"They lay aside their private cares,
To mend the Kirk and State affairs;
They'll talk o' patronage and priests,
Wi' kindling fury in their breasts;
Or tell what new taxation 's comin',
An' ferlie at the folk in _Lon'on_."--BURNS.
We had, as I have already stated, no Dissenters in the parish of
Cromarty. What were known as the Haldanes' people, had tried to effect a
lodgment among us in the town, but without success: in the course of
several years they failed to acquire more than six or eight members; and
these were not of the more solid people, but marked as an eccentric
class, fond of argument, and possessed by a rage for the novel and the
extreme. The leading teachers of the party were a retired English
merchant and an ex-blacksmith, who, quitting the forge in middle life,
had pursued the ordinary studies to no very great effect, and become a
preacher. And both were, I believe, good men, but by no means prudent
missionaries. They said very strong things against the Church of
Scotland, in a place where the Church of Scotland was much respected;
and it was observed, that while they did not do a great deal to convert
the irreligious to Christianity, they were exceedingly zealous in their
endeavours to make the religious Baptists. Much to my annoyance in my
younger days, they used to waylay Uncle Sandy on his return from the
Hill, on evenings when I had gone to get some lessons from him regarding
sand-worms, or razor-fish, or the sea-hare, and engage him in long
controversies about infant baptism and Church Establishments. The
matters which they discussed were greatly too high for me, nor was I by
any means an attentive listener; but I picked up enough to know that
Uncle Sandy, though a man of slow speech, held stiffly to the
Establishment scheme of Knox, and the defence of Presbyterianism; and it
did not require any particularly nice perceptive powers to observe that
both his antagonists and himself used at times to get pretty warm, and
to talk tolerably loud--louder, at least, than was at all necessary in
the quiet evening woods. I remember, too, that in urging him to quit the
National Church for theirs, they usually employed language borrowed from
the Revelations; and that, calling his Church _Babylon_, they bade him
come out of her, that he might not be a partaker of her plagues. Uncle
Sandy had seen too much of the world, and read and heard too much of
controversy, to be out of measure shocked by the phrase; but with a
decent farmer of the parish the hard words of the proselytizers did them
a mischief. The retired merchant had urged him to quit the
Establishment; and the farmer had replied by asking, in his simplicity,
whether he thought he ought to leave his Church to sink in that way?
"Yes," exclaimed the merchant, with great emphasis; "leave her to sink
to her place--the lowest hell!" This was terrible: the decent farmer
opened his huge eyes at hearing what he deemed a bold blasphemy. The
Church of which the Baptist spoke was, in Cromarty at least, the Church
of the _outed_ Mr. Hugh Anderson, who gave up his all in the time of the
persecution, for conscience' sake; it was the Church of Mr. Gordon,
whose ministry had been so signally countenanced during the period of
the great revival; it was the Church of devout Mr. Monro, and of worthy
Mr. Smith, and of many a godly elder and God-fearing member who had held
by Christ the Head; and yet here was it denounced as a Church whose
true place was hell. The farmer turned away, sick of the controversy;
and the imprudent speech of the retired merchant flew like wildfire over
the parish. "Surely," says Bacon, "princes have need, in tender matters
and ticklish times, to beware what they say, especially in those short
speeches which fly about like darts, and are thought to be shot out of
their secret intentions." Princes are, however, not the only men who
would do well to beware of short speeches. The short speech of the
merchant ruined the Baptist cause in Cromarty; and the two missionaries
might, on its delivery, have just done, if they but knew the position to
which it reduced them, what they were content to do a few years
after--pack up their moveables and quit the place.
Having for years no antagonists to contend with outside the pale of the
Establishment, it was of course natural that we should find opponents
within. But during the incumbency of Mr. Smith--the minister of the
parish for the first one-and-twenty years of my life--even these were
wanting; and we passed a very quiet time, undisturbed by controversy of
any kind, political or ecclesiastical. Nor were the first few years of
Mr. Stewart's incumbency less quiet. The Catholic Relief Bill was a
pebble cast into the pool, but a very minute one; and the ripple which
it raised caused scarce any agitation. Mr. Stewart did not see his way
clearly through all the difficulties of the measure; but, influenced in
part by some of his brethren in the neighbourhood, he at length made up
his mind to petition against it; and to his petition, praying that no
concessions should be made to the Papists, greatly more than
nineteen-twentieths of the male parishioners affixed their names. The
few individuals who kept aloof were chiefly lads of an extra-liberal
turn, devoid, like most extreme politicians, of the ordinary
ecclesiastical sympathies of their countryfolk; and as I cultivated no
acquaintance with them, and was more ecclesiastical than political in my
leanings, I had the satisfaction of finding myself standing, in
opposition to all my friends, on the Catholic Relief measure, in a
respectable minority of one. Even Uncle Sandy, after some little demur,
and an explosion against the Irish Establishment, set off and signed the
petition. I failed, however, to see that I was in the wrong. With the
two great facts of the Irish Union and the Irish Church before me, I
could not petition against Roman Catholic Emancipation. I felt, too,
that were I myself a Roman Catholic, I would listen to no Protestant
argument until what I held to be justice had first been done me. I would
have at once inferred that a religion associated with what I deemed
injustice was a false, not a true, religion; and, on the strength of the
inference, would have rejected it without further inquiry; and could I
fail to believe that what I myself would have done in the circumstances,
many Roman Catholics were actually doing? And believing I could defend
my position, which was certainly not an obtrusive one, and was at times
assailed in conversation by my friends, in a way that showed, as I
thought, they did not understand it, I sat down and wrote an elaborate
letter on the subject, addressed to the editor of the _Inverness
Courier_; in which, as I afterwards found, I was happy enough to
anticipate in some points the line taken up, in his famous emancipation
speech, by a man whom I had early learned to recognise as the greatest
and wisest of Scottish ministers--the late Dr. Chalmers. On glancing
over my letter, however, and then looking round me on the good men among
my townsfolk--including my uncle and my minister--with whom it would
have the effect of placing me in more decided antagonism than any mere
refusal to sign their petition, I resolved, instead of dropping it into
the post-office, to drop it into the fire, which I accordingly did; and
so the matter took end; and what I had to say in my own defence, and in
that of emancipation, was in consequence never said.
This, however, was but the mere shadow of a controversy; it was merely
a possible controversy, strangled in the birth. But some three years
after, the parish was agitated by a dire ecclesiastical dispute, which
set us all together by the ears. The place had not only its parish
church, but also its Gaelic chapel, which, though on the ordinary
foundation of a chapel of ease, was endowed, and under the patronage of
the crown. It had been built about sixty years previous, by a benevolent
proprietor of the lands of Cromarty--"George Ross, the Scotch
agent"--whom Junius ironically described as the "trusted friend and
worthy confidant of Lord Mansfield;" and who, whatever the satirist may
have thought of either, was in reality a man worthy the friendship of
the accomplished and philosophic lawyer. Cromarty, originally a Lowland
settlement, had had from the Reformation down till the latter quarter of
the last century no Gaelic place of worship. On the breaking up of the
feudal system, however, the Highlanders began to drop into the place in
quest of employment; and George Ross, affected by their uncared-for
religious condition, built for them, at his own expense, a chapel, and
had influence enough to get an endowment for its minister from the
Government. Government retained the patronage in its own hands; and as
the Highlanders consisted of but labourers and farm servants, and the
workers in a hempen manufactory, and had no manner of influence, their
wishes were not always consulted in the choice of a minister. About the
time of Mr. Stewart's appointment, through the late Sir Robert Peel, who
had courteously yielded to the wishes of the English congregation, the
Gaelic people had got a minister presented to them whom they would
scarcely have chosen for themselves, but who had, notwithstanding,
popular points about him. Though not of high talent, he was frank and
genial, and visited often, and conversed much; and at length the
Highlanders came to regard him as the very _beau-ideal_ of a minister.
He and Mr. Stewart belonged to the antagonist parties in the Church. Mr.
Stewart took his place in the old Presbyterian section, under Chalmers
and Thomson; while the Gaelic minister held by Drs. Inglis and Cook: and
so thoroughly were their respective congregations influenced by their
views, that at the Disruption in 1843, while considerably more than
nine-tenths of the English-speaking parishioners closed their connexion
with the State, and became Free Churchmen, at least an equal proportion
of the chapel Highlanders clung to the Establishment. Curiously enough,
however, there arose a controversy between the congregations at this
time, in which each seemed, in relation to the general question at
issue, to take the part proper to the other.
I do not think the English congregation were in any degree jealous of
the Gaelic one. The English contained the _elite_ of the place--all its
men of property and influence, from its merchants and heritors, down to
the humblest of the class that afterwards became its ten-pound
franchise-holders; whereas the Gaelic people were, as I have said,
simply poor labourers and weavers: and if the sense of superiority did
at times show itself on the more potent side, it was only among the
lowlier people of the English congregation. When, on a certain occasion,
a stranger fell asleep in the middle of one of Mr. Stewart's best
sermons, and snored louder than was seemly, an individual beside him was
heard muttering, in a low whisper, that the man ought to be sent up to
"_the Gaelic_," for he was not fit to be among them; and there might be
a few other similar manifestations; but the parties were not on a
sufficiently equal level to enact the part of those rival congregations
that are for ever bemoaning the shortcomings each of the other, and that
in their days of fasting and humiliation have the sins of their
neighbours at least as strongly before them as their own. But if the
English congregation were not jealous of the Gaelic one, the Gaelic one,
as was perhaps natural in their circumstances, were, I am afraid,
jealous of the English: they were poor people, they used sometimes to
say, but their souls were as precious as those of richer folk, and they
were surely as well entitled to have their just rights as the English
people--axioms which, I believe, no one in the other congregation
disputed, or even canvassed at all. We were, however, all roused one
morning to consider the case, by learning that on the previous day the
minister of the Gaelic chapel had petitioned the Presbytery of the
district, either to be assigned a parish within the bounds of the parish
of Cromarty, or to have the charge erected into a collegiate one, and
his half of it, of course, rendered coordinate with Mr. Stewart's.
The English people were at once very angry, and very much alarmed. As
the two congregations were scattered all over the same piece of
territory, it would be impossible to cut it up into two parishes,
without separating between a portion of Mr. Stewart's people and their
minister, and making them the parishioners of a man whom they had not
yet learned to like; and, on the other hand, by erecting the charge into
a collegiate one, the minister whom they had not yet learned to like
would acquire as real a jurisdiction over them as that possessed by the
minister of their choice. Or--as the case was somewhat quaintly stated
by one of themselves--by the one alternative "the Gaelic man would
become whole minister to the half of them, and by the other, half
minister to the whole of them." And so they determined on making a
vigorous resistance. Mr. Stewart himself, too, liked the move of his
neighbour the Gaelic minister exceedingly ill. He was not desirous, he
said, to have a colleague thrust upon him in his charge, to keep him
right on Moderate principles--a benefit for which he had not bargained
when he accepted the presentation; nor yet, as the other alternative,
did he wish to see his living child, the parish, divided into two, and
the half of it given to the strange claimant that was not its parent.
There was another account, too, on which he disliked the movement: the
two great parties in the Church were equally represented at this time in
the Presbytery;--they had their three members apiece; and he, of
course, saw that the introduction of the Gaelic minister into it would
have the effect of casting the balance in favour of Moderatism. And so,
as both minister and people were equally in earnest, counter petitions
were soon got up, praying the Presbytery, as a first step in the
process, that copies of the Gaelic minister's document should be served
upon them. The Presbytery decided, in terms of their prayer, that copies
should be served; and the Gaelic minister, on the somewhat extreme
ground that the people had no right to appear in the business at all,
appealed to the General Assembly. And so the people had next to petition
that venerable court in behalf of what they deemed their imperilled
rights; while the Gaelic congregation, under the full impression that
their overbearing English neighbours were treating them "as if they had
no souls," got up a counter petition, virtually to the effect that the
parish might be either cut in two, and the half of it given to their
minister, or that he might be at least made second minister to every man
in it. The minister, however, finding at the General Assembly that the
ecclesiastical party on whose support he had relied were opposed _in
toto_ to the erection of chapels of ease into regular charges, and that
the peculiarities of the case were such as to cut off all chance of his
being supported by their opponents, fell from his appeal, and the case
was never called in Court. Some of our Cromarty fisher-folk, who were
staunch on the English side, though they could not quite see the merits,
had rather a different version of the business. "The Gaelic man had no
sooner entered the Kirk o' the General Assembly," they said, "than the
maister of the Assembly rose, and, speaking very rough, said, 'Ye
contrarious rascal, what tak's you here? What are ye aye troubling that
decent lad Mr. Stewart for? I'm sure he's no meddling wi' you! Get about
your business, ye contrarious rascal!'"
I took an active part in this controversy; wrote petitions and
statements for my brother parishioners, with paragraphs for the local
newspapers, and a long letter for the _Caledonian Mercury_, in reply to
a tissue of misrepresentation which appeared in that print, from the pen
of one of the Gaelic minister's legal agents; and, finally, I replied to
a pamphlet by the same hand, which, though miserable as a piece of
writing--for it resembled no other composition ever produced, save,
mayhap, a very badly-written law paper--contained statements which I
deemed it necessary to meet. And such were my first attempts in the
rough field of ecclesiastical controversy--a field into which
inclination would never have led me, but which has certainly lain very
much in my way, and in which I have spent many a laborious hour. My
first pieces were rather stiffly written, somewhat on the perilous model
of Junius; but as it was hardly possible to write so ill as my opponent,
I could appeal to even his friends whether it was quite right of him to
call me illiterate and untaught, in prose so much worse than my own.
Chiefly by getting the laughers now and then on my side, I succeeded in
making him angry; and he replied to my jokes by _calling names_--a
phrase, by the way, which, forgetting his Watts' Hymns, and failing to
consult his Johnson, he characterized as not English. I was, he said, a
"shallow, pretending ninny;" an "impudent illiterate lad;" "a fanatic"
and a "frantic person;" the "low underling of a faction," and "Peter the
Hermit;" and, finally, as the sum-total of the whole he assured me that
I stood in _his_ "estimation the most ignoble and despised in the whole
range of the human species." This was frightful! but I not only outlived
it all, but learned, I fear, after in this way first tasting blood, to
experience a rather too keen delight in the anger of an antagonist. I
may add, that when, some two or three years after the period of this
controversy, the General Assembly admitted what were known as the
Parliamentary ministers, and the ministers of chapels of ease, to a seat
in the church courts, neither my townsmen nor myself saw aught to
challenge in the arrangement. It contained none of the elements which
had provoked our hostility in the Cromarty chapel case: it did not make
over the people of one minister to the charge of another, whom they
would never have chosen for themselves; but, without encroaching on
popular rights, equalized, on the Presbyterian scheme, the standing of
ministers and the claims of congregations.
The next matter which engaged my townsfolk was a considerably more
serious one. When, in 1831, cholera first threatened the shores of
Britain, the Bay of Cromarty was appointed by Government one of the
quarantine ports; and we became familiar with the sight, at first deemed
sufficiently startling, of fleets of vessels lying in the upper
roadstead, with the yellow flag waving from their mast-tops. The
disease, however, failed to find its way ashore; and, when, in the
summer of the following year, it was introduced into the north of
Scotland, it went stalking around the town and parish for several
months, without visiting either. It greatly more than decimated the
villages of Portmahomak and Inver, and bore heavily on the parishes of
Nigg and Urquhart, with the towns of Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall,
and Rosemarkie; in fine, the quarantine seaport town that seemed at
first to be most in danger from the disease, appeared latterly to be
almost the only place of any size in the locality exempted from its
ravages. It approached, however, alarmingly near. The opening of the
Cromarty Firth is little more than a mile across; a glass of the
ordinary power enables one to count every pane in the windows of the
dwellings that mottle its northern shore, and to distinguish their
inhabitants; and yet among these dwellings cholera was raging; and we
could see, in at least one instance, a dead body borne forth by two
persons on a hand-barrow, and buried in a neighbouring sand-bank.
Stories, too, of the sad fate of individuals with whom the townsfolk
were acquainted, and who had resided in well-known localities, told
among them with powerful effect. Such was the general panic in the
infected places, that the bodies of the dead were no longer carried to
the churchyard, but huddled up in solitary holes and corners; and the
pictures suggested to the fancy, of familiar faces lying uncoffined in
the ground beside some lonely wood, or in some dark morass or heathy
moor, were fraught to many with a terror stronger than that of death. We
knew that the corpse of a young robust fisherman, who used occasionally
to act as one of the Cromarty ferrymen, and with whose appearance, in
consequence, every one was familiar, lay festering in a sand-bank; that
the iron frame of a brawny blacksmith was decomposing in a mossy hole
beside a thorn-bush; that half the inhabitants of the little fishing
village of Inver were strewn in shallow furrows along the arid waste
which surrounded their dwellings; that houses divested of their tenants,
and become foul dens of contagion, had been set on fire and burnt to the
ground; and that around the infected fishing-hamlets of Hilton and
Balintore the country-people had drawn a sort of _barriere sanitaire_,
and cooped up within the limits of their respective villages the
wretched inhabitants. And in the general consternation--a consternation
much more extreme than that evinced when the disease actually visited
the place--it was asked by the townsfolk whether _they_ ought not so
long as the place remained uninfected, to draw a similar _cordon_ round
themselves. A public meeting was accordingly held, to deliberate on the
best means of shutting themselves in; and at the meeting almost all the
adult male inhabitants attended, with the exception of the gentlemen in
the commission of the peace, and the town officials, who, though quite
prepared to wink hard at our irregularities, failed to see that, on any
grounds tenable in the eye of the law, they themselves could take a
share in them.
Our meeting at first threatened to be stormy. The extra Liberals, who,
in the previous ecclesiastical struggle, had taken part to a man with
the Gaelic people, as they did, in the subsequent church controversy,
with the Court of Session, began by an attack on the Town Justices. We
might all see now, said a Liberal writer lad who addressed us, how
little these people were our friends. Now when the place was threatened
by the pestilence, they would do nothing for us; they would not even so
much as countenance our meeting; we saw there was not one of them
present: in short, they cared nothing at all about us, or whether we
died or lived. But he and his friends would stand by us to the last;
nay, while the magistrates were evidently afraid, with all their wealth,
to move in the matter, terrified, no doubt, by the prosecutions for
damages which might be instituted against them were they to stop the
highways, and turn back travellers, he himself, though far from rich,
would be our security against all legal processes whatever. This, of
course, was very noble; all the more noble from the circumstance that
the speaker could not, as the _Gazette_ informed us, meet his own actual
liabilities at the time, and was yet fully prepared, notwithstanding, to
meet all our possible ones. Up started, however, almost ere he had done
speaking, a friend of the Justices, and made so angry a speech in their
defence, that the meeting threatened to fall into two parties, and
explode in a squabble. I rose in the extremity, and, though unhappily no
orator, addressed my townsfolk in a few homely sentences. Cholera, I
reminded them, was too evidently of neither party; and the magistrates
were, I was sure, nearly as much frightened as we were. But they really
could do nothing for us. In matters of life and death, however, when
laws and magistrates failed to protect quiet people, the people were
justified in asserting the natural right to protect themselves; and,
whatever laws and lawyers might urge to the contrary, that right was now
ours. In a neighbouring county, the inhabitants of certain infected
villages were already fairly shut up amid their dwellings by the
countryfolk around, who could themselves show a clean bill of health;
and we, if in the circumstances of these villagers, would very possibly
be treated after the same manner. And what remained to us in our actual
circumstances was just to anticipate the process of being ourselves
bottled in, by bottling the country out. The town, situated on a
promontory, and approachable at only a few points, could easily be
guarded; and instead of squabbling about the merits of Justices of the
Peace--very likely somewhat Conservative in their leanings--or of
spirited Reformers who would like very well to be Justices of the Peace
also, and would doubtless make very excellent ones, I thought it would
be far better for us immediately to form ourselves into a Defence
Association, and proceed to regulate our watches and set our guards. My
short speech was remarkably well received. There was a poor man
immediately beside me, who was in great dread of cholera, and who
actually proved one of its first victims in the place--for in little
more than a week after he was in his grave--who backed me by an
especially vigorous Hear, hear!--and the answering Hear, hears, of the
meeting bore down all reply. We accordingly at once formed our Defence
Association; and ere midnight our rounds and stations were marked out,
and our watches set. All power passed at once out of the hands of the
magistrates; but the worthy men themselves said very little about it;
and we had the satisfaction of knowing that their families--especially
their wives and daughters--were very friendly indeed both to the
Association and the temporary suspension of the law, and that, on both
their own account and ours, they wished us all manner of success.
We kept guard for several days. All vagabonds and trampers were turned
back without remorse; but there was a respectable class of travellers
from whom there was less danger to be apprehended; and with these we
found it somewhat difficult to deal. I would have admitted them at once;
but the majority of the Association demurred;--to do that would be,
according to Corporal Trim, to "set one man greatly over the head of
another;" and it was ultimately agreed that, instead of at once
admitting them, they should be first brought into a wooden building
fitted up for the purpose, and thoroughly fumigated with sulphur and
chloride of lime. I know not with whom the expedient first originated:
it was said to have been suggested by some medical man who knew a great
deal about cholera. And though, for my own part, I could not see how the
demon of the disease was to be expelled by the steam of a little sulphur
and chloride, as the evil spirit in Tobit was expelled by the smoke of
the fish's liver, it seemed to satisfy the Association wonderfully well;
and a stranger well smoked came to be regarded as safe. There was a day
at hand which promised an unusual amount of smoking. The agitation of
the Reform Bill had commenced;--a great court of appeal was on that day
to hold at Cromarty; and it was known that both a Whig and Tory party
from Inverness, in which cholera was raging at the time, would to a
certainty attend it. What, it was asked, were we to do with the
politicians--the formidable bankers, factors, and lawyers--who would
form, we knew, the Inverness cavalcade? Individually, the question
seemed to be asked under a sort of foreboding terror, that calculated
consequences; but when the Association came to ask it collectively, and
to answer it in a body, it was in a bold tone, that set fear at
defiance. And so it was resolved, _nem. con._, that the Inverness
politicians should be smoked like the others. My turn to mount guard had
come round on the previous night at twelve o'clock; but I had calculated
on being off the station ere the Inverness people came up. Unluckily,
however, instead of being appointed a simple sentry, I was made officer
for the night. It was the duty assigned to me to walk round the several
posts, and see that the various sentinels were keeping a smart outlook,
which I did very faithfully; but when the term of my watch had expired,
I found no relieving officer coming up to take my place. The prudent man
appointed on the occasion was, I feared, tiding over the coming
difficulty in some quiet corner; but I continued my rounds, maugre the
suspicion, in the hope of his appearance. And as I approached one of the
most important stations--that on the great highway which connects the
town of Cromarty with Kessock Ferry, _there_ was the Whig portion of the
Inverness cavalcade just coming up. The newly-appointed sentinel stood
aside, to let his officer deal with the Whig gentlemen, as, of course,
best became both their quality and _his_ official standing. I would
rather have been elsewhere; but I at once brought the procession to a
stand. A man of high spirit and influence--a banker, and very much a
Whig--at once addressed me with a stern--"By what authority, Sir?" By
the authority, I replied, of five hundred able-bodied men in the
neighbouring town, associated for the protection of themselves and their
families. "Protection against what?" "Protection against the
pestilence;--you come from an infected place." "Do you know what you are
doing, Sir?" said the banker fiercely. "Yes; doing what the law cannot
do for us, but what we have determined to do for ourselves." The banker
grew pale with anger; and he was afterwards heard to say, that had he
had a pistol at the time, he would have shot upon the spot the man who
stopped him; but not having a pistol, he could not shoot me; and so I
sent him and his party away under an escort, to be smoked. And as they
were somewhat obstreperous by the way, and knocked the hat of one of the
guards over his nose, they got, in the fumigating process, as I was
sorry to learn, a double portion of the sulphur and the chloride; and
came into court, to contend with the Tories, gasping for breath. I was
aware I acted on this occasion a very foolish part;--I ought to a
certainty to have run away on the approach of the Inverness cavalcade;
but the running away would have involved, according to Rochester, an
amount of moral courage which I did not possess. I fear, too. I must
admit, that the rough tones of the banker's address stirred up what had
long lain quietly enough in my veins--some of the wild buccaneering
blood of John Feddes and the old seafaring Millers; and so I weakly
remained at my post, and did what the Association deemed my duty. I
trust the banker did not recognise me, and that now, after the lapse of
more than twenty years, he will be inclined to extend to me his
forgiveness. I take this late opportunity of humbly begging his pardon,
and of assuring him, that at the very time I brought him to bay I was
heartily at one with him in his politics. But then my townsfolk, being
much frightened, were perfectly impartial in smoking Whigs and Tories
all alike; and I could bethink me of no eligible mode of exempting my
friends from a process of fumigation which was, I daresay, very
unpleasant, and in whose virtues my faith was assuredly not strong.
When engaged, however, in keeping up our _cordon_ with apparent success,
cholera entered the place in a way on which it was impossible we could
have calculated. A Cromarty fisherman had died of the disease at Wick
rather more than a month previous, and the clothes known to have been in
contact with the body were burnt by the Wick authorities in the open
air. He had, however, a brother on the spot, who had stealthily
appropriated some of the better pieces of dress; and these he brought
home with him in a chest; though such was the dread with which he
regarded them that for more than four weeks he suffered the chest to lie
beside him unopened. At length, in an evil hour, the pieces of dress
were taken out, and, like the "goodly Babylonish garment" which wrought
the destruction of Achan and the discomfiture of the camp, they led, in
the first instance, to the death of the poor imprudent fisherman, and to
that of not a few of his townsfolk immediately after. He himself was
seized by cholera on the following day; in less than two days more he
was dead and buried; and the disease went creeping about the streets and
lanes for weeks after--here striking down a strong man in the full
vigour of middle life--there shortening, apparently by but a few months,
the span of some worn-out creature, already on the verge of the grave.
The visitation had its wildly picturesque accompaniments. Pitch and tar
were kept burning during the night in the openings of the infected
lanes; and the unsteady light flickered with ghastly effect on house and
wall, and tall chimney-top, and on the flitting figures of the watchers.
By day, the frequent coffins, borne to the grave by but a few bearers,
and the frequent smoke that rose outside the place from fires kindled to
consume the clothes of the infected, had their sad and startling effect;
a migration, too, of a considerable portion of the fisher population to
the caves of the hill, in which they continued to reside till the
disease left the town, formed a striking accompaniment of the
visitation; and yet, curiously enough, as the danger seemed to increase
the consternation lessened, and there was much less fear among the
people when the disease was actually ravaging the place, than when it
was merely stalking within sight around it. We soon became familiar,
too, with its direst horrors, and even learned to regard them as
comparatively ordinary and commonplace. I had read, about two years
before, the passage in Southey's "_Colloquies_," in which Sir Thomas
More is made to remark that modern Englishmen have no guarantee
whatever, in these latter times, that their shores shall not be visited,
as of old, by devastating plagues. "As touching the pestilence," says
Sir Thomas (or rather the poet in his name), "you fancy yourselves
secure because the plague has not appeared among you for the last
hundred and fifty years--a portion of time which, long as it may seem,
compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing in the
physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is as
possible now as it was in former times; and were it once imported, do
you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded
population of your metropolis than it did before the fire? What," he
adds, "if the sweating sickness, emphatically called the English
disease, were to show itself again? Can any cause be assigned why it is
not as likely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the
fifteenth?" And, striking as the passage is, I remembered perusing it
with that incredulous feeling, natural to men in a quiet time, which
leads them to draw so broad a line between the experience of history, if
of a comparatively remote age, or of a distant place, and their own
personal experience. In the loose sense of the sophist, it was contrary
to my experience that Britain should become the seat of any such fatal
and widely-devastating disease as used to ravage it of old. And yet, now
that I saw as terrible and unwonted an infliction as either the plague
or the sweating sickness decimating our towns and villages, and the
terrible scenes described by De Foe and Patrick Walker fully rivalled,
the feeling with which I came to regard it was one, not of strangeness,
but of familiarity.
When thus unsuccessfully employed in keeping watch and ward against our
insidious enemy, the Reform Bill for Scotland passed the House of Lords,
and became the law of the land. I had watched with interest the growth
of the popular element in the country--had seen it gradually
strengthening, from the despotic times of Liverpool and Castlereagh,
through the middle period of Canning and Goderich, down till even
Wellington and Peel, men of iron as they were, had to yield to the
pressure from without, and to repeal first the Test and Corporation
Acts, and next to carry, against their own convictions, the great Roman
Catholic Emancipation measure. The people, during a season of
undisturbed peace, favourable to the growth of opinion, were becoming
more decidedly a power in the country than they had ever been before;
and of course, as one of the people, and in the belief, too, that the
influence of the many would be less selfishly exerted than that of the
few, I was pleased that it should be so, and looked forward to better
days. For myself personally I expected nothing. I had early come to see
that toil, physical or intellectual, was to be my portion throughout
life, and that through no possible improvement in the government of the
country could I be exempted from labouring for my bread. From State
patronage I never expected anything, and I have received from it about
as much as I ever expected.
I was employed in labouring pretty hard for my bread one fine evening in
the summer of 1830--engaged in hewing with bare breast and arms, in the
neighbourhood of the harbour of Cromarty, a large tombstone, which, on
the following day, was to be carried across the ferry to a churchyard on
the opposite side of the Firth. A group of French fishermen, who had
gathered round me, were looking curiously at my mode of working, and, as
I thought, somewhat curiously at myself, as if speculating on the
physical powers of a man with whom there was at least a possibility of
their having one day to deal. They formed part of the crew of one of
those powerfully-manned French luggers which visit our northern coasts
every year, ostensibly with the design of prosecuting the herring
fishery, but which, supported mainly by large Government bounties, and
in but small part by their fishing speculations, are in reality kept up
by the State as a means of rearing sailors for the French navy. Their
lugger--an uncouth-looking vessel, representative rather of the
navigation of three centuries ago than of that of the present day--lay
stranded in the harbour beside us; and, their work over for the day,
they seemed as quiet and silent as the calm evening whose stillness they
were enjoying; when the letter-carrier of the place came up to where I
was working, and handed me, all damp from the press, a copy of the
_Inverness Courier_, which I owed to the kindness of its editor. I was
at once attracted by the heading, in capitals, of his leading
article--"Revolution in France--Flight of Charles X."--and pointed it
out to the Frenchmen. None of them understood English; but they could
here and there catch the meaning of the more important words, and,
exclaiming "_Revolution en France!!--Fuite de Charles X.!!_"--they
clustered round it in a state of the extremest excitement, gabbling
faster and louder than thrice as many Englishmen could have done in any
circumstances. At length, however, their resolution seemed taken:
curiously enough, their lugger bore the name of _"Charles X.;"_ and one
of them, laying hold of a large lump of chalk, repaired to the vessel's
stern, and by covering over the white-lead letters with the chalk,
effaced the royal name. Charles was virtually declared by the little bit
of France that sailed in the lugger, to be no longer king; and the
incident struck me, trivial as it may seem, as significantly
illustrative of the extreme slightness of that hold which the rulers of
modern France possess on the affections of their people. I returned to
my home as the evening darkened, more moved by this unexpected
revolution than by any other political event of my time--brimful of hope
for the cause of freedom all over the civilized world, and, in
especial--misled by a sort of _analogical experience_--sanguine in my
expectations for France. It had had, like our own country, its first
stormy revolution, in which its monarch had lost his head; and then its
Cromwell, and then its Restoration, and its easy, luxurious king, who,
like Charles II., had died in possession of the throne, and who had been
succeeded by a weak bigot brother, the very counterpart of James VII.
And now, after a comparatively orderly revolution like that of 1688, the
bigot had been dethroned, and the head of another branch of the royal
family called in to enact the part of William III. The historical
parallel seemed complete; and could I doubt that what would next follow
would be a long period of progressive improvement, in which the French
people would come to enjoy, as entirely as those of Britain, a
well-regulated freedom, under which revolutions would be unnecessary,
mayhap impossible? Was it not evident, too, that the success of the
French in their noble struggle would immediately act with beneficial
effect on the popular cause in our own country and everywhere else, and
greatly quicken the progress of reform?
And so I continued to watch with interest the course of the Reform
Bill, and was delighted to see it, after a passage singularly stormy and
precarious, at length safely moored in port. In some of the measures,
too, to which it subsequently led, I greatly delighted, especially in
the emancipation of our negro slaves in the colonies. Nor could I join
many of my personal friends in their denunciation of that appropriation
measure, as it was termed--also an effect of the altered
constituency--which suppressed the Irish bishoprics. As I ventured to
tell my minister, who took the other side--if a Protestant Church
failed, after enjoying for three hundred years the benefits of a large
endowment, and every advantage of position which the statute-book could
confer, to erect herself into the Church of the many, it was high time
to commence dealing with her in her true character--as the Church of the
few. At home, however, within the narrow precincts of my native town,
there were effects of the measure which, though comparatively trifling,
I liked considerably worse than the suppression of the bishoprics. It
broke up the townsfolk into two portions--the one consisting of elderly
or middle-aged men, who had been in the commission of the peace ere the
passing of the bill, and who now, as it erected the town into a
parliamentary burgh, became our magistrates, in virtue of the support of
a majority of the voters; and a younger and weaker, but clever and very
active party, few of whom were yet in the commission of the peace, and
who, after standing unsuccessfully for the magistracy, became the
leaders of a patriotic opposition, which succeeded in rendering the seat
of justice a rather uneasy one in Cromarty. The younger men were staunch
Liberals, but great Moderates--the elder, sound Evangelicals, but
decidedly Conservative in their leanings; and as I held ecclesiastically
by the one party, and secularly by the other, I found my position, on
the whole, a rather anomalous one. Both parties got involved in
law-suits. When the Whig Members of Parliament for the county and burgh
came the way, they might be seen going about the streets arm-in-arm
with the young Whigs, which was, of course, a signal honour; and during
the heat of a contested election, young Whiggism, to show itself
grateful, succeeded in running off with a Conservative voter, whom it
had caught in his cups, and got itself involved in a law-suit in
consequence, which cost it several hundred pounds. The Conservatives, on
the other hand, also got entangled in an expensive law-suit. The town
had its annual fair, at which from fifty to a hundred children used to
buy gingerbread, and which had held for many years at the eastern end of
the town links. Through, however, some unexplained piece of strategy on
the part of the young Liberals, a market-day came round, on which the
gingerbread-women took their stand on a green a little above the
harbour; and, of course, where the gingerbread was, there the children
were gathered together; and the magistrates, astonished, visited the
spot in order to ascertain, if possible, the philosophy of the change.
They found the ground occupied by a talkative pedlar, who stood up
strongly for the young Liberals and the new side. The magistrates
straightway demanded the production of his license. The pedlar had none.
And so he was apprehended, and summarily tried, on a charge of
contravening the statute 55 Geo. III. cap. 71; and, being found guilty
of hawking without a license, he was committed to prison. The pedlar,
backed, it was understood, by the young Liberals, raised an action for
wrongous imprisonment; and, on the ground that the day on which he had
sold his goods was a fair or market-day, on which anybody might sell
anything, the magistrates were cast in damages. I liked the law-suits
very ill, and held that the young Liberals would have been more wisely
employed in making money by their shops and professions--secure that the
coveted honours would ultimately get into the wake of the good
bank-accounts--than that they should be engaged either in scattering
their own means in courts of law, or in impinging on the means of their
neighbours. And ultimately I found my proper political position as a
supporter in all ecclesiastical and municipal matters of my Conservative
townsmen, and a supporter in almost all the national ones of the Whigs;
whom, however, I always liked better, and deemed more virtuous, when
they were out of office than when they were in.
On one occasion I even became political enough to stand for a
councillorship. My friends, chiefly through the death of elderly voters
and the rise of younger men, few of whom were Conservative, felt
themselves getting weak in the place; and fearing that they could not
otherwise secure a majority at the Council board, they urged me to stand
for one of the vacancies, which I accordingly did, and carried my
election by a swimming majority. And in duly attending the first meeting
of Council, I heard an eloquent speech from a gentleman in the
opposition, directed against the individuals who, as he finely expressed
it, "were wielding the destinies of his native town;" and saw, as the
only serious piece of business before the meeting, the Councillors
clubbing pennies a-piece, in order to defray, in the utter lack of town
funds, the expense of a ninepenny postage. And then, with, I fear, a
very inadequate sense of the responsibilities of my new office, I stayed
away from the Council board, and did nothing whatever in its behalf,
with astonishing perseverance and success, for three years together. And
thus began and terminated my municipal career--a career which, I must
confess, failed to secure for me the thanks of my constituency; but
then, on the other hand, I am not aware that the worthy people ever
seriously complained. There was absolutely nothing to do in the
councilship; and, unlike some of my brother office-bearers, the
requisite nothing I did, quietly and considerately, and very much at my
leisure, without any unnecessary display of stump-oratory, or of
anything else.