what is called its seat; every colony has its Paris, or 'seat
of government.' At this spot there is government; elsewhere
little or none. Montreal, for example, is the Paris of
Canada. Here, of course, as in the Paris of France, or in
London, representatives of the people assemble to make laws,
and the executive departments, with the cabinet of ministers,
are established. But now mark the difference between England
on the one hand, and France or Canada on the other. The laws
of England being full of delegation of authority for local
purposes, and for special purposes whether local or not,
spread government all over the country; those of Canada or
France in a great measure confine government to the capital
and its immediate neighbourhood. If people want to do
something of a public nature in Caithness or Cornwall, there
is an authority on the spot which will enable them to
accomplish this object, without going or writing to a distant
place. At Marseilles or Dunkerque you cannot alter a high
road, or add a gens-d'arme to the police force, without
correspondence with Paris; at Gaspé and Niagara you could
not, until lately, get anything of a public nature done,
without authority from the seat of government. But what is
the meaning, in this case, of a correspondence with Paris or
Montreal? It is doubt, hesitation, and ignorant objection on
the part of the distant authority; references backwards and
forwards; putting off of decisions; delay without end; and
for the applicants a great deal of trouble, alternate hope
and fear, much vexation of spirit, and finally either a rough
defeat of their object or evaporation by lapse of time. In
France, accordingly, whatever may be the form of the general
government, improvement, except at Paris, is imperceptibly
slow; whilst in Old, and still more in New England, you can
hardly shut your eyes anywhere without opening them on
something new and good, produced by the operation of
delegated government specially charged with making the
improvement. In the colonies it is much worse than in France.
The difficulty there is even to open a correspondence with
the seat of government; to find somebody with whom to
correspond. In France, at any rate, there is at the centre a
very elaborate bureaucratic machinery, instituted with the
design of supplying the whole country with government--the
failure arises from the practical inadequacy of a central
machinery for the purpose in view: but in our colonies, there
is but little machinery at the seat of government for even
pretending to operate at a distance. The occupants of the
public offices at Montreal scarcely take more heed of Gaspé,
which is five hundred miles off and very difficult of access,
than if that part of Canada were in Newfoundland or Europe.
Gaspé, therefore, until lately, when, on Lord Durham's
recommendation, some machinery of local government was
established in Canada, was almost without government, and one
of the most barbarous places on the face of the earth. Every
part of Canada not close to the seat of government was more
or less like Gaspé. Every colony has numerous Gaspés. South
Africa, save at Cape Town, is a Gaspé all over. All Australia
Felix, being from five hundred to seven hundred miles distant
from its seat of government at Sidney, and without a made
road between them, is a great Gaspé. In New Zealand, a
country eight or nine hundred miles long, without roads, and
colonised, as Sicily was of old, in many distinct
settlements, all the settlements, except the one at which the
government is seated, are miserable Gaspés as respects
paucity of government. In each settlement, indeed, there is a
meagre official establishment, and in one of the settlements
there is a sort of lieutenant-governor; but these officers
have no legislative functions, no authority to determine
anything, no originating or constructive powers: they are
mere executive organs of the general government at the
capital, for administering general laws, and for carrying
into effect such arbitrary instructions, which are not laws,
as they may receive from the seat of government. The
settlers, therefore, are always calling out for something
which government alone could furnish. Take one example out of
thousands. The settlers at Wellington in New Zealand, the
principal settlement of the colony, wanted a light-house at
the entrance of this harbour. To get a light-house was an
object of the utmost importance to them. The company in
England, which had founded the settlement, offered to advance
the requisite funds on loan. _But the settlement had no
constituted authority that could accept the loan and
guarantee its repayment._ The company therefore asked the
colonial office, whose authority over New Zealand is supreme,
to undertake that the money should be properly laid out and
ultimately repaid. But the colonial office, charged as it is
with the general government of some forty distinct and
distant communities, was utterly incapable of deciding
whether or not the infant settlement ought to incur such a
debt for such a purpose; it therefore proposed to refer the
question to the general government of the colony at Auckland.
But Auckland is several hundred miles distant from
Wellington, and between these distant places there is no road
at all--the only way of communication is by sea; and as there
is no commercial intercourse between the places,
communication by sea is either so costly, when, as has
happened, a ship is engaged for the purpose of sending a
message, or so rare, that the settlers at Wellington
frequently receive later news from England than from the seat
of their government: and moreover the attention of their
government was known to be, at the time, absorbed with
matters relating exclusively to the settlement in which the
government resided. Nothing, therefore, was done; some ships
have been lost for want of a lighthouse; and the most
frequented harbour of New Zealand is still without one."--(P.
212.)
This is a long extract, but it could not be abridged, and the
importance of the subject required it. Mr Wakefield has some remarks
upon the necessity of supplying religious instruction and the means of
public worship to our colonies, with which we cannot but cordially
agree. But we rubbed our eyes, and read the following passage twice
over, before we were quite sure that we had not misapprehended it: "I
am in hopes of being able, when the proper time shall come for that
part of my task, to persuade you that it would now be easy for England
to plant _sectarian colonies_--that is, colonies with the strong
attraction for superior emigrants, of a peculiar creed in each
colony"--(P. 160.) We thought that it was one of the chief boasts, and
most fortunate characteristics of our age, that men of different
sects, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, Independents and Baptists, had
learned to live quietly together. It is a lesson that has been slowly
learnt, and through much pain and tribulation. What is the meaning of
this retrograde movement, this drafting us out again into separate
corps? Possibly the fact of the whole settlement being of one sect of
Christians may tend at first to promote harmony--although even this
cannot be calculated upon; but differences of opinion are sure, in
time, to creep in; and the ultimate consequence would be, that such a
colony, in a future generation, would be especially afflicted with
religious dissensions, and the spirit of persecution. It would have to
learn again, through the old painful routine, the lesson of mutual
toleration. We suspect that Mr Wakefield is so engrossed with his
favourite subject of colonisation, that, if the Mormonites were to
make a good settlement of it, he would forgive them all their
absurdities; perhaps congratulate them on their harmony of views.
We have hitherto regarded colonisation in its general, national, and
legislative aspect: the following passage takes us into the heart of
the business as it affects the individuals themselves, of all classes,
who really think of emigrating. It is thus Mr Wakefield describes
"the charms of colonisation:"--
"Without having witnessed it, you cannot form a just
conception of the pleasurable excitement which those enjoy
who engage personally in the business of colonisation. The
circumstances which produce these lively and pleasant
feelings are, doubtless, counteracted by others productive of
annoyance and pain; but, at the worst, there is a great deal
of enjoyment for all classes of colonists, which the fixed
inhabitants of an old country can with difficulty comprehend.
The counteracting circumstances are so many impediments to
colonisation, which we must examine presently. I will now
endeavour to describe briefly the encouraging circumstances
which put emigrants into a state of excitement, similar to
that occasioned by opium, wine, or winning at play, but with
benefit instead of fatal injury to the moral and physical
man.
"When a man, of whatever condition, has finally determined to
emigrate, there is no longer any room in his mind for thought
about the circumstances that surround him: his life is for
some time an unbroken and happy dream of the imagination. The
labourer--whose dream is generally realised--thinks of light
work and high wages, good victuals in abundance, beer and
tobacco at pleasure, and getting in time to be a master in
his trade, or to having a farm of his own. The novelty of the
passage would be a delight to him, were it not for the ennui
arising from want of occupation. On his arrival at the
colony, all goes well with him. He finds himself a person of
great value, a sort of personage, and can indulge almost any
inclination that seizes him. If he is a brute, as many
emigrant labourers are, through being brutally brought up
from infancy to manhood, he lives, to use his own expression,
'like a fighting cock,' till gross enjoyment carries him off
the scene. If he is of the better sort, by nature and
education, he works hard, saves money, and becomes a man of
property--perhaps builds himself a nice house, glories with
his now grand and happy wife in counting the children, the
more the merrier, and cannot find anything on earth to
complain of, but the exorbitant wages he has to pay. The
change for this class of men being from pauperism, or next
door to it, to plenty and property, is indescribably, to our
apprehensions almost inconceivably, agreeable.
"But the classes who can hardly imagine the pleasant feelings
which emigration provides for the well-disposed pauper, have
pleasant feelings of their own when they emigrate, which are
perhaps more lively in proportion to the greater
susceptibility of a more cultivated mind to the sensations of
mental pain and pleasure. Emigrants of cultivated mind, from
the moment when they determine to be colonists, have their
dreams, which, though far from being always, or ever fully
realised, are, I have been told by hundreds of this class,
very delightful indeed. They think with great pleasure of
getting away from the disagreeable position of anxiety,
perhaps of wearing dependence, in which the universal and
excessive competition of this country has placed them. But it
is on the future that their imagination exclusively seizes.
They can think in earnest about nothing but the colony. I
have known a man of this class, who had been too careless of
money here, begin, as soon as he had resolved on emigration,
to save sixpences, and take care of bits of string, saying
'everything will be of use _there_.' There! it is common for
people whose thoughts are fixed 'there,' to break themselves
all at once of a confirmed habit--that of reading their
favourite newspaper every day. All the newspapers of the old
country are now equally uninteresting to them. If one falls
in their way, they perhaps turn with alacrity to the shipping
lists, and advertisements of passenger ships, or even to an
account of the sale of Australian wool, or New Zealand flax;
but they cannot see either the parliamentary debate, or the
leading article which used to embody their own opinions, or
the reports, accidents, and offences, of which they used to
spell every word. Their reading now is confined to letters
and newspapers from the colony, and books relating to it.
They can hardly talk about anything that does not relate to
'there.'"--(P. 127.)
A man is far gone, indeed, when he has given up his _Times_! This zeal
for emigration amongst the better classes, and especially amongst
educated youths, who find the avenues to wealth blocked up in their
own country, is, we apprehend, peculiar to our day, and amongst the
most novel aspects which the subject of colonisation assumes. How many
of these latter find their imaginations travelling even to the
antipodes! _Where_ shall we colonise? is a question canvassed in many
a family, sometimes half in jest, half in earnest, till it leads to
the actual departure of the boldest or most restless of the circle.
Books are brought down and consulted; from the ponderous folio of
Captain Cook's voyages--which, with its rude but most illustrative of
prints, was the amusement of their childhood, when they would have
thought a habitation in the moon as probable a business as one in New
Zealand--to the last hot-pressed journal of a residence in Sydney; and
every colony in turn is examined and discussed. Here climate is so
delicious you may sleep without hazard in the open air. Sleep! yes, if
the musquitoes let you. Musquitoes--oh! Another reads with delight of
the noble breed of horses that now run wild in Australia, and of the
bold horsemanship of those who drive in the herd of bullocks from
their extensive pasturage, when it is necessary to assemble in order
to number and to mark them. The name of the thing does not sound so
romantic as that of a buffalo-hunt; but, armed with your tremendous
whip, from the back of a horse whom you turn and wind at pleasure, to
drive your not over-tractable bullocks, must task a good seat, and a
steady hand, and a quick eye. A third dwells with a quieter delight on
the beautiful scenery, and the pastoral life so suitable to it, which
New Zealand will disclose. Valleys green as the meadows of Devonshire,
hills as picturesque as those of Scotland, and the sky of Italy over
all! and the aborigines friendly, peaceable. Yes, murmurs one, until
they eat you. Faugh! but they are reformed in that particular.
Besides, Dr Dieffenbach says, here, that "they find Europeans salt and
disagreeable." Probably they had been masticating some tough old
sailor, who had fed on junk all his life, and they found him salt
enough. But let no one in his love of science suggest this explanation
to them; let us rest under the odium of being salt and disagreeable.
These aborigines--one would certainly wish they were out of the way.
Wild men! Wild--one cannot have fellowship with them. Men--one cannot
shoot them. In Australia they are said to be not much wiser than
baboons--one wishes they were altogether baboons, or altogether men.
In New Zealand they are, upon the whole, a docile, simple people. The
missionaries are schooling them as they would little children. A very
simple people! They had heard of horses and of horsemanship; it was
some tradition handed down from their great discoverer, Captain Cook.
When lately some portly swine were landed on the island, they
concluded _these_ were the famous horses men rode upon in England.
"They rode two of them to death." Probably, by that time, they
suspected there was some error in the case.
Hapless aborigines! How it comes to pass we cannot stop to inquire,
but certain it is they never prosper in any union with the white man.
They get his gin, they get his gunpowder, and, here and there, some
travesty of his religion. This is the best bargain they make where
they are most fortunate. The two first gifts of the white man, at all
events, add nothing to the amenity of character, and happen to be
precisely the gifts they could most vividly appreciate. Our
civilisation seems to have no other effect than to break up the sort
of rude harmony which existed in their previous barbarism. They
imitate, they do not emulate; what they see of us they do not
understand. That ridiculous exhibition, so often described, which they
make with our costume--a naked man with hat and feathers stuck upon
his head; or, better still, converting a pair of leathers into a
glistening helmet, the two legs hanging down at the back, where the
flowing horse-hair is wont to fall--is a perfect emblem of what they
have gained in mind and character from our civilisation.
These poor New Zealanders are losing--what think you says Dr
Dieffenbach?--their digestion; getting dyspeptic. The missionaries
have tamed them down; they eat more, fight less, and die faster. One
of the "brethren," not the least intelligent to our mind, has
introduced cricket as a substitute for their war-dances and other
fooleries they had abolished.
When we want the soil which such aborigines are loosely tenanting, we
must, we presume, displace them. There is no help for it. But, in all
other cases, we could wish the white man would leave these dark
children of the earth alone. If there exists another Tahiti, such as
it was when Cook discovered it, such as we read of it under the old
name of Otaheite, we hope that some eternal mist, drawn in a wide
circle round the island, will shroud it from all future navigators.
Were we some great mariner, and had discovered such an island, and had
eaten of the bread-fruit of the hospitable native, and reclined under
their peaceful trees, and seen their youths and maidens crowned with
green boughs, sporting like fishes in their beautiful clear seas, no
mermaid happier--we should know but of one way to prove our
gratitude--to close our lips for ever on the discovery we had made. If
there exist in some untraversed region of the ocean another such spot,
and if there are still any genii, or jins, or whatever sea-fairies may
be called, left behind in the world, we beseech of them to protect it
from all prying circumnavigators. Let them raise bewildering mists, or
scare the helmsman with imaginary breakers, or sit cross-legged upon
the binnacle, and bewitch the compass--anyhow let them protect their
charge. We could almost believe, from this moment, in the existence of
such spirits or genii, having found so great a task for them.
We have no space to go back to other graver topics connected with
colonisation which we have passed on our road. On one topic we had
not, certainly, intended to be altogether silent. But it is perhaps
better as it is; for the subject of transportation is so extensive,
and so complicate, and so inevitably introduces the whole review of
what we call secondary punishments--of our penal code, in short--that
it were preferable to treat it apart. It would be very unsatisfactory
merely to state a string of conclusions, without being able to throw
up any defences against those objections which, in a subject so full
of controversy, they would be sure to provoke.
In fine, we trust to no ideals, no theory or art of colonisation.
Neither do we make any extraordinary or novel demands on Government. A
great work is going on, but it will be best performed by simple means.
We ask from the Government that it should survey and apportion the
land, and secure its possession to the honest emigrant, and that it
should delegate to the new settlement such powers of self-government
as are necessary to its internal improvement. These, however, are
important duties, and embrace much. The rest, with the exception of
such liberality as may be thought advisable, in addition to the fund
raised by the sale of waste land, for the despatch and outfit of the
poor labourer or artisan--the rest must be left to the free spirit of
Englishmen, whether going single or in groups and societies.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _A View of the Art of Colonisation, with present reference to the
British Empire; in Letters between a Statesman and a Colonist._ Edited
by (one of the writers) EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD.
THE REACTION, OR FOREIGN CONSERVATISM.
BOSTON, _February 1849_.
It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of
laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to
will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to
will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives
it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of what
a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of conscience. And
this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a free people is
substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with absolute
right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will
preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of
liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular conscience
is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it. They will fancy
that they ought to will what they are not permitted to will, and the
most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear tyrannical. For
such a people there can be no cure, till they are restored to a
healthy conscience. A despotism successfully established over them,
and then moderately maintained, and benevolently administered, is the
only thing that can save them from self-destruction.
I was not writing at random, then, my Basil, when I said in my last
letter that the first want of France is a national conscience. As a
nation, the French lack the moral sense. What sign of moral life have
they shown for the last fifty years? The root of bitterness in the
body politic of France, is the astonishing infidelity of the people.
Whatever be the causes, the fact is not to be denied: the land whose
crown was once, by courtesy, _most Christian_, must draw on courtesy
and charity too, if it be now called Christian at all. The spirit of
unbelief is national. It is the spirit of French literature--of the
French press--of the French academy--of the French senate; I had
almost added of the French church; and if I hesitate, it is not so
much because I doubt the corrupting influences of the French
priesthood, as because they are no longer Gallican priests, but simply
the emissaries of Ultramontanism. There is no longer a French church.
The Revolution made an end of that. When Napoleon, walking at
Malmaison, heard the bells of Ruel, he was overpowered with a sense of
the value of such associations as they revived in his own heart, and
forthwith he opened the churches which had so long been the sepulchres
of a nation's faith, convinced that they served a purpose in
government, if only as a cheap police. He opened the churches, but he
could not restore the church of France. He could do no more than
enthrone surviving Ultramontanism in her ancient seats, and that by a
manoeuvre, which made it a creature and a slave of his ambition. When
it revolted, he talked of Gallican liberties, but only for political
purposes. Nor did the Restoration do any better. The church of St
Louis was defunct. Gallican immunities were indeed asserted on paper;
but, in effect, the Jesuits gained the day. The Orleans usurpation
carried things further; for the priesthood, severed from the state,
became more Ultramontane from apparent necessity, and lost,
accordingly, their feeble hold on the remaining respect of the French
people. Who was not startled, when the once devout Lamartine talked of
"the new Christianity" of Liberty and Equality over the ruins of the
Orleans dynasty, and thus betrayed the irreligion into which he had
been repelled by the Christianity of French ecclesiastics! Thus always
uncongenial to the national character, Ultramontanism has coated, like
quicksilver, and eaten away those golden liberties which St Louis
consecrated his life to preserve, and with which have perished the
life and power of Christianity in France.
The history of France is emphatically a religious history. Every
student must be struck with it. To understand even the history of its
court, one must get at least an outline of what is meant by Jansenism
and Molinism, and Ultramontanism, and the whole tissue of isms which
they have created. No historian gives us an exemption from this amount
of polemical information. The school of Michelet is as forward as that
of de Maistre, in claiming a "religious mission" for France among the
nations; and de Stael and Chateaubriand are impressed with the same
idea. Her _publicists_, as well as her statesmen, have been always, in
their own way, theologians; and, from Louis IX. to Louis XVI., the
spirit of theology was, in some form or other, the spirit of every
reign. Not only the Mazarins, but the Pompadours also, have made
religion part of their craft; and religion became so entirely
political under Louis XV., that irreligion was easily made political
in its stead. In the court of France, in fact, theology has been the
common trade; the trade of Condé and of Guise, of Huguenot and Papist,
of Jansenist and Jesuit, of philosopher and poet, of harlots, and
almost of lap-dogs. Even Robespierre must legislate upon the
"consoling principle of an _Etre Suprême_," and Napoleon elevates
himself into "the eldest son of the church." "A peculiar
characteristic of this monarchy," says de Maistre, "is that it
possesses a certain theocratic element, special to itself, which has
given it fourteen centuries of duration." This element has given its
colour to reigns and revolutions alike; and if one admit the necessity
of religion to the perpetuity of a state, it deserves our attention,
in the light of whatever contending parties have advanced upon the
subject.
Let us begin with the revolutionists themselves. In the month of June
1844, Monsieur Quinet, "of the college of France," stood in his
lecture-room, venting his little utmost against the "impassioned
leaven of Reaction," which he declared to be fermenting in French
society. His audience was literally the youth of nations; for, as I
gather from his oratory, it embraced not only his countrymen, but,
besides them, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, Hungarians,
Spaniards, Portuguese, and a sprinkling of negroes. Upon this
interesting assembly, in which black spirits and white must have
maintained the proportion, and something of the appearance, of their
corresponding ebony and ivory in the key-board of a pianoforte, and
which he had tuned to his liking by a series of preparatory exercises,
he played, as a grand _finale_, a most brilliant experimental
quick-step, which satisfied him that every chord vibrated in harmony
with his own sweet voice. He was closing his instructions, and
addressed his pupils, not as disciples, but as friends. His great
object seems to have been to convince them of their own importance, as
the illuminated school of a new gospel of which he is himself the
dispenser, and through which, he promised them, they would become,
with him, the regenerators of the world. Having fully indoctrinated
them with his new Christianity, it was necessary to work them into
fury against the old. He had already established the unity of politics
and religion; he had shown, very artfully, that Christianity had
identified itself with Ultramontanism, and that France must perish if
it should triumph; and he had only to convince them of danger from
that quarter, to influence the combustible spirits of his credulous
hearers to the heat which his purpose required. This he did by
bellowing _Reaction_, and anathematising Schlegel and de Maistre.
You were mistaken then, my Basil, in supposing this word _Reaction_
altogether a bugbear, and in understanding it with reference only to
the counter-spirit in favour of legitimacy, which has been generated
by the revolution of last year. You see it was the hobgoblin of a
certain class of fanatics, long before Louis Philippe had received his
notice to quit. It was an "impassioned leaven" in French society five
years ago, in the heated imagination, or else in the artful theory, of
Quinet. What was really the case? There was, in his sober opinion, as
much danger from the reaction at that time as from the Great Turk, and
no more. He merely used it as an academic man-of-straw to play at
foils with. He held it up to contempt as an exploded folly, and then
pretended it was a living danger, only to increase his own reputation
for daring, and to quicken the development of antagonist principles.
He little dreamed the manikin would come to life, and show fight for
the Bourbons and legitimacy. He cried _Wolf_ for his own purposes, and
the actual barking of the pack must be a terrible retribution! The
reaction of 1848 must have come upon the professors like doomsday. I
can conceive of him, at present, only as of Friar Bacon, when he
stumbled upon the discovery of gunpowder. A moment since, he stood in
his laboratory compounding the genuine elixir of life, and assuring
his gaping disciples of the success of his experiment; but there has
been a sudden detonation, and if the professor has miraculously
escaped, it is only to find chaos come again, his admiring auditors
blown to atoms, and nothing remaining of his philosophical
trituration, except his smutty self, and a very bad smell. I speak of
him as the personification of his system. Personally, he has been a
gainer by the revolution. Guizot put him out of his place, and the
Republic has put him back; but the Reaction is upon him, and his
theories are already resolved into their original gases. "The college
of France" may soon come to a similar dissolution.