AN EDITORIAL ARTICLE FROM A JOURNAL. OF MAY 3rd, A.D. 3873.
At the quiet little village of Smithcester (the ancient London) will
be celebrated to-day the twentieth, centennial anniversary of this
remarkable man, the foremost figure of antiquity. The recurrence of
what, no longer than six centuries ago, was a popular _fête_ day, and
which even now is seldom allowed to pass without some recognition by
those to whom the word liberty means something more precious than
gold, is provocative of peculiar emotion. It matters little whether or
no tradition has correctly fixed the date of Smith's birth; that he
_was_ born--that being born he wrought nobly at the work his hand
found to do--that by the mere force of his intellect he established
our present perfect form of government, under which civilization has
attained its highest and ripest development--these are facts beside
which a mere question of chronology sinks into insignificance.
That this extraordinary man originated the Smitharchic system of
government is, perhaps, open to honest doubt; very possibly it had a
_de facto_ existence in various debased and uncertain shapes as early
as the sixteenth century. But that he cleared it of its overlying
errors and superstitions, gave it a definite form, and shaped it into
an intelligible scheme, there is the strongest evidence in the
fragments of twentieth-century literature that have descended to us,
disfigured though they are with amazingly contradictory statements of
his birth, parentage, and manner of life before he strode upon the
political stage as the liberator of mankind. It is stated that
Snakeshear--one of his contemporaries, a poet whose works had in their
day some reputation (though it is difficult to say why)--alludes to
him as "the noblest Roman of them all;" our ancestors at the time
being called Englishmen or Romans, indifferently. In the only fragment
of Snakeshear extant, however, we have been unable to find this
passage.
Smith's military power is amply attested in an ancient manuscript of
undoubted authenticity, which has just been translated from the
Japanese. It is an account of the water-battle of Loo, by an
eyewitness whose name, unfortunately, has not reached us. In this
battle it is stated that Smith overthrew the great Neapolitan general,
whom he captured and conveyed in chains to the island of Chickenhurst.
In his Political History of the Twentieth Century, the late
Mimble--or, as he would have been called in the time of which he
writes, _Mister_ Mimble--has this luminous sentence: "With the single
exception of Coblentz, there was no European government the Liberator
did not upset, and which he did not erect into a pure Smitharchy; and
though some of them afterward relapsed temporarily into the crude
forms of antiquity, and others fell into fanciful systems begotten of
the intellectual activity he had stirred up, yet so firmly did he
establish the principle, that in the Thirty-second Century the
enlightened world was, what it has since remained, practically
Smitharchic."
It may be noted here as a curious coincidence, that the same year
which saw the birth of him who established rational government
witnessed the death of him who perfected literature. In 1873, Martin
Farquhar Tupper--next to Smith the most notable name in history--died
of starvation in the streets of London. Like that of Smith, his origin
is wrapped in profoundest obscurity. No less than seven British cities
claimed the honour of his birth. Meagre indeed is our knowledge of
this only bard whose works have descended to us through the changes of
twenty centuries entire. All that is positively established is that
during his life he was editor of "The Times 'magazine,'" a word of
disputed meaning--and, as quaint old Dumbleshaw says, "an accomplished
Greek and Latin scholar," whatever "Greek" and "Latin" may have been.
Had Smith and Tupper been contemporaries, the iron deeds of the former
would doubtless have been immortalized in the golden pages of the
latter. Upon such chances does History depend for her materials!
Strangely unimpressible indeed must be the mind which, looking
backward through the vista of twenty centuries upon the singular race
from whom we are supposed to be descended, can repress a feeling of
emotional interest. The names of John Smith and Martin Farquhar
Tupper, blazoned upon the page of the dim past, and surrounded by the
lesser names of Snakeshear, the first Neapolitan, Oliver Cornwell,
Close, "Queen" Elizabeth, or Lambeth, the Dutch Bismarch, Julia Cæsar,
and a host of contemporary notables are singularly suggestive. They
call to mind the odd old custom of covering the body with "clothes;"
the curious error of Copernicus and other wide guesses of antique
"science;" the lost arts of telegramy, steam locomotion, and printing
with movable types; and the exploded theory of gunpowder. They set us
thinking upon the zealous idolatry which led men to make pious
pilgrimages to the then accessible regions about the North Pole and
into the interior of Africa, which at that time was but little better
than a wilderness. They conjure up visions of bloodthirsty "Emperors,"
tyrannical "Kings," vampire "Presidents," and useless
"Parliaments"--strangely horrible shapes contrasted with the serene
and benevolent aspect of our modern Smithocracy!
Let us to-day rejoice that the old order of things has for ever passed
away; let us be thankful that our lot has been cast in more wholesome
days than those in which John Smith chalked out the better destinies
of a savage race, and Tupper sang divine philosophy to inattentive
ears. And yet let us keep green the memory of whatever there was of
good--if any--in the dark pre-Smithian ages, when men cherished quaint
superstitions and rode on the backs of "horses"--when they passed
_over_ the seas instead of under them--when science had not yet dawned
to chase away the shadows of imagination--and when the cabalistic
letters A.D., which from habit we still affix to the numerals
designating the age of the world, had perhaps a known signification.
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