The Trials of a Country Parson

by Augustus Jessopp

NOTE.

The following appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette of August 15, 1889. If a more dreadful comment upon the above essay can be produced, I have not yet met with it:—

DISESTABLISHMENT BY DEMOLITION.

Mr. Thackeray Turner, the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, requests us to publish the following appeal for an ancient church which is in imminent danger of destruction:—

The parish of Sotterley, in the county of Suffolk, lies about five miles from the town of Beccles, and is one of those close parishes which they who live in the opens are wont to look upon with a suspicion of envy. It is the property of a single owner; not a field or meadow, not a yard of ground by the roadside, not a stake in the hedgerow, not a brick or a gate is to be seen in Sotterley that is not part and parcel of the possessions of the squire and lord of the manor. The estate was for some 400 years held by a family named Playters, which was counted among the great Suffolk houses, and which came to grief at last, partly by taking the wrong side in the troublesome times, and partly by the profuse hospitality which the overgrown size of Sotterley Hall tempted its owners to indulge in. But for four centuries they lived here, and here generation after generation they died and were laid in their graves. In the little church which in life they loved, their bones rest now, and there are their monuments in brass and marble. The walls are studded with their effigies.

Moreover, these Playters—and indeed their predecessors the Sotterleys—spent money and pains upon the sacred building. There to this day stands the fourteenth-century screen in wonderfully good preservation, four at least of the figures in its panels still retaining a great deal of the old brilliancy of colour, though at least 500 years have passed since they were first set up in the position they now occupy. There, too, in situ may be seen many of the old oak benches with their handsome “poppy-heads,” doubtless carved by Sotterley craftsmen, and carved out of the oaks that were growing in Sotterley wood before the Wars of the Roses had begun. The same roof, which might be easily repaired at an insignificant cost, covers the chancel which covered it before people had dreamed of a Tudor king, the panels but little injured, and of the bosses not one missing.

A man may visit fifty churches in East Anglia, and not meet with one so entirely adapted to the needs of the small population who delude themselves with the preposterous belief that they have a right to worship there.

Moreover, Sotterley Church stands in a churchyard of unusually large dimensions. It must cover at least an acre of ground, and not half of this space shows the smallest sign of interments having been made in it during the present century. But, unhappily, Sotterley Church and churchyard lie in the middle of Sotterley Park—not that it was always so, for the park has come to the church, not the church to the park—and people will insist in going to church, even farmers and farm labourers will, and worshipping the Most High where their forefathers worshipped before them. The Hall of the Playters was pulled down during the last century, and the new hall—an ugly white-brick mansion of no pretension—was set up much nearer to the ancient church; and when Sotterley people died nothing could prevent their relatives from carrying their dead to the old graveyard and laying them where they themselves hoped to lie some day. But was not this a little too bad, to have a funeral procession of tearful clodhoppers passing through your park gates and under your very windows, asking no leave, but taking it in quite a brutal fashion?

Therefore, about ten years ago, a vestry meeting, or something of the sort, was held in Sotterley. The landlord’s pleasure was signified, certain formalities were gone through, the tenantry, small and great, were told that it was desirable that Sotterley churchyard should be closed, and, the legal document being duly drawn up, an order was obtained from the Privy Council, and the churchyard was closed accordingly. Outside the park gates, in a place where four ways meet, a square patch of ground, scrubby and soppy, has been fenced off by a mean and ill-kept hedge, and in the middle of it stares rather than stands, a forbidding protuberance, an octagonal construction of cheap Sotterley bricks, covered with cheap Sotterley tiles, looking like a ginger beer stall in a cricket ground where there is no play going on. This thing is called a chapel, I believe, and here the Sotterley people must needs bring their dead. Will they all be brought here? High and low—rich and poor one with another? Well, to get rid of the funerals passing through the park was one point scored; but it was but a beginning. On Easter Monday last a meeting of the parish in vestry assembled was held as usual in Sotterley church. I am told that the parishioners, knowing what was coming, very discreetly kept away, all except the unhappy parson, who was bound to be there, the landlord and one, two, or three others, who, it is suspected, were told to be there. Forthwith a resolution drawn up beforehand was proposed, seconded, and carried unanimously—for the parson had nothing to do but to “put it to the meeting”—to the effect that it was desirable to pull down or shut up the church of Sotterley, and build another somewhere else. I am told that this resolution has been actually forwarded to the Bishop of Norwich and that a faculty has been actually applied for to close or destroy a church which has been standing in its present site for the best part of a thousand years, and that it only remains for the Bishop to give his assent to this iniquitous proposition, and one more of those monstrous outrages will have become an accomplished fact which we English submit to with just a little snarling after they have been committed, and which we allow to be perpetrated under our eyes without ever lifting a finger to prevent. Whether the Bishop of Norwich is the man to connive at so shameful a job as this, and to give his episcopal sanction to the proposed desecration, is a question that is a humiliating one to ask, for is it less than infamous that such things are so possible that we begin to inquire about their probability?

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V.
CATHEDRAL SPACE FOR NEGLECTED RECORDS.

The most delightful place of resort on the face of the globe is to be found within a bow-shot of Temple Bar. Not on the south side of Fleet Street, whatever enthusiastic gentlemen of the law may say, nor on the west, nor on the east, for there too there is little to attract us except in the shop windows, and there is noise and turmoil and the roar of a restless multitude bewildering and disturbing us whether we move or halt on our way. No! my happy valley lies to the north of the great thoroughfare; its courts and halls and corridors, its restful solitudes, its mines of gold that are waiting to be worked, its storehouses of precious things that are practically inexhaustible, all are to be found in a favoured region that lies between Chancery and Fetter Lanes.

“Record Office, Fetter Lane!” I said to the driver of a Hansom some months ago. “Do you mean Chancery Lane, sir?” asked the voice through the hole over my head. “No, I mean Fetter Lane.” The man actually did not know the situation of the earthly Paradise.

Pone me pigris ubi nulla vicis
Arbor æstiva recreatur aura,

I murmured to myself—I could not waste my Horace upon Cabby.

I am in the habit of assuring my lowly congregation upon Sundays that for all their talk about heaven they would find themselves very much out of place there without some previous preparation for that desirable abode. The same warning is equally true when applied to other blissful resting-places besides the celestial mansions. You must have a taste for them; you must have qualified yourself to enjoy them and to mix with the company you find there. Surely Valhalla could only have suited the few. But this place of resort of which I am thinking is a pleasure-house whose resources are actually limitless, however well you may have learnt to use your opportunities. “Life piled on life were all too little” to get even so much knowledge of this prodigious and enormous accumulation of treasures as to be able to answer with certainty what may be found there and what not. For eight-and-forty years there has appeared annually a Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, presenting us with an elaborate summary of work carried on by the functionaries employed in examining our national archives; and so far are we from getting to the end of the work of men cataloguing and calendaring that it may reasonably be estimated another fifty years will be required to complete this vast preliminary labour; and when that time comes it will be necessary to begin again at summarizing and supplying indices to the reports issued. What next will follow it is difficult to conjecture or imagine.

The forty-eighth Report, issued in 1887, happens to be lying at my elbow as I write, and there, ready for consultation, I find a brief calendar of the Patent Rolls of the seventh year of Edward the First, drawn up by one of the many accomplished archivists of the Office. It fills 216 closely printed pages. It summarizes at least 3,000 documents, some of them of considerable length; they all belong to a single class, and they are all concerned with the life of our forefathers—yours and mine, my estimable reader—during the single year ending the 20th of November, 1279. Six centuries ago. Think of that! Yet this collection is but one among thousands. The third Report, issued in 1842, first drew attention to the existence of a huge mass of ancient letters of the reigns of King John, Henry the Third, and Edward the First, the most modern of them, observe, coming down no nearer to our own time than the year 1307 A.D. “This important mass,” we are told, “appears to contain 1,942 bundles, each containing on the average about 200 documents, or about 388,400 on the whole.” Scared by such figures as these, the imagination, a trifle jaded, refuses to dwell upon 913 Papal Bulls of various dates, or to take the trouble to speculate upon the probable bulk of seven or eight thousand documents which reveal unknown secrets about the ancient forests and their boundaries. But we are fairly aghast at the news that there are hundreds of rolls averaging 200 feet in length, and at least one extending to the enormous dimensions of 800 feet, written within and without with lamentation and mourning and woe. There could be no eating such a roll as that!

The documents deposited in the Record Office, and which, as we have seen, are likely to have taken a hundred years to catalogue before they become readily accessible to students and explorers, count by millions. They are of all sorts, conditions, and classes, but they may be roughly described as concerned with the civil and political history of the nation; that is, they deal with the development of our institutions, with the government of our sovereigns through their ministers, with the changes in our laws and their administration, with the complex questions of the tenure of land and the changes in its ownership, with the rise and growth of our commerce, with our wars by land and by sea, with a hundred other matters which never can cease to have a profound and undying interest for the citizens of a great empire. Let us, for convenience’ sake, call the Record Office the storehouse of authorities on England’s constitutional history.

This vast tabularium, as the Romans called their Public Record Office, is situated, as I have said, within a bow-shot of Temple Bar, and to the northeast of that vanished structure. About double the same distance on the south-west there exists another huge depository of records, which may be said to be a great storehouse of authorities concerned with our family history. The wills which are stored in Somerset House, though beginning at a date centuries later than the early records in Fetter Lane, go back quite far enough to make the reading of the great mass of them not always easy for the uninitiated. They, too, probably count by millions, and I have known one gentleman who estimated the number which he himself had looked at and examined with more or less attention at not less than a hundred thousand. This collection is more easily accessible to students than the other, inasmuch as here we are dealing with a single class of documents, which present no difficulties of arrangement, and which have been carefully preserved and habitually consulted for generations, and are as a rule bound up in big volumes of transcripts, or offices copies, made for the most part within a short time of the original wills having been proved before the accredited officials. So far as they go the wills in Somerset House contain to a very great extent the genealogical history of England. It is necessary to guard this statement by qualifying words, for the wills in Somerset House are the wills of men and women who died in the southern province only.

If we lengthen our radius, keeping to Temple Bar as our centre and sweeping a circle say of five miles in diameter, we shall include within this circumference a vast collection of records of a very miscellaneous character. There are the muniments of the City of London; there is an unknown mass of curious “evidences” in the secret chambers of the London companies; there are the mysterious and probably very large stores of recondite lore hidden away somewhere in the great Inns of Court, and perhaps in forgotten garrets of some of the minor dependencies of those august institutions. There are the sessional records of the county of Middlesex, which a very moderate estimate has assured us contain more than half a million documents; and, in addition to all these, there are probably many other important collections subsidiary to these larger ones, the very existence of which is unknown and unsuspected except by some few reticent creatures, who with the grip of the miser cling secretively to the hoarded treasures that they cannot spend and will not let any one else look at. It must be evident to any one who reflects upon the measureless bulk—the mere bulk—of these various assemblages of ancient documents to be found within the metropolitan area alone, that any heroic policy which should contemplate gathering them all under a single roof, and unifying them in a centralized national tabularium, is inpracticable. A Public Record Office which should not only be a monster warehouse for the safe custody of our ancient muniments, but should be a library of reference open to all duly qualified persons desirous of pursuing historical research among our unprinted sources, would be a building that would more than fill Trafalgar Square. Obviously such a collection, to be practically accessible, would require to be methodized, arranged, catalogued, and to some extent indexed. An army of trained officials would be needed to deal with the materials under their hands. It would take a lifetime to set the house in order. The very geography of such a world would require a guide-book as perplexing as a Bradshaw.

The magnificent collection now at the Record Office is, as has been seen, only in course of being examined and calendared. Even after fifty years of unremitting labour bestowed upon it we have a very imperfect knowledge of what it contains; and this, be it remembered, though no department of the public service can compare with this in the ability, industry, enthusiasm, and profound learning which have been for generations the characteristic of the officials, one and all, high and low. From the days of that cross-grained, combative, and overwhelmingly learned miracle of erudition William Prynne down to our own day there has been a kind of apostolical succession among the keepers of the national archives and their coadjutors. The Record Office almost deserves to have a dictionary of biography of its own. To widen the field of labour here would be to destroy all hope of its ever being brought into order. Centralization of our muniments has well-nigh reached its utmost limits in the unwieldy proportions of the collection now under the charge of the Deputy Keeper. To extend those limits and to bring together additional millions of MSS. from distant depositories would be to convert the great tabulariumn into a colossal cæmeterium, in which they would be not so much preserved as buried for all time.

Let it be conceded, then, that, as far as the Record Office is concerned, it will be best to leave well alone. The custodians of our archives in Fetter Lane have quite enough to occupy their time for many a long day. They are not the men to need urging or to embarrass by loading them with new accessions of work which they can never hope to get through. On the other hand, the muniments of such bodies as the great Inns, the chartered companies, or the Corporation of London can hardly—at any rate hardly yet—be looked upon and dealt with as public property. These corporations very naturally cling to their own possessions; they are jealous of throwing open their muniments to be scrutinized and peeped into by prying eyes by no means always looking with a kindly or benevolent gaze. Why should the benchers of the Middle Temple, for instance, lay out their early charters to be copied by every chance grievance-monger, to be printed with appropriate comments in the columns of the Wapping Watchman, and enriched by learned notes and illustrations full of love and sweetness? Why should the ancient Guild of the Girdlers court publicity when there is a host of Grub Street ragamuffins only too glad to make merchandise of their “Curious Revelations” and to ferret out inconvenient scraps of information to be used for the destruction of the things that are? “Confound that shabby old Dryasdust!” we might hear the warden growl out to his brethren of the craft. “If the fellow goes on like that we shall have to ask him to dinner, give him a bad one, and protest we could not afford a better in the lamentable condition of our finances.” No! Diligent explorers and omnivorous antiquaries like my friend Mr. Cadaverous must be patient and submissive. “The rights of property, sir—the rights of property must be respected. Make your approaches in a spirit of courtesy and with becoming respect for the august body to which we belong, and you may find us gracious and condescending; but come to us as a footpad grabbing at our fobs, and you may find the consequences disastrous. We have been known to give pence to beggars, but to submit to be plundered—never!”

There is, however, one class of documents to be found within the area that I have been dealing with which may fairly be regarded as public property in a different sense from that in which the civic and corporate muniments can be considered such. I refer to the registers and churchwardens’ books, which constitute an important collection of records from which a great deal of our parochial and family history may be gleaned. I know how contemptuously some good folks affect to treat pedigree-hunting and genealogy. I know how much ridicule has been heaped upon the pompous pettiness of beadles and vestrymen. Mr. Bumble in a Punch and Judy show or in a Christmas pantomime is always greeted with a welcome of convulsive merriment. And yet somehow we all do feel some sly hankering to know how they managed it in the parochial councils, say, two or three hundred years ago; and few men are so indifferent as some dull men pretend to be about the mere bare births, deaths, and marriages of their forefathers. It may be very profitless, very silly, but so is playing at chess, and smoking, and many another harmless diversion. And is that all?

I am not going to enter into the question of what larger and wider fields of enquiry the humbler by-paths of research may help us to pass through without going helplessly astray; but this is certain, that there never has been a civilized nation since nations grew into organized life—never has been, never will be—in which something like a passion for finding out the smaller secrets of the past has not been strong, and in some minds absorbing. Be that as it may, there are, it may be estimated, some hundreds of volumes scattered about in all sorts of odd places, in the custody of all sorts of odd people, within the metropolitan area which contain the entries of the three most important events in the lives of millions of people who have been born, wedded, and died within five miles of Temple Bar during the last three centuries and a half. These volumes are being consulted every week. Copies of the entries made in them are produced as evidence in courts of justice every month, and vast sums of money change hands every year on the testimony which those books afford, and almost upon that alone. On that testimony again and again the title to large estates, the right to seats in the House of Lords, the legitimacy of son or daughter, has depended. Fiction and fact have vied with each other in emphasizing the romantic incidents that our parish registers have chronicled or concealed. All the existing parish registers within the metropolitan area, from the year 1538 (when parish registers first began to be kept in England) to the beginning of the present century, and all the churchwardens’ books besides, might easily be kept in a single room of Somerset House, and be easily supplied with perfect personal indices in five years.

* * * * *

One more class of ancient records remains to be dealt with before we leave London and its purlieus. Nothing has yet been said of that immense mass of precious muniments which constitute the apparatus from which the ecclesiastical history of England may be compiled; that is, the history of the part which the Church has played in the political, religious, and, I may add, the moral and intellectual training and education of the nation.

There are within little more than a mile of our old friend Temple Bar three great depositories of ecclesiastical records of inestimable value and of unknown richness—one at the Archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth, one at St. Paul’s, one in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. (1) The collection of MSS. at Lambeth was very ably catalogued nearly eighty years ago, and is readily accessible to all who are desirous and competent to make an intelligent use of the treasures it contains. (2) The archives of St. Paul’s comprehend not only the muniments of the great Metropolitan Chapter, but those also of the bishopric of London. The Chapter records have been examined and reported upon by the present Deputy Keeper in the Ninth Report of the Historic MSS. Commission. Of course Mr. Lyte has done his work in a masterly way, and to the wonder and despair of smaller men who have tried their ’prentice hands at such employment; but he warns us that “the greater part of the collection has never yet been examined for literary or historical purposes;” and so far from this important assemblage of original documents being accessible to research, Mr. Lyte, when he began his examination, found it stowed away in boxes “in an octagonal chamber above the Dean’s vestry,” and one box full of ancient documents had been discovered by the Bishop of Oxford “in a loft over the Chapter House.” The extent, interest, and importance of the capitular records to historical students is in the present condition of our knowledge quite incalculable.

But the archives of the diocese of London are also said to be kept in St. Paul’s. Thirty years ago, when I was very young at this kind of work, I obtained permission to make a search among the muniments of the Bishop of London for certain small fragments of information which, in the glorious hopefulness of youth, I was bent on discovering. During three short December days I was privileged to climb to a certain chamber in a certain tower of St. Paul’s, and there to immure myself for five or six hours at a time. There is a region where beings who succeed in retaining their personality must needs be the sport of the vortices that whirl and eddy through the “vast inform,” where “Chaos umpire sits” and “next him high arbiter Chance governs all.” But in such a region none may hope to find anything that he can carry away. I emerged from that three-days’ audacious voyage of discovery with my intellect only a little disordered and my constitution only a trifle shattered, and I survive to speak of that bewildering and horrible experience as men speak of their confused recollection of an escape from drowning. From that day to this I have never met with a human being who had ever been bold enough to search among the archives of the bishopric of London or who could tell me anything about them, good or bad.

(3) Somewhere—somewhere—within the precincts of the great Abbey of Westminster there are said to be imprisoned in grim and forbidding seclusion unknown multitudes of witnesses, voiceless, tongueless, forgotten, whose testimony, if it could be extorted, would strangely and powerfully affect our views upon hundreds of incidents and movements, hundreds of crimes and errors and sacrifices and grand endeavours that now are very imperfectly understood, often wholly misrepresented, and some of them passed out of remembrance. Let us take an example.

We have all of us heard of the Star Chamber. Pray may I ask my accomplished readers if they know anything about the Stars? Nay! Be not rash with thy lips. The name Star Chamber has not the remotest connection with astronomy. The name carries us back to a time when the children of Israel were swarming in England and when they were the great bankers or money-lenders—almost the only bankers and money-lenders—within the four seas. Impecunious scoundrels up and down the land mortgaged their lands or pawned their valuables, and the Jews advanced them money upon their securities. The promises to pay, the agreements to surrender property on non-payment, the bonds, the bills, the orders of court, and the documentary evidence bearing upon all these transactions between the creditors and the debtors, the borrowers and the lenders, were drawn up in the Hebrew language, and the records of these multifarious transactions between the Jews and the Christians, dating back to an unknown antiquity (possibly to a time very little after the Conquest) and ending about the year 1290, when all Jews were banished from England with unspeakable acts of cruelty and wrong—these records, I say, are to be found in the archives of Westminster Abbey. These Hebrew records are believed to count by thousands, and are known by the name of stars among the few who even know that there are such things in existence. As to the exact meaning or derivation of the word, I dare not venture upon an explanation of it; nor as to the correct spelling of it am I qualified to express an opinion. It is sufficient for me that the court in which these suits between the Jews and their victims, or their defrauders, were tried and decided was in ancient times called the Star Chamber, because the records of the proceedings which were there adjudicated upon were popularly known as stars. Perhaps not six men in Britain have ever looked intelligently at this mass of Hebrew MSS. I believe only one man living—Mr. Davies—has devoted any time to the study of them. And yet with this immense and unique apparatus absolutely untouched, with this virgin soil that has been neglected and unknown for six centuries, literary empirics have more than once set themselves to write the history of the Jews to the Middle Ages, “resorting to their imagination for their facts” when the facts were there at their elbows if they had only known it. The history of the Jews in England down to the time of their expulsion by Edward the First remains to be written, because the materials for that history have remained to the present hour unread.

Take another instance. There have been many very interesting books printed about Westminster Abbey; about the sovereigns that were crowned there, about sovereigns that were buried there, about dramatic incidents that occurred within the glorious church, about its architecture, about its school, about its single bishop and its many illustrious deans. The magnificent and venerable institution is so spangled with golden memories that the dryest handbook must needs prove attractive to the dullest of readers. The whole place in its every stone and nook and corner is wrapped in an atmosphere of romance and wonder and mystery; but anything that deserves to be called by so grand a name as a History of Westminster Abbey, or anything approaching to it, can no more be said to exist than can the History of Carthage or Damascus. There may be, there is, some excuse for our ignorance in the one case, but in the other case there is none. There, within the very walls where the history was a-making through the ages, in the very handwriting of the men whose lives were passed within the precincts and who were actors in the drama of which they left their fragments of notes or scraps of illustrations or briefest mementoes, there, huddled together in bunks and trunks and sacks and boxes—no one can tell you exactly where—there is such a wealth of materials that when it comes to be methodized and utilized, digested and studied, as it must be some day, the result will inevitably be to make the men of the future look with larger, other eyes than ours upon the action of those forces and the character of those movements, and the statesmanship of those leaders and commanders of the people which have worked together in the evolution of a great nation from its inchoate condition of a mere gathering of peoples. Nevertheless, for any facilities that exist for studying the records of Westminster Abbey they might almost as well be kept in glass cases in the moon as be where they are. Am I, then, going to propose...? My good sir, I am going to propose nothing, nothing at any rate with regard to the London records, lay or clerical. Only this I venture to remark, that before we have taken stock of our metropolitan muniments and got them into order, before we have provided suitable receptacles for them and put them under the charge of qualified custodians, we shall be wiser if we learn a little modesty in talking about other people and other places, and what they ought to do and what ought to be done for them.

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Once upon a time there was a grizzly monster who sat himself down in the neighbourhood of the ancient city of Thebes. He was a ravenous monster with an insatiable appetite, and he demanded for his meals large supplies of Theban youths and maidens. The monster conducted himself in a very exacting and insolent manner, and somehow he contrived to make the unhappy Thebans acquiesce in his bold assumption that the gods had created Thebes and all that belonged to it for no other purpose under heaven than for the support and glorification of his own unwieldy self, growing daily more corpulent, voracious, and overbearing. At last one fine day the monster in a sportive humour asked the Thebans a riddle, and a sagacious gentleman guessed the riddle. The answer was “Man.” It was a very curious conundrum, and when the answer came it brought with it an important and startling suggestion. “Ye burghers of Thebes,” one cried, “look to it! Man was not created for the monster! That be far from us! Monsters peradventure there must be—some beneficent, some malign, some to be proud of, some to loathe. But be they what they may, let it be ours to proclaim, Not man for the monsters, but monsters for the behoof of man!” That wholly novel and unexpected resolution, having been carried unanimously and by acclamation, wrought quite a revolution among the Theban folk. I am sorry to say its effect upon the voracious creature aforesaid was disastrous. They say he did not wait to perish of famine, but died violently of a ruptured heart.

There is among us a school of pundits, who live and always have lived within the sound of Bow Bells, whose Dagon and Baal and Moloch and Juggernaut combined is London, whose Gospel is “Blessed are they whom the great city vouchsafes to devour.” Outside the five-miles circle, or the ten-miles circle, these men think there are indeed certain insignificant atoms, minute, nebulous, meteoric, held in solution in that impalpable medium which for convenience has been called by idealists the realm of England, but that these purposeless particles have no sort of cohesion, and their continuance even as atoms can only be assured in so far as they are destined to become integral portions of that vast pleroma the all-embracing and all-devouring London. No! Let it be proclaimed upon the housetops, let the protest go forth and awake the echoes, “England does not exist for London, but London for England!” Let men ponder that profound and pregnant utterance of the greatest of our historians—“From the beginning of its political importance London acts constantly as the pulse, sometimes as the brain, never perhaps in its whole history as the heart of England.” Is that so? Then let us beware how we give our monster more than its due and more than it can manage, lest it develop into a hydrocephalous monster with a pulse that beats but feebly by reason of its life’s blood being scantily supplied.

Indeed, it is easy to exaggerate the value and importance even of the metropolitan archives. To begin with, the records of the City of London will be found of little or no use for investigating the history of English agriculture. What will they teach us about the complex questions of land tenure, the life of the peasantry, the relations between the lords and the tenants of the soil, about the condition of the people, high and low, about those local courts and franchises and customs, and disciplinary and formative machinery, which “through oppression prepared the way for order and by routine educated men for the dominion of law”? You must go a long way out of London to get anything like a grasp of the constitution of a county palatine, and to understand the working, if I may use the expression, of such forms of local government as were once active in the manor, the honour, or the hundred. You must study such matters not only in the rolls and charters that survive, but you must study them too in the geographical areas with which they are concerned. What! gather together all the parish registers, and all the wills and all the sessional papers within the four seas and toss them all together into a vast heap “somewhere” in London! What for? That a score or two of cockney dryasdusts may have the opportunity of getting at them by a short ride outside a “penny bus”? Why, you might just as well propose that all the parish churches should be carted away bodily and set up “somewhere” in battle array as a kind of ecclesiastical wall round the metropolis, in order to give adequate facilities of study to the Institute of British Architects in Conduit Street.

The fact is that within the last few years more has been done in the way of arranging, cataloguing, and providing for the safe custody of ancient documents in the provinces than has been even attempted (outside the Record Office) by London and the Londoners. We poor creatures in the wilds, we don’t go whining for subsidies from the Government, we don’t clamour for grants from the national exchequer; and there are some of us that can give a very much better account of our muniments than you Londoners can give of yours. Thirty years ago the corporation of Norwich had a catalogue of its records drawn up by a local antiquary, which for convenience of reference and the intimate and wide knowledge it displays could bear comparison with any similar undertaking then existing in the country. The records of the borough of Ipswich, says Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson, “are at present so perfectly arranged that with the help of the new catalogue and index ... the custodian can produce without difficulty any charter, roll, or paper account that it may be needful to examine.” The records of the corporation of Leicester, says the same learned antiquary, “will endure comparison with the muniments of any provincial borough in Great Britain.” The magnificent enthusiasm of two citizens of that same borough has brought this immense assemblage of MSS. into a condition which may well arouse envy and ought to stimulate rivalry; while the example set by the mayor and corporation in making their treasures accessible to all comers proves that enthusiasm is contagious.

These instances are taken at random; there is no need to multiply them. It is well known to experts, and to some who are much less than experts, that the condition of our corporation records throughout the land is very far more satisfactory than was suspected a few years ago, and that every year more and more attention is being bestowed upon them, more vigilance displayed in their preservation, and more zeal and earnestness exhibited in the patient study of their contents. Every year the number of intelligent explorers of our municipal and other local archives is steadily increasing, which means that every year the study of our history is being more laboriously pursued by specialists. For the rest, the whole field is felt to be too vast to travel through in the present state of our knowledge. But just as great laws and great generalizations in physical science have been made, and could only have been made, by the devotion of students concentrating their attention upon a single branch of physiology, chemistry, or astronomy, and registering the conclusions—that is, the certainties—which their several researches have arrived at, so must it be with history; there, too, research must be carried on by men who will be content to labour in a limited area and to deal with problems which cease to be insignificant when their bearing upon larger questions is recognized and the results of one man’s toil are affiliated to those of another’s.

But if this be so, if indeed the history of England of the future will be the outcome of what may be called the experimental and departmental method of research, it is obvious that the examination of the enormous body of evidence now at our command must be carried on by local inquiries. Only so can slight hints and faint clues be apprehended, the local customs and dialects understood, and the very names of places and persons detected in their various disguises. But what we have found ourselves led to suspect when we were dealing with the various collections of records now dispersed in the great hiding-places of London—namely, that sooner or later we shall have to group those records in departmental archives—this we are irresistibly compelled to believe we shall sooner or later have to do with the large masses of historic MSS. which are scattered broadcast over the island from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House.

In the smaller world of London—yes, Mr. Gigadibs, the smaller world—observe, it is a concession to your stubborn prejudices to call it a world at all, but if a world I protest that the qualifying epithet must be resorted to—in the smaller world of London we have seen that the existing collections of records may be roughly associated in certain groups or classes according as they are regarded as belonging to the evidences bearing upon (1) the history of the monarchy and the development of the constitution; (2) the history of English law and all that concerns such matters as procedure, judicature, and the like; (3) the history of the City of London—of its great guilds, its customs, privileges, and commerce; (4) personal and family history, and (5) lastly, ecclesiastical history, including in that the history of the religious houses. In the wider area we should have to make a similar classification, but in doing so we should have to add one class of documents very inadequately represented in the London collections; I mean those which supply an apparatus for studying the history of the land.

And here we are face to face with a serious difficulty. The evidences, which until the present century were so intimately associated with a landed estate that they passed with the estate as an almost necessary proof that possession had been conveyed, had in the lapse of ages grown in many instances to an aggregate of documents whose bulk was prodigious and its mere stowage embarrassing. Where the capital mansion of an extensive property was proportionate to the acreage it was easy to set apart one room as a muniment-room, in which thousands of charters, court rolls, bailiffs’ accounts, and other records were deposited and sometimes arranged with great care and precision; but where a great estate was broken up, or there was no longer any important residence upon it, the evidences often found their way into very strange depositories. The family solicitor had to find a home for them, and to do so was often extremely inconvenient; or the capital mansion became a farm-house, and the evidences were packed in boxes and sent up to the garrets under the roof, in some cases were bundled into the hayloft. By the legislation which simplified the conveyance of land and rendered it no longer necessary to go back to the beginning of time in order to prove a title, the ancient “evidences” became at once valueless for all practical purposes. They became not only useless but odious lumber, and a process of quietly getting rid of them set in and has been steadily carried on to the present moment. The rolls of manor courts and courts leet, which give an insight into the daily life of our forefathers, and which may still be met with in large numbers, dating back to the days of Henry the Third, were destroyed by tens of thousands. Documents which could have thrown light upon some of the most interesting problems which are now being worked at by the profoundest jurists and the most acute students of constitutional history have perished in unknown multitudes. Others which contained invaluable illustrations of local customs—of tyrannous overstraining of feudal authority on the one hand or of crafty evasions of feudal services on the other, of the rapacity of lords and stewards of manors here and of successful appropriations of strips of land or rights of commonage or pasture there—vanished from the face of the earth, none would tell how. The extent to which this destruction of ancient muniments has been carried on cannot yet be even approximately estimated. Nevertheless much remains. The interest which such writers as Mr. Seebohm, Mr. Maitland, Mr. Thorold Rogers, and others have aroused in the many important inquiries which they have severally pursued is increasing day by day, and there can be no doubt that a desire to become better acquainted with the contents of those documents which still survive and may still be rescued and preserved is spreading rapidly and widely. But “where are they to be kept when we have got them?” is the question that presses. It is more than can be expected of the civic authorities that they should charge the rates of the town with providing house room for collections of MSS. which are but remotely concerned with the history of the boroughs themselves. The local museums as a rule are overcrowded and can barely keep their heads above water. The boxes and bundles of rolls and parchments in the lawyers’ offices are provokingly in the way; the country houses are changing hands week by week, and Philistines prefer dressing-rooms to muniment rooms. Will no one suggest a way out of our difficulties?

* * * * *

I have passed very lightly over the condition of affairs at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, and that for more reasons than one, the chief reason, but by no means the only one, being that I know nothing about the Abbey muniments or of those of the bishopric of London, and nobody seems able to tell me anything. I have not even alluded to the archdeaconries of the diocese of London.

Those lofty souls whose habit it is to dogmatize most airily when they declaim most ignorantly, are never more jocose than when they take a turn at the archdeacons and their visitations. Well, it is very funny to think of there being any grotesque survivals of such an institution as an archdeacon’s court still existing among us. What a droll prelate Bishop Remigius must have been that he actually divided his overgrown and unwieldy diocese of Lincoln into seven archdeaconries about twelve years after the Conquest! How very odd that the successors of those seven functionaries have been going on merrily archdeaconizing down to the present day! How did they amuse themselves all this long time? How did they keep up their little game? “Exercising archidiaconal functions, of course.” And of course we are expected to receive that novel explanation with shouts of laughter. Well, but wouldn’t you like to know how they really did employ themselves? Suppose you were by chance to hear that the action of the archdeacons’ courts had something to do with the emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers and many hundreds of their friends to New England, say, in the seventeenth century; something perhaps to do with the death of Arch-bishop Laud and the twenty years’ imprisonment of Bishop Wren. Wouldn’t you like to know something about it all? What have become of the records of the archdeaconries? I know where a few of them are: but where the great mass of them are to be found I know not, and it would take a great deal of trouble to discover. Those that I know of are in closets in lawyers’ offices. A blessing on those lawyers, say I, for they have at any rate preserved some fragments of ancient evidences which but for them would have gone to make glue long ago. But if you want to find out what the ecclesiastical discipline exercised by the archdeacons upon gentle and simple in the old days was like, you will have to fish up the records of the archdeacons’ courts out of their hiding-places, and you will find them to contain some very, very funny items of information, almost as droll as the buffoonery of those lofty souls.

If we are ever to arrive at clearer and truer views of the history of the slow growth of certain moral, religious, and even political convictions among the great body of the people—by the help of, or in despite of, the inquisitorial, coercive, and repressive machinery of the local ecclesiastical courts, which for centuries were exercising a real and terrible power within a ride of every man’s door through the length and breadth of the land—we certainly must not neglect that large body of evidence which is to be found in the records of the archdeacons’ courts. But it is obvious that such records must be unified, must be made accessible to students, which means, in other words, that they must be collected into diocesan or provincial archives.

So with the parochial registers, churchwardens’ books, the wills and other MSS. which are more or less concerned with the private and family life of our ancestors. We have a right to know what our fathers thought and believed, and how they got to break away from this or that superstition, arrived at this or that new truth, were delivered from this or that thraldom, rebelled against this or that wrong, suffered for their errors as if they were crimes, learnt to reverence even doubt when it dawned upon them that doubters could be earnest, noble, and loving, learnt to see that Christian charity could be tolerant even of mistakes; how their horizon widened as their vision became stronger; how as knowledge grew from more to more the old bonds and shackles that cramped the spirit of man became more and more strained even to bursting; how the old fetters bit into the flesh of some, the old chains wore out the hearts and brains of others; how they spoke to their children in their last hours; what messages they sent to friends and kindred when the end was drawing very near; what their hope and trust was as they looked beyond the veil. Yes, we have a right to know these things if they are to be known. You may sneer at the follies of pedigree hunters if you will, and deride the harmless madness of genealogists; but I do not envy the man who would not give two straws to find out whether his grandfather’s grandfather was a hero or a blackleg, whether he lived the life of a successful pickpocket, or died the death of a martyr for his honest convictions. And if any one is so little acquainted with the curiosities of parish registers, or the contents of parish chests, or the strange secrets often revealed or alluded to in the wills of provincial probate courts, as to suppose that these “rags of time” are wholly wanting in any elements of pathos and romance, he certainly has a great deal to learn, and he knows very little indeed about the contents of documents which he so tranquilly assumes to be “barren all.”

From what has been said thus far I hope it will be clear that I am as little inclined to advocate the removal of the municipal records from their proper homes, the muniment rooms of the provincial boroughs, as I am to propose that the archives of London should be transferred from the Guildhall to any other repository. What is wanted is not centralization but classification. Already it has been found advisable to remove the natural history collections from the British Museum and to find a home for them in Kensington. The time may come, and may not be far distant, when a further step will have to be taken in the direction of relieving the congested storehouses at Bloomsbury of some other assemblage of precious objects. In London we find ourselves more and more driven to specialize our collections, if only to save ourselves from bewilderment.

But as to any great collections of historical documents, except only that at the Record Office, they do not exist; they have still to be made. Meanwhile one large class of records—the ecclesiastical, parochial, and testamentary records—may be said to be in great danger of gradually but certainly perishing, partly from mere disuse, partly from the want of any adequate provision for their safe keeping, partly from the actual uncertainty that attaches to their ownership. One and all they are national records, the preservation of which ought to be assured to the nation by very different precautions from any which now are provided. Whom do the parish registers belong to? What guarantee have we that X or Y or Z may not sell “his” registers to the highest bidder? In point of fact, parish registers have been bought and sold again and again. Who are the owners of such a splendid collection of historic MSS. as is to be found in the archives of St. Lawrence’s Church, Reading? What is to prevent the churchwardens from selling them to a “collector” and appropriating the proceeds towards the expense of a new organ? Where are the records of Barchester now that the Venerable Archdeacon Grantley has ceased to edify us with his eloquent charges? In how many instances is there to be found anything remotely resembling a catalogue of such archidiaconal records? How many living men have ever consulted such as there are or would know where to look for them?

Let me not be misunderstood. I have received so much kindness, hospitality, and cordial assistance at the hands of so many who have laid open their muniments to my inspection, I have found and made among these gentlemen such warm friends that I can only think of them and speak of them with gratitude and esteem. But who knows better than the most learned and most entirely loyal among the custodians of our ecclesiastical and parochial muniments that the state of things as they are is not the state of things that ought to be?

And yet there can surely be no insuperable difficulty in grouping together our ecclesiastical, testamentary, and parochial muniments, forming them into one homogeneous collection, and bringing them together into a single provincial record office, taking the geographical limits of the diocese as the area within which the several aggregates of ancient documents shall be deposited.

Few men can pay a visit to any of our cathedrals, especially those within whose precincts there are still to be found any considerable remains of the old conventual buildings, without being struck by what seems to be the waste of room in the church itself and its outlying dependencies. Not to speak of the side chapels, which some would have a sentimental objection to utilizing—though I know instances where they are mere store places for workmen’s tools and lumber—consider the immense areas at our disposal in many a transept, triforium, or chapter house. Consider how comparatively small a chamber suffices, for the most part, to contain all the existing records of a cathedral chapter or of the bishop of a see. Consider how all the parochial registers even of a large diocese from 1538 to 1800 could easily stand upon a dozen shelves of ten feet long, and all the wills of two or three counties from the earliest times to the beginning of this century could be accommodated without difficulty in many a drawing-room. Consider all these things and more that I forbear from dwelling on, and it will be abundantly clear that the difficulty of providing accommodation for one group of historic MSS. at any rate will be found insignificant if we set ourselves seriously to deal with it. Within the precincts of our cathedrals there is ample space and verge enough for any such requirements as this group of records may be supposed to make upon us.

But assuming that such an assemblage, such a grouping, of historic MSS. were determined on, and that the housing of it were found to be easy and practicable, would it not be necessary that a duly qualified custodian should be appointed to take the oversight of the collection and to act as the provincial or diocesan keeper of the records? Of course it would; and this is exactly what is very urgently needed. I am told that a letter from Mr. Charles Mason, which appeared in The Times not so very long ago, and which gave an account of his experience in trying to institute a search among the diocesan records of Llandaff, “produced quite a sensation in some quarters.” I think it must be among those who have had very little experience indeed of similar adventures. The truth is that it is the exception rather than the rule to find among the present responsible keepers of parochial testamentary or episcopal records a gentleman who even professes to be able to decipher the more ancient and precious MSS. which he has under his charge. The registrar of a diocese, of an archdeaconry, or of a prerogative court, the parson of a parish, or the churchwarden, each and all have something else to do than spend the precious hours upon poring over their muniments.

Such men as Dr. Bensley of Norwich are few and far between. Gentlemen whose duties involve many hours a day of arduous and exhausting labour can only devote their leisure moments to research, and when they do so they are in danger of getting something less than thanks as their reward. The chivalrous and splendid enthusiasm of the late Mr. Wickenden at Lincoln, of Dr. Sheppard at Canterbury, of Canon Raine at York, has laid us under profound obligation, but in each and all of these instances the labour of long years has been a labour of love, and the very permission to engage and continue in it has been conceded as a privilege conferred upon the toiler. Or again, when the fascination which “musty parchments” exercise over some minds has irresistibly impelled such generous students as Archdeacon Chapman of Ely, the late Canon Swainson of Chichester, or Mr. Symonds of Norwich, to make sacrifices of time and money in the preservation or deciphering or calendaring the precious documents to which their position as members of the chapter gave them free access, they have found some portion of their recompense in the wonder and astonishment of the Philistines that any human being could undertake and carry on so much without being paid for it.

A registrar is a functionary whose duty it is to keep a register of what is going on from day to day. I suspect it is very seldom part of his duty to find out what people were doing or recording long before he was born. At any rate it is no part of his duty to find that out for you, or to teach you where and how to look for what you want to discover. So with the parson of a parish. For the most part he is possessed by a conviction that if he loses his registers something dreadful will happen to him; and accordingly when he goes away for a holiday he leaves his cook in charge, with a solemn warning that she is to let no one see “the books” except in her presence and under her eye; and a very awful eye it sometimes is. But who of us has not been kindly and frankly told by a genial brother that if we want such or such an entry copied we must come and copy it ourselves, for that our good-natured correspondent cannot make out the old writing?

As to the churchwardens, assuming that they are to be looked upon as responsible for the custody of the parochial evidences, to talk of them as keepers of ancient MSS. is a little too ridiculous. It is true that there are in my vestry two dilapidated parish chests, which once presumably were full of wills and deeds and conveyances and evidences, which if they were now forthcoming, might considerably disturb the equanimity of some personages here and there; but those old chests are used as coal-bins now, and have been so used from times to which the memory of man doth not extend. I could tell some odd stories of my experience as a dryasdust in days when I employed my leisure hours in peeping into the dens and caves of the earth.

Assuredly if we resolve upon collecting together any group of historic MSS. and making them available for students engaged in original research, it will be necessary to put them under the custody of a trained archiviste, as the French call such a functionary, and give him a recognized position as provincial keeper of the records. Such an official, with one or two subordinates under him, should be required to give their time exclusively to the work marked out for them. Let that work be organized in the same way and on the same lines as those laid down in the great London tabularium. Let there be the same system adopted of arranging, indexing, and calendaring. Let there be issued periodically reports addressed to the central authorities, let the archives be open to students and inquirers without fee or any payment. If any one wishes to have a document transcribed or a search made which, if he knew how to set about it, he might carry on himself, let him pay for his “office copy” or his search at a reasonable charge. As for the details of such an arrangement let them settle themselves, as they surely will; in the meantime let us trust to the golden principle “Solvitur ambulando.”

Can it be doubted that into such provincial depositories there would flow, in the natural course of things, a stream of contributions from the possessors of documents illustrative of county and provincial history, for which their owners have no room in their houses, which they know not how to make use of and are half inclined to burn? Nay, it will probably come to pass that collections of great historic importance will be committed for safe custody to such provincial archives on the understanding that they shall in due time be examined, arranged, and reported on, and thus the work now carried on by the Historic Manuscripts Commission will be continued in a much more exhaustive way than is now attempted by the Commissioners, who necessarily spend much of their time and much of the public money in itinerating, and whose work can only be by-work and subordinated to their daily duties and the regular business of their lives. I have known two instances of cartloads of MSS. of great antiquity, and comprehending almost certainly large numbers of charters, letters, rolls, and the like of estimable value and interest, deliberately destroyed, and in one of these instances destroyed with some difficulty and at some expense, only because they were “in the way.” What I know, others doubtless may find parallels for. Would such a catastrophe have happened if there had been any recognized depository for records of this kind, which, by the very fact of their being guarded with care and intelligence and treated with respect, men had learnt to look upon as having an intrinsic value?

* * * * *

It will be noticed that in the foregoing pages I have said very little about any objections that may be urged or difficulties that may be suggested in carrying out a measure of this character. No! I must leave that delightful duty to others. I offer a suggestion. The draughting of a scheme must come by-and-by. As to difficulties, sentimental, professional, or financial, we are sure to hear of them. Was there ever a proposal for any sort of reform that had not to run the gauntlet of those clamorous people who love nothing better, and are good for nothing better, than bawling out, “There’s a lion in the way!”? There is no need to suggest difficulties to these people; to do so would be only to intrude into their domain. But this I am more and more convinced of, namely, that there are no difficulties in carrying out such a suggestion as is here brought forward which will not disappear if they are faced with a desire to overcome them, and I am even more convinced that a feeling is growing up in our midst against allowing the present condition of affairs to continue. It is quite sufficiently scandalous that we have submitted to it so long.

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VI.
SNOWED UP IN ARCADY.

No truer saying was ever uttered than that “one half the world does not know how the other half lives.” And yet I am continually contradicted by wiseacres of the streets and squares when I meekly but firmly maintain that it is actually possible to live a happy, intelligent, useful, and progressive life in an out-of-the-way country parish—“far from the madding crowd”—and literally (as I happen to know at this moment) three miles from a lemon. “Don’t tell me!” says one of my agnostic friends who knows everything, as agnostics always do, and who is absolutely certain, as agnostics always are, that they know all about you—“don’t tell me! You may make the best of it as you do, and you put a good face upon it, which I dare say is all right; but to try and make me believe you like being buried alive is more than you can do. Stuff, man! You might as well try and persuade me you like being snowed up!”

Now it so happened that, a few days after my bouncing and aggressive friend had delivered himself of this delicate little protest against any and every assertion I might venture to make in the conversation which had arisen between us, I was awaked at the usual hour of 7 a.m. by Jemima knocking at the door; and when Mr. Bob had growled his usual growl, and I had declared myself to be awake in a surly monosyllable, Jemima cried aloud, saying, “It’s awful snow, sir—drifts emendjous!” I drew the curtains open, pulled up the blinds, and lo! there was snow indeed. Not on the trees—that was well, at any rate—but all the air was full of snow. Not coming down from the clouds, but driving across the fields in billows of white dust—piling itself up against every obstacle—pollard, stump or gatepost, hedgerow, or wall, or farmstead—rolling, eddying, scudding along before the cruel north-easter, that was lashing the earth with his freezing scourge of bitterness. At about the distance of a pistol-shot from my window the high road runs straight as a ruler between low banks and thin hedges, and we can see it for half a mile or so till some rising ground blocks the view. This morning there was no road!—only a long broad stripe of snow that seemed a trifle higher than the ploughed lands that lay to the northward, and which were almost swept bare by the gale. To the southward there were huge drifts packed up against every little copse or plantation, and far as the eye could see not a human creature or sheep or head of cattle to lessen the impression of utter desolation.

By the time we got down to breakfast the wind had lulled, and fresh snow was falling. That was, at any rate, an improvement upon the accursed north-easter. But it was plain that there were to be no ante-jentacular or post-prandial peregrinations, as Jeremy Bentham used to phrase it, for us this day. “My dear,” I said, “I’m afraid we are really snowed up!” Now, what do you suppose was the reply I received from her Royal Highness the Lady Shepherd? Neither more nor less than this—“What a jolly day we will have! We needn’t go out, need we?”

Nathan, the wise youth—agnostic, as he calls himself, which is only Greek for ignoramus—would have sneered at the Lady Shepherd’s chuckle, and she—she would have chuckled at his sneer. But as he was not there we only laughed, and somewhat gleefully set ourselves to map out the next fifteen hours with plans of operation that would have required at least fifty hours to execute.

“The only thing that can be said for your pitiful life,” said Nathan to us once, “is that you have no interruptions. But there is not much in that, where there’s nothing to interrupt.” Nathan, the wise youth, is a type of his class. He’s so delicate in his little innuendos, so sympathetically candid, so tender to “the things you call your feelings, you know.” Do these people always wear hob-nailed boots, prepared at any moment for a wrestling match, where kicking is part of the game? “No interruptions!” Oh, Lady Shepherd, think of that! “No interruptions!”

You observe that our day begins at eight. When we came first to Arcady we said we would breakfast at half-past eight. We tried the plan for a month. It was a dead failure. Jemima never kept true to the minutes. We found ourselves slipping into nine o’clock; that meant ruin. It must either be eight o’clock, or the financial bottom of the establishment would inevitably drop out. So eight o’clock it is and shall be.

At eight o’clock, accordingly, on this particular morning we went down as usual to the library—and, I am bound to say, we were just a little depressed, because we had made up our minds that no postman in England could bring us our bag this morning. To our immense surprise and joy, there were the letters and papers lying on the table as if it were Midsummer Day. The man had left the road, tramped along the fields which the howling wind had made passable. There were nine letters. When I see what these country postmen go through, the pluck and endurance they exhibit, the downright suffering (i.e., it would be to you and me) which they take all as a part of the day’s work, and how they go on at it, and retire at last, after years of stubborn jog-trotting, to enjoy a pension of ten shillings a week and the repose of acute rheumatism consequent upon sudden cessation from physical exertion, I find myself frequently exclaiming with the poet,—

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κ’ οὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

Many the wonderful things that be, but the wonder of wonders is—Man!

Now it will be a surprise, perhaps a very great surprise, to some of my genuine town friends, to learn that even a country parson—who after all is a man and a brother—gets pretty much the same sort of letters that other people do. He gets offers to assign to him shares in gold mines; offers of three dozen and four, positively all that is left, of that transcendental sherry; offers to make him a life governor of the new college for criminals; invitations to be a steward at a public dinner of the Society for Diminishing Felony; above all, he gets some very elegant letters from gentlemen in very high positions in society offering to lend him money. I do verily believe these scoundrels, who invariably write a good hand on crested paper and express themselves in a style which is above all praise, are in league with one of my banker’s clerks. How else does it happen that, as sure as ever my account is very low and that I am in mortal terror lest my last cheque should be returned dishonoured, so sure am I to hear from one of these diabolical tempters? There’s one scarlet Mephistopheles who must know all about my financial position. How else could he have thought of sending me two of his gilt-edged seductions in a single week just when my banking account was overdrawn? It is absurd to pretend that he keeps a medium.

Moreover, proof sheets come by post even in this wilderness, and they have to be corrected, too; and real letters that are not begging letters come, some kind and comforting, some stern and uncompromising, some with the oddest inquiries and criticisms. Sometimes, too, anonymous letters come. What a queer state of mind a man must have got himself into before he can sit down to write an anonymous letter! Does any man in his senses ever read an anonymous letter of four pages? If he does, the writer gets no fun out of it. I am inclined to think that the practice of writing anonymous letters is dying out now that the schoolmaster is abroad; and yet, they tell me, insanity is not decreasing. Then, too, there are the newspapers. I could live without butter—I shouldn’t like it, but I could submit to it; or without eggs, though I dislike snow pancakes; or without sugar—and there are some solids and some liquids that are insipid without that; but there is one thing I could not do without—I could not do without the Times. We have tried again and again to economize by having a penny paper, but it has always ended in the same way. As entremets they are all delightful, but for a square meal give me the Times. Without it “the appetite is distracted by the variety of objects, and tantalized by the restlessness of perpetual solicitation,” till, when the day is done, the mind wearies under “a feeling of satiety without satisfaction, and of repletion without sustenance.”

On this particular morning we had adjourned from the library to the breakfast-room, and were opening our letters in high spirits, spite[6] of Nathan the wise, and notwithstanding the bitter wind and the snow, when a hideous sound startled us. There, under the window, the snow steadily falling, drawn up in single file, were four human creatures, two males and two females, arrayed in outlandish attire, and every one of them playing hideously out of tune. It was a German band!

A more lugubrious spectacle than is presented by a German band, droning forth “Herz, mein Herz” in front of your window in a snowstorm it would be difficult to imagine. We suffer much from German bands, but we have only ourselves to thank. I love music, and I am possessed by the delusion that it is my duty to encourage the practice of instrumental execution. Five or six years ago there was a band of eight or nine performers who perambulated Norfolk, and they came to me at least once a month. Whenever they appeared I went out to them and gave them a shilling, airing my small modicum of German periodically, and receiving flattering compliments upon my pronunciation, which gratified me exceedingly. These people disappeared at last, but they were succeeded by another band, and a very inferior one, and I took but little notice of them. There were seven of these performers, a cornet and two clarionets being prominent—very. However, they got their shilling, and vanished. Three days after their departure came another band: this time there were only four. I thought that rather shabby, but I was busy, did not take much notice of them, and again gave them a shilling. The cornet player was really quite respectable. Next day came four more, and there was no cornet, only the abominable clarionet. It was insufferable. I said I really must restrict myself to sixpence, and that was fourpence more than they were worth. Two days after their departure came a single solitary performer; he had a pan-pipe fastened under his chin, a peal of bells on his head, which he caused to tinkle by his nods, a pair of cymbals attached to his elbows, a big drum which he beat by the help of a crank that he worked with one of his feet, and a powerful concertina which he played with his hands. He led off with a dolorous chorale in a minor key. It was really more than flesh and blood could bear. “Send him away, Jemima. Send him away!—instantly! Tell him I am sehr krank. Send him away!” The fellow smiled with unctuous complacency. But when he got only twopence, his face fell. “Ach, nein! You plaize, ze professor, he geeve one sheeling to ze band—I am ze band. He geeve ze band only twopence. He do not understand I am ze band! You plaise tell him I am ze band!” “No! You’re to go away. Master’s sore and kranky!” Ze band loitered for half a minute; then it took itself to pieces and went its way. But the fellow’s hint about the shilling was significant, and led to an investigation. Then it turned out that the band of seven or eight which was going its rounds that year, split itself up when it came into my neighbourhood, and, in view of my shilling, presented itself in two detachments, each of which reckoned on my shilling, and several times carried it off. Now I give one penny for each performer, and only when there is a cornet do I send out coffee to the instrumentalists.

It was, however, not in flesh and blood to withhold the shilling from the players of that quartette on that bitter morning. It was heart-rending to think of their having at the peril of their lives staggered through three miles of snowdrifts. It was inhuman to send them away without coffee. And they had it accordingly. Poor things! poor things! Where were they going? They were going back to the “Red Lion,” a stone’s throw off, where they had slept the night before, and where they meant to spend this night in delighting the hearts of the rustics by waltzes and polkas, and gathering not such a bad harvest for the nonce. “Lor, sir!” said Mr. Style, “to hear that there trombone a soleing ‘Rule Britannia’! That made you feel he was a real musician—that it did!”

So you see we began the day with a band of music. That does not sound so bad. But the band being dismissed, we finish our breakfast and retire to the library.

We do not go empty-handed. Each of us carries a plate piled up high with bread cut up for the birds that are waiting to be fed. A space under the window is swept clear from snow, and there the birds are, ready for their breakfast. Sparrows by the score, robins that will hardly wait till the window is opened, chaffinches and tomtits, dunnocks, blackbirds and thrushes, linnets and—jackdaws, yes! and, watching very warily for a chance, a dozen or so of rooks in the trees in yonder plantation, very much excited, very restless, very shy, but ready to come down and gobble up the morsels if we keep ourselves out of sight. As to the robins, there is no mauvaise honte about them; they will almost fly on to the plate. Sometimes I send a shower of morsels quite over the robins, and they greatly enjoy the fun. One saucy little fellow last week laughed out loud at me. “Laughed?” Yes, laughed! I’ve known a robin laugh convulsively. But then it was not under a street lamp.

It is one of the laws of this palace that we do not begin real work before half-past nine. And before that time arrives there is usually a good half-hour for reading aloud by the Lady Shepherd. What is the Shepherd doing meanwhile? He is not going to tell you anything more than this, that he is devoting himself during that half-hour to preventing the ravages of moths and bookworms. You people who suppose we poor country folk must be horribly dull and depressed may as well understand that this library in which I am sitting is an apartment that for a country parsonage may be regarded as palatial. Pray haven’t I a right to have one good room in my house? One thing I know, and that is that I am rated as if I lived in a house of £430 a year, and if I must pay rates on that amount I may as well have something to show for it. Also I would have you to know that the walls of this library are lined with books from floor to ceiling. Then there are flowers all about—grown on the premises, mind you—none of your bought blossoms stuck on to a bit of stick with a bit of wire, but live flowers that turn and look at you—at any rate, they certainly do turn and look out at the window if you give them a chance. Moreover, they are not under the dominion of a morose stipendiary, for the sufficient reason that the head gardener is the Lady Shepherd, and the under gardener only comes three times a week, and Jabez has his hands full, and Ishmael is no servant of ours, but the servant of the maids in the kitchen; and when you’re snowed up Ishmael must give his life to the solemn duties of a stoker and filler of coal-scuttles, and to shovelling away the snow, and to running errands. There is no doubt about the seriousness of that boy. He is oppressed by the sense of his responsibility, and convinced that he occupies the position of the divine being in Plato’s Theœtetus. As long as τὸ ὄν kept his hand upon the world it went round all right; when he took it off, the world straightway spun round the wrong way. That being Ishmael’s view, he is naturally grave. When the maids shriek at him he exhibits a terror-stricken alacrity, but when I tell him to do this or that, he looks at me with a cunning expression as if he would say, “Do you really mean that? Well, you must take the consequences.” Then he glides off. From Ishmael not much is to be expected in the greenhouse. But when half-past nine strikes I roll my table into position and set to work, my head gardener puts on her apron and gathers up her skirts, and starts forth with her basket on her arm, equipped for her day’s work.

Now, if a man has four good hours in the morning which he may call his own, it’s a great deal more than most men have, and there’s no saying what may be done in such hours as these. But if you allow morning callers to disturb you, then it’s—I was going to say a bad word!

I had just settled myself to work in earnest when Jemima’s head appeared. “Please, sir, Tinker George wants to see you.” “Tell your mistress.” And I thought no more about it, but went on with what I was doing. If Tinker George had been one of my parishioners I should have jumped up and heard him patiently, but Tinker George does not belong to me, but to the next parish, and as his usual object in coming to see me is to show me his poetry, I passed him on this time, knowing very certainly that he would not be the worse for my not seeing him. An hour later I got up to warm myself. “May I speak?” said the Lady Shepherd. “I let Tinker George go away, but I’m afraid you’ll be sorry I did. I think you would have liked to see him.” “What’s the matter?” “He’s been writing to the dear Queen” (the Lady Shepherd always speaks of “the dear Queen”) “and he came to show you the letter, and to ask what address he should put on it.”

Tinker—George—writing to—the—Queen! What did the man want? He wanted to be allowed to keep a dog without paying tax for it. George goes about with a wheel, and he calls for broken pots and pans. Sometimes he finds the boys extremely annoying, they will persist in turning his wheel when his back is turned and he has gone into a house for orders. Now, you see, if he had a dog of spirit and ferocity chained to his wheel, George might leave that wheel in charge of that dog; but then a dog is an expensive luxury when there is the initial outlay of seven shillings and sixpence for the tax. So he wrote to the Queen, and he put it into the post, and I never saw it. This was just one of those things which cause a man lifelong regret, all the more poignant because so vain. The Lady Shepherd is the most passionately loyal person in England, and she firmly believes that there will come a holograph reply from her Majesty in the course of a few days addressed to Tinker George, promptly and graciously granting him his very reasonable request. “I’ve promised Tinker George,” she added, “to give him a sovereign for the letter when it comes, and it shall have a box all to itself among my autographs.”

Be pleased to observe that it was only just noon, and two events of some interest had happened already, though we were snowed up. But at this point I must needs inform you who we are. In the first place there are the Shepherd and the Lady Shepherd; in the second place there are the Shepherd’s dogs. No shepherd can live without dogs—it would not be safe. No man ever pulled another man out of the snow: it is perfectly well known that men don’t know how to do it. Till lately we had three of these protectors. But—eheu fugaces!—we have only two now; one a blue Skye, silky, surly, and exceptionally stubborn; and a big colley, to whom his master is the Almighty and the All-wise. I do not wish to claim more for my friends than is due to them. Ours are only average dogs; but they are average dogs. And if any one will have the hardihood to assert that he holds the average man to be equal to the average dog in morals, manners, and intelligence, I will not condescend to argue with that purblind personage. I will only say that he knows no more about dogs than I do about moles, and I never kept a tame mole.

Nothing perplexes some of my friends more than to hear that I do not belong to a single London club. Not belong to a club? One man was struck dumb at the intelligence; he looked at me gravely—suspicion in every wrinkle of his face, perplexity in the very buttons of his waistcoat. He was working out the problem mentally. I saw into his brain. I almost heard him say to himself, “Not belong to a club? Holloa! Ever been had up for larceny? Been a bankrupt? Wonder why they all blackballed him?—give it up!” He evidently wanted to ask what it meant—there must be something wrong which he did not like to pry into: a skeleton in the cupboard, in fact.

“I said a London club!” I added, to relieve his embarrassment. “Of course I do belong to a club here—the Arcadian Club. It’s a very select club, too, and we can introduce strangers, which is an advantage, as you may perhaps yourself have felt if you have ever been kept for ten minutes stamping on the door-mat of the Athenæum with the porter watching you while that arch boy was sauntering about, pretending to carry your card to your friend upstairs. We are rational beings in our club, and I’ll introduce you at once—Colonel Culpepper, Toby! Colonel Culpepper, Mr. Bob.” Neither Toby nor Mr. Bob took the least notice of the gallant colonel, who seemed rather shy himself. “They’re dangerous dogs are colleys, so I’m told. In London it does not so much matter, because, you see, they must go about with a muzzle. And this is really all the club you belong to?”

Yes. This and no other; the peculiarities of our club being that false witness, lying, and slandering were never so much as known among the members. There is a house dinner every day, music every evening, no sneering, no spite, no gossip, no entrance fee, no annual subscription, no blackballing, no gambling, no betting, and no dry champagne or dry anything. Show me a club like that, my dear colonel, and I’ll join it to-morrow, whether in Pall Mall or in the planet Jupiter. At the present moment I know of only one such club, and it is here—the Arcadian Club! Enjoy its privileges while you may, and be grateful.

Seriously, I defy any club in England or anywhere else to produce me fifty per cent. of its members so entirely courteous, cordial, and clubbable—so graceful, intelligent, and generous—such thorough gentlemen, and so entirely guiltless of talking nonsense, as our friends Toby and Mr. Bob. Of course there are the infirmities which all flesh is heir to, and jealousy is one of these. But put the case that you should say to a little man, “You may sleep inside that door on a cushion by the fire,” and say to a big man, “You’re to sleep outside that same door on the mat!” and put the case that each of those men knew he was a member of the same club to which the fire, the cushion, and the mat belonged:—and pray what modus vivendi could be found between the big man and the little man on this side the grave?

But to return. The snow had ceased falling, but in the bleak distance as far as the eye could see, the road was blocked by ugly-looking drifts, in which a man on horseback might very easily be buried and flounder hopelessly till he sank exhausted never to rise again. There was nothing stirring except the birds, looking fluffy, cold, and starving. So I turned my chair to my table again and resumed my task.

Hark! Actually a ring at the front-door bell. The dogs growled and sniffed, but there was no fierce barking. Confound these tramps! That trombone has gone back to the “Red Lion,” and the rogues are oozing out to practise upon our weakness. “That’s not a tramp,” said the Lady Shepherd. “Toby didn’t bark.” She was right, as she always is. For Toby has quite an unerring discernment of the proximity of a tramp. His gift in this line is inexplicable. How the great Darwin would have delighted to observe that dog! If it was not a tramp, who could it be? “I believe it’s Polus!” said the Lady Shepherd. “Only Polus could have the ferocity to come here in defiance of the snowdrifts.” Right again. It was Polus. She had given him the name because he was eager to get into the County Council.—Poor man! He only got three votes.—There was no reference to the young gentleman in the Gorgias who bore that name—only a desire to indicate that he was the man who went to the Poll.

It was hardly more than noon; we were snowed up, and yet already we had had music; poetry as represented by Tinker George; a flood of literature; and now there was discussion imminent on the profoundest questions of politics, philosophy, and law.

Enter Polus! What in the world had brought him hither this dreadful day? What had he been doing? whither was he going? Should we put him to bed? To send for a doctor was out of the question. But we could soon get him a mustard poultice and a hot bath. Polus laughed the hearty laugh of rude health and youth. “You, dear old people, you forget I’m only thirty-five. I’ve had a pleasant walk from Tegea—greased my boots well—only rolled over twice. I’ve come for a talk. Dear me! dear me! Didn’t I see a moth there on the curtains? Curious that they should come out in such numbers when you’re snowed up! May I help you to get rid of the pests?”

The man had come to show his defiance of the laws of nature and ordinary prudence. In fact, he had come for mere cussedness! Also he had come for a conference. What was the subject to be this time? “Anything but the education question,” said I; “we must draw the line somewhere. Woman’s rights, Man’s wrongs. Agricultural depression. The People’s Palace. The Feudal System. The Bacon-Shakespeare—anything you please in reason—but Education! No! Not for worlds.” It was not long before the cat jumped out of the bag. Polus was bent on floating a most magnificent new International League. His ideas were a trifle mixed, but so are those of many men in our times. Polus makes the mistake of bottling his grand schemes and laying them down, as it were, when they ought to be kept on draught. The result is that there’s always a superabundance of froth—or shall we call it foam?—that we have to plunge into before we can taste of that pleasant draught; and when you have drunk about half your fill, there’s a wholly unnecessary and somewhat disagreeable sediment at the bottom, which interferes with your enjoyment. Thus the new League was to be so comprehensive a League, for effecting so many desirable objects, that it was difficult to discover what the main object was—or, in fact, if the main object did not resolve itself into an assemblage of objects, each of which was struggling with the rest for prominence and supremacy.

On this occasion Polus had the effrontery to begin by assuring me that I was in honour and conscience bound to join the League, for the idea of it had been first suggested to him by a pregnant and suggestive saying of mine some months before. “What! when you were so hot for the abolition of the punishment by death?” Oh dear no. He’d changed his mind about that long ago. “Was it when you were advocating the desirability of the labourers having the cows and the landlords keeping the land?” “No, no! I’ve improved greatly upon that. Haven’t you heard? I’m for letting the landlord keep the cows, but giving the labourers the calves only; that appears to me the equitable adjustment of a complex question.” I thought a little, and Polus gave me time. What was it? What could it have been that we had been talking about? Enfantin’s hullucinations and the dual priesthood (couple-prêtre)? Fourrier’s Phalanstery? It must have been an obiter dictum which dropped from me as he laid down the law about Proudhon. I shook my head. “Don’t you remember? Entails!”

Then it appeared that the great League was to be started for the abolition of everything in the shape of entails. In our last conference I had let fall the remark that for every acre of land tied up in strict entail there was a thousand pounds sterling tied up in much stricter entail. If you are going to deal with the one, why not with the other? Polus was putting on his hat when I gave him that parting dig, and I thought I had silenced him for ever. So far from it, I had but sown a new seed in his soul, and now he came to show me the baby.

Polus meanwhile had plunged into the heaving billows of statistics. He had discovered, to his own satisfaction, that 500 millions of the National Debt was strictly entailed; that 217 millions belonged prospectively to babes unborn; that the British people were paying “enormous taxes, sir!” not only for the sins and extravagances of their forefathers, but for enriching of their hypothetical progeny. That it was a state of things altogether outrageous, irrational, monstrous, and a great many other epithets. Would I join the League? Of course I’d join a league for the extinction of nasal catarrh or the annihilation of stupidity—gladly, but upon conditions. I must first know how the thing is to be effected. Your object may be heroic, but the means for carrying out this glorious reform? the machinery, my dear Polus? Let me hear more about that. A new voyage en Icarie implies that you are going to embark upon some safe vessel. By the way, how did Cabet get to his enchanting island?

Hereupon ensued an elaborate monologue, admirably expressed, closely reasoned, carrying not so much conviction as demonstration along with it. Granting the premises, the conclusion was inevitable. It was as good as Bishop Blougram. The scheme was this: Property—even in the funds—is a fact. There is no denying that. Therefore face the facts first, and deal with them as such. Timid reformers go only halfway towards building up the ideal social fabric. They say meekly, nationalize the land. The true reformer says, abolish all permanent financial obligations. But hardships would ensue upon any sudden and violent extinction of private debts. Prudence suggests that you should begin by a gradual extinction of public debts—in other words, the National Debt. The living holders of stock shall be fairly dealt with, and during their lifetime they shall enjoy their abominable dividends wrenched from the pockets of the people. As they drop off—and the sooner they go the better—their several claims upon the tax-payer shall perish with them. None shall succeed to their privileges of robbing the teeming millions. All stock standing in the name of trustees shall be transferred to the names of the present beneficiaries, and shall be extinguished by the death of the several holders. All powers of bequest in regard of such stock shall be taken away. In the case of infants—and there are 147,623 of such cases—who are only prospective owners of stock—being only prospective owners, and therefore having never actually tasted the joys of unrighteous possession—they shall continue to be prospective owners, and never be allowed to become anything else. They will have nothing to complain of; you take from them nothing that they ever had. All that will happen to them will be that they will be saved from cherishing delusive hopes, such as should never have been aroused in them. The scales will drop from their eyes; they will no longer be the victims of treacherous phantasms. The sooner they learn their glorious lesson the better. They will speedily rise to a true conception of the dignity of citizenship, and grow to the stature of a loftier humanity, whose destiny who shall foreshadow? “Now, my dear Doctor,” said Polus, pausing for a moment in his harangue, “I ask you as a Christian and a philosopher, is not ours a magnificent League, and is not the vision that opens before us sublime?”

“Place aux dames! Place aux dames!” I answered. “Ask the Lady Shepherd. Let her speak.”

* * * * *

It is a curious physiological fact that I have been puzzled by for several years past, and which I am only half able to explain or account for, that flashing eyes have almost disappeared from off the face of the earth. You may see many sorts of eyes—eyes of various shades of colour and various shapes—eyes that glitter, that gleam, that sparkle, that shine, that stare, that blink; even eyes that are guilty of the vulgarity of winking; but eyes that flash with the fire and flame of wrath, and scorn, and scorching indignation—such as once or twice I have cowered and trembled under when I was young—such eyes have passed away; the passion in them has been absorbed in something, it may be better or it may be worse—absorbed in utter tenderness. The last time I saw eyes flash was when a certain college don came to pay his respects to a certain little lady—she was a little lady then—a week after she was married. The old blunderer boasted that he had been on Lord Powis’s committee on a certain memorable occasion. “Ah, my dear madam, you are too young to know anything about that, and your husband of course was an undergraduate. But——” The man almost jumped from his chair; he turned pale as an oyster. The little lady sprang up a pillar of flame. “Do you mean, sir, that you voted against the Prince Consort? You will oblige me by not referring to the subject.” I rang the bell again and again; I called for buckets of water—the whole room seemed to be, the whole house seemed likely to be on fire.

Ah! there were real live Tories (spelt with a capital T) then. We were blue or yellow, not a pale green made up by smudging the two together. We didn’t stand upon legs that were not a pair. None of your Conservative Liberals or Liberal Conservatives going about hat in hand and timidly asking, “What will you be good enough to wish to have conserved?” It was “Church and Queen, sir, or salt and water. No shilly-shallying.” Hesitate, and nothing remained for you but pistols for two in the back yard. Argument? Nay! We dealt with that as Uncle Sammy’s second wife did, and everyone knows that

She with the heel of assertion
Stampt all his arguments down!

If I could have looked forward in those days, what a monster would my future self have appeared!

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

* * * * *

Something in the look of the Lady Shepherd’s, eyes this snowy morning reminded me of the old terrible flash; but it all passed, and only merriment shone out. “Sublime, my good Polus? How can a vision be sublime? A visionary is at best a dreamer, and a vision is a sham. A sublime sham is a contradiction in terms. Why don’t you try and talk sense sometimes?” “You’re not a bit better than that chit of a girl with a mop on her head that came gabbling here last week. But it’s like you men—you’ve no more common sense than this trowel! Visions indeed!

I gladly live amid the real,
And I seek a worthier ideal.
Courage, brothers; God is overhead!

Ah! you may laugh. But it’s all on my side.”

Away she swept, basket and trowel and all. Stop to listen to that gibberish—not she!

When her Royal Highness came back to us [in these moods she is the Princess, in her gentler and more pastoral moods she is the Lady Shepherd] she found us deep in another part of the discussion. The business of the Great International League having extinguished the National Debt by a very simple process, the next stall in the Augean stable of existing abomination, as he expressed it, must be dealt with. “Suppose we change the metaphor, my dear Polus, and say the next plank in your platform must be pulled up.” “Pulled up? Quite the contrary. Fixed, firmly fixed, nailed down!” “Be it so! Let us look at the plank. A stall in the stable of abominations suggests dirty work, you know!”

The next great problem which the Great International League sets before itself to solve is this: the National Debt being annihilated, how is the accumulation of property to be prevented in the future? I observed that at this point Polus was not so inclined for the monologue form of discussion as before. It was not the Socratic speaking ex cathedrâ, as in the Laws; there was a quite unusual glad-of-a-hint attitude, as in the Lysis or the Meno.

“Come,” I said, “I see through you; you haven’t thought it out, and you want me to give you a hint. Which is it to be? Am I to serve as whetstone, or do you come in trouble and pain crying out for τὴν μαιείαν?” He threw up his hands: “Speak, and I will listen.” Then said I, “O Polus, you’re just the man I want. Everybody knows I am a dull old dog, slow of thought and slow of speech as a country bumpkin must be; feeling after my words, and as often as not choosing the wrong ones. But I have been excogitating of late a theory which will supply your next plank to perfection, and in fact would make your fortune as a politician, if indeed the Great League will allow you to have any property, even in your brains. Forty years ago—for there were thinkers, my dear Polus, in the waste places of the earth even before you were born—I came across quite a “sublime” scheme of some French financier, propounded, I think, during the Great Revolution, for which the world was not yet ready. The man was before his age, and his own generation pooh-poohed him. I quite forget his name. I quite forget the title of his book if he ever wrote one; and I shall be very much obliged to you if you can find out something about the great man, for a great man he was. When I heard of this scheme I was little more than a lad, and now, after much cogitation, I cannot honestly tell you how much of the plan is his and how much my own. But I’ll give him all the credit for it.”

The scheme was a scheme for automatically adjusting all incomes and reducing them to something like equilibrium—that is, the operation of the process set in motion would tend in that direction. All incomes, no matter from what sources derived, were to be fixed according to an algebraic formula, and the formula was this:

·0001 (x-m)² = The income tax levied upon each citizen.

Here x=the actual income earned by the citizen;

m=1,000 pounds sterling, or an equivalent in francs or dollars, if you prefer it.

When x=m, then of course there could be nothing to pay; which is only another way of saying that a man with £1,000 a year was free from all taxation.

When x was greater than m, then taxation upon the income in excess of £1,000 came into operation with rather alarming rapidity: until when a man was convicted of having in any single year made £10,000 his taxation amounted to £8,100 for that year, and if he were ever found guilty of having made an income of £12,000 the State claimed the whole in obedience to this great and beneficent law.

But what happens in the case of those who have an income below the £1,000 a year—that is, when x is less than m?

In this case the grandeur and sagacity, not to speak of the paternal character of the scheme, become apparent. The moment a man begins to earn more than the normal £1,000 a year, that moment he begins to pay his beautifully adjusted quota of taxation to the State; but the moment that his income falls below the £1,000, that moment the State begins to pay him. Of course you will not forget that minus into minus gives plus, therefore the square of the minus quantity represented by x-m, where m is greater than x, offers no difficulty. The two poles of this perfect sphere, if I may so speak, this financial orb—teres atque rotundus—are reached, first when x=0, last when x = £11,000. In the first case the State comes to the help of the pauper who has earned or can earn nothing, and gives him a ten-thousandth part of a hypothetical million, which amounts to exactly £100 a year; in the other case the State deprives the bloated plutocrat of a ten-thousandth part of the same million, and relieves the dangerous citizen of ten thousand out of the eleven, saying to him, “Citizen, be grateful that you still have your thousand, and beware how you persist in piling up riches, for the State knows how to gather them.”

“Now, my dear Polus, next time you come, do bring me tidings of my Frenchman, and do work the thing out on paper, for I never was much of a mathematician, and now my decimals are scandalously vague!” So Polus went his way with a dainty rosebud in a dainty paper box for Mrs. Polus, and a saucy message from the Lady Shepherd. “Tell her, with my love, I’m very sorry her husband’s such a goose!” We watched him floundering through the snowdrifts; and I verily believe he was working out my problem with his stick, ·0001 (x-m)².

I don’t think that man went away much impressed with the darkness and desolation of our Arcadian life. Nay, I’m inclined to think the other side had something to say, and I’m afraid this is what it said: “Oh yes, it’s all very fine—intellectual intercourse, and so on. Freshens you up? Glad to see people? Of course I am. But I did hope we were going to have a long day together, and there! it’s all broken into. It’s always the way. How was I to do my autographs with him extinguishing my £1,000 in the funds all the while?”

* * * * *

Here I may as well explain that the Shepherd and his lady are the objects of some wonder and perplexity to their great friends on the one hand and their little friends on the other. The first pronounce them to be poor as rats; the second declare that they are rolling in riches. This conflict of opinion is easily accounted for. When the great and noble Asnapper comes to smile at us he has to take pot-luck. Come when he may, there is all due provision—

Ne turpe toral, ne sordida mappa
Corruget nares, ne non et cantharus et lanx
Ostendat tibi te.

But the forks are all electro-plate, and the dishes are all of the willow pattern. When meek little Mr. Crumb brings Mrs. Crumb and two of the eight daughters to enjoy one hearty meal at afternoon tea, he is awe-struck by the sight of the books and the splendour of half a dozen good engravings hanging upon the walls. As the old grey pony trots home in high spirits—for Jabez has a standing order always to give that poor little beast a double feed of corn—Mr. Crumb remarks to Mrs. Crumb, “Those people must be extremely affluent. I wonder he does not restore his church!”

The great and noble Asnapper, on the contrary, observes, “All the signs of deep poverty, my dear. Keeps his pluck up, though. Quite out of character with the general appearance of the establishment to have those books and collections and what not. I suppose some uncle left him the things. Cooking? I forgot to notice that; but the point of one’s knife went all sorts of ways, and the earthenware was most irritating. Eccentric people. The Lady Shepherd, as they call her, has actually got near a thousand autographs. Why in the world doesn’t she send them up to Sotheby’s and buy some new stair carpets?” Ah! why indeed? Because such as she and the Shepherd have a way of their own which is not exactly your way, my noble Asnapper; because they have made their choice, and they do not repent it. Some things they have, and take delight in them; some things they have not, and they do without them.

But not even in Arcady is it all cakes and ale. Thank God we have our duties as well as our enjoyments; pursuits and tastes we have, and the serious blessed duties which call us from excess in self-indulgence. When the roads are blocked for man and beast we chuckle because there can be no obligation to trudge down to the school a mile and a half off, or to go and pay that wedding call upon the little bride who was married last week, or to inquire about the health of Mrs. Thingoe on the common, whose twins are ten days old.

But snow or no snow, as long as old Biddy lives, one of us positively must go and look after “the old lady.” Every man, woman, and child in the parish calls her “the old lady,” and a real old lady she is. Biddy was ninety-three last November. She persists she’s ninety-four—“leastways in my ninety-four. That Register only said when I was christened, you know, and who’s a-going to say how long I was born before I was christened?”

Biddy has been married three times, and she avers that she wouldn’t mind marrying again if she could get another partner equal to her second. Every one of her husbands had had one or more wives before he wedded Biddy. We make out that Biddy and her three spouses committed an aggregate of twelve acts of matrimony. If you think that old Biddy is a feeble old dotard, drivelling and maundering, you never made a greater mistake in your life. She is as bright as a star of the first magnitude, and as shrewd as the canniest Scotchman that ever carried a pack. She is almost the only genuine child of Arcady I ever knew who has a keen sense of humour, and is always on the look-out for a joke. She is quite the only one in whom I have noticed any tender pity for the fallen, not because of the consequences that followed the lapse, but simply and only because it was a fall. Biddy lives by herself in a house very little bigger than an enlarged dog-kennel, and much smaller than an average cow-house. Till she was eighty-three she went about the country with a donkey and cart, hawking; since then she has managed to exist, and pay her rent too, on eighteen pence a week and a stone of flour. She is always neat and clean, and more than cheerful. She has been knitting socks for me for eight years past, and I am provided with sufficient hosiery now to last me even to the age of the patriarchs. Of course we demoralise old Biddy; her little home is hardly 100 yards off the parsonage, and every now and then the old lady comes to tea in the kitchen. One of the servants goes to fetch her, and another takes her home; and, as I have said, most days one of us goes to sit with her, and I make it a rule never to leave her without making her laugh. You may think what you like, but I hold that innocent merriment keeps people healthy in mind and body, improves the digestion, clears the intellect, brightens the conscience, prepares the soul for adoration—for is not gaiety the anticipation of that which in the spiritual world will be known as fulness of joy?

On this day of snow I found Biddy sitting before the fire, half expecting me and half doubting whether I could get there. “‘Cause, you know, you ain’t as young as you was when you came here first.” “Is any one, Biddy?” She looked up in her sly way. “Dash it, I ain’t!” By her side on the little table was a Book of Common Prayer in very large print, and her spectacles on it. “I’ve begun to read that book through,” she said, “and I’ve got as far as where it’s turned down, but there’s some on it as I’ve got to be very particular with. That there slanting print, that’s hard, that is; that ain’t so easy as the rest on it. But I’m going to read it all through for all that. You see I’ve done it all before, and some of it comes easy.” “Well, Biddy, you ought to know the marriage service by this time.” “And so I do,” said Biddy, grinning. “But I never had no churchings, and I don’t hold wi’ that there Combination. Dash it! I never did like cussing and swearing!”[7] It turned out that Biddy had set herself the task of reading the Prayer Book through, rubrics and all. Very funny, wasn’t it? Pray, my reverend brethren of the clergy, have you all of you set yourselves the same task and carried it out?

A little later the Lady Shepherd dropped in to look at Biddy. She found the old woman chuckling over some very mild pleasantry of mine, which she repeated in her own odd way. Suddenly she stopped. “Our doctor won’t live to ninety-four!” “Oh, Biddy, that’s more than you can tell. One thing is quite certain; if he does, you won’t be here to see him.” “Why sha’n’t I?” answers Biddy. “He’s nigh upon threescore, ain’t he? and I’m in my ninety-four. You can’t tell, neither, as I shan’t be here. The Lord knows.”

* * * * *

Dear old Biddy! Who does know anything? It seems to me that we can none of us know anything about anything but the past. I hardly know whether we are most ignorant of the things that shall be or the things that are. Old Biddy is the last of the old-world folk that fascinated me so much with their legends and traditions and reminiscences when first I settled among them—it seems but yesterday. Old Biddy has told me all she has to tell, the gossip and the experiences of days that were not as our days. With her will pass away all that is left of a generation that was the generation of our fathers. If I leave her with a smile upon the wrinkled old face there is more often a shade of sadness that passes over my own. Other faces rise up before me; other voices seem to sound; the touch of the vanished hand—gone—gone! As I turn homeward with bowed head in the grey twilight, and muse upon those ten years that have rushed by so peacefully, and yet which have remorselessly levied their tribute and left me beggared of some who were dearer than all the jewels of the mine—

The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth,
Slow through the winter air a-shrinking,
Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearth
Of empty places set me thinking.

That, however, is not because Arcady is Arcady, but because life is life.

Such as we have long ago found the secret of contentment, and something more. Shall I tell you what that secret is? Will you promise to take it as the rule of your own life if I do? Here it is, then, wrapped up in a very short and pithy aphorism—“The man who does not like the place he has to live in is a fool.” Ponder it well, you people who are never tired of prescribing “a change” as absolutely necessary to endurable existence. Banished to the sweetest village in England, how dazed and forlorn you’d be! We could accommodate ourselves to your life as easily as we could put on a new suit of clothes. You could never accommodate yourselves to ours. You would mope and pine. Your only solace would be in droning forth a new version of the Tristia, which would not be half as melodious as Ovid’s.

This poor Shepherd and his Lady Shepherd will never see the Alps again—never take a boat on Lugano’s lake in the summer evening, never see Rome or Florence, never again stand before the Sistine Madonna, hearing their hearts beat. Ravenna will remain for them unvisited, and Munich will be welcome to keep its acres of splashes, which Britain’s young men and maidens are told with some insistence are genuine works of Rubens, every one of them. These are joys of the past. But if you assume that two old fogies like us must be longing for a change, fidgeting and hankering after it, and that we must be getting rusty, dull, and morose for lack of it, that we are eating our hearts out with a querulous whimpering, instead of brimming over with thankfulness all day and every day—then you do us grievous wrong. What, sir! Do you take us for a couple of babies floundering in a tub, and puling for a cake of Pears’ Soap? Arcady or Athens is much the same to us. Where our home must be, there are our hearts.

---

NOTE.
THE AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENT OF INCOMES.

This—the great financial measure of the future—can hardly be expected to commend itself to the philosophic economists of the present day. It is the penalty which every man who is before his time must expect to pay for his excessive sagacity, that his contemporaries neglect or deride him. Accordingly the very name of the French thinker who suggested this beautiful scheme for ensuring Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity has been forgotten and—will it be believed?—the number of those who have ever taken the trouble to work out his formula is quite disgracefully small.

The Formula of the great unknown stands thus:—

·0001 (x - m)² = The amount which the state deals with in all incomes above £100 a year.[8]

Here x = the income. m = £1,000.

In working out this Formula, the Rule may be stated as follows:—

1. From the number of pounds of income (x) deduct 1,000.

2. Multiply the remainder into itself, i.e., square it.

3. Divide the product by 10,000.

The result will give—

(i) The amount paid by the State to the owners of income under £1,000 a year.

(ii) The amount paid to the State by owners of income above £1,000 a year.

Examples:—

(a) Income of £200 a year; i.e., x = 200.

200 - 1,000 = -800.
-800 squared; [i.e.,-800 multiplied by -800] = 640,000.

Result of 640,000/10,000 = 64.

Consolation income to all possessors of £200 a year ... £64.

(b) Income of £500 a year; i.e., x = 500.

500 - 1,000 = -500.
-500 squared; [i.e.,-500 multiplied by -500] = 250,000.

Result of 250,000/10,000 = 25.

Consolation income to all possessors of £500 a year ... £25.

(c) Income of £900 a year; i.e., x = 900.

900 - 1,000 = -100.
-100 squared; [i.e., -100 multiplied by -100] = 10,000.

Result of 10,000/10,000 = 1.

Consolation income to all possessors of £900 a year ... £1.

(d) Income of £1,000 a year; i.e., x = 1,000.

1,000 - 1,000 = 0.
0 multiplied by 0 = 0.

Consolation income to all possessors of £1,000 a year ... 0.

(e) Income of £2,000 a year; i.e., x = 2,000.

2,000 - 1,000 = 1,000.
1,000 squared [i.e., 1,000 multiplied by 1,000] = 1,000,000.

Result of 1,000,000/10,000 = 100.

Income tax paid by all possessors of £2,000 a year ... £100.

Reduced to a tabulated form it becomes evident that the consolation paid by the State to all owners of income below £1,000 will decrease as the incomes increase; until, when a prosperous gentleman attains to £1,000 a year, the consolation will disappear, and instead of receiving anything he will begin to pay tax upon his income, such tax becoming greater and greater as his income grows—until, if he be so rash as to attain an income of £11,000 a year, he will pay £10,000 a year income tax, and if he does not take this warning and rises to £12,000 a year the State will not only claim all his £12,000 but demand £100 a year more.

That is to say,

A.

Incomes of
£200	will receive from the State the Consolation of	£64
300	” ” ”	49
400	” ” ”	36
500	” ” ”	25
600	” ” ”	16
700	” ” ”	9
800	” ” ”	4
900	” ” ”	1
1,000	” ” ”	Nil

B.

Incomes of
£2,000	will pay to the State a Tax of	£100
3,000	” ” ”	400
4,000	” ” ”	900
5,000	” ” ”	1,600
6,000	” ” ”	2,500
7,000	” ” ”	3,600
8,000	” ” ”	4,900
9,000	” ” ”	6,400
10,000	” ” ”	8,100
11,000	” ” ”	10,000
12,000	” ” ”	12,100

* * * * *

The richest man in the community will thus be he who has an income of £6,000 a year; on this he will have to pay £2,500 income tax, leaving him with an available balance of £3,500 a year to spend! Now was not this anonymous Frenchman a man of real genius? And is he not a signal example of the truth that

“The world knows nothing of its greatest men”?

* * * * *

The assumptions on which this lofty attempt to reconstruct the social fabric are based are obvious. They are these:—

   I. That the earners of daily or weekly wages are not owners of property, nor can they be classed among the possessors of a secure annual income. De minimis non curat lex.

  II. That it is to the advantage of the community to increase the number of small capitalists, and to assist them with State aid—though in a diminishing ratio as their property or incomes increase, and they need less and less encouragement.

III. That it is equally for the advantage of the community to decrease the number of large capitalists and to discourage the accumulation of wealth in few hands; and therefore it is necessary to fix a limit of wealth which men shall not be permitted to exceed.

·0001 (x - m)² = The amount which the state deals with in all incomes above £100 a year.[8]

Here x = the income. m = £1,000.

1. From the number of pounds of income (x) deduct 1,000.

2. Multiply the remainder into itself, i.e., square it.

3. Divide the product by 10,000.

(i) The amount paid by the State to the owners of income under £1,000 a year.

(ii) The amount paid to the State by owners of income above £1,000 a year.

Incomes of
£200	will receive from the State the Consolation of	£64
300	” ” ”	49
400	” ” ”	36
500	” ” ”	25
600	” ” ”	16
700	” ” ”	9
800	” ” ”	4
900	” ” ”	1
1,000	” ” ”	Nil

Incomes of
£2,000	will pay to the State a Tax of	£100
3,000	” ” ”	400
4,000	” ” ”	900
5,000	” ” ”	1,600
6,000	” ” ”	2,500
7,000	” ” ”	3,600
8,000	” ” ”	4,900
9,000	” ” ”	6,400
10,000	” ” ”	8,100
11,000	” ” ”	10,000
12,000	” ” ”	12,100

   I. That the earners of daily or weekly wages are not owners of property, nor can they be classed among the possessors of a secure annual income. De minimis non curat lex.

  II. That it is to the advantage of the community to increase the number of small capitalists, and to assist them with State aid—though in a diminishing ratio as their property or incomes increase, and they need less and less encouragement.

III. That it is equally for the advantage of the community to decrease the number of large capitalists and to discourage the accumulation of wealth in few hands; and therefore it is necessary to fix a limit of wealth which men shall not be permitted to exceed.

Oh! ye Astors and Vanderbilts! Ye Rothschilds and Barings! Ye kings of railroads and bacon and nitre! Aye! and such as thou citizen Labouchere—thou of the morbidly sensitive conscience. Tremble, for your day is coming! The age of hap-hazard and empirical finance is passing—the age of scientific and philosophic readjustment is about to dawn. There are those whose mission it will be to set all things straight, and to bring peace on earth and goodwill to men by the exquisitely simple machinery of Fiscal Reform. When that time comes Mammon’s Kingdom will sink to be a mere tributary to the great pantisocracy of the future. Hoarding and accumulating will pass away and die—brought to an end by the phlebotomy of the scientists. Money-grubbing will be an incident in the historic romances of that happy time, and the tutored youth, young men and maidens, will smile at the darkness and fumbling stupidity of those untaught generations who only chattered of a golden age, with never a dream that a better age than that would come with the revolving years—to wit, the age of—

·0001 (x-m)².

---

VII.
WHY I WISH TO VISIT AMERICA.

Many more years than I like to acknowledge, have passed away since a day when my father caught me slinking out of his library with Mrs. Trollope’s “Travels in the United States” under my arm. He laughed at my absurd precocity, for I was little more than a child, and as he took the book away from me, he said, “My boy, that is not a book for you to read. It is not even true. You shall go to America yourself one day, when you’re a man, and you’ll know better than to write that kind of stuff.” It was a great hope that was stirred by that promise that I should go to America myself some day. I used to think about it, and wonder when I might look forward to being a man, and how it could be managed, and who would help me, and whether I should settle there and own a slave. A hundred times I have dreamt of Boston, and of Richmond, for somehow I never thought of New York, and there was no Chicago then, and no San Francisco. Perhaps, too, the United States might collapse before I ever grew to be a man, and that was a prospect that made my heart sick to think of. I have been told, indeed, that one night I awoke with a cry, and was heard to exclaim, “Pray, God, keep America till I’ve been and seen it!”

And yet I never have seen America, and I am afraid I never shall see it now, though my youthful prayer has been answered, and America has been kept and seems in small danger of collapsing yet awhile. I have read a great many books about America since those days; but I am bound to say they have not made me much in love with the writers, and I am also bound to say that they have given me very, very little information upon exactly those points that I most wished to inquire into. Of late years I have altogether given up this kind of literature. I believe the last time I looked into any one of these so-called “Travels,” or “Tours,” or “Reminiscences,” was when Mr. Anthony Trollope’s volumes appeared, and I could not get through them. Somehow my father’s words on the mother’s book seemed to apply to the son’s, and spite of myself his voice seemed to be saying to me, “It is not even true!”

But though I have ceased to read books about America, the strong desire to see the New World has never faded; nay, it has increased in intensity as the years have gone on, and what was at first but a vague hankering after something merely visionary, has gradually become a definite longing to see and know an attainable reality. My friends laugh at me and assure me I should be very much disappointed; that I should not like it; that no man ought to go to the States after thirty; that at Cincinnati there are only hogs to see, and at Chicago only monstrous corn warehouses, at New York only monster hotels, and at Boston—oh, dear! such arrogant prigs; finally, that it would be quite impossible for me to continue wearing a white cravat over there, for the washing of my linen would simply ruin me. I hold my peace, but I am not convinced, and I still wish to visit America. And why is this wish so strong in me? I will try to answer that question as briefly as I can, but I must needs answer it in a disorderly kind of way, and give my reasons as they occur to me, without any attempt at systematic arrangement.

First and foremost, let it be understood that I wish to visit America because I am so very ignorant about the real life of a great nation that has sprung into magnificent maturity in a single century. History has nothing like a parallel to produce, which can for a moment be compared with the growth of this nationality. I use that word advisedly. As to the mere progress in wealth and numbers, that does not impress me much. From anything I have heard or read, it does not seem to me inconceivable that a horde of Chinamen, urged on by avarice and selfishness, might have done quite as much as has been done in the United States in the same time, if John Chinaman had happened to get the start; but if they had done so, they would, I am convinced, have remained a horde of Chinamen still. There would have been no new nation; there would have been nothing like the sublime patriotism that, to my mind, characterizes the great American nation; none of that incomparable chivalry that animated a whole people during the war of secession; none of that proud sensitiveness that surprises cosmopolitan philosophers when they hear Americans speak of “the flag.” This is what I should like to look into, like to ask about, like to study on the spot, namely, What is the amazing cohesive force so infinitely potent to bind together into one corporate, living nationality, atoms so dissimilar as the population that makes up the great American people; which, as I understand it does, seems to give a new focus to whatever old love of home warms the breast of German, or Dane, or Swiss, or Englishman; which makes them, one and all, forget their old country and their father’s house, and lose all desire to return; which, extinguishing the old love of fatherland, replaces it by a new love, a passion for the glory of the present, with its boundless hopes and ambitions, and an almost haughty contempt for traditions; this exulting confidence in a great destiny which disdains the lessons of experience, and does not ask from them guidance or instruction or warning? Am I wrong? or is it not the fact that Americans have incomparably more faith in the solvitur ambulando principle than in any other, and that, whenever it is a question between looking back to see what others have done, and looking forward regardless of all precedent, they always prefer striking out a new line rather than following another’s lead? Above all men upon earth, Americans are self-reliant, self-asserting. Yet, was there ever a people so much at unity with itself? Selfishness never seems to diminish the intense national pride; the fierce war of parties in politics never seems to affect patriotism. A whisper of disrespect to “our country,” or the semblance of a sneer at it, and woe to you! Is not this so? I should like to see the working of this mysterious and, to my mind, awful force, a force that acts upon the new-comer with exceeding rapidity. How soon does the immigrant feel its operation? By what processes does it exercise its prodigious sway? How is it that the Dutchman, who has spent all his life in Java, looks to lay his bones with his father’s at Amsterdam or the Hague; that our own Australian colonists, when they have “made their pile,” come back to us and call England still their home; that the Frenchman is always a Frenchman, with an astonishing faculty of producing a bad copy of French fashions wherever he settles, and no power of assimilating himself to the manners and customs of the people among whom he sojourns; but that, when people go to America, it is only a question of time when they will become Americans—become absorbed, that is, into a new nationality? These are questions I should like to ask on the spot, and, if possible, test the truth of the answers suggested.

As there are these problems that present themselves in what I may call the national life of America, so there are others in the political life of the American people that I have never been fortunate enough to find discussed adequately.

We in England have been spending fifty years in timidly feeling our way toward giving our masses a voice in the election of members of Parliament. We are on the eve of a great change, when something very like manhood suffrage will be ushered in among us. It is undeniable that among the upper and middle classes there is a feeling of great uneasiness at the prospect, amounting in some quarters to absolute terror and despair, of what may be coming in the not very distant future. Yet America has prospered in spite of universal suffrage, and, as far as I know, seems to be by no means afraid of it. One hears, indeed, of numbers of dainty people, who are sometimes spoken of as “the upper classes” in American society, affecting to hold aloof from political life and taking no part in the strife of parties. It may be so; but do not these citizens of the great commonwealth who give themselves such airs—these ἄχρηστοι πολῖται, as somebody calls them, who, like naughty children, won’t play because they can’t always be on the in side—constitute a very insignificant number? The fact remains that the enormous majority of Americans are not only earnest and, if I am rightly informed, passionate politicians, but they go to the polls in shoals. That fact alone strikes some of us here with wonder; and the wonder increases upon us enormously when we are assured that this deep interest in political questions appears to be wholly distinct from the political excitement that intermittently rouses the masses in Europe to outbreaks of frenzied hate against established institutions. In France men get wild with panic lest the ouvriers should turn upon the bourgeoisie. In Germany the socialists have their own ends in view, and do not disguise them. In Ireland the wretched peasantry avow their designs to confiscate the land. The war of politics with us is eminently selfish, and in proportion as it is carried on with more and more passion the less there seems to be of real patriotism. On our side of the Atlantic it is becoming increasingly apparent that the characteristic of our political warfare may be described as

Each man lusting for all that is not his own.

Mr. Lowell has summed it all up in one of those stinging antitheses that are so stinging they can hardly be true, when, speaking from the American point of view, he says:

Their people’s turned to mob—our mob’s turned people.

How is it that in America the masses can be disciplined so readily to take their side, and to engage so heartily in the fray, moving together as mysteriously as the swallows that with scarce audible twitterings gather in thousands, plume their wings for flight, seem to hesitate for a brief hour, and the next are gone? We, indeed, have of late been aping some American practices, and trying our hands at the caucus, and the three hundred, and what not. I suspect it is a very feeble imitation, and I suspect that one of my American friends was right when he said with a laugh: “Your fellows don’t know their business; they don’t understand what they are talking about. They’re first-rate at turning out steel pens and such small ware, but they’d better leave our political machinery alone. You’re too crowded up in your little island to find room for one of our big fly-wheels!” But how is all this enthusiasm for politics kept up with comparatively so little appeal to the lowest selfishness? and how are these immense numbers manipulated, the vast armies handled as skilfully as if they were soldiers on parade? It is all inexplicable to large numbers of wiseacres in England, who will persist in talking of petty “motives” and “reason” as if they were the prime factors in every social problem.

And this leads me to touch upon another matter, on which I feel myself profoundly ignorant, and which I am sure that others here are quite as ignorant about as I am. We are told that in America there is a recognized profession of politics, just as here there is a medical profession or a legal profession, or, if this is putting the case too strongly, just as here there is the profession of journalism. How in the world do the members of this profession get along? A new President is elected, and we are told that all the old officials are turned out. Where do they go? What becomes of them? What is the effect upon the executive? With us the patronage of the government, at any rate in the civil service, has been reduced to a minimum. Our executive is to a very great extent, indeed, independent of the government of the day. “Men may come and men may go,” but permanent secretaries “go on for ever.” So do commissioners and their clerks, and the thousands of stipendiaries to whom it matters not one straw whether the Radicals are in or the Tories. With us, when a man has gained an appointment by passing a good examination at eighteen or nineteen years old, it is his own fault if he ever loses it. Practically, there is no getting rid of him as long as he can do his work; he is as safe as a judge, and irremovable. But in America, we hear, every four years they shuffle the cards, and away they go! What results from this? Am I wrongly informed? or is there more absolute patronage, patronage pur et simple, in the hands of the President of the United States than in any other hands on the face of the earth? Assuming that it is so, what, I ask, must be the effect upon the moral sentiments of the people at large, inevitably brought day by day and hour by hour into relations with a class of eager office-seekers, hungry, alert, jealous, disappointed, unprincipled, or vindictive, according to their success or failure, in getting what they consider their due. Do the “outs” accept the logic of facts without demur, and forthwith betake themselves to other callings?

That in every change in the chief magistracy of a nation every stipendiary of the executive, from the postman to the judge of the supreme court, should get his dismissal, and the Democrat clerk in the custom-house who was behindhand with his work on Monday evening should leave his arrears to be made up by his Republican successor on Tuesday morning; that when President A enters upon his office, a new game should be begun, and the pieces be all set up again, regardless of the position in which the knights or the pawns were when President B was checkmated,—all this seems to us, from our point of view, not only difficult to understand, but difficult to imagine. Surely, theory and fact in this matter must differ very widely. Am I only exposing my ignorance?

I have used the terms “upper and middle classes” on a previous page. When I have asked Americans what the subtle barriers are that in American society separate class from class, they have replied more than once, “In America there are no classes! We have no differences of rank with us.” Strange! And yet we hear of colonels and generals and senators often enough, and I am much mistaken if such titles are at all less esteemed on that side of the water than on this. Be it as it may, however, rank and title may be shadows, but class differences are substantial things. With us the titular aristocracy constitute a class, an inner circle, that at one time united in itself shadow and substance, and now tends to become less exclusive and less influential, however loudly some may complain that

... in these British islands
’Tis the substance that wanes ever, ’tis the symbol that exceeds.

We love rank, because we have a lingering suspicion that it somehow symbolizes wealth, or power, or brilliant intellectual gifts, or great public services, that have forced their possessors into the front rank at some time or other, and received their due recognition in the shape of titular distinction conferred either recently or in days gone by. But if a title is found to be dissociated from any nobleness of character, and is unsupported by brain power or purse power, it will not save a man from humiliating snubs, or give him the entrée to the drawing-rooms of the upper classes. For we have more than one upper class among us, as other nations have had and will continue to have while the world lasts. In that social world where Mrs. Grundy bears sway, our titular aristocracy undoubtedly are the acknowledged leaders, and to them great homage is paid. But it is not only because a man is an earl, or a lady is a duchess, that the one or the other is surrounded by a little court, approached with deference and treated with studied respect, but because both the one and the other are rich enough to “support the title,” as we say. Yes, it is true that in some sense or other

Our nobles wear their ermine on the outside, or walk blackly
In presence of the social law, as most ignoble men.

You may protest that society in England is under the dominion of a plutocracy, then. Yes! and No! Yes! in so far as it is true and always must be true, that no man or woman can live on familiar terms, and keep up the habitual intercourse with the leisure classes, without a certain amount of money. No! in so far as it is also true that money alone, however abundant it may be, will never, among us, give any one an introduction to what we call society. I have heard of cases, and I know of one, where a millionaire from our colonies took a palace in London, and lived en prince; was visited by no one, failed to get into any but a third-rate club, found no one to entertain and but few people to speak to; and finally has gone back from whence he came, astonished, disappointed, and soured. They tell me that wealth in America will gain admission to any society for any one. I have been repeatedly assured by intelligent Americans that this is so; yet I cannot understand that it should be so. I can quite understand that, whatever a man’s rank, or gifts, or prospects may be, he would find it very painful to mix with the upper ten thousand if he could not afford to pay for cab-hire, or keep up his subscription at the club, every day finding it hard to get his dinner, and every night perplexed de lodice paranda; but I can no more understand how a mere expenditure of cash could get X, Y, or Z into the best society, than I can understand how a payment of, say £10,000, would get an average cricketer into the All-England eleven, or a second-rate oar into the University crew. The Corporation of London is a plutocracy; but society, while accepting his lavish hospitality, treats even the Lord Mayor of London de haut en bas. The Lady Mayoress receives ambassadors with condescension; next year some young attaché stares at Mrs. Tomkins, and wonders where he has met that woman.

Who are the upper classes in America? It is nonsense to say there are none. Not to speak of those states in pre-Christian times that tended more or less to become dominated over by an oligarchy, Athens was at least as pure a republic as America is; her people were as proud, as self-asserting, as audaciously enterprising, as ambitious, as shrewd in commercial ventures, as greedy for money, and as lavish in spending it, as the Americans are; yet the “first families” among the Athenians were as haughty as Spaniards, as exclusive as the old French noblesse, and bragged of their ancestry as absurdly as Scotchmen do. If a loud-voiced, bawling demagogue came to the front by sheer force of will and impudence, his political opponents never allowed the populace to forget that he was brought up in a tan-yard. Demosthenes gives point to his most withering sarcasms against Æschines by reminding his audience that he was the son of a school-mistress, and had to scrub the ink off the desks at which his mother taught the dirty little urchins; and who that has read the “Clouds” can forget Strepsiades’s doleful lamentation over his fatal mistake in marrying a fine lady with a pedigree, and begetting a son who did not take after his father? There must be an aristocracy in America who stand upon their birth rather than their mere wealth, yet how little we hear of them. What recognition do they receive? How is it they so seldom come to be leaders? How is it that Hyperbolus seems to push aside Cimon, and Cleon is quite too much for Alcibiades?

It used to be said that no two Englishmen could be found to maintain a conversation together for five minutes without one asking the other what he thought of the weather. It is true still; but there is another question that of late years has become the stock question when two people meet one another, and that is, “When are you going away?” If a man replies boldly that he is not going away at all, he is looked upon as the very impersonation of eccentricity. “Not going away! Why, what are you going to do?” This “going away” means leaving our country-houses when the flowers are in their splendour and all nature bids us stay where we are, and starting off for Norway or Switzerland to spend our money among strange people, drink bad wine, get in late for table-d’hôte when we are faint and weary, or find ourselves five flights of stairs from our pocket handkerchief in a towering edifice without a lift. But go where we will, we are sure to find ourselves not two chairs away from American tourists; they are everywhere. Sir James Ross used to say that if ever he reached the North Pole he would be sure to find a Scotchman sitting upon it. I don’t know what has become of all the Scotchmen; they and the gypsies have grown rarer since I was a boy; but you can never escape from Americans. Of course there are Americans and Americans; they differ from one another as much as any other people do, as much and no more; but this is true of all the transatlantic tourists, they are abundantly supplied with money, and they do not grudge spending it; in fact, if we were to judge by the Americans we meet with in Europe, we should be forced to the conclusion that all Americans are rich, even very rich. But when I have asked them how clergymen and doctors and lawyers and elderly people with strictly limited incomes live in the United States,—such people as among us live in comfort with a couple of female servants, or even keep a pony chaise,—I have found my tourist acquaintances very much amused at my supposing that in America helps could be got to stay in such a household. “Are there, then, no small people in America?” I have asked. The answer has been more often than not, “If there are, we don’t know them.”

It is obvious that quiet, domestic people of small means are not to be met with among tourists at luxurious hotels, and equally obvious that such people are hard to get at by travellers who are themselves birds of passage. When a householder is living very near the wind, he does not like to expose his small economies and humble ways to a stranger; and because he is living a quiet, unostentatious life, he has little to offer to those whose occupation is seeing sights. But any man or woman who wishes to gain some insight into our domestic life may easily obtain it if he will but take the trouble to read our works of fiction. Our novelists come from the middle classes, not from the rich or leisure classes, and they speak as they do know. They tell us all about the habits and sentiments and ways of talking among clergymen and doctors and farmers and millers and clerks and shopkeepers in England; they show us the good and the bad side with equal impartiality; and no more faithful delineations have ever been made of the inner and outer life of the lowest struggling classes than are to be found in English literature. But if we want to get an insight into the morale of such people in America, we do not know where to look for it. Such a character as Kitty Ellison in Mr. Howell’s “Chance Aquaintance,” whose heart is with Uncle Jack and his anxieties and troubles while she is enjoying all the gaieties and luxuries that wealth can bestow, is a rarity in America; and, moreover, all the people one meets with in Mr. Howell’s stories are away from home. In the “Biglow Papers” one does now and then get a hint that there are shrewd farmers and hard-headed country folk somewhere in the States, who do not wander very far, but one never gets to know them. That exquisite story of Mr. Stockton’s, “Rudder Grange,” as far as I know, occupies a unique position in American literature, and has for many of us lifted the veil from a whole world of little people across the Atlantic, of whose very existence some on our side the water had almost begun to entertain doubts. Yet we are in the habit of thinking that it is precisely among these people that we must look for the real heart of a great nation, and that the pulse of every great nation is to be felt among them, if at all.

But of all subjects of inquiry that a thoughtful Englishman could set himself to work at, the most instructive, the most suggestive, would be the effect of perfect equality between the various religious bodies upon the philosophic speculations, religious sentiments, and ethical convictions of the American people. In England there is one Church by law established, and they who separate from the communion of that Church are all classed together as dissenters. That there should be anywhere on the face of the earth a condition of society where there can be no such thing as a dissenter, is a thought extremely difficult for some good folks here to grasp. But much harder is the other notion, which I presume is familiar enough to Americans, that there should be anywhere no sects. No dissenters, because no predominant or paramount Christian organization that rejoices in the “most-favoured-nation” clause. No sects, because no church recognized as the Church from which the other religious bodies have cut themselves off. That there should be no bigotry and exclusiveness, no odium theologicum, no fierce rivalry, no proselytizing, in America, as everywhere else, is inconceivable. Theological disputants will cease to wrangle when lawyers learn to love one another as brethren and doctors differ without asperity; but among us the situation is extremely embarrassing as between the Church—for with us it is the Church—and the non-conformist, that is, with those who will not subscribe to our Church doctrine, accept our formularies, or conform to our liturgy. Here we have a standard by which we try all other Christian bodies, and we pronounce them more or less orthodox or denounce them as absolutely unorthodox, in proportion as they approach or depart from this standard which is tacitly accepted among us as the established standard. If there were no Church of England by law established, I believe that a vast number of people would find themselves quite dazed, quite lost. To them it would be practically pretty much as if we were all to awake some fine morning to find that the Home Secretary had shut up Greenwich observatory and run away with the key, having previously taken measures to stop all the great clocks in the land. We should all of us be going by our own watches.

Yet somehow in America every man goes by his own watch; and if nobody is right, nobody else is likely to consider himself hopelessly wrong. Here the social position of the clergy of the established Church is something quite peculiar. There is no need to dwell upon the fact, but that it is a fact there can be no doubt. The result is, that the attitude of the clergy[9] toward all the religious teachers has always been exclusive; there has never been any cordiality, and very little coöperation. I do not say this is not deplorable; I am concerned with facts only. A supercilious tone is so habitually natural to the clergyman when speaking or dealing with the dissenting minister, and a tone of soreness, jealousy, and suspicion on the part of the minister towards the clergyman seems to us so inseparable from their relations one to the other, that we in England can hardly bring ourselves to believe that the Episcopalian and the Independent, the Wesleyan and the Primitive Methodist, could meet on absolutely equal terms, just as officers of two regiments in the same army can meet at mess and fight valiantly side by side against the common foe. Every now and then we get one of those necessary evils, the religious newspapers, sent us by kind friends from America, or we catch a glimpse of an American bishop or Episcopalian popular preacher. Was it only a dream, or have I really, actually, in the flesh, once met with an American archdeacon? But from these exalted personages and their organs surprisingly little is to be learned; and I observe that an ecclesiastic, let him come from where he may, is a shy creature, ready enough to listen, but not to talk. He puts himself on the defensive, and is so very much afraid of committing himself, that you are apt to retire into your interior, too; just as I have observed two snails meeting on their evening walk; one at the approach of his brother shuts himself up in his shell, and the other tickles at him with his horns for a little while, but ends by accepting the situation, and shutting himself up also. Result, to all appearance, nothing but two unoccupied snail-shells, inhabitants having retired from publicity.

I cannot believe that even in America the priests of the Roman Church would ever assume any other than a haughty bearing toward all other Christian teachers. Theirs is either the Church, or it is nothing. But how do all the rest behave to one another? Are they all, in point of fact, merely ministers of their respective congregations? How about proselytizing? It is comparatively easy to draw up a constitution that shall keep up a certain amount of discipline among the officers of any force; but it is quite another thing to keep control over the rank and file when they are all volunteers. Such a regiment as that famous one of Artemus Ward’s, “composed exclusively of commanders-in-chief,” would hardly be found a successful organization in the church militant. Are the clergy of all denominations held by all denominations in equal esteem? Do they “love as brethren,” or do they “bite and devour one another?”

* * * * *

These are some of the questions I find myself continually asking when I turn my thoughts toward the magnificent country and the great nation on the other side of the ocean. I do not believe a man could get any answer to them, satisfactory to his own mind, except by personal observation. He must for a time live among living men, and see them at their daily tasks, to understand their life even a very little. It is too much the habit of travellers to take their theories with them. I, for my part, have none. If I ever carry out the wish of my life, I shall start as a naturalist does who goes to make collections—with empty cases, notebooks, and apparatus—not too ready to generalize, but very anxious to learn. The probability is, I shall never go at all. But others more fortunate than I may, perhaps, be able to enlighten my darkness and inform my ignorance, and it may happen that the hints I have thrown out may be suggestive to them.

As to the big cities, with their colossal warehouses and enormous trade, their gigantic hotels and prodigious growth, they possess for me no attraction. There is something dreadful to my mind in losing my personality in a surging multitude and being absorbed in a crowd. To find myself unable to hear my own voice because steam-hammers are pounding all round me, and iron wheels are keeping up a ceaseless din, annihilating articulate speech—that seems to me horrible. I shrink from these things. I should be found creeping into out-of-the-way places, prying into schools and colleges and universities, begging that nobody would notice me, while I might be permitted to notice everybody. Sometimes I should put very impertinent questions about the wonderful endowments that I hear Americans believe in firmly, just when we are beginning to lose our faith in their value. Sometimes I should even venture to inquire about the war—the war—the one war that reflected only imperishable glory upon both sides—the one civil war in the world’s history that ended with the grandest of all triumphs, freedom to the oppressed, without one single act of vengeance inflicted upon the beaten side. Sometimes—but I am in danger of treading upon perilous ground, in danger of saying too much, in danger of making some one growl out suspiciously, “When you do come, if ever you do, you’d better keep out of my way!”

* * * * *

A few days ago, I was turning over an old volume of “Punch,” when I was attracted by a cartoon that may be familiar to some of my readers. A mighty coal-heaver, his day’s work done, is leaning against one of the many posts to be found in the region of the Seven Dials, his hands in his pockets, his lips pipeless, his eyes staring at vacancy. By him stands an exquisitely dressed clergyman, tall, slim, gentle, refined, who has blandly laid his extended hand upon the other’s brawny shoulder. Says the clergyman, “My friend, I want to go to Exeter Hall.” Says the coal-heaver, “Then why the dooce don’t you go?” Was it that the good man did not know his way? or was he suffering from a little tightness in the chest?

UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.