Southerner sympathizes with bishops,
who, like Meade of Virginia, preach from the text, "Servants, obey your
masters," and, like Polk of Louisiana, convert old sermons upon the
divine sanction of Slavery into cartridge-paper. We must recollect, too,
that a good many educated Englishmen dislike republican institutions
because they have identified the phrase with all the atrocious things
which successive pro-slavery administrations have conceived and
perpetrated; for the Englishman is dull at understanding foreign
politics, and reads the "Times," though he strongly avers that he is not
influenced by it. An administration appears to an Englishman to be the
country; he has not yet heard an authoritative interpretation of
republicanism, for a Washington cabinet has not till lately spoken the
mind of the common people. But when he understands us better he will
dread us all the more, because the people in all countries speak the
same language in expressing the same wants; and when universal suffrage
puts universal justice on its throne in America, injustice will
everywhere uneasily await the ballot which shall place it in the
minority. The dislike of the English Tory is already passing into this
second stage, when his hope of a dissolved Union gives place to his
dread of a regenerated country that hastens to propagate its best ideas.
There were three elements in this anti-Northern feeling. First, a
sympathy with the smaller and feebler party. This is a trait which puts
the English people by the side of the Turk in the Crimea, the Circassian
in the Caucasus, the Pole, the Dane,--which inspired Milton's famous
letter, in the name of Cromwell, that espoused the cause of the
Waldenses. In fact, wherever the smaller and weaker party has no
relations with England, the country hurries to protect it. But where, as
in the case of the Irish, the Sepoy, the New-Zealander, the Caffre, and
the Chinese, England's interest is touched by the objections of people
to her own harsh and inveterate rule, she has no magnanimity, and
forgets the sentiments of her nobler minds. The same Cromwell who
threatened Europe in behalf of the Waldenses contrived the massacre of
the Irish at Drogheda. So when sympathy with the distant South
harmonized with dread of the North, she was willingly misled by Southern
agents to see a war of conquest and aggression.
The second element is a fear of the ultimate consequences of a Union
reconstructed without Slavery; for then Mr. Bright may argue in favor of
universal suffrage, uninterrupted by allusions to the arrogance and
coarseness, the boastful and aggressive spirit belonging to a
pro-slavery America. "Why do you desire the dissolution of the Union?"
asked one Englishman of another. "Oh, I have no reason, except that the
Americans are so bounceable I want to see them humbled." But we were the
weakest when Slavery made us so loud-mouthed and vaporing; we shall be
strongest when the cause of our boasting has disappeared. When a country
is fully conscious of the principles that belong to it, and sees them
cleansed with her children's blood, through eyes that stand full with
tears, she will invite, but no longer threaten; and the flag which she
once waved in the face of all mankind to exasperate will rain persuasion
as often as it is unfurled.
But it will be a long time before the Englishman appreciates the altered
condition of this country and resigns his prejudices, in consequence of
another element in this un-American feeling, namely, insular ignorance.
Among the contraband articles which are with difficulty smuggled into
any point of the English coast is an accurate knowledge of the polity
and condition of another country. Indifference is the coastguard which
protects, without moving, every inlet and harbor. The Englishman is
surprised, if all the world is not intimately acquainted with the
British Constitution, which is not a written document, but a practical
result that appears in all the administrative forms of the country, and
can be studied only on the spot; but he will not take the trouble to
inquire into the relation which the separate States bear to the Federal
government; and he seems prevented by some congenital deficiency from
understanding how the latter is the direct result of the independence of
the former. The question he asks most frequently is, "Why has not an
independent State the right to secede?" He is infected by nature with
Mr. Calhoun's fallacy. You cannot make a Tory understand that powers are
derived from the consent of the governed, and that the consent is itself
an institution. "What becomes of State rights?" he asks. And when you
reply, that the concentred function of each State is contained within a
diffused popular will whose centre is at Washington, and that
thirty-four concentrations of this kind are nothing more than
thirty-four general conveniences, he takes you slowly by the button,
looks pityingly in your face, and says, "That is a Northern crotchet,
which this civil war has come to cure," and then he leaves you. It is in
vain that you shout after him, "That is a Northern principle, which this
war has come to confirm": he was out of hearing before he left. You feel
that you are a stranger in the house of your own mother. You walk about
among these slow, good-natured men, with plump boys' faces and men's
chests, and hear them speak your language without your sense. They have
a limited one, like their monarchy. How admirably it keeps the square
miles of their own island! how shockingly it tends the acres of Ireland!
how haughtily it ignored and trampled upon the instincts of the Hindoo!
how unwilling it is to see a difference between the circumstances of
Australia and those of England! How it blundered into a neutrality which
was a recognition of infamy! This is the distance which Toryism spreads
between the mother country and our own.
But this must not be accepted as a final statement of the prospects of
England, or of its relation to America. There is, in the first place, a
great popular sympathy with the North, and it prophesies the future
condition of England. When you use the phrase, "people of England,"
understand that the Toryism which governs England is left out. Bigoted
Churchmen, who are afraid that the island will drag its anchor because
Bishop Colenso notices some errors in the Pentateuch,--shifty
politicians, like Russell and Palmerston,--sour ones, like
Roebuck,--scandalous ones, like Lindsay,--and conservatives, like Cecil
and Gladstone, now make all the political blunders which they call
governing England. Their constituents are two thirds of the merchants,
nearly all the literary men, nearly all the clergymen, half the
University fellows and professors. But the people of England have not
yet been mentioned. They govern England at this moment, and yet John
Bright sits almost alone for them in Parliament; John Stuart Mill,
Professors Cairnes, Newman, Goldwin Smith, are almost their only
powerful writers. The people of England put the broad arrow of their
Queen upon the Rebel rams. They stay at home, and by taking the penny
papers slowly undermine the "Times." They have defeated every attempt to
organize a party for Southern recognition, by simply staying away from
the public meetings which the sympathizers called. Once they uttered
their opinion by the lips of starving operatives, when the distress in
the manufacturing districts was deepest, and capitalists were chary of
their aid. The Southern agent was busy then, in all the towns and
villages where the misery dwelt. "You are starving."--"Yes."--"And it
is for want of cotton."--"So it seems."--"Well, do you mean to sit here?
Come out in great force, as in the old Chartist times; tell the
manufacturer and the minister to break that blockade and let bread into
the mouths of your little ones." And the answer was, "We prefer that
they should starve." Again and again, the answer was, "We would rather
starve." And this haggard patience was saving the manufacturer himself
from ruin, who had been engaged in over-manufacturing, till his
warehouses groaned with an enormous stock which the cotton blockade
enabled him to work off. Great fortunes have been made in this way,
while the operative slowly went to rags, road-mending, and the
poor-rates. In London, hard upon midnight, I have often been attracted
by the sound of street-music to a little group, in the centre of which
stood half a dozen pallid and threadbare men, playing gentle tunes upon
the faithful instruments which clung to their sad fortunes. And on a
square of canvas, lighted by a lantern, or set in the flaring gas, I
have read, to the sound of these paupers' music, the story of America:
"Lancashire Weavers out of Work," "Poor Operatives' Band,--a penny, if
you please." That music keeps the heart of England quiet while your
cannons roar. It is the pulse of the people of England, responding in
the faint distance to the throb of victory.
Another sight which can be seen by day in London streets belongs also to
the people of England. When there was a dearth of troops during the
Crimean War, the coast forts were stripped of their garrisons, and there
was a call made by Government for volunteers to fill their places.
Citizens came forward and manned the forts. This was the origin
of the volunteer force of England, which has grown to be very
formidable,--since jealousy of France, dread of invasion, and the need
of troops for India have always deterred the Government from recalling
the arms which it first put into the hands of the people. The force now
comprises infantry, cavalry, light and heavy artillery, organized like
the regular army, and under the control of the Horse Guards. Rifle-corps
and target-practice have become a mania. The Government encourages it by
magnificent reviews and prizes for the best shooting, utterly
unconscious that Government itself may one day be the target. But a
bloody revolution can hardly occur again in England. It will only be
necessary, at some critical moment, for the London volunteers to march
as far as Charing-Cross on their way towards Parliament and the Palace.
The concession would be there before them.
Mr. Holyoake, who is one of the most vigorous champions of free thought
and popular rights in England, says,--"Revolution is no longer necessary
in English politics. Our wise and noble forefathers, of those old times
of which modern radicals in many towns know too little, laid broad
foundations of freedom in our midst. It only needs that we build upon
these, and the English educated classes, who always move in the grooves
of precedent, will acquiesce with a reasonable readiness."[B]
The feeling of the radical class of English workmen is elsewhere
illustrated by Mr. Holyoake with a story from the Allendale mining
district. "Four miners published a volume of poems. One of these four in
his poem talks of tyranny falling at a moment's notice. Tyranny is not
in such a hurry. A 'voice of thunder' is to proclaim its doom. Alas, it
is the voice of steady intelligent purpose, much more difficult to
elicit, and not that of 'thunder,' which is to accomplish that. The poet
of course has a vision about the 'equal share' which the fall of tyranny
is to end in. The 'equal share' system would not last a day, as
everybody who reflects knows, and would give endless trouble to renew it
every morning."[C]
It is a striking characteristic of English Toryism, that it gives way
just in time. Every reform has hitherto been granted as it was on the
point of being extorted. Official carriages roll over the very spot
where Charles I. dropped his self-willed head; Lady Macbeth might wash
her hands as soon as the English people their memories of the civil
bloodstain. Toryism knows one thing well: that no water-pipes can be
made strong enough to withstand the sudden stoppage of a long column of
water. They will burst and overflow. No matter what material may be in
motion, if the motion be suddenly arrested, heat, in a direct ratio to
the motion, is developed. A decided popular tendency will never be
peremptorily stopped in England.
It is therefore a grand sight to an American, when the well-appointed
companies of London riflemen march up Fleet Street and the Strand,
through Temple-Bar, that bars nothing any longer, and stands there a
decaying symbol of Toryism itself. The brass bands may play, "Britannia
rules the Waves," or "God save the Queen," but to the American ear they
sound, "The Waves rule Britannia," "God save the Common People!" Every
shouldered musket shall be a vote; the uniform shall represent community
of interest and sentiment. The rhythm of the living column is the march
of England's steady justice into coal-mines and factories, Church and
State.
For this reason we ought to cultivate pacific relations with the
Government of England. Beware lest the question of the Alabama break
loose to prey upon the true commerce of mankind! A war would put back
the people of England for fifty years. When England is at war, the
people are apt to rally to the Government. The island is so small, that,
when a feeling once gets started, it sweeps all men away into an
inconsiderate and almost savage support of the public honor. If Toryism
cannot secure to itself the benefit of a war upon some point that
involves an English prejudice or interest, it cannot prevent the rising
strength of the people from going into opposition. Dissenters of every
class are emptying the pews of the Establishment; liberal thinkers now
hold University fellowships only to avoid surrendering all the ground to
a reactionary party. The abolition of the stamp-tax has freed the daily
press, and expensive newspapers no longer represent little cliques, but
belong to the people of England, who take their pennyworth of honest
criticism every morning; and the best of these newspapers have been for
three years on the side of Northern republicanism. This is the instinct
of human nature, which knows its rights and hungers to possess them.
We are maintaining half a million of men in the field, half a million
outlets of our heart's blood, because we believe that inclusion is
better than exclusion. The nation's instinct for that truth has gone
into camp. It is a belief that the life of the Republic depends upon
including every State, and including every citizen, and including every
emigrant, and including every slave, in the right to live, labor, and be
happy, and excluding none. We feel that the blood we lose in fighting
for that plain maxim of republican economy will make again fast enough
when the maxim has prevailed. The weaver of Lancashire, who plays out
his hunger in London streets, and our seamen who make the weaver wait
while they watch three thousand miles of seaboard, are both listening to
the rote of the same great truth, as it dashes on the shores of Time,
and brings bracing air to the people who are sick with waiting. If we
are gaining battles because we love the rights of the common people, our
success will include the English weaver, Dissenters will build churches
on our corner-stone of Liberty, the taxed will borrow our ballot-boxes
to contain their votes, and none shall be excluded but the betrayers of
mankind.