BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S
Edinburgh
MAGAZINE.
VOL. LXIX.
JANUARY-JUNE, 1851.
[Illustration: portrait]
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH;
AND
37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
1851.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCXXIII. JANUARY, 1851. VOL. LXIX.
CONTENTS.
THE CURRENCY EXTENSION ACT OF NATURE, 1
MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. PART V., 20
BIOGRAPHY, 40
THE LAY OF THE NIEBELUNGEN, 55
ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS FROM THE HISTORY OF JOHN BULL, 69
HUNGARIAN MILITARY SKETCHES, 89
THE MESSAGE OF SETH. BY DELTA, 107
THE VOICE OF NATURE, 111
BRITISH LABOUR AND FOREIGN RECIPROCITY, 112
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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCXXIII. JANUARY, 1851. VOL. LXIX.
THE CURRENCY EXTENSION ACT OF NATURE.
Whoever has examined with attention the past annals of mankind, must
have become aware that the greatest and most important revolutions
that have occurred in human affairs have originated in the variations
which from time to time have taken place in the supply of the precious
metals which could be obtained for the use of man. As they constitute,
by the universal consent of the world, the common medium of exchange
and measure of value among nations, their plenty or scarcity has an
immediate and powerful influence upon the remuneration of industry and
the activity of the working-classes in all countries. According as they
are increasing or diminishing, abundant or awanting, is the condition
of the people prosperous or calamitous--the national prospects bright
or gloomy. No amount of human exertion, no efforts of human patriotism,
can sustain the national fortunes for any length of time, or diffuse
general and enduring prosperity among the people, if the existing
medium of exchange is below what their numbers and transactions
require; because, in such a case, prices are constantly declining,
credit is liable to periodical and ruinous contractions, and industry,
on an average of years, ceases to meet with its due reward. No
calamities are insuperable, no dangers insurmountable, when a currency
is provided adequate to the wants of men, and capable of extension
in proportion to their necessities; because, in such a case, prices
are rising or remunerative, and individual effort, stimulated by the
prospect of an adequate return, becomes universal, and acts powerfully
and decisively upon the general welfare of society and the issue of the
national fortunes.
The two greatest revolutions which have taken place in the annals of
the species, and which have for ever left their traces on the fortunes
of mankind, have arisen from the successive diminution and increase
in the supply of the precious metals for the use of the world. There
can be no doubt that the decline and fall of the Roman empire--so long
and falsely ascribed to its latter extension, plebeian slavery, and
patrician corruption--was in reality mainly owing to the failure in the
mines of Spain and Greece, from which the precious metals in ancient
times were chiefly obtained, joined to the unrestricted importation of
grain from Egypt and Libya, which ruined the profit of the harvests
and destroyed the agriculture of Italy and Greece, at once paralysing
industry, and rendering taxes overwhelming.[1] We know now to what the
failure of these mines, attended with such portentous results, was
owing. It was to the exhaustion of the auriferous veins in Spain and
Greece near the surface, from long-continued working, and the extreme
_hardness of the rock_ in which they were imbedded farther down, which
seems to be a general law of nature all over the world,[2] and which
rendered working them, to any considerable depth, no longer a source
of profit. On the other hand, the prodigious start which Europe took
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which has implanted
the European race for ever in the new hemisphere, is well known to have
been mainly owing to the discovery of the mines of Mexico and Peru, and
the continual rise of prices during nearly two centuries, which took
place all over the world, from the constant and increasing influx of
the precious metals drawn out of their rich strata.
The greatest and most momentous contests which have taken place among
nations, have been in a great degree determined by the discovery or
use, by one of the belligerents, of an expansive currency, to which
the other was for a time a stranger. The most memorable strife in
antiquity, that between Rome and Carthage, on which depended whether
Europe or Africa was to become the mistress of the civilised world, was
in reality determined by a great extension of the Italian circulating
medium during the second Punic war; and that dreadful contest was less
brought to a successful issue by the firmness of the senate or the
arms of Scipio, than by the wisdom of a decree which virtually, at the
crisis of its fate, doubled the currency of the Roman republic.[3] The
Transatlantic revolution was brought to a successful issue in the same
way; and the independence of the United States is less to be ascribed
to the imbecility of British counsels, or the wisdom of American
generalship, than to the establishment of a paper currency, which
sustained the efforts of the insurgent states when they had no other
resources wherewith to maintain the contest. It was the assignats, as
all the world knows, that set on foot those prodigious armies which,
amidst the destruction of all private fortunes, enabled France, during
the Reign of Terror, to repel the assault of all the European powers;
and the coalition which at last overturned the empire of Napoleon
was sustained by a vast system of paper currency, issued in 1813 in
Germany, which, guaranteed by the four Allied powers, passed as gold
from the Atlantic Ocean to the wall of China, and arrayed all the
armies of Europe in dense and disciplined battalions on the banks of
the Rhine. Of what incalculable importance it was may be judged of by
the dreadful straits to which Wellington, for five previous years,
had been reduced by its want. Great Britain emerged victorious from
the strife, chiefly from the powerful influence of the same omnipotent
agent. Vain would have been the constancy of Pitt, the genius of
Nelson, or the wisdom of Wellington, if the paper currency, established
in 1797, had not given her people the sinews of war, and the means of
illimitable industry, when the Continent was shut to her commerce,
and the whole precious metals were drained away by the necessities
of Continental warfare. Nor have the effects of the opposite system,
pursued since the peace, been less striking and momentous; for the
contraction of British currency to one half of its former dimensions,
by the bills of 1819 and 1844, has brought about the dreadful panics
of 1825, 1837, and 1847, induced by the decline of prices and the
sufferings it occasioned. The English revolution of 1832 transferred
power in the British islands exclusively to the inhabitants of towns,
and spread such misery through the rural population, that _three
hundred thousand_ emigrants now annually leave the British islands for
Transatlantic or Australian shores.
As the expansion or contraction of the circulating medium is thus an
agent of such prodigious power and irresistible weight, both upon the
fortunes of particular states and the general progress of the species,
so it will be found upon examination that it is by a withholding or
letting loose the fertilising flood, that Providence appears often to
act most directly and decisively upon human affairs. When a nation
has performed its mission, and is to make room for other actors on
the great stage of the world, if its power has rendered conquest by
a foreign enemy impossible, a contraction of its domestic currency
paralyses its internal strength, and renders dissolution, at no distant
period, a matter of certainty. If a great start is prepared for human
industry, if new continents are laid open to its energies, and an
unusual impulse communicated to its activity by the development of
social and democratic passions, a vast addition is suddenly made to
its metallic resources, and the increased numbers or enhanced efforts
of mankind are amply sustained by the newly opened treasures of the
reserves of nature. Rome, impregnable to the assaults of undisciplined
barbarians, yielded, at the appointed season, to the contraction of its
domestic currency, which rendered the maintenance of armaments adequate
to the public defence a matter of impossibility in the later days
of the empire; and when the discovery of the compass, of the art of
printing, and of the new hemisphere, had at once given a vast impulse
to European activity, and provided new and boundless fields for its
exertion, the mines of Potosi and Mexico were suddenly thrown open, and
nature provided a suitable reward for all this enhanced effort by the
continually rising price of its produce.
That a period of equal, perhaps greater activity, than that which
followed the discoveries of Columbus, would succeed the outbreak of the
social passions that occasioned the French Revolution, has long been
familiar to the thinking part of men, and unequivocal proofs of the
reality of the change may be seen in every direction around us. But
sufficient attention has not hitherto been paid to the extraordinary
encouragement which this increased mental energy has received, from the
facilities which have been placed at its disposal by the _mechanical_
discoveries of the last half century. Yet are they such as to throw all
past discoveries into the shade, and give an impulse to human affairs
which has scarcely been exceeded since the first separation of the
dwellers in cities and the sojourners in the fields. The steam-engine
has wrought these prodigies. Applied to mechanical invention, and the
moving of machinery, it has multiplied tenfold the powers of urban
industry, elevated the districts possessing the necessary fuel to the
clouds, cast down places once the seats of commercial greatness, but
destitute of that essential element in modern manufacturing energy, to
the dust. Applied to the propelling of vessels, it has more than halved
the breadth of the ocean, rendered navigable against the current the
greatest rivers, sent the colonists of Europe in countless multitudes
_up_ the streams of the New World, and provided an entrance for
civilised man into the greatest continents by the very magnitude of the
waters which flow down from their inaccessible mountains, or are fed in
their marshy plains. Applied to travelling by land, it has diminished
distance to a third--brought the capital of every civilised state into
close proximity to its most distant provinces; while the simultaneous
discovery of the electric telegraph has rendered the communication of
intelligence all but instantaneous, and made the circulation of ideas
and, it is to be feared, also of passions, as rapid over a mighty
empire as heretofore it was in the streets of a crowded capital.
When nature communicated this vast impulse to human activity, and
placed these mighty instruments in the hands of men, she was not
unmindful of the extended field for industry which their enlarged
numbers and increased energies would require. The plain of the
Mississippi, the garden of the world, containing a million of square
miles, or six times the area of France, was thrown open to their
enterprise. Steam power propelled a thousand vessels through the thick
network of natural arteries which in every direction penetrate its
vast and fertile plains. In 1790, five thousand Anglo-Saxons were
settled in this magnificent wilderness; now their numbers exceed _eight
millions_. Australia has opened its vast prairies, New Zealand its
fertile vales, to European enterprise. The boundless plains of Central
Russia and Southern Siberia, afforded inexhaustible resources to the
rapidly increasing Muscovite population; and an empire which already
possesses in Europe and Asia sixty-six million inhabitants, can without
apprehension contemplate a continuance of its present rate of increase
for centuries to come. The Andes even have been passed; the Rocky
Mountains surmounted; and on the reverse of their gigantic piles new
states, peopled by the Anglo-Saxon race, are arising, and increasing
with unheard-of rapidity, in regions rivalling Italy in the variety and
riches of their productions, and exceeding it tenfold in the magnitude
of their extent. Proportionate to the wants and necessities of mankind,
in an age of such intellectual and physical activity, has been the
hitherto untrodden fields which the beneficence of nature has laid open
to their industry.
These advantages, however, great and unbounded as they are, have
been, till very recently, counterbalanced, and perhaps more than
counterbalanced, by the _serious decrease_ which, for the greater part
of the period that has elapsed since the peace of 1815, has been going
on, from the effect of human violence or folly, in the _circulating
medium of the globe_. The South American revolution at once almost
destroyed the working of the mines of Mexico and Peru: the annual
produce of those mines sank from £10,000,000, to which, according to
Humboldt, it had risen prior to 1810, to less than £3,000,000. The
diminution in the supply of the precious metals for the use of the
globe, from the effects of this most calamitous revolution, which
Great Britain did so much to promote, was, during the thirty years
which elapsed from 1810 to 1840, certainly not less than £150,000,000
sterling. Contemporaneous with this immense reduction, took place
the great contraction of the paper currency of Great Britain, the
commercial heart of the globe, which was reduced by the bill of 1819
from £60,000,000, which it had reached in 1814, to little more than
£30,000,000, its average since that time. These two great causes of
decrease, operating simultaneously during a period of general peace,
unbroken industry, great increase in population both in Europe and
America, and a vast addition to the transactions and mercantile
dealings of men in every part of the world, produced that universal and
unlooked-for decline of prices which has been everywhere felt as so
discouraging to industry, and nowhere so much so as in the highly taxed
and deeply indebted realm of Great Britain. It was the exact converse
of the general and long-continued prosperity which the progressive
rise of prices consequent on the discovery of the South American mines
produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was
apparently the commencement of a long and disastrous period of rise in
the value of money, and fall in the price of every species of produce,
similar to that which, in the first four centuries of the Christian
era, crushed the industry and paralysed the strength of the Roman
Empire, and at length prostrated the dominion of the legions before the
arms of an untutored and barbarous enemy.
It is now ascertained, therefore, by the only sure guide in political
science--experience--that if no addition to the circulating medium of
the globe had been made at a time when so immense an increment was
going forward in the numbers and transactions of the most active part
of mankind, consequences the most disastrous to human industry and
happiness _must_ have taken place. If--when the United States, with
their population of 25,000,000 doubling every twenty-five years, and
Russia, with its population of 66,000,000 doubling every forty years,
and Great Britain, with its population of 29,000,000 doubling in about
the same time, and its exports and imports tripling in thirty years,
were in a state of full and undiminished activity--there had been no
addition made to the circulating medium of the globe, it is difficult
to estimate the amount of embarrassment and distress which must have
become all but universal. If the circulating medium of the earth had
_remained stationary_, or gone on receiving only its wonted annual
increment, when so prodigious an addition was going forward in the
numbers and transactions of men, a universal and progressive fall of
prices must have ensued. The remuneration of industry must have been
halved--the weight of debts and taxes doubled. The fatal increase in
the value and power of riches, so truly felt and loudly complained of
in the declining days of the Roman empire, would have been everywhere
experienced. A _money famine_ would have been universally felt; and,
paradoxical as it may appear, dear-bought experience has now taught
us that such a famine is attended with more disastrous, because more
widely spread and irremovable, consequences, than even a shortcoming
in the supply of food for the use of man. The latter may be removed by
increased rural activity and a good harvest in a single year. But the
former is susceptible of no such remedy. On the contrary, the augmented
activity which it brings on, from the general and pinching suffering
with which it is attended, only tends to aggravate the common distress,
because it multiplies the transactions in which money as a medium of
exchange is indispensable, and consequently makes its scarcity in
proportion to the existing demand be more severely felt.
To this must be added another and most important cause, which operated
since the peace of 1815 in withdrawing the precious metals from the
globe, arising from the very scarcity of these metals themselves. The
addition which their enhanced value made to the riches of the affluent
was so great, that it led to a rapid and most important increase in
the consumption of gold and silver in articles of luxury. Gold and
silver plate, jewels, and other ornaments set in gold, became general
among the richer classes, and to an extent unprecedented since the fall
of the Roman empire. Gilding was employed so much in furniture, the
frames of pictures, the roofs of rooms, carriages, and other articles
of state or show, as to withdraw a considerable part of that the most
precious of the precious metals from the monetary circulation. The
scarcer gold and silver became, the more was this direction of a large
portion of it increased, because the richer did the fortunate few who
possessed amassed capital become from the daily decline in the price
of all other articles of merchandise. This effect was most conspicuous
in ancient Rome in its latter days, where, while the legions dwindled
into cohorts from the impossibility of finding funds to pay them
in large numbers, and the fields of Italy became desolate from the
impossibility of obtaining a remunerating price for their produce, the
gold and silver vases, statues, and ornaments amassed in the hands of
the wealthy patricians in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and the
other great cities of the empire, so prodigiously increased, that, with
the currency, which formed but a small part of its amount, their value
is estimated by Gibbon at the almost incredible amount of £350,000,000
sterling of our money.
Bills of exchange and paper money, which have become known and
general only in modern Europe, might have gone far to mitigate these
disastrous consequences in particular states, or even, if conducted
with prudence and regulated by wisdom, might in some places have
altogether prevented them. But as paper currency is a new element of
surpassing power and efficacy, but recently introduced into common
use among men, the principles on which it should be regulated are far
from being generally understood. Even if understood, it requires for
its due regulation a combination of wisdom and self-denial that can
rarely be looked for among the rulers of mankind. The fundamental
principles on which its due regulation must be rested--that of being
based on _certain and available property of some kind_, and of being
capable of _extension_ in proportion to the increase in the numbers and
transactions of men, and the abstraction of the precious metals forming
the medium of international circulation, and yet duly restrained and
over-issue prevented--were successively overlooked by the greatest and
most enlightened nations of the world. Issued in unbounded profusion
in France during the fervour of the Revolution and the terrors of
European invasion, with no real basis of available property on which
to rest, the assignats produced, simultaneously with the prodigious
armaments which saved the country, an unheard-of confusion among the
transactions and obligations of men, and destroyed in a few years
the whole capital of that great country, the accumulated savings
of centuries of industry. Contracted with equal rapidity from the
influence of the opposite set of interests in Great Britain after
the peace, the paper circulation of the British Empire was rendered
the instrument of destruction of property as great, and misery as
widespread and universal, among its inhabitants, as the assignats or
confiscations of the Convention. Adopted with heedless eagerness, and
without any adequate safeguards, at one time in America, and checked
at another with precipitate and imprudent severity, four-fifths of
the wealth of the United States were in a few years swept away by the
fearful oscillation of prices consequent on these violent changes. And
although wisdom and prudence could easily have devised a system of
paper currency which, entirely based upon available property of some
kind, and therefore perfectly secure, was yet capable of expansion in
proportion to the increase of the numbers and transactions of men, and
the temporary abstraction of the precious metals from a particular
country by the mutations of commerce or the necessities of war, yet
it was evident that no such wise and patriotic system was to be
anticipated, till a vast amount of general suffering had enlightened
the majority of men on the subject. Least of all could it be hoped
for in Great Britain, where the increase and weight of the moneyed
interests, and the consequent determination to enhance the value
of money, without any regard to its effects on the remuneration of
industry, had become such, that no other interest in the State, nor
even all other interests allied, were able to make head against it.
The future destinies of mankind, and of this country in particular,
seemed, therefore, to be involved in clouds and darkness; nor did
any means appear to be within the bounds of possibility by which the
difficulties which beset or awaited industry could be obviated. The
greater the efforts made by industry, it was plain the greater would be
the distress in which it would be involved; because an increase in the
transactions of men required an augmentation in the circulating medium
by which they were to be conducted; and an addition to the produce of
labour, while the currency was fixed or declining, only rendered its
remuneration less. The whole object of statesmen and legislators, both
in Great Britain and America, had come to be to cheapen everything,
and raise the value of money by contracting its amount--augmenting
instead of relieving the general distress arising from the inadequacy
of the existing circulating medium for the enlarged wants and numbers
of men. The evil seemed to be beyond the reach of human remedy; for
in the only country in which a remedy could be effectually applied,
the moneyed interests had become so powerful, that Government was
set chiefly on measures which, for the sake of private profit, most
grievously aggravated it. But Providence is wiser than man: Nature
is seldom awanting in the end to those who are suffering from the
faults of others. A few bands of American squatters wandered into
Texas--a war of aggression on the part of the United States succeeded
to make good the settlement--a serious contest took place with
Mexico--the Anglo-Saxon race asserted their wonted superiority over
the Castilian--CALIFORNIA was wrested from them--and by the ultimate
effects of that conquest some of the greatest evils inflicted by human
selfishness or folly were alleviated, and the destinies of the world
were changed!
It is a striking proof how much the fortunes of men are in their own
hands, and how vain are the choicest gifts of nature if not seconded by
the vigour and industry of those for whom they are intended, that the
rich auriferous veins, the discovery of which has been attended with
such important effects, and is destined to avert so many evils arising
from the absurd legislation or selfish desires of men in recent times,
had been for three hundred years in the possession of the Spaniards,
but they had never found them out! The gold was there, under their
feet, in such quantities that its excavation, as will immediately
appear, is adequate to double the annual supply of the precious metals
for the use of man over the whole world; but they never took the
trouble to turn it up! It was so near the surface, and so accessible,
being mixed with the alluvial sand and gravel of the country, that it
was first discovered in the cutting a common mill-course through a
garden, and has since been obtained almost entirely by common labourers
digging holes not deeper than ordinary graves through the level surface
of the alluvial deposit of the mountains. They had never attempted
agricultural operations, nor thought of an improvement which would have
led to its detection. The Spaniards, as all the world knows, and as
their history in every age has demonstrated, were passionately desirous
of gold; and from the days of Columbus they had been familiar with a
tradition or report among the native Indians, that there existed beyond
the mountains in the far west a country in which gold was as plentiful
as the sand on the seashore, and was to be had simply for the trouble
of taking it. It was all true it was there, mixed in large quantities
with the alluvial deposit of the mountains; yet during three hundred
years that they held the country, they never found it out! A single
ditch in any part of the flat region, which is above three hundred
miles long and forty or fifty broad, would have revealed the treasure,
but they never took the trouble to cut it. Before the Anglo-Saxons had
been there three months, they had discovered the riches lying below
their feet. Such is the difference of races! It is easy to see to which
is destined the sceptre of the globe.
It is impossible as yet to say with positive certainty what is the
amount of gold which may be obtained for a long period from this
auriferous region; but it is already evident that it will be very
great--much greater than was at first anticipated. The following
extract, from the great and able Free-Trade organ, the _Times_, of Nov.
19, 1850, will show what amount has been realised and exported from San
Francisco last year, and what may be anticipated in the next:--
"Some estimates have lately been formed of the shipments of
gold received in Europe from California to the present time,
which, we believe, may be regarded as tolerably accurate,
and according to which the amount is about £3,300,000. On
the other side, up to the end of September, the receipts at
the two mints of the United States had been about 31,000,000
dols., or £6,200,000. Since that time we have had advices
of farther arrivals at New York and New Orleans amounting
to £500,000. An aggregate is consequently formed of exactly
£10,000,000. To this must be added, in order to estimate the
total production, not only the amounts which have found their
way to China, Manilla, Australia, Oregon, the Sandwich Islands,
the States of Spanish America, &c., but also the total which
has been retained in California for the purposes of currency.
The population in that country now ranges somewhere between
200,000 and 300,000, and although a considerable amount of
silver dollars have been imported, the bulk of the circulation
is believed still to be in the form of gold-dust or of gold
tokens. If the 250,000 persons possess, on an average, £10
a-piece, we have a sum of £2,500,000; and, looking at the
expense of a week's maintenance in the country, as well as
the large quantities constantly in transit, as well as the
reserves, which, as was shown by the last advices, the various
deposit-houses are compelled to retain to meet sudden runs,
it is probable that this is under the real total. Taking all
points into consideration, it may, therefore, be assumed
that the whole which has been raised is equal to at least
£13,000,000 sterling. Of this production, according to recent
official returns from the United States, nearly four-fifths
have taken place during the present year. Of 25,966,817 dols.
received in the United States Mint at Philadelphia, up to the
end of September last, only 44,177 dols. had arrived in 1848,
and 5,481,430 dols. in 1849, while the quantity in 1850 had
been 20,441,210 dols. The same proportions would probably
prevail with regard to the sums distributed to other places;
and we are, therefore, led to the supposition that the export
this year has already actually reached upwards of £10,000,000,
although the results of two additional months have yet to be
known. It will be observed, consequently, that the unexpected
feature which has hitherto attended the progress of this new
region--namely, that almost all the accounts from it, although
deemed exaggerations at first, have proved ultimately to have
been understatements--is still presented. At the commencement
of 1850 the most sanguine expectations that were formed in any
direction fixed its probable yield at £10,000,000; and not only
has this been exceeded, but each quarter of the year has thus
far shown an increase of nearly half upon the amount gathered
in the preceding one. Thus the receipts at Philadelphia, for
the first three months, were 4,370,714 dols., while they were
6,920,496 dols. for the second, and again 9,250,000 dols. for
the third. This rate of augmentation coincides with the influx
of population, and, as the emigration to the country is certain
to be continued until the remuneration it affords for labour is
brought to a level with the advantages offered elsewhere, there
is no reason, so long as we are without accounts of an apparent
limit to the field of operations, to anticipate anything else
than a steady continuance of an improving ratio. So far from a
limit having yet been found, each fresh exploration seems to
develope new and more favourable localities, and an extended
discovery of dry diggings lately alleged to have been made,
together with the steps in progress elsewhere to crush the
mountain ore by machinery, appears to hold out the prospect
that, even with the approach of winter, there will scarcely be
a suspension of the prevailing activity."--_Times, Nov. 19,
1850._
By the last accounts there was no less than a million sterling
exported from California in _six days_. This amount of gold, great
as it is, however, is by no means the whole of the supply which has
been obtained. It is the regular measured amount only--what entered
the custom-house books, and was exported in the entered traders. But
who can estimate the amount which in those vast and desolate regions
has been amassed by individuals, and made its way out of the country
in their private possession, or secretly in shipments of which no
account was kept? It is incalculable: like the plunder amassed during
the sack of a capital or province, it may be guessed at, but cannot
be ascertained with anything approaching to accuracy. Probably the
amount thus acquired, but not entering any public records, may equal
all that is ascertained from the custom-house books. But call it only
a half, or fifty per cent, it will follow that last year the amount
raised was upwards of £15,000,000, and this year (1851) may be expected
to reach £17,000,000 or £18,000,000! If so, it will nearly double the
annual supply of the precious metals for the use of the globe, which at
present, from all sources, is between £16,000,000 and £17,000,000. It
may with confidence be anticipated, that how secretly soever great part
of this treasure may be smuggled or conveyed out of California, none,
or at least very little of it, will be lost. It will all be carefully
preserved, and sooner or later find its way into the circulation of the
world, or be manufactured into the gold ornaments and vessels which
minister to its luxury or magnificence. Nothing more is required to
show the prodigious influence of this great change; beyond all question
it will, in its ultimate effects, alter the face of the globe.
Mr M'Culloch observes in his _Commercial Dictionary_--"Should _eight
or ten millions_ yearly, in addition to the present supply, be
obtained from any other source, it will produce a gradual alteration
of prices, similar to that which took place three centuries ago on the
discovery of the mines of Mexico and Peru." No one can doubt that this
observation is well founded; but if the effect of eight or ten millions
annually added to the treasures of the world would be so considerable,
what must the effect of the addition of sixteen or eighteen millions?
Yet this addition is just _now going on_. In the month of August
last, the gold shipped at San Francisco alone was 2,984,000 dollars,
or about £800,000; and supposing a half more was raised, of which no
account is kept, this is £1,200,000 in a single month! In five weeks
from September 1, the quantity shipped was 5,000,000 dollars, or above
£1,200,000; which implies at least £1,800,000 altogether obtained. This
is from the labour of 40,000 or 50,000 persons only, who are at present
engaged in the diggings; but it is known that from 80,000 to 90,000
will be engaged in them next year, so that the supply raised may be
expected to be nearly doubled. There is great inequality in the amount
obtained by individual persons employed in that laborious occupation;
but taking the average, it is about four and a half dollars a day.
Call it four only, and suppose they work 250 days in the year, each
person at this rate will raise 1000 dollars' worth of gold, or nearly
£250. At that rate, 50,000 persons would raise £12,500,000 in a year;
and 75,000, £18,750,000;--which coincides very nearly with the result
derived as above from other sources of information.
The bullionists, struck with terror at so prodigious an addition
annually to their darling gold, and consequent diminution in its
exchangeable value, are beginning to exert themselves to decry it. They
say that there is a "_Currency Restriction Act of Nature_;" that the
supply of gold from the alluvial washings will soon be exhausted; and
that when the excavation comes to be made from the rocks and mountains
in which the veins are embedded, it will cease to be profitable, from
the hardness of the strata of rock in which the veins are found.[4] The
plea in abatement of the supply of gold thus likely to be obtained is
very remarkable. The fact of its appearing in the highly respectable
journal where it first was ushered to the world, and from the pen of
the eminent geologist from whom it is said to have proceeded, are
alike ominous. It shows at once how marvellously strong has been the
hold which the mania for raising the value of gold and cheapening
that of everything else prevailing during the last thirty years, from
the influence of the holders of realised wealth, has got of the most
influential classes in this country; and how deep is their alarm at the
prospect of all their measures being at once blown into the air by the
augmented supply _of this very gold_ from the shores of California! A
"Currency Restriction Act of Nature!" What a commentary on the measures
of Sir R. Peel, so vehemently lauded and strenuously supported by all
the capitalists whose fortunes, from the Currency Restriction Act of
the right hon. baronet, were every day increasing in value! They would
fain enlist Nature in the same crusade against labour and in favour of
riches; but they may save themselves the trouble. There is no Currency
Restriction Act of Nature: her beneficence, unlike that of man, is
equally distributed over all her children. The CURRENCY EXTENSION ACT
of Nature will only stand forth in brighter relief from having been
immediately preceded by the Currency _Restriction_ Act of Man.
To show how chimerical are the hopes of a Currency Restriction Act of
Nature, which is to limit and interrupt the blessings with which an
increased supply of the precious metals for the general service of the
world cannot fail to be attended, it is sufficient to observe that
the auriferous region where the gold is found in alluvial deposit, is
said to be a tract of country between three and four hundred miles
long and from thirty to forty miles broad. It is therefore as long as
from London to Berwick, and as broad as the average breadth of the
plains of Yorkshire. What is the scraping or excavations of sixty or
eighty thousand men on so immense a surface? Conceive every one of
these persons _daily digging his own grave_ in this auriferous region:
how long will it take them to go over the whole surface and exhaust
its treasures? Only apply to it the test of the rudest calculation.
A square mile contains above 3,000,000 square yards. Supposing each
digging occupies two square yards, there will be 1,500,000 diggings
in a square mile; and if each person excavates a digging a-day, which
is probably as much as can be calculated upon at an average, as the
operation is so much impeded by water, 100,000 persons will take
fifteen days to turn up and exhaust one square mile. In the gold
region, however, there are at least 9000 square miles. Supposing that
the 100,000 persons work 300 days in the year, which is more than can
be calculated upon, they will only turn over and thoroughly search
twenty square miles in a year. At this rate, it would take above
four hundred years for even that large army of labourers to exhaust
the _alluvial_ gold region. We are aware the diggings do not go on
regularly as is now supposed; that one man tries his fortune here, and
another there; and that the earth is perforated at the same time in a
great variety of places, many of them at a considerable distance from
each other. We know, too, that the real extent of the gold region is
hitherto the object of speculation and hope, rather than actual survey
or knowledge. It is quite probable, too, that our calculation, which
is a mere rough guess, may be above the mark in some particulars,
and below it in others. Still, enough, making allowance for all such
errors, remains to show that, in the alluvial gold region alone, if the
accounts of its extent and riches are at all to be relied on, there is
ample room for a vast annual addition to the treasures of the earth for
a great many generations to come. The circumstance which makes it all
but certain that the gold region must be very extensive, is its being
found in the _alluvial_ deposits of the mountain rivers, such as the
Sacramento, along their whole course. If you find granite or mica slate
particles in the beds of rivers and the level fields they overflow near
the sea, you are sure of finding the same deposits up to the mountain
regions from which they are brought down.
But what is the alluvial gold region to the mountain region from
which the precious metals with which it abounds have been torn down
by the storms and wintry torrents of thousands of years! If you find
a _detritus_ of a certain description in the mixed sand and gravel of
a plain, you may predicate with perfect certainty the existence of
mountains and rocks of the same formation in the higher regions from
which it has been brought down. Granite or mica-slate _debris_ in the
beds of rivers or the level fields which they occasionally overflow,
imply granite or mica-slate in the hilly region from which they take
their rise. Whence has all the gold come which in the alluvial plains
of California is producing such treasures, and changing prices over
the whole world? It has come down from the mountains. And what must be
the metallic riches with which they are charged, when the washed-down
gravel at their feet is so prolific of mineral wealth! The bullionists,
influenced by dread of a general rise of prices, and depreciation of
the exchangeable value of their realised fortunes from this rise, say
there is a "Currency Restriction Act of Nature;" that gold at any depth
is unworkable at a profit; that Providence is niggardly of its bounty;
and they in secret indulge the hope that it will continue permanently
that contraction of the currency which they have contrived to force
upon mankind, and which, while it lasted, has proved so eminently
profitable to themselves. But a little consideration must show that
their hopes in this respect are entirely fallacious. Granting that the
veins of gold, when they go deep, are embedded in very hard rock, what
is to be said to the cropping out of the veins over the vast extent of
the auriferous Rocky Mountains? If the wasting away of wintry storms on
the tops and sides of these mountains brings down such quantities of
gold with the streams which furrow their sides, must not the laborious
hand of industry prove equally efficacious in removing it? If the
expansive force of a rapid thaw, following severe frost, can rend the
rocks in which the gold is embedded, is not the power of gunpowder
or steam equally great? Already a company, composed of English
capitalists, has been formed to explore the mountain treasures; and
without supposing that they are to find an El Dorado in every hill, and
admitting that there may be several failures before the right one is
hit on, it is morally certain that in the end the mountain reserves of
treasure must be discovered.
The additions to the currency of the earth, hitherto considered, have
been those coming from these auriferous regions of North America, now
for the first time brought into view only; but this is by no means
the whole of the provision made by nature for the extended wants of
mankind in this age of transition, vehement excitement, extended
transactions, and rapidly-increasing numbers. The URAL AND ALTAI
MOUNTAINS have brought forth their treasures at the same time, and
provided as amply for the wants of the Sclavonic race in the Old, as
the Californian hills have done for the growth of the Anglo-Saxon in
the New World. Gradually, for twenty years past, the Russian treasures
have been brought to light; and their progressive increase has done
more to alleviate the distress and sustain the industry of western
Europe than all the wisdom of man in her aged monarchies has been to
effect. Grievous as have been the calamities which the contraction of
the currency of the world by the reduction of paper in Great Britain,
simultaneously with the ruin of the South American mines by the
revolutions of its vast regions, which we laboured so assiduously to
promote, have produced, they would have been doubly severe if the Ural
and Altai Mountains had not provided treasures at the very time when
the other supplies were failing, which in part at least supplied their
place. Their influence was long felt in Europe before their amount was
suspected, and even now the wisdom or terrors of the Russian Government
have prevented it from being accurately known; but it is generally
understood to have now reached five or six millions sterling annually;
and, like the Californian gold, it is susceptible of an indefinite
increase, in the event of the influx of that metal from America not
lowering its value so as to render it unworkable in Asia at a profit.
Assuming it, then, as certain that for a very long period, and for
many successive generations, a vast addition is to be made to the
annual supply of the metallic treasures of the earth, it becomes
of the highest importance to the interests of industry in all its
branches, agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing, to consider
what _the effects of the change_ thus induced must be--what benefits
it will confer upon mankind--what dangers, if any, it will remove,
especially in the great commercial community in which we are placed.
And a little consideration must be sufficient to demonstrate to every
impartial and disinterested mind what these effects will be--and to
prevent, on the one hand, chimerical or unfounded hopes being formed,
and, on the other, undue or unmanly depression from the effects of
recent calamities being felt. Fortunately we are not driven to theory
or speculation to ascertain what these effects will be--experience,
the only sure guide in political science, points to them with unerring
certainty: the great monetary revolution of the sixteenth century is
the precursor and the monitor of that of the nineteenth.
The first effect of a great addition being made to the annual supply
of a particular metal in general use and high estimation all over the
world, is that the exchangeable value of _that metal_, in comparison
with other metals or articles of consumption, will undergo an immediate
alteration, which will prove lasting and considerable if the increased
supply turns out to be great and permanent. This is no more than takes
place every day with all the articles of commerce. According as the
crop of wheat, or oats, or barley, or cotton proves abundant, so surely
does the price of these articles rise or fall in the market. If gold
is produced in much greater quantities than heretofore, its price, as
compared with everything else, and in particular with the precious
metal in common use, next to it in value, silver, must ere long
change. If the increased supply proves very great, it may in time come
to reduce the price of gold, as compared with silver, fifty, eighty,
or even a hundred per cent. Gold is more valuable than silver, only
because it is more scarce: if it becomes equally plentiful, its value
will gradually sink; and if the quantity afloat in the earth should
ever come to be as great as that of silver, it would come to be of no
greater value. This effect may appear either in the fall of the value
of gold as compared with silver, or notes exchangeable into gold, or
in the _rise_ in the value of silver as compared with that of gold,
or notes exchangeable into that metal. This effect has already taken
place. Silver is 3 per cent dearer as compared with gold than it was a
year ago: and this change will doubtless continue. This is the first
and obvious effect of a great addition to the gold treasures of the
earth; and even this is a considerable benefit; because, as it has been
produced by the augmentation of the amount of the circulating medium of
mankind, it must facilitate the acquisition of it for the purposes of
commerce, or for sustaining the undertakings of industry.
But though this is the first, it is by no means either the only or the
most important effect of a great addition to the gold treasures of
the earth. By far the most important and beneficial effect is to be
found in _the gradual but certain rise of prices_, whether measured in
gold, silver, or paper, which inevitably results from any considerable
addition to the circulating medium of mankind. This effect is precisely
analogous to the great rise of prices which took place during the
war, in consequence of the extended issue of paper which was made
after 1797 to sustain its expenses. It is well known that it more than
doubled the cost of every article of consumption: it raised the price
of wheat, in fifteen years, from 55s. to 110s.[5] This effect resulted
from the extension of the issues of the Bank of England from twelve to
twenty-eight millions a-year. A result precisely the same must take
place over the whole world from a lasting and considerable addition to
the metallic treasures by which its exchanges are conducted. If the
gold in circulation, or which may be put into circulation, is greatly
augmented, the price of everything must rise, whether it is paid in
_gold or silver_, just as the price of everything rose during the war,
whether paid in specie or in paper. Gold then bore such a monopoly
price, from its being so much in request for the necessities of war,
that the guinea at last came to be worth twenty-eight shillings. That
was the enhanced price of gold, as compared with silver; it had risen
thirty per cent in consequence of the absorption of gold specie in the
Peninsular, German, and Russian campaigns. But the change of prices
resulting from the extended issue of paper was much more considerable;
it had increased not thirty, but a hundred per cent, and that equally,
whether the price was paid in gold, silver, paper, or copper.
This change will be universal. It is a mistake to suppose that it
will be limited to the countries, such as England, in which gold is
the established standard of value. It will affect equally, certainly,
though perhaps somewhat more indirectly, the nations, such as France,
where silver is the standard and great medium of exchange. The reason
is, that by adding considerably to the general circulating medium of
the globe, it brings a larger quantity to be balanced against every
article which forms the subject of commerce, and consequently raises
its price when measured by any part of that circulating medium. This
effect may be seen every day in ordinary life. A plentiful crop of
wheat, especially if it continues for several years in succession,
lowers the price not only of wheat, _but of every other grain crop in
the country_, and consequently raises the price of every article of
commerce when measured by the amount given for it in any of these grain
crops. And the same effect took place on a great scale, over the whole
world, for centuries together, when the mines of Mexico and Peru were
discovered, which, although chiefly productive of silver only, yet, by
the large quantity of that metal which they yielded, raised prices to
a very great degree universally, and that equally whether those prices
were paid in gold, silver, or copper.
The effects hitherto considered are those on the value of the precious
metals themselves from a considerable and continued increase in their
supply in any part of the world. But in a commercial and opulent
community such as Great Britain, where the greater part of its
undertakings are carried on by means of money advanced by banks in
their own notes or those of the Bank of England, on the security of
bills or other obligations, the effect of a considerable increase in
the supply of gold or silver is far more extensive. Such an increase
diminishes the great weakness of a paper circulation, that of being
dependent on the supply of the precious metals, and liable to be
contracted when they are withdrawn. An inconvertible paper, issued in
reasonable and not excessive quantities, and adequately guaranteed,
would answer the purpose just as well in a particular country, and
effectually secure it against the terrible disasters consequent on
the alternate expansion and contraction of the currency; the former
inducing the commencement of undertakings of which the latter disabled
the performance. But the world is not wise enough yet to perceive how
easy and effectual a remedy this simple expedient would provide against
the greatest and most extensive calamities which now afflict humanity;
and so great is the power of vested capital which such calamities
benefit, that it is probable several generations must descend to
their graves, or become insolvent, before it is generally adopted.
But the extension of the metallic currency of the globe, though it
cannot altogether remove, materially lessens this dreadful danger. _It
inspires confidence among moneyed men._ It diminishes the terror of the
withdrawal of the precious metals, which, when it once seizes them, is
productive of such unbounded calamities; and thus renders the granting
of accommodation on their part both more abundant and more regular.
Paper becomes more plentiful, because gold, on which it is based, has
flowed into the coffers of the banks in larger quantities, and thus at
once augmented their own treasures, and diminished the risk of their
being drained away by the necessities of other men. The effect of this
change in a commercial and manufacturing community is incalculable.
We can form a clear idea from woeful experience, of what it is. It is
precisely the converse of Sir R. Peel's measure.
It is impossible to give a better picture of what this great Currency
Extension Act of Nature will do for industry in all countries, and
especially the commercial, than by saying that it will as nearly as
possible _reverse_ the effects which Mr Cobden, the great advocate for
the cheapening system, said, in his evidence before the Committee on
Bank Issues in 1840, he had experienced in the preceding years in his
own business from the contraction of the currency consequent on the
great importation of grain in 1838 and 1839:--
"I could adduce a fact derived from my own experience that
would illustrate the heavy losses to which manufacturers were
exposed in their operations, by those fluctuations (in 1837)
in the value of money. I am a calico printer. I purchase the
cloth, which is my raw material, in the market; and have
usually in warehouse three or four months' supply of material.
I must necessarily proceed in my operations, whatever change
there may be--whether a rise or a fall in the market. I employ
six hundred hands; and those hands must be employed. I have
fixed machinery and capital which _must_ also be kept going;
and, therefore, whatever the prospects of a rise or fall in
price may be, I am constantly obliged to be purchasing the
material, and contracting for the material on which I operate.
In 1837 I lost by my stock in hand L.20,000, as compared with
the stock-taking in 1835, 1836, and 1838; the average of
those three years, when compared with 1837, shows that I lost
L.20,000 by my business in 1837; and what I wish to add is,
that the whole of this loss arose from the depreciation in the
value of my stock.
"My business was as prosperous; we stood as high as printers
as we did previously; our business since that has been as
good, and there was no other cause for the losses I then
sustained, but the depreciation of the value of the articles
in warehouse in my hands. What I wish particularly to show,
is the defenceless condition in which we manufacturers are
placed, and how completely we are at the mercy of these
unnatural fluctuations. Although I was aware that the losses
were coming, it was impossible I could do otherwise than
proceed onward--with the certainty of suffering a loss on the
stock; to stop the work of six hundred hands, and to fail to
supply our customers, would have been altogether ruinous; that
is a fact drawn from my own experience. I wish to point to
another example of a most striking kind, showing the effect of
these fluctuations on merchants. I hold in my hand a list of
thirty-six articles which were imported in 1837, by the house
of Butterworth and Brookes of Manchester, a house very well
known; Mr Brookes is now borough-reeve of Manchester. Here is a
list of thirty-six articles imported in the year 1837, in the
regular way of business, and opposite to each article there is
the rate of loss upon it as it arrived, and as it was sold. The
average loss is 37-1/2 per cent on those thirty-six articles,
and they were imported from Canton, Trieste, Bombay, Bahia,
Alexandria, Lima, and, in fact, all the intermediate places
almost. This, I presume, is a fair guide to show the losses
which other merchants incurred on similar articles."
It was these disastrous losses which made Mr Cobden a Free-trader. He
wished to cheapen everything as his own produce had been cheapened.
The contraction of the currency, and its being made dependent on the
retention of gold, was the origin and root of the whole evil and all
the disasters the nation has since undergone.
Such a change, however, the reverse of all this, like all those
produced by nature, is so gradual as to the vast majority of men to be
imperceptible. Like the gradual extension of the day in spring, or the
change of temperature, the change is so slight from day to day that
it eludes even the closest observation. From one month to another,
however, the alteration is great and striking. The addition, first,
of six or eight millions of gold, annually raised, rising by degrees
to sixteen or eighteen millions--which doubles the annual supply of
the precious metals for the use of the globe--being diffused over an
immense surface, and finding its way more or less into the coffers of
all nations, may not produce a great or even visible start of prices at
any one time. But the change will be incessant; and before many years
have elapsed, the result, if the increased supply continues, will be
great and apparent. In the first instance, the effect will appear in
arresting the fall of prices which has so long been going on, and which
our legislative measures have all been calculated to increase. But
after arresting the fall, it will speedily induce a rise; and this rise
will for a long period be so steady and considerable as to produce a
very great increase in the remuneration of the labouring classes, and
immensely to benefit them. There is no speculation in this: it is only
supposing that the increase of gold is to produce the same effect as
the increase of silver, from the discovery of the South American mines,
did three centuries ago.
The effect of the same change, by diminishing the weight of debt and
taxes, will be still more signal and beneficial. Among the many and
appalling evils of which a rise in the value of the circulating medium,
and consequent fall in that of everything else, is productive, there is
perhaps none so widespread and calamitous in its effects, as the adding
to the weight of debts and taxes, and thus weighing down the energies
of the productive classes, upon whose efforts the whole prosperity
of society depends. It is that which has been the great cause of the
long-continued depression and agony, interrupted only by fleeting
gleams of prosperity, of the last thirty years, as the sudden expansion
and contraction of the currency consequent on its being made dependent
on the presence or absence of the precious metals, has been of its
frightful oscillations. The taxes now paid by the nation, as measured
by the price of wheat--the true measure--are, after, five-and-thirty
years of peace, twice as heavy as they were in 1815, after twenty
years of a costly war. This is what renders it so difficult for any
government to maintain armaments, either at sea or land, at all
commensurate to the public necessities; which has weakened our national
influence, and degraded our national character, and exposed us to the
deplorable state of weakness against foreign aggression, to the dangers
of which, the Duke of Wellington has said he has found it impossible
to awaken any Administration for thirty years. The Government see the
public dangers, but they are disabled from guarding against them,
because Parliament, stimulated by suffering constituencies whom the
fall of prices has involved in constant difficulties, will not vote
the necessary supplies. It is the same with the weight of mortgages,
jointures, family provisions, bonds, bills, and debts of every
description. They have all been doubled in weight since the bill of
1819 contracted the currency; and hence the inextricable embarrassments
into which nearly all classes of the community have been precipitated,
except the moneyed, whose fortunes have every day been increasing in
real amount, from the same cause which has spread ruin so generally
around them.
When it is said that the effect of Californian gold will be to reverse
all this--to reduce gradually, and probably before twenty years have
elapsed, _half the weight of debt and taxes_ now felt as so grievous a
burden by the community--it is affirmed that it will confer, perhaps,
the greatest blessing which a beneficent Providence could confer on a
suffering world. In England it will gradually and to a certain extent,
so far as average prices are concerned, undo all that the Bullionists
and Free-traders have been doing for the last thirty years. It will
remove a large part of the frightful evils consequent on the monetary
measures of Sir Robert Peel; and if seconded by a revision of our
import duties, and a moderate tax for fiscal purposes on all foreign
articles brought into the country, it would go far to repair the
devastation produced by the selfish legislation of the last thirty
years. In France it will arrest that dreadful fall of wages which, ever
since the peace, has been felt to be increasing, from the constant
reduction of prices arising from the destruction of the South American
mines, and the simultaneous measures adopted for the contraction of
the currency in Great Britain. The unjust monopoly of realised capital
will be arrested, at least for a long period. The unjust depression
of industry, by the continued fall of prices, will be gradually
terminated. But so gradual will be the change, and so unseen the
operation of the vivifying element thus let into society, that even the
classes most benefited by it will, for the most part, be ignorant of
the cause to which their improved circumstances have been owing. They
will be blessed by the hand of Nature, they know not how or by whom,
as, under the former system, they were cursed by the hand of man, they
knew not how or by whom.
Already the beneficial effects of Californian gold have been felt over
the whole world, and nowhere more strongly than in this country. It
is well known that prices of all articles of commerce, except corn
and sugar, have risen twenty or thirty per cent within the last year;
and the Free-traders consider that as being entirely owing to their
measures. If so, it is singular how _corn and sugar_, on which the
inundation of Free Trade has been chiefly let in since 1846, should
be the _only exceptions_ to the general rise. It is singular what
contradictory effects they ascribe to their system: at one time it is
lauded to the skies, because it tends to lower prices, and cheapen
every article of consumption; at another, because it is said to raise
prices, and encourage every branch of industry. Both effects cannot be
owing to the same system: to ascribe them both to it is to say that a
certain combination of gases produces alternately fire and water. At
all events, if Free Trade brings about a rise of prices, what comes of
all the arguments which went to recommend it on the score of reducing
them? The truth is, however, Free Trade has nothing whatever to do
with the recent rise of prices of manufactured articles, nor with the
extension of the national exports which has taken place. These happy
results, the passing gleam of sunshine, have been entirely owing to
other causes, among which Californian gold bears a prominent place.
Free Trade has tended only to continue and perpetuate the misery and
depression which attended its first introduction.
This argument of the increase of our exports last year (1850) having
been owing to Free Trade, has been so admirably disposed of by that
able and intrepid man to whom the nation is under such obligations
for the light he has thrown on these subjects, and the courageous way
in which he has everywhere asserted them, in a late public meeting at
Rugby, that we cannot do better than quote his words:--
"The Free-traders had boasted much of their system as having
increased the amount of our exports; and he (Mr Young) had
been continually trying for a long period to get from them
the names of the countries to which those increased imports
went. At length he had the fact; and the result would be most
startling as applied to the arguments and predictions of
that party before the corn law was repealed. The countries
he would take were Russia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Prussia,
Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France; and he found that in
the year 1845 the quantity of corn imported from all these
countries, comprising, as they did, the whole of northern and
central Europe, amounted to 1,741,730 quarters, whilst the
declared value of British and Irish manufactures exported
to those countries was L.17,504,417. But last year the corn
imported from those countries had increased in quantity to
6,857,530 quarters, whilst our exports to them had decreased
to L.15,274,639. These figures showed that from the whole of
northern and central Europe we took last year no less than
5,115,800 quarters of corn more than in 1845, and that there
was a decrease in the value of our exports of L.2,229,778.
Again, last year the declared value of our _gross_ exports
amounted to L.63,596,025, but in 1845 it reached the sum of
L.60,111,082; so that in the course of these four years the
increase was only L.3,484,943. He found also that our exports
in 1830 were L.35,842,623, and in 1835, L.47,372,270, being an
increase on the five years of L.11,529,647, or 32 2-10ths per
cent. That was an increase under the operation of protection.
In 1840 the exports amounted to L.51,406,430, or an increase
upon 1835 of L.4,634,160, or 8 5-10ths per cent. In 1845 they
were L.60,111,082--an increase on 1840 of L.8,704,652, or
16 9-10ths per cent. In 1849, L.63,596,025, an increase on
1845 of L.3,484,943; and in the present year, supposing the
increase continued in the same ratio, he calculated that that
increase would on the year 1845 be about L.4,350,000, or 7
2-10ths per cent. Would Free-traders boast of their exports
after that? They talked upon this question as if the country
had, under the system of protection, been in a perfectly dead
and stagnant condition, and that the agriculturists were like
the clods of the earth, and less capable of improvement. Why,
it was under protection that our ships were employed to go to
the island of Ichaboe, from which guano was first imported into
this country; and it was under protection that that island
had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and every cwt. of
its guano had been brought here and spread upon the soil. He
rejoiced and exulted in the march of science as much as any
man; but it was an arrogant and an unfounded assumption on
the part of the Free-traders to monopolise to themselves, as
the result of their system, those improvements in agriculture
which were going on under protection with railroad speed, and
to which, in truth, their measures had only given a check, and
not an impetus. But then he was asked, what have you to say
to the United States? He would tell them. He found that the
exports to the United States amounted to L.11,971,028 in 1849;
but in 1836 they were not less than L.12,425,605; so that the
exports in the former exceeded those in the latter year by
L.454,577. Surely facts like these would dispose of a few of
the Free-trade fallacies, and we should not hear them again
repeated, at all events."--_Morning Herald_, Nov. 28, 1850.
The restoration of peace on the Continent was the principal cause
which again raised the amount of our exports to the Old World. This
appears decisively in the returns: the exports of Great Britain to
Germany alone, which, in 1848, had sunk to less than £4,000,000, rose,
in 1850, to £6,078,355. The cessation of purchases to the Continent,
during the two preceding years, in consequence of the alarm consequent
on the French and German revolutions, only made the rush for English
manufactures greater when the restoration of tranquillity reopened the
Continent to our industry. In America the change was equally great, and
equally irrespective of Free Trade: our exports to the United States,
in 1850, exceeded £12,000,000. This extension arose from the general
rise of prices, and extension of credit, from the opening of the
treasures of California. It not only created a new market for exports
on the reverse of the Rocky Mountains, but so vivified and animated
every part of the Union, as rendered them capable of purchasing a much
larger quantity of the manufactured articles of this country than they
had done for a great number of years.[6]
But by far the most important and beneficial effect of Californian gold
hitherto experienced has been in the extension of credit and increase
of accommodation at home. This effect is obvious and important. The
notes of the Bank of England in circulation, have risen in the last
year to L.20,000,000 or L.21,000,000 from L.16,500,000, which they had
fallen to during the panic. The circulation of every other bank has,
as a matter of course, been proportionably augmented. What produced
this great increase in the circulating medium? The influx of bullion
into the country, which augmented the treasure in the Bank of England
to above L.16,000,000. There is the secret of the whole thing; of the
activity in the manufacturing districts, and the general extension of
credit and rise of prices through the districts. It is Californian gold
which has done the whole; for it has at once filled to overflowing the
vaults of the Bank of England, and relieved its officers, and those of
all similar establishments, from all dread of a drain of specie setting
in. Gold was abundant; the banks no longer feared a collapse: therefore
notes were abundant also; the terrors of the holders of them were
abated. Prices rose, and credit was extended. We are far from thinking
that it is a wise and judicious system to make credit of every kind
entirely dependent on the amount of metallic treasure in the vaults of
the Bank of England: we only say, having done this by Sir R. Peel's
monetary system, we have to thank California for having put at least
_a temporary stop to the evils with which it was pregnant_. It is not
surprising that the addition of even so small a sum to the metallic
circulation of the commercial world should produce, in a single year,
so great a result. The discovery of two millions of bank-notes, in an
old chest of the Bank of England, stopped the panic of December 1825;
the mere issuing of Lord J. Russell's letter, announcing the temporary
repeal of the Bank Charter Act, put a period to the far severer crash
of 1847. The addition of five millions to the metallic treasure of this
country is quite sufficient to vivify every branch of industry, for it
will probably put fifty millions, in bank-notes and private bills, into
circulation.
As the influx of Californian gold, however, is an element of such
immense importance thus let into the social world, it is material
to observe what evils it is adequate to remedy, and to what social
diseases it can be regarded as a panacea. This is the more necessary,
because, while it tends by its beneficent influence to conceal for
a time the pernicious effects of other measures, it is by no means
a remedy for them; nor has it a tendency even, in the long run, to
lessen their danger. It induces immediate prosperity, by the extension
of credit and rise of prices with which it is attended; but it has no
tendency to diminish the dreadful evils of Free-Trade and a currency
mainly dependent on the retention of the precious metals at all times
in the country.
On the contrary, it may, under many circumstances, materially aggravate
them.
As the effect produced by a great addition of the metallic treasures
of the earth is _universal_, it must affect prices equally in every
part of the world. The largest part of the bullion, indeed, will be
brought to the richest country, which is best able to buy it, and has
most need of it to form the basis of its transactions. But still, some
part will find its way into every country; prices will be everywhere
raised, and _the relative proportion between them in different
countries will remain the same, or even be rendered more unfavourable
to the richer state_. That is the material circumstance; for it shows
that it must leave the greatest and most lasting evils of Free Trade
untouched. Supposing gold to become so plentiful that the sovereign
is only worth ten shillings, and the effect on general prices to be
such that the average price of the quarter of wheat is raised from
forty to sixty shillings--which, in a course of years, is by no means
improbable--still the relative position of the British with the Polish
and American cultivator will remain the same. The price of the wheat
may be raised from 15s. to 25s. a-quarter, on the banks of the Vistula
or the Mississippi; but still the _ability of their cultivators to
undersell our farmers will remain the same_, or rather be augmented.
Prices will still be so much higher in the old rich and heavily-taxed
country, which absorbs the largest part of the metallic circulation
of the earth, than in the young poor and untaxed one, that in the
production of the fruits of the earth, to which machinery can never be
made applicable, the inability to carry on the competition will only
be rendered the more apparent by the increasing, or at all events,
permanent difference of the prices.
In the next place, how cheap soever gold, from its augmented plenty,
may become, there will be no cessation, as long as our paper
circulation remains on its present footing, of those dreadful monetary
crises which now, at stated periods recurring every five or six years,
spread such unheard-of ruin through the industrious classes. Let gold,
from its greater plenty, become of only half its value, or a sovereign
be only worth ten shillings, and prices, in consequence, rise to double
their present amount, the danger of a monetary crisis, as long as our
currency is based on its present footing, will remain the same. Still,
any considerable drain of the metallic treasure of the country, such as
it is--either from the necessities of foreign war, the adverse state of
foreign exchanges, or a great importation, occasioned by a deficient
home harvest--will send the specie headlong out, and, by suddenly
contracting the currency, ruin half of the persons engaged in business
undertakings. It is the _inconceivable folly_ of making the paper
circulation dependent on the retention of the metallic; the enormous
error of enacting, that, for every five sovereigns that are drawn out
of the country, a five-pound note shall be drawn in by the bankers; the
infatuated self-immolation arising from the gratuitous negation of the
greatest blessing of a paper circulation--that of supplying, during the
temporary absence of the metallic currency, its want, and obviating all
the evils thence arising--which is the real source of the evils under
which we have suffered so severely since the disastrous epoch of 1819,
when the system was introduced. The increased supply of gold, so far
from tending to obviate this danger, has a directly opposite effect;
for, by augmenting the metallic treasures of the country, and thus
raising credit during periods of prosperity, it engages the nation in
a vast variety of undertakings, the completion of which is rendered
impossible when the wind of adversity blows, by the sudden contraction
of its currency and credit. And to this danger _the mercantile classes
are exposed beyond any other_; for as their undertakings are always far
beyond their realised capital, and supported entirely by credit, every
periodical contraction of the currency, recurring every five or six
years, exposes one-half of them to inevitable ruin.
Let not the Free-traders, therefore, lay the flattering unction
to their souls, that California is to get them out of all their
difficulties, and that after having, by their ruinous measures, brought
the nation to the very brink of ruin, and destroyed one-half of its
wealth engaged in commerce, they are to escape the deserved execration
of ages, by the effects of an accidental discovery of metallic
treasures on the shores of the Pacific. Californian gold, a gift of
Providence to a suffering world, will arrest the general and calamitous
fall of prices which the Free-traders have laboured so assiduously
to introduce, and thus diminish in a most material degree the weight
of debts and taxes. So far it will undoubtedly tend to relieve the
industrious classes, _especially in the rural districts_, from much
of the misery induced on them by their oppressors; but it cannot work
impossibilities. It will leave industry in all classes, and in none
more than the manufacturing, exposed to the ruinous competition of
foreigners, working, whatever the value of money may be, at a cheaper
rate than we can ever do, because in poorer and comparatively untaxed
countries. It will leave the commercial classes permanently exposed to
the periodical recurrence of monetary storms, arising out of the very
plenty of the currency when credit is high, and its sudden withdrawal
from the effect of adverse exchanges, or the drain consequent on vast
importations of food. It will leave the British navy, and with it
the British colonial empire and our national independence, gradually
sinking from the competition, in shipping, of poorer states. Nature
will do much to counteract the disasters induced by human folly; but
the punishment of guilty selfishness is as much a part of her system
as the relief of innocent suffering; and to the end of the world those
who seek to enrich themselves by the ruin of their neighbours will work
out, in the very success of their measures, their own deserved and
memorable punishment.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See "Fall of Rome," Alison's _Essays_, vol. iii. p. 440.
[2] See a very able article on California, _Quarterly Review_, Oct.
1850.
[3] "Quum Censores ob inopiam ærarii, se jam locationibus abstinerent
ædium sacrarum tuendarum, curuliumque equorum præbendorum, ac similium
his rerum: convenere ad eos frequentes, qui hastæ hujus generis
assueverant; hortatique censores, _ut omnia perinde agerent, locarent,
ac si pecunia in ærario esset_. NEMINEM, NISI BELLO CONFECTO, PECUNIAM
AB ÆRARIO PETITURUM ESSE."--LIVY, lib. xxiv. c. 19. "The censors,"
says Arnold, "found the treasury unable to supply the public services.
Upon this, trust monies belonging to widows and minors, or to widows
and unmarried women, were deposited in the treasury; and whatever
sums the trustees had to draw for, were paid by the quarter _in
bills on the banking commissioners_, or _triumvirs mensarii_. It is
probable that these bills were actually a _paper currency_, and that
they circulated as money on the security of the public faith. In the
same way _the government contracts were also paid in paper_; for the
contractors came forward in a body to the censors, and begged them to
make their contracts as usual, _promising not to demand payment till
the end of the war_. This must mean, I conceive, that they were to be
paid in orders upon the treasury, which orders were to be converted
into cash when the present difficulties of the government should be
at an end."--ARNOLD'S _History of Rome_, ii. 207, 208. This was just
an inconvertible paper currency; and its issue immediately after the
battle of Cannæ saved the Roman empire. We have heard, from a gentleman
who was present, that, in a political Whig party many years ago, when
the conversation turned on the service of a paper currency in bringing
a state through a pecuniary crisis, and some one said it was that which
enabled the Romans to surmount the Second Punic war, Lord Melbourne,
who was present, immediately repeated, from memory, the words above
quoted from Livy in capitals.
[4] _Quarterly Review_, October 1850.
[5] AVERAGE PRICES OF WHEAT:--
_s._ _d._
1792, 47 1
1793, 49 6
1794, 54 0
1795, 81 6
1796, 80 3
1809, 106 0
1810, 112 0
1811, 108 0
1812, 118 0
1813, 120 0
[6] Exports to the United States from Great Britain:--
1837, £4,695,225
1838, 7,585,760
1839, 8,839,204
1840, 5,283,020
1841, 7,098,842
1842, 3,528,807
1849, 11,971,028
MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.--PART V.
BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.
BOOK III.--INITIAL CHAPTER, SHOWING HOW MY NOVEL CAME TO BE CALLED "MY
NOVEL."
"I am not displeased with your novel, so far as it has gone," said my
father graciously; "though as for The Sermon--"
Here I trembled; but the ladies, Heaven bless them! had taken Parson
Dale under their special protection; and, observing that my father
was puckering up his brows critically, they rushed boldly forward in
defence of The Sermon, and Mr Caxton was forced to beat a retreat.
However, like a skilful general, he renewed the assault upon outposts
less gallantly guarded. But as it is not my business to betray my weak
points, I leave it to the ingenuity of cavillers to discover the places
at which the Author of _Human Error_ directed his great guns.
"But," said the Captain, "you are a lad of too much spirit,
Pisistratus, to keep us always in the obscure country quarters of
Hazeldean--you will march us out into open service before you have done
with us?"
PISISTRATUS, magisterially, for he has been somewhat nettled by Mr
Caxton's remarks--and he puts on an air of dignity, in order to awe
away minor assailants.--"Yes, Captain Roland--not yet awhile, but all
in good time. I have not stinted myself in canvass, and behind my
foreground of the Hall and the Parsonage I propose, hereafter, to open
some lengthened perspective of the varieties of English life--"
MR CAXTON.--"Hum!"
BLANCHE, putting her hand on my father's lip.--"We shall know better
the design, perhaps, when we know the title. Pray, Mr Author, what is
the title?"
MY MOTHER, with more animation than usual.--"Ay, Sisty--the title?"
PISISTRATUS, startled.--"The title! By the soul of Cervantes! I have
never yet thought of a title!"
CAPTAIN ROLAND, solemnly.--"There is a great deal in a good title. As a
novel reader, I know that by experience."
MR SQUILLS.--"Certainly; there is not a catchpenny in the world but
what goes down, if the title be apt and seductive. Witness 'Old Parr's
Life Pills.' Sell by the thousand, sir, when my 'Pills for Weak
Stomachs,' which I believe to be just the same compound, never paid for
the advertising."
MR CAXTON.--"Parr's Life Pills! a fine stroke of genius! It is not
every one who has a weak stomach, or time to attend to it, if he have.
But who would not swallow a pill to live to a hundred and fifty-two?"
PISISTRATUS, stirring the fire in great excitement.--"My title! my
title!--what shall be my title!"
MR CAXTON, thrusting his hand into his waistcoat, and in his most
didactic of tones.--"From a remote period, the choice of a title has
perplexed the scribbling portion of mankind. We may guess how their
invention has been racked by the strange contortions it has produced.
To begin with the Hebrews. 'The Lips of the Sleeping,' (_Labia
Dormientium_)--what book do you suppose that title to designate?--A
Catalogue of Rabbinical writers! Again, imagine some young lady of
old captivated by the sentimental title of 'The Pomegranate with its
Flower,' and opening on a treatise on the Jewish Ceremonials! Let us
turn to the Romans. Aulus Gellius commences his pleasant gossiping
'Noctes' with a list of the titles in fashion in his day. For instance,
'_The Muses_' and '_The Veil_,' '_The Cornucopia_,' '_The Beehive_,'
and '_The Meadow_.' Some titles, indeed, were more truculent, and
promised food to those who love to sup upon horrors--such as '_The
Torch_,' '_The Poniard_,' '_The Stiletto_'--"
PISISTRATUS, impatiently.--"Yes, sir; but to come to My Novel."
MR CAXTON, unheeding the interruption.--"You see, you have a fine
choice here, and of a nature pleasing, and not unfamiliar to a
classical reader; or you may borrow a hint from the early Dramatic
Writers."
PISISTRATUS, more hopefully.--"Ay! there is something in the Drama akin
to the Novel. Now, perhaps, I may catch an idea."
MR CAXTON.--"For instance, the author of the _Curiosities of
Literature_ (from whom, by the way, I am plagiarising much of the
information I bestow upon you) tells us of a Spanish gentleman who
wrote a Comedy, by which he intended to serve what he took for Moral
Philosophy."
PISISTRATUS, eagerly.--"Well, sir?"
MR CAXTON.--"And called it 'The Pain of the Sleep of the World.'"
PISISTRATUS.--"Very comic indeed, sir."
MR CAXTON.--"Grave things were then called Comedies, as old things
are now called Novels. Then there are all the titles of early Romance
itself at your disposal--'Theagenes and Chariclea,' or 'The Ass' of
Longus, or 'The Golden Ass' of Apuleius, or the titles of Gothic
Romance, such as 'The most elegant, delicious, mellifluous, and
delightful History of Perceforest, King of Great Britain,'"--And
therewith my father ran over a list of names as long as the Directory,
and about as amusing.
"Well, to my taste," said my mother, "the novels I used to read when a
girl, (for I have not read many since, I am ashamed to say,)--"
MR CAXTON.--"No, you need not be at all ashamed of it, Kitty."
MY MOTHER, proceeding.--"Were much more inviting than any you mention,
Austin."
THE CAPTAIN.--"True."
MR SQUILLS.--"Certainly. Nothing like them now-a-days!"
MY MOTHER.--"'_Says she to her Neighbour, What?_'"
THE CAPTAIN.--"'_The Unknown, or the Northern Gallery_'--"
MR SQUILLS.--"'_There is a Secret; Find it Out!_'"
PISISTRATUS, pushed to the verge of human endurance, and upsetting
tongs, poker, and fire-shovel.--"What nonsense you are talking, all
of you! For heaven's sake, consider what an important matter we
are called upon to decide. It is not now the titles of those very
respectable works which issued from the Minerva Press that I ask you to
remember--it is to invent a title for mine--My Novel!"
MR CAXTON, clapping his hands gently.--"Excellent--capital! Nothing can
be better; simple, natural, pertinent, concise--"
PISISTRATUS.--"What is it, sir--what is it! Have you really thought of
a title to My Novel?"
MR CAXTON.--"You have hit it yourself--'My Novel.' It is your
Novel--people will know it is your Novel. Turn and twist the
English language as you will--be as allegorical as Hebrew, Greek,
Roman--Fabulist or Puritan--still, after all, it is your Novel, and
nothing more nor less than your Novel."
PISISTRATUS, thoughtfully, and sounding the words various ways.--"'My
Novel'--um--um! 'My Novel!' rather bald--and curt, eh?"
MR CAXTON.--"Add what you say you intend it to depict--Varieties in
English Life."
MY MOTHER.--"'_My Novel; or, Varieties in English Life_'--I don't
think it sounds amiss. What say you, Roland? Would it attract you in a
catalogue?"
My Uncle hesitates, when Mr Caxton exclaims imperiously--
"The thing is settled! Don't disturb Camarina."
SQUILLS.--"If it be not too great a liberty, pray who or what is
Camarina?"
MR CAXTON.--"Camarina, Mr Squills, was a lake, apt to be low, and then
liable to be muddy; and 'Don't disturb Camarina' was a Greek proverb
derived from an Oracle of Apollo; and from that Greek proverb, no
doubt, comes the origin of the injunction, '_Quieta non movere_,' which
became the favourite maxim of Sir Robert Walpole and Parson Dale. The
Greek line, Mr Squills, (here my father's memory began to warm,) is
preserved by STEPHANUS BYZANTINUS, de _Urbibus_--
®'Mê kinei Kamarinan, akinêtos gar ameinôn.'®
ZENOBIUS explains it in his Proverbs; SUIDAS repeats ZENOBIUS; LUCIAN
alludes to it; so does VIRGIL in the Third Book of the ÆNEID; and
SILIUS ITALICUS imitates Virgil--
'Et cui non licitum fatis Camarina moveri.'
Parson Dale, as a clergyman and a scholar, had, no doubt, these
authorities at his fingers' end. And I wonder he did not quote them,"
quoth my father; "but, to be sure, he is represented as a mild man,
and so might not wish to humble the Squire over much in the presence
of his family. Meanwhile, My Novel is My Novel; and now that that
matter is settled, perhaps the tongs, poker, and shovel may be picked
up, the children may go to bed, Blanche and Kitty may speculate apart
upon the future dignities of the Neogilos, taking care, nevertheless,
to finish the new pinbefores he requires for the present; Roland may
cast up his account-book, Mr Squills have his brandy and water, and
all the world be comfortable, each in his own way. Blanche, come away
from the screen, get me my slippers, and leave Pisistratus to himself.
®Mê kinei Kamarinan®--don't disturb Camarina. You see, my dear,"
added my father kindly, as, after settling himself into his slippers,
he detained Blanche's hand in his own--"you see, my dear, every house
has its Camarina. Man, who is a lazy animal, is quite content to let it
alone; but woman, being the more active, bustling, curious creature, is
always for giving it a sly stir."
BLANCHE, with female dignity.--"I assure you, that if Pisistratus had
not called me, I should not have--"
MR CAXTON, interrupting her, without lifting his eyes from the book he
has already taken.--"Certainly you would not. I am now in the midst of
the great Puseyite Controversy. ®Mê kinei Kamarinan®--don't disturb
Camarina."
A dead silence for half an hour, at the end of which
PISISTRATUS, from behind the screen.--"Blanche, my dear, I want to
consult you."
Blanche does not stir.
PISISTRATUS.--"Blanche, I say."
Blanche glances in triumph towards Mr Caxton.
MR CAXTON, laying down his theological tract, and rubbing his
spectacles mournfully.--"I hear him, child; I hear him. I retract my
vindication of Man. Oracles warn in vain: so long as there is a woman
on the other side of the screen,--it is all up with Camarina!"
CHAPTER II.
It is greatly to be regretted that Mr Stirn was not present at the
Parson's Discourse--but that valuable functionary was far otherwise
engaged--indeed, during the summer months he was rarely seen at the
afternoon service. Not that he cared for being preached at--not
he: Mr Stirn would have snapped his finger at the thunders of the
Vatican. But the fact was, that Mr Stirn chose to do a great deal
of gratuitous business upon the day of rest. The Squire allowed all
persons, who chose, to walk about the park on a Sunday; and many came
from a distance to stroll by the lake, or recline under the elms.
These visitors were objects of great suspicion, nay, of positive
annoyance, to Mr Stirn--and, indeed, not altogether without reason,
for we English have a natural love of liberty, which we are even more
apt to display in the grounds of other people than in those which
we cultivate ourselves. Sometimes, to his inexpressible and fierce
satisfaction, Mr Stirn fell upon a knot of boys pelting the swans;
sometimes he missed a young sapling, and found it in felonious hands,
converted into a walking-stick; sometimes he caught a hulking fellow
scrambling up the ha-ha! to gather a nosegay for his sweetheart from
one of poor Mrs Hazeldean's pet parterres; not unfrequently, indeed,
when all the family were fairly at church, some curious impertinents
forced or sneaked their way into the gardens, in order to peep in at
the windows. For these, and various other offences of like magnitude,
Mr Stirn had long, but vainly, sought to induce the Squire to withdraw
a permission so villanously abused. But though there were times when
Mr Hazeldean grunted and growled, and swore "that he would shut up the
park, and fill it (illegally) with man-traps and spring-guns," his
anger always evaporated in words. The park was still open to all the
world on a Sunday; and that blessed day was therefore converted into a
day of travail and wrath to Mr Stirn. But it was from the last chime of
the afternoon service bell until dusk that the spirit of this vigilant
functionary was most perturbed; for, amidst the flocks that gathered
from the little hamlets round to the voice of the Pastor, there were
always some stray sheep, or rather climbing desultory vagabond goats,
who struck off in all perverse directions, as if for the special
purpose of distracting the energetic watchfulness of Mr Stirn. As soon
as church was over, if the day were fine, the whole park became a
scene animated with red cloaks, or lively shawls, Sunday waistcoats,
and hats stuck full of wild-flowers--which last Mr Stirn often stoutly
maintained to be Mrs Hazeldean's newest geraniums. Now, on this Sunday
especially, there was an imperative call upon an extra exertion of
vigilance on the part of the superintendent--he had not only to detect
ordinary depredators and trespassers; but, first, to discover the
authors of the conspiracy against the Stocks; and secondly, to "make an
example."
He had begun his rounds, therefore, from the early morning; and
just as the afternoon bell was sounding its final peal, he emerged
upon the village green from a hedgerow, behind which he had been at
watch to observe who had the most suspiciously gathered round the
stocks. At that moment the place was deserted. At a distance, the
superintendent saw the fast disappearing forms of some belated groups
hastening towards the church; in front, the Stocks stood staring at him
mournfully from its four great eyes, which had been cleansed from the
mud, but still looked bleared and stained with the marks of the recent
outrage. Here Mr Stirn paused, took off his hat, and wiped his brows.
"If I had sum un, to watch here," thought he, "while I takes a turn by
the water-side, praps summat might come out; praps them as did it ben't
gone to church, but will come sneaking round to look on their willany!
as they says murderers are always led back to the place where they
ha' left the body. But in this here willage there ben't a man, woman,
nor child, as has any consarn for Squire or Parish, barring myself."
It was just as he arrived at that misanthropical conclusion that Mr
Stirn beheld Leonard Fairfield walking very fast from his own home.
The superintendent clapped on his hat, and stuck his right arm akimbo.
"Hollo, you sir," said he, as Lenny now came in hearing, "where be you
going at that rate?"
"Please, sir, I be going to church."
"Stop, sir--stop, Master Lenny. Going to church!--why, the bell's
done; and you knows the Parson is very angry at them as comes in late,
disturbing the congregation. You can't go to church now!"
"Please, sir"--
"I says you can't go to church now. You must learn to think a little of
others, lad. You sees how I sweats to serve the Squire! and you must
serve him too. Why, your mother's got the house and premishes almost
rent free: you ought to have a grateful heart, Leonard Fairfield, and
feel for his honour! Poor man! _his_ heart is wellnigh bruk, I am sure,
with the goings on."
Leonard opened his innocent blue eyes, while Mr Stirn dolorously wiped
his own.
"Look at that ere dumb cretur," said Stirn suddenly, pointing to the
Stocks--"look at it. If it could speak, what would it say, Leonard
Fairfield? Answer me that!--'Damn the Stocks, indeed!'"
"It was very bad in them to write such naughty words," said Lenny
gravely. "Mother was quite shocked when she heard of it, this morning."
MR STIRN.--"I dare she was, considering what she pays for the
premishes: (insinuatingly,) you does not know who did it--eh, Lenny?"
LENNY.--"No, sir; indeed I does not!"
MR STIRN.--"Well, you see, you can't go to church--prayers half
over by this time. You recollex that I put them stocks under your
'sponsibility,' and see the way you's done your duty by 'em. I've half
a mind to,"--
Mr Stirn cast his eyes on the eyes of the Stocks.
"Please, sir," began Lenny again, rather frightened.
"No, I won't please; it ben't pleasing at all. But I forgives you this
time, only keep a sharp look-out, lad, in future. Now you just stay
here--no, there,--under the hedge, and you watches if any persons
come to loiter about or looks at the Stocks, or laughs to hisself,
while I go my rounds. I shall be back either afore church is over or
just arter; so you stay till I comes, and give me your report. Be
sharp, boy, or it will be worse for you and your mother: I can let the
premishes for four pounds a year more, to-morrow."
Concluding with that somewhat menacing and very significant remark, and
not staying for an answer, Mr Stirn waved his hand, and walked off.
Poor Lenny remained by the Stocks, very much dejected, and greatly
disliking the neighbourhood to which he was consigned. At length he
slowly crept off to the hedge, and sate himself down in the place of
espionage pointed out to him. Now, philosophers tell us that what is
called the point of honour is a barbarous feudal prejudice. Amongst
the higher classes, wherein those feudal prejudices may be supposed to
prevail, Lenny Fairfield's occupation would not have been considered
peculiarly honourable; neither would it have seemed so to the more
turbulent spirits among the humbler orders, who have a point of
honour of their own, which consists in the adherence to each other in
defiance of all lawful authority. But to Lenny Fairfield, brought up
much apart from other boys, and with a profound and grateful reverence
for the Squire instilled into all his habits of thought, notions of
honour bounded themselves to simple honesty and straightforward truth;
and as he cherished an unquestioning awe of order and constitutional
authority, so it did not appear to him that there was anything
derogatory and debasing in being thus set to watch for an offender.
On the contrary, as he began to reconcile himself to the loss of the
church service, and to enjoy the cool of the summer shade, and the
occasional chirp of the birds, he got to look on the bright side of
the commission to which he was deputed. In youth, at least, everything
has its bright side--even the appointment of Protector to the Parish
Stocks. For the Stocks, themselves, Leonard had no affection, it is
true; but he had no sympathy with their aggressors, and he could well
conceive that the Squire would be very much hurt at the revolutionary
event of the night. "So," thought poor Leonard in his simple heart--"so
if I can serve his honour, by keeping off mischievous boys, or letting
him know who did the thing, I'm sure it would be a proud day for
mother." Then he began to consider that, however ungraciously Mr
Stirn had bestowed on him the appointment, still it was a compliment
to him--showed trust and confidence in him, picked him out from his
contemporaries as the sober moral pattern boy; and Lenny had a great
deal of pride in him, especially in matters of repute and character.
All these things considered, I say, Leonard Fairfield reclined in his
lurking-place, if not with positive delight and intoxicating rapture,
at least with tolerable content and some complacency.
Mr Stirn might have been gone a quarter of an hour, when a boy came
through a little gate in the park, just opposite to Lenny's retreat in
the hedge, and, as if fatigued with walking, or oppressed by the heat
of the day, paused on the green for a moment or so, and then advanced
under the shade of the great tree which overhung the Stocks.
Lenny pricked up his ears, and peeped out jealously.
He had never seen the boy before: it was a strange face to him.
Leonard Fairfield was not fond of strangers; moreover, he had a vague
belief that strangers were at the bottom of that desecration of the
Stocks. The boy, then, was a stranger; but what was his rank? Was he
of that grade in society in which the natural offences are or are not
consonant to, or harmonious with, outrages upon Stocks? On that Lenny
Fairfield did not feel quite assured. According to all the experience
of the villager, the boy was not dressed like a young gentleman.
Leonard's notions of such aristocratic costume were naturally
fashioned upon the model of Frank Hazeldean. They represented to him
a dazzling vision of snow-white trousers, and beautiful blue coats,
and incomparable cravats. Now the dress of this stranger, though not
that of a peasant nor of a farmer, did not in any way correspond with
Lenny's notions of the costume of a young gentleman: it looked to him
highly disreputable; the coat was covered with mud, and the hat was all
manner of shapes, with a gap between the side and crown.
Lenny was puzzled, till it suddenly occurred to him that the gate
through which the boy had passed was in the direct path across the
park from a small town, the inhabitants of which were in very bad
odour at the Hall--they had immemorially furnished the most daring
poachers to the preserves, the most troublesome trespassers on the
park, the most unprincipled orchard-robbers, and the most disputatious
assertors of various problematical rights of way, which, according to
the Town, were public, and, according to the Hall, had been private
since the Conquest. It was true that the same path led also directly
from the Squire's house, but it was not probable that the wearer of
attire so equivocal had been visiting there. All things considered,
Lenny had no doubt in his mind but that the stranger was a shop-boy
or 'prentice from the town of Thorndyke; and the notorious repute of
that town, coupled with this presumption, made it probable that Lenny
now saw before him one of the midnight desecrators of the Stocks. As
if to confirm the suspicion, which passed through Lenny's mind with a
rapidity wholly disproportionate to the number of lines it costs me to
convey it, the boy, now standing right before the Stocks, bent down and
read that pithy anathema with which it was defaced. And having read
it, he repeated it aloud, and Lenny actually saw him smile--such a
smile!--so disagreeable and sinister! Lenny had never before seen the
smile Sardonic.
But what were Lenny's pious horror and dismay when this ominous
stranger fairly seated himself on the Stocks, rested his heels
profanely on the lids of two of the four round eyes, and, taking out a
pencil and a pocket-book, began to write. Was this audacious Unknown
taking an inventory of the church and the Hall for the purposes of
conflagration? He looked at one, and at the other, with a strange,
fixed stare as he wrote--not keeping his eyes on the paper, as Lenny
had been taught to do when he sate down to his copy-book. The fact is,
that Randal Leslie was tired and faint, and he felt the shock of his
fall the more, after the few paces he had walked, so that he was glad
to rest himself a few moments; and he took that opportunity to write a
line to Frank, to excuse himself for not calling again, intending to
tear the leaf on which he wrote out of his pocket-book, and leave it at
the first cottage he passed, with instructions to take it to the Hall.
While Randal was thus innocently engaged, Lenny came up to him, with
the firm and measured pace of one who has resolved, cost what it may,
to do his duty. And as Lenny, though brave, was not ferocious, so
the anger he felt, and the suspicions he entertained, only exhibited
themselves in the following solemn appeal to the offender's sense of
propriety,--
"Ben't you ashamed of yourself? Sitting on the Squire's new Stocks! Do
get up, and go along with you!"
Randal turned round sharply; and though, at any other moment, he would
have had sense enough to extricate himself very easily from his false
position, yet, _Nemo mortalium_, &c. No one is always wise. And Randal
was in an exceedingly bad humour. The affability towards his inferiors,
for which I lately praised him, was entirely lost in the contempt for
impertinent snobs natural to an insulted Etonian.
Therefore, eyeing Lenny with great disdain, Randal answered briefly,--
"You are an insolent young blackguard."
So curt a rejoinder made Lenny's blood fly to his face. Persuaded
before that the intruder was some lawless apprentice or shop-lad,
he was now more confirmed in that judgment, not only by language so
uncivil, but by the truculent glance which accompanied it, and which
certainly did not derive any imposing dignity from the mutilated,
rakish, hang-dog, ruinous hat, under which it shot its sullen and
menacing fire.
Of all the various articles of which our male attire is composed, there
is perhaps not one which has so much character and expression as the
top-covering. A neat, well-brushed, short-napped, gentlemanlike hat,
put on with a certain air, gives a distinction and respectability to
the whole exterior; whereas a broken, squashed, higgledy-piggledy
sort of a hat, such as Randal Leslie had on, would go far towards
transforming the stateliest gentleman that ever walked down St James's
Street into the ideal of a ruffianly scamp.
Now, it is well known that there is nothing more antipathetic to
your peasant-boy than a shop-boy. Even on grand political occasions,
the rural working-class can rarely be coaxed into sympathy with the
trading town-class. Your true English peasant is always an aristocrat.
Moreover, and irrespectively of this immemorial grudge of class, there
is something peculiarly hostile in the relationship between boy and
boy when their backs are once up, and they are alone on a quiet bit
of green. Something of the game-cock feeling--something that tends to
keep alive, in the population of this island, (otherwise so lamb-like
and peaceful,) the martial propensity to double the thumb tightly over
the four fingers, and make what is called "a fist of it." Dangerous
symptoms of these mingled and aggressive sentiments were visible in
Lenny Fairfield at the words and the look of the unprepossessing
stranger. And the stranger seemed aware of them; for his pale face grew
more pale, and his sullen eye more fixed and more vigilant.
"You get off them Stocks," said Lenny, disdaining to reply to the
coarse expressions bestowed on him; and, suiting the action to the
word, he gave the intruder what he meant for a shove, but which Randal
took for a blow. The Etonian sprang up, and the quickness of his
movement, aided but by a slight touch of his hand, made Lenny lose his
balance, and sent him neck-and-crop over the Stocks. Burning with rage,
the young villager rose alertly, and, flying at Randal, struck out
right and left.