_To Mr. Ledru Rollin._
Sir,
I generally believe everything that is going to happen; and as it is a
remarkable fact that everything that is going to happen is of a
depressing nature, I undergo a good deal of anxiety. I am very careful
of myself (taking a variety of patent medicines, and paying particular
attention to the weather), but I am not strong. I think my weakness is
principally on my nerves, which have been a good deal shaken in the
course of my profession as a practising attorney; in which I have met
with a good deal to shock them; but from which, I beg leave most
cheerfully to acquaint you, I have retired.
Sir, I am certain you are a very remarkable public gentleman, though you
have the misfortune to be French. I am convinced you know what is going
to happen, because you describe it in your book on “The Decline of
England,” in such an alarming manner. I have read your book and, Sir, I
am sincerely obliged to you for what you have made me suffer; I am very
miserable and very grateful.
You have not only opened up a particularly dismal future, but you have
shown me in what a miserable condition we, here, (I mean in Tooting, my
place of abode, and the surrounding portion of the British Empire) are
at this present time; though really I was not aware of it.
I suppose that your chapter on the law of this land is the result of a
profound study of the statutes at large and the “Reports of Cases
argued,” &c.; for students of your nation do not take long for that sort
of thing, and you have been amongst us at least three months. In the
course of your “reading up” you must doubtless have perused the
posthumous reports of J. Miller, Q. C. (Queen’s Comedian). There you
doubtless found the cause of Hammer _v._ Tongs, which was an action of
_tort_ tried before Gogg, C. J. Flamfacer (Serjeant)—according to the
immortal reporter of good things—stated his case on behalf of the
plaintiff so powerfully, that before he could get to the peroration,
said plaintiff’s hair stood on end, tears rolled down his cheeks in
horror and pity at his own wrongs, and he exclaimed, while wringing his
pocket-handkerchief, “Good gracious! That villain Tongs! What a terrific
box on my ear it must have been! To think that a man may be almost
murdered without knowing it!”
I am Hammer, and you, Mr. Rollin, are Tongs. Your book made my ears to
tingle quite as sharply as if you had actually boxed them. I must,
however, in justice to the little hair that Time has left me, positively
state that, even while I was perusing your most powerful passages, it
showed no propensity for the perpendicular. I felt very nervous for all
that; for still—although I could hardly believe that a French gentleman
residing for a few months in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square,
London, could possibly obtain a thorough knowledge, either from study or
personal observation, of the political, legislative, agricultural,
agrarian, prelatical, judicial, colonial, commercial, manufacturing,
social, and educational systems and condition of this empire—yet, from
the unqualified manner in which you deliver yourself upon all these
branches, I cannot choose but think that your pages must, like certain
fictions, be at least founded on _some_ fact; that to have concocted
your volume—of smoke—there must be some fire somewhere. Or is it only
the smell of it?
For, Sir, even an alarm of fire is unpleasant; and, to an elderly
gentleman with a very small stake in the country (prudently inserted in
the three per cent. consols), reading of the dreadful things which you
say are to happen to one’s own native land is exceedingly uncomfortable,
especially at night; when “in silence and in gloom” one broods over
one’s miseries, personal and national; when, in fact, your or any one
else’s _bête noire_ is apt to get polished off with a few extra touches
of blacking. Bless me! when I put my candle out the other night, and
thought of your portrait of Britannia, I quite shook; and when I lay
down I could almost fancy her shadow on the wall. Even now I see her
looking uncommonly sickly, in spite of the invigorating properties of
the waves she so constantly “rules;” the trident and shield—her
“supporters” for ages—can hardly keep her up. Grief, and forebodings of
the famine which you promise, has made her dwindle down from Great to
Little Britain. The British Lion at her feet is in the last stage of
consumption; in such a shocking state of collapse, that he will soon be
in a condition to jump out of his skin; but you do not point out the Ass
who is to jump into it.
Fortunately for my peace I found, on reading a little further, that this
is not Britannia as she is, but Britannia seen by you, “as in a glass
darkly”—as she is to be—when some more of her blood has been sucked by a
phlebotomising Oligarchy and State-pensionary; by an ogreish Cotton
lordocracy; by a sanguinary East India Company, whose “atrocious
greediness caused ten millions of Indians to perish in a month;” by the
servile Parsonocracy, who “read their sermons, in order that the priest
may be able to place his discourse before the magistrate, if he should
be suspected of having preached anything contrary to law;” by the
Landlords, whose oppressions cause labourers to kill one another “to get
a premium upon death;” and by a variety of other national leeches, which
your imagination presents to our view with the distinctness of the
monsters in a drop of Thames water seen through a solar microscope.
But, Sir, as Mr. Hammer said, “to think that a man may be almost
murdered without knowing it!” and so, _I_ say, (one trial of your book
will prove the fact) may a whole parish—such as Tooting—or an entire
country—such as England. If it had not been for your book I should not
have had the remotest notion that “English society is about to fall with
a fearful crash.” Society at large, so far as I can observe it (at
Tooting, and elsewhere), seems to be quite innocent of its impending
fate; and if one may judge from appearances (but then you say, we may
not),—we are rather better off than usual just now: indeed, when you
paint Britannia as she is at the present writing, she makes a rather fat
and jolly portrait than otherwise. In your “Exposition” (for 1850) you
say: “The problem is not to discover whether England is great, but
whether her greatness can endure.” In admitting, in the handsomest
manner possible, that England _is_ great, you go on to say, that “Great
Britain, which is only two hundred leagues long, and whose soil is far
from equal to that of Aragon or Lombardy, draws every year from its
agriculture, by a skilful cultivation and the breeding of animals, a
revenue which amounts to more than three billions six hundred millions
francs, and this revenue of the mother-country is almost doubled by the
value of similar produce in its colonies and dependencies. Her industry,
her commerce, and her manufactures, create a property superior to the
primal land-productions, and all owing to her inexhaustible mines, her
natural wealth, and her admirable system of circulation by fourscore and
six canals, and seventy lines of railway. The total revenue of England
then amounts to upwards of twelve billion francs. Her power amongst the
nations is manifest by the number and greatness of her fleets and of her
domains. In Europe she possesses, besides her neighbour-islets,
Heligoland, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands; in Asia, she holds
British Hindostan with its tributaries, Ceylon, and her compulsory
allies of the Punjab and of Scinde—that is to say, almost a world; in
Africa she claims Sierra Leone with its dependencies, the Isle of
France, Seychelles, Fernandez Po, the Cape of Good Hope and Saint
Helena; in America, she possesses Upper and Lower Canada, Cape Breton,
the Lesser Antilles, the Bermudas, Newfoundland, Lucays, Jamaica,
Dominica, Guiana, the Bay of Honduras, and Prince Edward’s Island;
lastly, in Oceania, she has Van Dieman’s Land, Norfolk Island, Nova
Scotia, Southern Australia; and these hundred nations make up for her
more that one hundred and fifty millions of subjects, including the
twenty-seven to twenty-eight millions of the three mother kingdoms. As
to her mercantile marine, two details will suffice to make it known; she
has about thirty thousand sailing-vessels and steamers, without counting
her eight thousand colonial ships; and in one year she exports six or
seven hundred millions of cotton stuffs, which makes for a single detail
an account beyond the sum total of all the manufacturing exportation of
France.”
But now for the plague spot! All this territory, and power, and
commercial activity is, you say, our ruin; all this wealth is precisely
our pauperism; all this happiness is our misery. What Montesquieu says,
and you Mr. Ledru Rollin indorse with your unerring imprimatur, _must_
be true:—“The fortune of maritime empires cannot be long, for they only
reign by the oppression of the nations, and while they extend themselves
abroad, they are undermining themselves within.”
Upon my word, Mr. Rollin, this looks very likely: and when you see your
neighbours gaily promenading Regent Street; when you hear of the “Lion
of Waterloo” (at whom you are so obliging as to say in your Preface, you
have no wish “to fire a spent ball”) giving his usual anniversary dinner
to the usual number of guests, and with his usual activity stepping off
afterwards to a ball; when you are told that a hundred thousand
Londoners can afford to enjoy themselves at Epsom Races; and that
throughout the country there is just now more enjoyment and less
grumbling than there has been for years, I can quite understand that
your horror at the innocent disregard thus evinced at the tremendous
“blow up” that is coming, must be infinitely more real than that of
Serjeant Flamfacer. “Alas!” you exclaim with that “profound emotion”
with which your countrymen are so often afflicted; “Government returns
inform me that during the past year English pauperism has decreased
eleven per cent., and that the present demand for labour in the
manufacturing districts nearly equals the supply? The culminating point
is reached; destruction must follow!”
Heavens! Mr. Rollin, I tremble with you. The plethora of prosperity
increases, and will burst the sooner! We, eating, drinking, contented,
trafficking, stupid, revolution-hating, spiritless, English people, “are
undermining ourselves within.” We are gorging ourselves with National
prosperity to bring on a National dyspepsia, and will soon fall asleep
under the influence of a national nightmare! Horrible! the more so
because
“Alas! unconscious of their fate,
The little victims play.”
Now, Sir, I wish to ask you calmly and candidly, if there _is_ any fire
at the bottom of your volumes of smoke? or have you read our records,
and seen our country through a flaming pair of Red Spectacles, that has
converted everything within their range into Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones?
Indeed I hope it is so; for though I am very much obliged to you for
putting us on our guard, you have made me very miserable. This is the
worst shock of all. With my belief in “what is going to happen,” I have
led but a dog-life of it, ever since I retired from that cat-and-dog
life, the Law. First, the Reform Bill was to ruin us out of hand; then,
the farmers threatened us with what was going to happen in consequence
of Free Trade; and that was bad enough, for it was starvation—no less.
What was going to happen if the Navigation Laws were repealed, I dare
not recall. Now we are to be swept off the face of the earth if we allow
letters to be sorted on a Sunday. But these are comparative trifles to
what you, Mr. R., assert is going to happen, whatever we do or don’t do.
However, I am resolved on one thing—_I_ won’t be in at the death, or
rather _with_ the death. I shall pull up my little stake in Capel Court,
and retire to some quiet corner of the world, such as the Faubourg St.
Antoine, the foot of Mount Vesuvius, or Chinese Tartary.
Yours truly,
CHRISTOPHER SHRIMBLE.
Paradise Row, Tooting.
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