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BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCIII. MAY, 1849. Vol. LXV.
COLONISATION—MR WAKEFIELD'S THEORY.[1]
We agree with those, and they are the majority of reflective minds, who, taking a survey of our half-peopled globe, and considering the peculiar position which England occupies on it—her great maritime power, her great commercial wants, her overflowing numbers, her overflowing wealth—have concluded that colonisation is a work to which she is especially called. She is called to it by her marked aptitude and capability for the task, as well as by an enlightened view of her own interests. Without too much national partiality, without overlooking our own faults, and that canker of a too money-loving, too money-making morality, which has eaten into our character, (though perhaps not more so than it has corroded the character of other European nations, who have quite as strong a passion for gold, without the same industry in obtaining it,) we may boldly say that the best seed-plot of the human race that now exists (let the best be estimated as it may by the moralist and the divine) is to be found in this island of Great Britain. To plant the unoccupied regions of the earth, or regions merely wandered over by scattered tribes of savages, who cannot be said to possess a soil which they do not use, by off-sets from this island, is itself a good work. It is laying no ill foundation for the future nations that shall thus arise, to secure to them the same language, the same literature, the same form of religion, the same polity, or, at all events, the same political temper (the love and obedience to a constitution) that we possess; to make native to them that literature in which the great Christian epic has been written, in which philosophy has spoken most temperately, and poetry most profusely, diversely, and vigorously. Nor will England fail to reap her own reward from this enterprise. In every part of the world an Englishman will find a home. It will be as if his own native soil had been extended, as if duplicates of his own native land had risen from the ocean. A commercial intercourse of the most advantageous character will spring up; the population and the wealth of the old country will find fresh fields of employment in the new; the old country will itself grow young again, and start in the race with her own children for competitors. Neither will the present age pass by without participating in the benefit, since its overcrowded population will be relieved by the departure of many who will exchange want for plenty, and despondency for hope. Whatever opinion may be held of the remedial efficacy against future pauperism of a system of emigration, it must be allowed that this present relief arrives most opportunely, as a balance to that extraordinary pressure produced by the distress in Ireland, and the influx of its famine-stricken peasantry into other parts of the kingdom.
On this subject—the measure of permanent relief which colonisation will afford to this country by carrying off its surplus population—the degree in which emigration may be calculated upon as the future antagonist of pauperism—we would speak with caution. We are so far hopeful that we see here a great resource against the national evil of an unemployed population, but it is a resource which must be rightly understood and wisely taken advantage of; it is a great resource for an intelligent people; it comes in aid of that fundamental remedy, a good sound education for the people, moral and religious, but is no substitute for that most necessary of all measures. Misunderstood, and vaguely relied on by those who know not how properly to avail themselves of it, the prospect of emigration may even prove mischievous, by rendering the thoughtless and improvident still more reckless, still more improvident.
Granted, it may be said, that emigration supplies an outlet annually for a certain excess of population, it supplies, by that very reason, an additional and constant impulse to an increase of population. The old country may overflow, but it is always kept full, and to the brim. The restraint of prudence is relaxed. "We can feed ourselves; and, as to our children, are there not the colonies?" may be said by many an improvident pair. People even of the better sort, who would shrink from the idea of their children sinking into a lower grade of society than they themselves occupied, would find in emigration a vague provision for the future family—a provision which would often disappoint them, and which they would often fail in resolution to embrace.
Let it be borne in mind that, when we speak of the duty of restraining from improvident marriage, we are not inculcating any new morality founded upon the recent science of political economy. It is a duty as old as the love of a parent to his child, and needs only for its enforcement an anticipation of this parental affection. No man who has married, and become a father, ever doubted of the existence of such a duty, or spoke slightingly of it. Ask the Scotch peasant, ask the simplest Switzer, who knows nothing of reading-clubs or mechanics' institutes—who has perhaps never quitted his native valley, and all whose knowledge is the growth of his own roof-tree—what he thinks of the morality of him who becomes the father of a family he cannot rear, or must rear like wild beasts more than men—he will give you an answer that would satisfy the strictest Malthusian. The prudence that would avoid famine, the just and righteous fear of having hungry children about our knees—this is no new wisdom in the world, though, like all our old wisdom, it continually cries in vain in our streets. Now the operation of this, in every respect, moral restraint would be materially interfered with, if the notion should prevail, that in the colonies there existed (without any distinct knowledge how it was to be secured) an inexhaustible provision for human life. Numbers would marry, trusting to this resource, yet the offspring of such marriages might never reach their destined refuge, or reach it only after much suffering, and in the degraded condition of uneducated paupers. And men who have calculated that, at all events, without seeking aid from Government or the parish, they shall be able to send their child abroad, when the child has grown up, will hesitate to part with it. They had calculated what they would do, when parents, before they became such. They had not been able to anticipate that bond of parental affection which, we may observe in passing, is by no means weakest in the humblest ranks, but, on the contrary, until we reach the very lowest, seems to increase in strength as we descend in the social scale.
The fact is, that it is not as a distant provision for their children that the youthful pair should be taught to look on emigration. If it comes at all into their calculation, they should embrace it as a provision for themselves, and, through them, for their future offspring. They should carry their hopes at once to the climate which is to realise them. Marriage should be the period of emigration. At this period a man can readily leave his country, for he can leave his home. The newly married couple, as it is commonly said, and with no undue exaggeration, are all the world to each other. It is at this period that men have double the strength, for they have twice the hope, and exhilaration, and enterprise, that they have at any other epoch of their lives. That slender hoard, too, which will so soon be wasted in this country, which a few pleasures will drain, would carry them creditably into another, and lay the foundation for the utmost prosperity their birth and condition has led them to wish for. To the distant colony let them not devote their ill-fed and ill-taught children; but, going thither themselves, rear a healthy race for whom they will have no cares. If at this period of life it should become the fashion of the humbler classes to emigrate, it would be difficult to say how far our colonies might become a real, and effectual, and permanent resource against overpopulation. At all events, the mischievous influence we have been describing could never arise. We see not why England, if she learns rightly to use them, may not reap from her colonies all those advantages which the United States have been so frequently felicitated upon in their territories in the Far West. Much will depend on the current which public opinion takes. Presuming that Government discontinues entirely the old system of transportation, which must always render emigration extremely unpalatable; presuming that a steady, equitable rule is adopted in dealing with the unappropriated land, so that a moderate price, a speedy possession, and a secure title may be depended upon—we think it highly probable that colonisation will become very popular amongst us. The more that is learnt about the colonies, the more the imagination is familiarised with them by accounts of their climate, products, and the mode of life pursued in them, the less apparent, and the less fearful will their distance become, and the more frequently will men find themselves carrying their hopes and enterprises in that direction. If, therefore, an intelligent and practicable view is taken of colonisation, we may re-echo, without scruple, the words of our thoughtful poet—
"Avaunt the fear
Of numbers crowded in their native soil,
To the prevention of all healthful growth
Through mutual injury! Rather in the law
Of increase, and the mandate from above,
Rejoice!—and ye have special cause for joy.
For, as the element of air affords
An easy passage to the industrious bees,
Fraught with their burdens, and a way as smooth,
For those ordained to take their sounding flight
From the thronged hive, and settle where they list,
In fresh abodes—their labour to renew;
So the wide waters open to the power,
The will, the instincts, and the appointed needs
Of Britain; do invite her to cast off
Her swarms, and in succession send them forth
Bound to establish new communities
On every shore whose aspect favours hope
Or bold adventure; promising to skill
And perseverance their deserved reward."
Excursion, book 9.
How best to colonise; how far Government should undertake the regulation and control of the enterprise; how far leave it to the spirit and intelligence of private individuals, separate or banded together in groups, or companies; and especially under what terms it shall permit the occupation of the unappropriated soil—all these have become highly interesting topics of discussion.
For ourselves, we will at once frankly confess that we have no faith in any model colonies, in ideals of any description, or in any "Art of colonisation." What has been done, may be done again; what America is doing every day on the banks of the Mississippi, England may do in her Australian continent. With regard more particularly to the last and most important matter that can affect a new settlement, the mode of dealing with the land, it appears to us that the duties of Government are few, simple, and imperative—as simple in their character as they are indispensable. A previous survey, a moderate price, lots large and small to suit all purchasers—these are what we should require. The land-jobber, who interposes between Government and the emigrant, to make a cruel profit of the latter, must be kept out, either by laying a tax (as they do in America, under the denomination of the "Wild-land Tax,") on all land not reclaimed within a certain time, or by declaring the purchase forfeited, if, within that time, the soil is not cultivated. Government also must restrain its own hands from large grants to favoured individuals, who are no better than another species of land-jobbers. This, though a merely negative duty, will probably be the last performed, and the most imperfectly. Few readers are perhaps aware of the criminal ease with which the Government has been persuaded into lavish grants of land to persons who had, and could have, no immediate prospect of making use of it; enormous grants unjust to other settlers, and ruinous to the young colony, by dispersing the emigrants, interposing between them wide tracts of barren property. We ourselves read with no little surprise the following statement, which we extract from the work before us, Mr Wakefield's Art of Colonisation:—
"There are plenty of cases in which mischievous dispersion has taken place, but not one, to my knowledge, in which the great bulk of settlers had a choice between dispersion and concentration. In the founding of West Australia there was no choice. In disposing of the waste land, the Government began by granting 500,000 acres (nearly half as much as the great county of Norfolk) to one person. Then came the governor and a few other persons, with grants of immense extent. The first grantee took his principality at the landing-place; and the second, of course, could only choose his outside of this vast property. Then the property of the second grantee compelled the third to go further off for land; and the fourth again was driven still further into the wilderness. At length, though by a very brief process, an immense territory was appropriated by a few settlers, who were so effectually dispersed, that, as there were no roads or maps, scarcely one of them knew where he was. Each of them knew, indeed, that he was where he was positively; but his relative position—not to his neighbours, for he was alone in the wilderness, but to other settlers, to the seat of government, and even to the landing-place of the colony—was totally concealed from him. This is, I believe, the most extreme case of dispersion on record. In the founding of South Africa by the Dutch, the dispersion of the first settlers, though superficially or acreably less, was as mischievous as at Swan River. The mischief shows itself in the fact, that two of the finest countries in the world are still poor and stagnant colonies. But in all colonies, without exception, there has been impoverishing dispersion, arising from one and the same cause."—(P. 433.)
Two very different ideals of colonisation have often haunted the imaginations of speculative men, and coloured very diversely their views and projects on this subject. Both have their favourable aspects; neither is practicable. As is usual, the rough reality rides zig-zag between your ideals, touching at both in turns, but running parallel with neither.
With one party of reasoners, the ideal of a colony would be a miniature England, a little model of the old country, framed here, at home, and sent out (like certain ingeniously-constructed houses) to be erected forthwith upon the virgin soil. A portion of all classes would sally forth for their New Jerusalem. The church, with tower and steeple, the manor-house, the public library, the town-hall, the museum, and the hospital, would all simultaneously be reproduced. Science would have its representatives. Literature with its light luggage, thoughts and paper, would be sure to hover about the train. Nobility would import its antique honours into the new city, and, with escutcheon and coat of arms, traditionally connect it with knighthood and chivalry, Agincourt, and the Round Table. There would be physicians and divines, lawyers, and country gentlemen "who live at ease," as well as the artisan and ploughman, and all who work in wood and in iron. Dr Hind, the present Dean of Carlisle, in an elegantly written essay, incorporated in Mr Wakefield's book, proposes and advocates this mode of colonisation. After remarking on the greater success which apparently accompanied the schemes of the Greeks and Romans to found new communities, Dr Hind thus proceeds.—The italics, it may be as well to say, are his, not ours.
"The main cause of this difference may be stated in few words. We send out colonies of the limbs, without the belly and the head; of needy persons, many of them mere paupers, or even criminals; colonies made up of a single class of persons in the community, and that the most helpless, and the most unfit to perpetuate our national character, and to become the fathers of a race whose habits of thinking and feeling shall correspond to those which, in the mean time, we are cherishing at home. The ancients, on the contrary, sent out a representation of the parent state—colonists from all ranks." And further on, after insisting on the propriety of appointing to the colony educated and accomplished clergymen, he says—"The same may be urged in respect of men of other professions and pursuits. The desirable consummation of the plan would be, that a specimen, or sample, as it were, of all that goes to make up society in the parent country, should at once be transferred to its colony. Instead of sending out bad seedlings, and watching their uncertain growth, let us try whether a perfect tree will not bear transplanting."
We apprehend that this project of "transplanting a perfect tree" is none of the most feasible. However the Greeks managed matters, we moderns find it absolutely necessary to begin "at the beginning," and with somewhat rude beginnings. If the Greeks had the art in the colony, as in the epic poem, of rushing in medias res—of starting with and from maturity—then indeed must colonisation be reckoned, as Dr Hind seems half to suspect, amongst the artes perditæ. Anything more lamentable than a number of cultivated men—"samples" of all kinds, physicians, and divines, and lawyers, with, of course, their several ladies—set down upon the uncultivated soil, on the long green grass, we cannot imagine. It seems to us quite right and unavoidable to send out "a single class," first—good stout "limbs," without much of "the belly"—which must mean, we presume, the idle folks, or much of "the head," which must mean the thinkers. That class, or those classes which cultivate the soil, and render the place somewhat habitable, had better surely precede, and act as pioneers, before the gentry disembark from their ships. Other classes must follow as they are wanted, and find room and scope. What would the physician do with his elaborate skill and courtesy, without that congregation of idlers on whose ailments he rides and dines? What need yet of eloquent barrister, or are his fees forthcoming, when a new estate could be purchased with less money than would serve to defend the old one by his pleading? Who would attend to the man of science, and his latest experiments on magnetic currents, when every one is trying over again the very first experiment—how to live?—where corn will grow, and what the potato will yield? Even your clergy must be of a somewhat different stamp from the polished ecclesiastic, the bland potentate of our drawing-rooms. He must have something more natural—"some rough-cast and a little loam" about him, be serviceable, accessible. And the fair "sample" partners of all these classes, what is to become of them? As yet, pin-money is not. There is nothing refined and civilised; men talk of marriage as if for prayer-book purposes. Very gross ideas!
The ancients, says Dr Hind, "began by nominating to the honourable office of captain, or leader of the colony, one of the chief men, if not the chief man of the state—like the queen bee leading the workers. Monarchies provided a prince of the blood royal; an aristocracy its choicest nobleman; a democracy its most influential citizen." In order to entice some one of our gentry—some one of wealth, station, and cultivated mind, to act as "queen bee" of the colony—seeing that a prince of the blood royal, or a Duke of Northumberland, would be hard to catch—the Doctor proposes to bestow upon him a patent of nobility. Wealth he has already, and wealth would not bribe him, but honour might. We see nothing ridiculous whatever in the suggestion. A patent of nobility might be much worse bestowed; but, unless we err greatly in our notion of what colonisation really is, the bribe would be lamentably insufficient. The English gentleman of fortune and of taste, who should leave his park and mansion in the county of Middlesex, to share the squabbles and discomforts of a crowd of emigrants—too often turbulent, anxious, and avaricious—would have well earned his earldom. He would be a sort of hero. Men of such a temper you may decorate with the strawberry leaf, but it is not the coronet, nor any possible bribe—nothing short of a certain thirst for noble enterprise can prompt them.
The other ideal of what colonisation might be is quite the reverse, presents a picture every way opposite to this of our classical dean. Many energetic and not uncultured spirits, wearied with the endless anxieties, cares, hypocrisies, and thousand artificialities of life, are delighted with the idea of breaking loose from the old trammels and conventionalities of civilisation. Their romance is to begin life afresh. Far from desiring to form a part of the little model-England, they would take from the Old World, if possible, nothing more than knowledge, seeds, and tools. To a fresh nature they would take a fresh heart, and a vigorous arm. Fields rescued by themselves from the waste should ripen under their own eyes. Thus, with a rude plenty, care and luxury alike cut off, no heartburnings, no vanity, a cultivated temper and coarse raiment—they and their families, and some neighbours of kindred dispositions, would really enjoy the earth, and the being God had given them. Not theirs the wish to see a matured society spring from the new soil. They regret to think that their own rustic community must inevitably advance, or decline, into some one of the old forms of civilisation; but they and their children, and perhaps their grandchildren, would be partakers of a peculiar and envied state of social existence, where the knowledge and amenity brought from the old country would be combined with the healthy toil and simple abundance of the new; where life would be unanxious, laborious, free; where there would be no talk of wars, nor politics, nor eternal remediless distress; but a disciplined humanity, in face of a kindly nature whose bounty had not yet been too severely taxed.
A charming ideal! which here and there is faintly and transiently realised. Here and there we catch a description of this simple, exhilarating, innocuously enterprising life, either in some Canadian settlement, or in the forests of America, or even in the Bush of Australia. There is rude health in all the family; housekeeping is a sort of perpetual pic-nic, full of amusing make-shifts; there is rudeness, but not barbarism; little upholstery, but wife and child are caressed with as much amenity and gentle fondness as in carpeted and curtained drawing-rooms. If the tin can should substitute the china cup, the tea is drunk with not the less urbanity. Such scenes we have caught a glimpse of in this or that writer. But alas! that which generally characterises the young settlement, let it be young as it may—that which would so wofully disappoint our pastoral and romantic emigrant, is precisely this: that, instead of leaving care behind them, the care to get rich, to get on, as it is disgustingly called—our colonists take a double portion of this commodity with them. Comparatively few seem to emigrate simply to live then and there more happily. They take land, as they would take a shop, to get a profit and be rich. And then, as for the little community and its public or common interests, it is the universal remark that, if politics in England are acrid enough, colonial politics are bitterness itself. The war is carried on with a personal hatred, and attended by personal injuries, unknown in the old country.
One would indeed think that people, fatigued with this anxious passion which plays so large a part in English life—this desire to advance, or secure, their social position—would seize the opportunity to escape from it, and rejoice in their ability to live in some degree of freedom and tranquillity. But no. The man commerce bred cares not to enjoy life and the day. He must make a profit out of himself; he must squeeze a profit out of others; he toils only for this purpose. If he has succeeded, in the new colony, in raising about him the requisite comforts of life—if he has been even rescued from threatened famine in England, and is now living and well housed, he and his family—you find him full of discontent because of the "exorbitant wages" he has to pay to the fellow emigrants who assist him in gathering in his corn—full of discontent because he cannot make the same profit of another man's labour there that he could have done in the old country—in that old country where he could not for his life have got so much land as the miserable rag upon his back would have covered. Such men carry out a heart to work, none to enjoy: they have not been cultivated for that. The first thing the colonist looks for is something to export. It was in vain that Adelaide boasted its charming climate and fruitful fields; it was on the point of being abandoned—so we hear—by many of its inhabitants, when some mines were discovered. There was then something that would sell in England, something to get rich with; so they that would have left the soil, stayed to work in the bowels of the earth. In the Bush you hear of the shepherds and small owners of sheep living, the year round, on "salt beef, tea, and damper," which last is an extemporised bread, an unleavened dough baked in such oven as the usual fire-place supplies. But fresh mutton, you exclaim, is plentiful enough; what need to diet themselves as if they were still in the hold of that vessel which brought them over? True, plentiful enough—it sells in Sydney at some three-halfpence a pound; but while the sheep lives it grows wool upon its back. For this wool it is bred. Sometimes it is boiled down bodily for its tallow, which also can be exported. Mutton-chops would be a waste; it would be a sin to think of them.
Set sail from England in whichever direction you will, East or West, over whichever ocean, the first thing you hear of, in respect to colonial society, is its proverbial "smartness"—an expression which signifies a determination to cheat you in every possible manner. The Old World, and the worst of it, is already there to welcome you. Nay, it has taken possession of the very soil before the spade of the emigrant can touch it. There lies the fresh land, fresh—so geologists say of Australia—as it came up at its last emergence from the ocean. You are first? No. The land-jobber is there before you. This foulest harpy from the stock exchange has set its foot upon the greensward, and screeches at you its cry for cent per cent!
There is yet a third and later ideal of colonisation—the ideal of the political economist. With him colonisation presents itself under the especial aspect of a great exploitation of the earth. He is desirous that capital and labour should resort to those spots where they will be most productive. Thus the greatest possible amount of production will be generated between man and his terraqueous globe; capital and labour are with him the first elements of human prosperity; and to transfer these in due proportions, and as quickly as possible, to the new land, when they may be most profitably employed, is the main object of his legislation. Hitherto, it may be observed, the political economist has limited his efforts to the undoing what he conceives has been very unskilfully done by previous legislators. In this matter of emigration he steps forward as legislator himself. It is no longer for mere liberty and laissez-faire that he contends; he assumes a new character, and out of the theory of his science produces his system of rule and regulation. He knows how a small village becomes a great city; he will apply his knowledge, and by positive laws expedite the process. Let us see with what success he performs in this new character.
Mr Wakefield's system—for it is he who has the honour of originating this politico-economical scheme—consists in putting a price upon unoccupied land, and with the proceeds of the sale raising a fund for the transmission of emigrant labourers. This is, however, but a subordinate part of his project, which we mention thus separately, because, for a purpose of our own, we wish to distinguish it from the rest. This price must, moreover, (and here is the gist of the matter,) be that "sufficient price" which will debar the labourer from becoming too soon a proprietor of land, and thus deserting the service of the capitalist.
The object of Mr Wakefield, it will be seen at once, is to procure the speedy transmission in due proportion of capital and labour. The capitalist would afford the means of transferring the labourer to the scene of action; the labourer would be retained in that condition in order to invite and render profitable the wealth of the capitalist. The twofold object is good, and there is an apparent simplicity in the means devised, which, at first, is very captivating. There is nothing from which the colonial capitalist suffers so much as from the want of hired labour. He purchases land and finds no one to cultivate it; the few he can engage he cannot depend upon; the project of agricultural improvement which, if it be not completed, is utterly null and useless, is arrested in mid progress by the desertion of his workmen; or his capital is exhausted by the high wages he has paid before the necessary works can be brought to a termination. The capitalist has gone out, and left behind him that class of hired labourers without which his capital is useless. Meanwhile, in England, this very class is super-abundant; but it is not the class which spontaneously leaves the country, or can leave it. Mr Wakefield's scheme supplies the capitalist with the labour so essential to him, and relieves our parishes of their unemployed poor. But these emigrant labourers would soon extend themselves over the new country, as small proprietors,—Mr Wakefield checks this natural tendency by raising the price of land.
There is, we say, an apparent and captivating simplicity in the scheme; but we are persuaded that, the more closely it is examined, the more impracticable and perplexing it will reveal itself to be. As Mr Wakefield's system has made considerable progress in public opinion, and obtained the approval, not only of eager speculative minds, but of cool and calculating economists—as it has already exerted some influence, and may exert still more, upon our colonial legislation—and as we believe that the attempt to carry it out will give rise to nothing better than confusion and discontent, we think we shall be doing no ill service to the cause of colonisation by entering into some investigation of it.
We are compelled to make a division, or what to Mr Wakefield will appear a most unscientific fracture, of the two parts of his scheme. We acquiesce in fixing a price upon unappropriated land, and with the proceeds of the sale forming a fund for the transmission and outfit of the poor emigrant. We do not say that these proceeds must necessarily supply all the fund that it may be thought advisable to spend in this matter, or that the price is to be regulated solely according to the wants of this emigration fund. But we do not acquiesce in the proposal to fix a price for the specific purpose of retarding the period at which the labourer may himself become a proprietor. The doctrine of "a sufficient price" (as it has been called, and for brevity's sake we shall adopt the name) we entirely eschew. To the imposing of an artificial value upon the land, for this purpose, we will be no parties. Simply to transport the labourer hence, shall be the object of our price, beyond such other reasons as may be given for selling at a certain moderate sum the waste land of the colonies, instead of disposing of it by free grant. This object may be shown to be equitable; it appeals to the common justice of mankind. But as to the longer or shorter term the hired labourer remains in the condition of hired labourer, for this the capitalist must take his chance. This must be determined, as it is in the old country, and as alone it can be determined amicably, by that current of circumstances over which neither party can exercise a direct control. To such collateral advantage as may accrue to the capitalist from even the price we should impose, he is welcome; only we do not legislate for this object—we neither give it, nor take it away.
The wild unappropriated land of our colonies belongs to the crown, to the state—it is, as Mr Wakefield says, "a valuable national property." In making use of this land, one main object would be to relieve the destitute of the old country; to give them, if possible, a share of it. What more just or more rational? To give, however, the soil itself to the very poor would be idle. They cannot reach it, they cannot travel to their new estate—they have no seeds, no tools, no stock of any kind wherewith to cultivate it. The gift would be a mere mockery. We will sell it, then, to those who can transport themselves thither, and who have the necessary means for its cultivation, and the purchase-money shall be paid over to the very poor. By far the best way of paying over this purchase-money, which as a mere gift of so much coin would be all but worthless, and would be spent in a week, is by providing them with a free passage to the colony where they will permanently improve their condition; obtaining high wages, and probably, after a time, becoming proprietors themselves; and assisting in turn, by the purchase-money their own savings will have enabled them to pay, to bring over other emigrants to the new field of labour, and the new land of promise.
This is an equitable arrangement, and, what is more, the equity of it is level to the common sense of all mankind. It effects also certain desirable objects, though not such as our theorist has in view. It places the land in the possession of men who will and can cultivate it, and who, by paying a certain moderate price, have shown they were in earnest in the business; and it has transmitted, at their expense, labourers to the new soil. With the question, how long these shall continue labourers, it interferes not. It is a question, we think, no wise man would meddle with. Least of all does it represent that the capitalist has obtained any claim upon the services of the labourer, by having paid for his passage out: this payment was no gift of his; it was the poor man's share of the "national property." They meet in the colony as they would have met in England, each at liberty to do the best he can for himself.
Observe how the difficulties crowd upon us, when we enter upon the other and indeed the essential part of Mr Wakefield's scheme. The emigrant is not "too soon" to become a proprietor. What does this "too soon" mean? How long is he to be retained in the condition of hired labourer? How many years? Mr Wakefield never fixes a period. He could not. It must depend much upon the rapidity of immigration into the colony. If the second batch of immigrants is slow of coming in, the first must be kept labourers the longer. If the stream of labour flow but scantily into this artificial canal, the locks must be opened the more rarely. But how is the "sufficient price" to be determined until this period be known? It is the sum the labourer can save from his wages, during this time, which must constitute the price of so much land as will support him and his family, and enable him to turn proprietor. Thus, in order to regulate the sufficient price, it will be necessary to find the average rate of wages, the average amount of savings that a labourer could make (which, again, must depend upon the price of provisions, and other necessaries of life) during an unknown period!—and, in addition to this, to determine the average produce of so many acres of land. The apparent simplicity of the scheme resolves itself into an extreme complexity. The author of it, indeed, proposes a short method by which his sufficient price may be arrived at without these calculations: what that short method is, and how fallacious it would prove, we shall have occasion to show.
But granting that, in any manner, this "sufficient price" could be determined, the measure has an unjust and arbitrary character. It is not enough that such a scheme could be defended, and shown to be equitable, because for the general good, before some committee of legislators; if it offends the popular sense of justice it can never prosper. "I know," the humble emigrant might say—"I know there must be rich and poor in the world; there always have been, and always will be. To what is inevitable one learns to submit. If I am born poor there is no help for it, except what lies in my own ability and industry. But if you set about, by artificial regulations, in a new colony, where fruitful land is in abundance, to keep me poor, because I am so now, I rebel. This is not just. Do I not see the open land before me unowned, untouched? I well enough understood that, in old England, I could not take so much of any field as the merest shed would cover—not so much as I could burrow in. Long before I was born it had been all claimed, hedged, fenced in, and a title traced from ancestor to ancestor. Here, I am the ancestor!"
Tell such a man that a price is put upon the land in order that some companions whom he left starving in England may come over and partake the benefit of this unbroken soil,—he will see a plain justice here. He himself was, perhaps, brought over by the price paid by some precursor. What he received from one more prosperous, he returns to another less prosperous than himself. But tell him that a price is put upon the land, in order that he may serve a rich master the longer,—in order that he may be kept in a subordinate station, from which circumstances now permit him to escape—he will see no justice in the case. He will do everything in his power to evade your law; he will look upon your "sufficient price" as a cruel artificial barrier raised up against him; he will go and "squat" upon the land, without paying any price at all.
Indeed, the objection to his scheme, which Mr Wakefield seems to feel the strongest,—to which he gives the least confident reply, is just this—that, equitable or not, it would be impossible to carry out his law into execution; that if the price were high enough to answer his purposes, the land, in colonial dialect, would be "squatted" on,—would be taken possession of without any payment whatever. A moderate price men will cheerfully pay for the greater security of title: Englishmen will not, for a slight matter, put themselves wittingly on the wrong side of the law. But, if coupled with a high price, there is a rankling feeling of injustice: they will be very apt to satisfy themselves with actual possession, and leave the legal title to follow as it may. It is true, as Mr Wakefield urges, the richer capitalists will by no means favour the squatter; they will be desirous of enforcing a law made for their especial benefit. But they will not form the majority. Popular opinion will be against them, and in favour of the squatter. It would not be very easy to have a police force, and an effective magistracy, at the outskirts of a settlement stretching out, in some cases, into an unexplored region. Besides, it is a conspicuous part of Mr Wakefield's plan to give municipal or local governments to our colonies: these, as emanating from the British constitution, must need be more or less of a popular character; and we are persuaded that no such popular local government would uphold his "sufficient price," or tolerate the principle on which it was founded.
But, even if practicable, if carried out into complete execution, it remains to be considered whether the measure proposed would really have the effect contemplated by our theorist—that of supplying the capitalist with the labour he needs. With a certain number of labourers it might,—but of what character? It is not a remote possibility that will influence a common day-labourer to save his earnings. It is one of the terms of the proposition that high wages are to be given; for without these there would be no emigration, and certainly no fear of a too speedy promotion to the rank of proprietor. It follows, therefore, that you have a class of men earning high wages, and not under any strong stimulus to save—a class of men always found to be the most idle and refractory members of the community. A journeyman who has no pressing motive for a provident economy, and who earns high wages, is almost invariably a capricious unsteady workman, on whom no dependence can be placed; who will generally work just so many days in the week as are necessary to procure him the enjoyments he craves. One of these enjoyments is indolence itself,—a sottish, half-drunken indolence. Drinking is the coarse pleasure of most uneducated men: it is so even in the old country; and in a colony where there are still fewer amusements for the idle hour, it becomes almost the sole pleasure. How completely it is the reigning vice of our own colonies is known to all. Imagine a labourer in the receipt of high wages, little influenced by the remote prospect of becoming, by slow savings, a proprietor of land—and feeling, moreover, that he was retained in a dependent condition, arbitrarily, artificially, expressly for the service of the capitalist—what amount of work think you the capitalist-farmer would get from such a labourer? Not so much in seven years as he would have had from him in two, if, at the end of that two, the man had calculated upon being himself a farmer.
Recollect that it is not slave labour, or convict labour, that we are here dealing with: it is the free labour of one man working for another man, at wages. He gets all the wages he can, and gives as little labour as he can. If the wages are high, and the inducement to save but feeble, he will probably earn by one day's work what will enable him to pass the two next in idleness and debauchery. What boon will Mr Wakefield have conferred upon the capitalist?
The theory of a "sufficient price" is, therefore, placed in this hopeless predicament:—1. It would be almost impossible to enforce it; and, 2. If enforced, it would fail of its purpose. It would supply the capitalist with inefficient, profligate, and idle workmen, on whose steady co-operation and assistance he could never calculate.
That it may be desirable to tempt the capitalist abroad by securing him an abundance of hired labour, something like that which lies at his door in England, we do not dispute. But the thing is impossible. You cannot manage this by direct legislation. You cannot combine in one settlement the advantages of a new and of an old country. It is not in the wit of man to bring together these two stages of society. Our political economist is in too great a haste to be rich: he forgets the many lessons he has given to others against bootless and mischievous intermeddling with the natural course of things. Meanwhile "the attempt will confound us,"—it will throw an unpopularity over the whole subject of emigration in the minds of the working classes. Already we hear it murmured that the land is to be made a monopoly for the rich; that the man of small substance is to be discouraged; that the sole object of the moneyed class is to make profit of the labours of others; and that they are bent upon creating, artificially, in the colony, those circumstances which put the workmen in their power in the old country. We would earnestly counsel those who are interested in the subject of emigration, to consider well before they teach or practise this new "art of colonisation."
Those who have not perused Mr Wakefield's book may, perhaps, entertain a suspicion that, in thus separating the objects for which a price is to be laid on land, admitting the one and rejecting the other, we are only engaging ourselves unnecessarily in a theoretical debate. If a price is to be affixed, the result, it may seem to them, is practically the same, whatever the object may be. But the practical result would be very different; for a very different price would be exacted, according to the object in view, as well as a very different motive assigned for imposing it. The price at which a considerable fund would be raised for the purpose of emigration, would be too low to answer the purpose of restraining the labourer from soon becoming a proprietor of land. Those, however, who are familiar with Mr Wakefield's book, know well that this last purpose forms the very substance of the plan it proposes; and that hitherto no price—although it has ranged as high as 40s. per acre—has been considered sufficiently high to effect the object of the theorist.
"There is but one object of a price," says Mr Wakefield, (p. 347,) "and about that there can be no mistake. The sole object of a price is to prevent labourers from turning into landowners too soon: the price must be sufficient for that one purpose, and no other." "The sufficient price," he says, (p. 339,) "has never yet been adopted by a colonising government." And a little further, (p. 341,) he thus continues: "There are but three places in which the price of new land has had the least chance of operating beneficially. These are South Australia, Australia Felix, and New Zealand. In none of these cases did the plan of granting with profusion precede that of selling; but in none of them did the price required prevent the cheapest land from being cheap enough to inflict on the colony all the evils of an extreme scarcity of labour for hire. In these cases, moreover, a large portion of the purchase-money of waste land was expended in conveying labourers from the mother-country to the colony. If this money had not been so spent, the proportion of land to people would have been very much greater than it was, and the price of new land still more completely inoperative. More facts might be cited to show the insufficiency of the highest price yet required for new land."
We will continue our first quotation from p. 347. The manner in which Mr Wakefield himself exposes the difficulties of fixing the "sufficient price," and the very inadequate expedient he points out for obviating, or avoiding, these difficulties, may throw some further light upon the matter.
"The sole object of a price is to prevent labourers from turning into landowners too soon: the price must be sufficient for that one purpose, and no other. The question is, What price would have that one effect? That must depend, first, on what is meant by 'too soon;' or on the proper duration of the term of the labourer's employment for hire; which again must depend upon the rate of the increase of population in the colony, especially by means of immigration, which would determine when the place of a labourer, turning out a landowner, would be filled by another labourer; and the rate of labour-emigration again must depend on the popularity of the colony at home, and on the distance between the mother-country and the colony, or the cost of passage for labouring people. Secondly, what price would have the desired effect, must depend on the rate of wages and cost of living in the colony, since according to these would be the labourer's power of saving the requisite capital for turning into a landowner: in proportion to the rate of wages, and the cost of living, would the requisite capital be saved in a longer or a shorter time. It depends, thirdly, on the soil and climate of the colony, which would determine the quantity of land required (on the average) by a labourer, in order to set himself up as a landowner. If the soil and climate were unfavourable to production, he would require more acres; if it were favourable, fewer acres would serve his purpose: in Trinidad, for example, ten acres would support him well; in South Africa, or New South Wales, he might require fifty or a hundred acres. But the variability in our wide colonial empire, not only of soil and climate, but of all the circumstances on which a sufficient price would depend, is so obvious, that no examples of it are needed. It follows, of course, that different colonies, and sometimes different groups of similar colonies, would require different prices. To name a price for all the colonies, would be as absurd as to fix the size of a coat for mankind.
"'But, at least,' I hear your Mr Mother-country say, 'name a price for some particular colony—a price founded on the elements of calculation which you have stated.' I could do that, certainly, for some colony with which I happen to be particularly well acquainted, but I should do it doubtingly, and with hesitation; for, in truth, the elements of calculation are so many, and so complicated in their various relations to each other, that in depending on them exclusively there would be the utmost liability to error. A very complete and familiar knowledge of them in each case would be a useful general guide, would throw valuable light on the question, would serve to inform the legislator how far his theory and his practice were consistent or otherwise; but, in the main, he must rely, and if he had common sagacity he might solely and safely rely, upon no very elaborate calculation, but on experience, or the facts before his eyes. He could always tell whether or not labour for hire was too scarce or too plentiful in the colony. If it were too plentiful, he would know that the price of new land was too high—that is, more than sufficient: if it were hurtfully scarce, he would know that the price was too low, or not sufficient. About which the labour was—whether too plentiful or too scarce—no legislature, hardly any individual, could be in doubt, so plain to the dullest eye would be the facts by which to determine that question. If the lawgiver saw that the labour was scarce, and the price too low, he would raise the price; if he saw that labour was superabundant, and the price too high, he would lower the price; if he saw that labour was neither scarce nor superabundant, he would not alter the price, because he would see that it was neither too high nor too low, but sufficient."
Admirable machinery! No steam-engine could let its steam on, or off, with more precision. The legislature or governor "could always tell whether or not labour for hire was too scarce or too plentiful," and open or close his value accordingly. "No legislature, hardly any individual could be in doubt" about the matter! Indeed! when was hired labour ever thought too cheap—in other words, too plentiful—by the capitalist? When was it ever thought too dear—in other words, too scarce—by the labourer? Could the most ingenious man devise a question on which there would be more certainly two quite opposite and conflicting opinions? And suppose the legislature to have come to a decision—say that the labour was too scarce—there would still be this other question to decide, whether to lower the price, in order to tempt emigrants, might not be as good a means of rendering labour more plentiful, as to raise the price in order to render it still more difficult for labourers to become landowners? Here there is surely scope for the most honest diversity of opinion. One party might very rationally advise to entice thither the stream of emigration:—"Let it flow more copiously," they might exclaim, "though we retain the waters for a shorter time;" while the party thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of the "sufficient price" would devise fresh dikes and dams, and watch the locks more narrowly.
In his "sufficient price," Mr Wakefield has discovered the secret spring that regulates the economical relations of society. He has his hand upon it. He, or his lawgiver, will henceforward regulate the supply of labour, and the remuneration of labour, upon scientific principles. Unenviable post! We should infinitely prefer the task of the philosopher in Rasselas, who fancied himself commissioned to distribute rain and sunshine, in just proportions, to all the farmers in the neighbourhood.
It is quite curious to observe how strong a faith our projector has in his theory of a sufficient price, and how singular a bias this has exerted on his mind in some other matters of speculation. He finds that slavery, both in olden and modern times, has been all owing to "cheapness of land." Could he have fixed his sufficient price upon the arable land in Chaldea, or about the cities of Athens and Rome, neither the patriarchs, nor the Greeks, nor the Romans, would have known the institution of slavery. "Slavery is evidently," he says, "a make-shift for hiring; a proceeding to which recourse is had only where hiring is impossible, or difficult. Slave labour is, on the whole, much more costly than the labour of hired freemen; and slavery is also full of moral and political evils, from which the method of hired labour is exempt. Slavery, therefore, is not preferred to the method of hiring: the method of hiring would be preferred if there was a choice."—(P. 324.) Most logical "therefore!" The mode of hiring is preferred by those to whom experience has taught all this; but slavery, so far from being the "make-shift," is the first expedient. It is the first rude method which unscrupulous power adopts to engross the produce of the earth. The stronger make the weaker labour for them. "It happens," he continues, "wherever population is scanty in proportion to land." It happens wherever people prefer idleness to work, and have been able to coerce others to labour for them, whether land has been plentiful or not. Was it abundance of land, or the military spirit, that produced the amiable relationship between the Spartan and the Helot?—or was there any need of a "sufficient price" to limit the supply of good land in Egypt, which lay rigidly enough defined between the high and low margin of a river? Or could any governor, with his tariff of prices, have performed this duty more effectually than the Nile and the desert had done between them?
But the most amusing instance is still to follow. "It was the cheapness of land that caused Las Casas (the Clarkson or Wilberforce of his time, as respects the Red Indians of America) to invent the African slave-trade. It was the cheapness of land that brought African slaves to Antigua and Barbadoes."—(P. 328.) It was the cheapness of land! If land had been dearer, the Spaniards would have worked for themselves, and not have asked the Red Indians for their assistance! If land had been dearer in Antigua and Barbadoes, the climate would have lost its influence on European frames, and Englishmen would have laboured in their own sugar plantations!
Doubtless the difficulty of obtaining hired labour has been sometimes a reason, and sometimes an excuse, for the continuance of slavery. It is also true that the willingness of the discharged slave to work, as a hired labourer, is almost a necessary condition to the extinction of slavery. But, losing sight of all our amiable passions and propensities, to describe slavery as originating altogether in the scarcity of hired labour, (as if the slave had first had the offer made to him to work for wages, and had refused it,) and then to resolve this cause again into no other circumstance than the "cheapness of land," is something like monomania.
In America, those states which have colonised so rapidly have not been the slave-holding states, nor have they needed slaves; nor has land been scarce; nor has much been done by the mere capitalist who goes to hire labour; but almost all by the man who goes there to labour himself, upon property of his own. And who, after all, we would ask, are the best of emigrants, in every new country where the land has yet to be reclaimed? Not those who seek the colony with an intention of making a fortune there, and returning to England; nor even those who go with some feeling that they shall be the Cæsars of the village; nor the easy capitalist, who expects, from the back of his ambling nag, to see his fields sprout with corn and grow populous with cattle. The best of emigrants, as pioneers of civilisation, are those who intend to settle and live on the land they shall have reduced to cultivation, who go to labour with their own hands on property they shall call their own. It is the labour of such men that has converted into corn-fields the dark forests of America. That ardent and indefatigable industry which has been so often admired in the peasant proprietor—the man who has all the hardy habits of the peasant and all the pride of proprietorship—is never more wanted, never more at home, than in the new colony. We have a sympathy with these men—we like their hearty toil, their guiltless enterprise. This is not the class of men we would disgust; yet it is precisely this class who go forth with their little store of wealth in their hand, or with hope soon to realise it, whom the "sufficient price" of Mr Wakefield would deter from entering the colony, or convert, when there, into unwilling, discontented, uncertain labourers.
The rights of every class must, of course, be determined by a reference to the welfare of the whole community. The poorer settler must have his claims decided, and limited, according to rules which embrace the interest of the empire at large. We hope we shall not be misunderstood on so plain a matter as this. We do not contemplate the settler as arriving on the new land unfettered by any allegiance he owes to the old country. He belongs to civilised England; carries with him the knowledge and the implements which her civilisation has procured him; lives under her protection, and must submit to her laws. But in limiting the rights of the settler in a land spreading open before him—where nothing has taken possession of the soil but the fertilising rain, and the broad sunshine playing idly on its surface—you must make out a clear case, a case of claims paramount to his own, a case which appeals to that sense of justice common to the multitude, which will bear examination, which readily forces itself upon an honest conviction. It must not be a mere speculative measure, a subtle theory, hard for a plain man to understand—benevolently meant, but, intricate in its operation, and precarious in its result—that should come betwixt him and the free bounty of nature. Not of such materials can you make the fence that is to coop him up in one corner of a new-found continent. Laudable it may be, this experiment to adjust with scientific accuracy the proportion of capital and labour; but a man with no peculiar passion for political economy, will hardly like to be made the subject of this experiment, or that a scientific interest should keep his feet from the wilderness, or his spade from the unowned soil. It would be an ungracious act of parliament, to say the least of it, whose preamble should run thus—"Whereas it is expedient that the labouring population emigrating from England should be 'prevented from turning too soon into landowners,' and thus cultivating the soil for themselves instead of for others, Be it enacted," &c. &c.
Although this theory of a "sufficient price" is the chief topic of Mr Wakefield's book, yet there are many other subjects of interest discussed, and many valuable suggestions thrown out in it; and if we have felt ourselves compelled to enter our protest against his main theory, we are by no means unwilling to confess our share of obligation to one who has made colonisation the subject of so much study, and who has called to it the attention of so many others. It was he who, struck with the gross error that had been committed of stocking certain of our colonies with too large a proportion of the male sex, first pointed out that the period of marriage was the most appropriate period for emigration. Do not wait till want drives out the half-famished children, but let the young married couple start whilst yet healthy and vigorous, and not broken down by poverty. Some might be disposed to object that these will do well enough in England. They might, but their children might not. It is wise to take the stream of population a little higher up, where it yet runs clear; not to wait till the waters have become sluggish and polluted.
In a literary point of view, Mr Wakefield's book is an extremely entertaining one. It is difficult to believe what we are told in the preface, and hear with regret, that it was written in ill health, so elastic a spirit is observable throughout. The work assumes the form of letters passing between a statesman, who is in search of information and theory on the subject of colonisation, and a colonist who has both to give. One would naturally conclude, from the letters themselves, that both sets were written by the same author, and that the correspondence was but one of those well-understood literary artifices by which the exposition of certain truths or opinions is rendered more clear or interesting. The letters of the statesman have that constrained fictitious aspect which responses framed merely for the carrying on of the discussion are almost sure to acquire. At all events, it was hardly necessary for Mr Wakefield to describe himself in the title-page as "one of the writers;" since the part of the statesman, in the correspondence, is merely to ask questions at the proper time, to put an objection just where it ought to be answered, and give other the like promptings to the colonist.
With many readers it will add not a little to the piquancy of the work, that a considerable part is occupied in a sharp controversy with the Colonial Office and its present chief. Mr Wakefield does not spare his adversaries; he seems rather to rejoice in the wind and stir of controversy. What provocation he has received we do not know: the justice of his quarrel, therefore, we cannot pretend to decide upon; but the manner in which he conducts it, is certainly not to our taste. For instance, at p. 35 and p. 302, there is a littleness of motive, a petty jealousy of him (Mr Wakefield) attributed to Lord Grey as the grounds of his public conduct—a sort of imputation which does not increase our respect for the person who makes it. But into this controversy with the Colonial Office we have no wish to enter. So far as it is of a personal character, we can have no motive to meddle with it; and so far as the system itself is attacked, of governing our colonies through this office, as at present constituted, there appears to be no longer any controversy whatever. It seems admitted, on all hands, that our colonies have outgrown the machinery of government here provided for them.
In the extract we lately made from Mr Wakefield's book, some of our readers were perhaps startled at meeting so strange an appellation as Mr Mothercountry. It is a generic name, which our writer gives to that gentleman of the Colonial Office (though it would seem more appropriate to one of the female sex) who for the time being really governs the colony, and is thus, in fact, the representative of the mother country. The soubriquet was adopted from a pamphlet of the late Mr Charles Buller, in which he very vividly describes the sort of government to which—owing to the frequent change of ministry, and the parliamentary duties of the Secretary of State—a colony is practically consigned. We wish we had space to quote enough from this pamphlet, to show in what a graphic manner Mr Buller gradually narrows and limits the ideas which the distant colonist entertains of the ruling mother country. "That mother country," he finally says, "which has been narrowed from the British isles into the Parliament, from the Parliament into the Executive Government, from the Executive Government into the Colonial Office, is not to be sought in the apartments of the Secretary of State, or his Parliamentary under-secretary. Where are we to look for it?" He finds it eventually in some back-room in the large house in Downing Street, where some unknown gentleman, punctual, industrious, irresponsible, sits at his desk with his tape and his pigeon-holes about him. This is the original of Mr Mother-country.
That which immediately suggests itself as a substitute and a remedy for the inefficient government of Downing Street, is some form of local or municipal government. As Mr Wakefield justly observes, a local government, having jurisdiction over quite local or special matters, by no means implies any relinquishment by the imperial government of its requisite control over the colony. Neither does a municipal government imply a republican or democratic government. Mr Wakefield suggests that the constitution of a colony should be framed, as nearly as possible, on the model of our own—that there should be two chambers, and one of them hereditary. The extreme distance of many, of most of our colonies, absolutely precludes the possibility of their being efficiently governed by the English Colonial Office, or by functionaries (whether well or ill appointed) who have to receive all their instructions from that office. Throughout our colonies, the French system of centralisation is adopted, and that with a very inadequate machinery. And the evil extends with our increasing settlements; for where there is a "seat of government" established in a colony, with due legislative and executive powers, every part of that colony, however extensive it may be, has to look to that central power for the administration of its affairs.
"In our colonies," says Mr Wakefield, "government resides at what is called its seat; every colony has its Paris, or 'seat of government.' At this spot there is government; elsewhere little or none. Montreal, for example, is the Paris of Canada. Here, of course, as in the Paris of France, or in London, representatives of the people assemble to make laws, and the executive departments, with the cabinet of ministers, are established. But now mark the difference between England on the one hand, and France or Canada on the other. The laws of England being full of delegation of authority for local purposes, and for special purposes whether local or not, spread government all over the country; those of Canada or France in a great measure confine government to the capital and its immediate neighbourhood. If people want to do something of a public nature in Caithness or Cornwall, there is an authority on the spot which will enable them to accomplish this object, without going or writing to a distant place. At Marseilles or Dunkerque you cannot alter a high road, or add a gens-d'arme to the police force, without correspondence with Paris; at Gaspé and Niagara you could not, until lately, get anything of a public nature done, without authority from the seat of government. But what is the meaning, in this case, of a correspondence with Paris or Montreal? It is doubt, hesitation, and ignorant objection on the part of the distant authority; references backwards and forwards; putting off of decisions; delay without end; and for the applicants a great deal of trouble, alternate hope and fear, much vexation of spirit, and finally either a rough defeat of their object or evaporation by lapse of time. In France, accordingly, whatever may be the form of the general government, improvement, except at Paris, is imperceptibly slow; whilst in Old, and still more in New England, you can hardly shut your eyes anywhere without opening them on something new and good, produced by the operation of delegated government specially charged with making the improvement. In the colonies it is much worse than in France. The difficulty there is even to open a correspondence with the seat of government; to find somebody with whom to correspond. In France, at any rate, there is at the centre a very elaborate bureaucratic machinery, instituted with the design of supplying the whole country with government—the failure arises from the practical inadequacy of a central machinery for the purpose in view: but in our colonies, there is but little machinery at the seat of government for even pretending to operate at a distance. The occupants of the public offices at Montreal scarcely take more heed of Gaspé, which is five hundred miles off and very difficult of access, than if that part of Canada were in Newfoundland or Europe. Gaspé, therefore, until lately, when, on Lord Durham's recommendation, some machinery of local government was established in Canada, was almost without government, and one of the most barbarous places on the face of the earth. Every part of Canada not close to the seat of government was more or less like Gaspé. Every colony has numerous Gaspés. South Africa, save at Cape Town, is a Gaspé all over. All Australia Felix, being from five hundred to seven hundred miles distant from its seat of government at Sidney, and without a made road between them, is a great Gaspé. In New Zealand, a country eight or nine hundred miles long, without roads, and colonised, as Sicily was of old, in many distinct settlements, all the settlements, except the one at which the government is seated, are miserable Gaspés as respects paucity of government. In each settlement, indeed, there is a meagre official establishment, and in one of the settlements there is a sort of lieutenant-governor; but these officers have no legislative functions, no authority to determine anything, no originating or constructive powers: they are mere executive organs of the general government at the capital, for administering general laws, and for carrying into effect such arbitrary instructions, which are not laws, as they may receive from the seat of government. The settlers, therefore, are always calling out for something which government alone could furnish. Take one example out of thousands. The settlers at Wellington in New Zealand, the principal settlement of the colony, wanted a light-house at the entrance of this harbour. To get a light-house was an object of the utmost importance to them. The company in England, which had founded the settlement, offered to advance the requisite funds on loan. But the settlement had no constituted authority that could accept the loan and guarantee its repayment. The company therefore asked the colonial office, whose authority over New Zealand is supreme, to undertake that the money should be properly laid out and ultimately repaid. But the colonial office, charged as it is with the general government of some forty distinct and distant communities, was utterly incapable of deciding whether or not the infant settlement ought to incur such a debt for such a purpose; it therefore proposed to refer the question to the general government of the colony at Auckland. But Auckland is several hundred miles distant from Wellington, and between these distant places there is no road at all—the only way of communication is by sea; and as there is no commercial intercourse between the places, communication by sea is either so costly, when, as has happened, a ship is engaged for the purpose of sending a message, or so rare, that the settlers at Wellington frequently receive later news from England than from the seat of their government: and moreover the attention of their government was known to be, at the time, absorbed with matters relating exclusively to the settlement in which the government resided. Nothing, therefore, was done; some ships have been lost for want of a lighthouse; and the most frequented harbour of New Zealand is still without one."—(P. 212.)
This is a long extract, but it could not be abridged, and the importance of the subject required it. Mr Wakefield has some remarks upon the necessity of supplying religious instruction and the means of public worship to our colonies, with which we cannot but cordially agree. But we rubbed our eyes, and read the following passage twice over, before we were quite sure that we had not misapprehended it: "I am in hopes of being able, when the proper time shall come for that part of my task, to persuade you that it would now be easy for England to plant sectarian colonies—that is, colonies with the strong attraction for superior emigrants, of a peculiar creed in each colony"—(P. 160.) We thought that it was one of the chief boasts, and most fortunate characteristics of our age, that men of different sects, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, Independents and Baptists, had learned to live quietly together. It is a lesson that has been slowly learnt, and through much pain and tribulation. What is the meaning of this retrograde movement, this drafting us out again into separate corps? Possibly the fact of the whole settlement being of one sect of Christians may tend at first to promote harmony—although even this cannot be calculated upon; but differences of opinion are sure, in time, to creep in; and the ultimate consequence would be, that such a colony, in a future generation, would be especially afflicted with religious dissensions, and the spirit of persecution. It would have to learn again, through the old painful routine, the lesson of mutual toleration. We suspect that Mr Wakefield is so engrossed with his favourite subject of colonisation, that, if the Mormonites were to make a good settlement of it, he would forgive them all their absurdities; perhaps congratulate them on their harmony of views.
We have hitherto regarded colonisation in its general, national, and legislative aspect: the following passage takes us into the heart of the business as it affects the individuals themselves, of all classes, who really think of emigrating. It is thus Mr Wakefield describes "the charms of colonisation:"—
"Without having witnessed it, you cannot form a just conception of the pleasurable excitement which those enjoy who engage personally in the business of colonisation. The circumstances which produce these lively and pleasant feelings are, doubtless, counteracted by others productive of annoyance and pain; but, at the worst, there is a great deal of enjoyment for all classes of colonists, which the fixed inhabitants of an old country can with difficulty comprehend. The counteracting circumstances are so many impediments to colonisation, which we must examine presently. I will now endeavour to describe briefly the encouraging circumstances which put emigrants into a state of excitement, similar to that occasioned by opium, wine, or winning at play, but with benefit instead of fatal injury to the moral and physical man.
"When a man, of whatever condition, has finally determined to emigrate, there is no longer any room in his mind for thought about the circumstances that surround him: his life is for some time an unbroken and happy dream of the imagination. The labourer—whose dream is generally realised—thinks of light work and high wages, good victuals in abundance, beer and tobacco at pleasure, and getting in time to be a master in his trade, or to having a farm of his own. The novelty of the passage would be a delight to him, were it not for the ennui arising from want of occupation. On his arrival at the colony, all goes well with him. He finds himself a person of great value, a sort of personage, and can indulge almost any inclination that seizes him. If he is a brute, as many emigrant labourers are, through being brutally brought up from infancy to manhood, he lives, to use his own expression, 'like a fighting cock,' till gross enjoyment carries him off the scene. If he is of the better sort, by nature and education, he works hard, saves money, and becomes a man of property—perhaps builds himself a nice house, glories with his now grand and happy wife in counting the children, the more the merrier, and cannot find anything on earth to complain of, but the exorbitant wages he has to pay. The change for this class of men being from pauperism, or next door to it, to plenty and property, is indescribably, to our apprehensions almost inconceivably, agreeable.
"But the classes who can hardly imagine the pleasant feelings which emigration provides for the well-disposed pauper, have pleasant feelings of their own when they emigrate, which are perhaps more lively in proportion to the greater susceptibility of a more cultivated mind to the sensations of mental pain and pleasure. Emigrants of cultivated mind, from the moment when they determine to be colonists, have their dreams, which, though far from being always, or ever fully realised, are, I have been told by hundreds of this class, very delightful indeed. They think with great pleasure of getting away from the disagreeable position of anxiety, perhaps of wearing dependence, in which the universal and excessive competition of this country has placed them. But it is on the future that their imagination exclusively seizes. They can think in earnest about nothing but the colony. I have known a man of this class, who had been too careless of money here, begin, as soon as he had resolved on emigration, to save sixpences, and take care of bits of string, saying 'everything will be of use there.' There! it is common for people whose thoughts are fixed 'there,' to break themselves all at once of a confirmed habit—that of reading their favourite newspaper every day. All the newspapers of the old country are now equally uninteresting to them. If one falls in their way, they perhaps turn with alacrity to the shipping lists, and advertisements of passenger ships, or even to an account of the sale of Australian wool, or New Zealand flax; but they cannot see either the parliamentary debate, or the leading article which used to embody their own opinions, or the reports, accidents, and offences, of which they used to spell every word. Their reading now is confined to letters and newspapers from the colony, and books relating to it. They can hardly talk about anything that does not relate to 'there.'"—(P. 127.)
A man is far gone, indeed, when he has given up his Times! This zeal for emigration amongst the better classes, and especially amongst educated youths, who find the avenues to wealth blocked up in their own country, is, we apprehend, peculiar to our day, and amongst the most novel aspects which the subject of colonisation assumes. How many of these latter find their imaginations travelling even to the antipodes! Where shall we colonise? is a question canvassed in many a family, sometimes half in jest, half in earnest, till it leads to the actual departure of the boldest or most restless of the circle. Books are brought down and consulted; from the ponderous folio of Captain Cook's voyages—which, with its rude but most illustrative of prints, was the amusement of their childhood, when they would have thought a habitation in the moon as probable a business as one in New Zealand—to the last hot-pressed journal of a residence in Sydney; and every colony in turn is examined and discussed. Here climate is so delicious you may sleep without hazard in the open air. Sleep! yes, if the musquitoes let you. Musquitoes—oh! Another reads with delight of the noble breed of horses that now run wild in Australia, and of the bold horsemanship of those who drive in the herd of bullocks from their extensive pasturage, when it is necessary to assemble in order to number and to mark them. The name of the thing does not sound so romantic as that of a buffalo-hunt; but, armed with your tremendous whip, from the back of a horse whom you turn and wind at pleasure, to drive your not over-tractable bullocks, must task a good seat, and a steady hand, and a quick eye. A third dwells with a quieter delight on the beautiful scenery, and the pastoral life so suitable to it, which New Zealand will disclose. Valleys green as the meadows of Devonshire, hills as picturesque as those of Scotland, and the sky of Italy over all! and the aborigines friendly, peaceable. Yes, murmurs one, until they eat you. Faugh! but they are reformed in that particular. Besides, Dr Dieffenbach says, here, that "they find Europeans salt and disagreeable." Probably they had been masticating some tough old sailor, who had fed on junk all his life, and they found him salt enough. But let no one in his love of science suggest this explanation to them; let us rest under the odium of being salt and disagreeable.
These aborigines—one would certainly wish they were out of the way. Wild men! Wild—one cannot have fellowship with them. Men—one cannot shoot them. In Australia they are said to be not much wiser than baboons—one wishes they were altogether baboons, or altogether men. In New Zealand they are, upon the whole, a docile, simple people. The missionaries are schooling them as they would little children. A very simple people! They had heard of horses and of horsemanship; it was some tradition handed down from their great discoverer, Captain Cook. When lately some portly swine were landed on the island, they concluded these were the famous horses men rode upon in England. "They rode two of them to death." Probably, by that time, they suspected there was some error in the case.
Hapless aborigines! How it comes to pass we cannot stop to inquire, but certain it is they never prosper in any union with the white man. They get his gin, they get his gunpowder, and, here and there, some travesty of his religion. This is the best bargain they make where they are most fortunate. The two first gifts of the white man, at all events, add nothing to the amenity of character, and happen to be precisely the gifts they could most vividly appreciate. Our civilisation seems to have no other effect than to break up the sort of rude harmony which existed in their previous barbarism. They imitate, they do not emulate; what they see of us they do not understand. That ridiculous exhibition, so often described, which they make with our costume—a naked man with hat and feathers stuck upon his head; or, better still, converting a pair of leathers into a glistening helmet, the two legs hanging down at the back, where the flowing horse-hair is wont to fall—is a perfect emblem of what they have gained in mind and character from our civilisation.
These poor New Zealanders are losing—what think you says Dr Dieffenbach?—their digestion; getting dyspeptic. The missionaries have tamed them down; they eat more, fight less, and die faster. One of the "brethren," not the least intelligent to our mind, has introduced cricket as a substitute for their war-dances and other fooleries they had abolished.
When we want the soil which such aborigines are loosely tenanting, we must, we presume, displace them. There is no help for it. But, in all other cases, we could wish the white man would leave these dark children of the earth alone. If there exists another Tahiti, such as it was when Cook discovered it, such as we read of it under the old name of Otaheite, we hope that some eternal mist, drawn in a wide circle round the island, will shroud it from all future navigators. Were we some great mariner, and had discovered such an island, and had eaten of the bread-fruit of the hospitable native, and reclined under their peaceful trees, and seen their youths and maidens crowned with green boughs, sporting like fishes in their beautiful clear seas, no mermaid happier—we should know but of one way to prove our gratitude—to close our lips for ever on the discovery we had made. If there exist in some untraversed region of the ocean another such spot, and if there are still any genii, or jins, or whatever sea-fairies may be called, left behind in the world, we beseech of them to protect it from all prying circumnavigators. Let them raise bewildering mists, or scare the helmsman with imaginary breakers, or sit cross-legged upon the binnacle, and bewitch the compass—anyhow let them protect their charge. We could almost believe, from this moment, in the existence of such spirits or genii, having found so great a task for them.
We have no space to go back to other graver topics connected with colonisation which we have passed on our road. On one topic we had not, certainly, intended to be altogether silent. But it is perhaps better as it is; for the subject of transportation is so extensive, and so complicate, and so inevitably introduces the whole review of what we call secondary punishments—of our penal code, in short—that it were preferable to treat it apart. It would be very unsatisfactory merely to state a string of conclusions, without being able to throw up any defences against those objections which, in a subject so full of controversy, they would be sure to provoke.
In fine, we trust to no ideals, no theory or art of colonisation. Neither do we make any extraordinary or novel demands on Government. A great work is going on, but it will be best performed by simple means. We ask from the Government that it should survey and apportion the land, and secure its possession to the honest emigrant, and that it should delegate to the new settlement such powers of self-government as are necessary to its internal improvement. These, however, are important duties, and embrace much. The rest, with the exception of such liberality as may be thought advisable, in addition to the fund raised by the sale of waste land, for the despatch and outfit of the poor labourer or artisan—the rest must be left to the free spirit of Englishmen, whether going single or in groups and societies.
THE REACTION, OR FOREIGN CONSERVATISM.
Boston, February 1849.
It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of what a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of conscience. And this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a free people is substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with absolute right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular conscience is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it. They will fancy that they ought to will what they are not permitted to will, and the most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear tyrannical. For such a people there can be no cure, till they are restored to a healthy conscience. A despotism successfully established over them, and then moderately maintained, and benevolently administered, is the only thing that can save them from self-destruction.
I was not writing at random, then, my Basil, when I said in my last letter that the first want of France is a national conscience. As a nation, the French lack the moral sense. What sign of moral life have they shown for the last fifty years? The root of bitterness in the body politic of France, is the astonishing infidelity of the people. Whatever be the causes, the fact is not to be denied: the land whose crown was once, by courtesy, most Christian, must draw on courtesy and charity too, if it be now called Christian at all. The spirit of unbelief is national. It is the spirit of French literature—of the French press—of the French academy—of the French senate; I had almost added of the French church; and if I hesitate, it is not so much because I doubt the corrupting influences of the French priesthood, as because they are no longer Gallican priests, but simply the emissaries of Ultramontanism. There is no longer a French church. The Revolution made an end of that. When Napoleon, walking at Malmaison, heard the bells of Ruel, he was overpowered with a sense of the value of such associations as they revived in his own heart, and forthwith he opened the churches which had so long been the sepulchres of a nation's faith, convinced that they served a purpose in government, if only as a cheap police. He opened the churches, but he could not restore the church of France. He could do no more than enthrone surviving Ultramontanism in her ancient seats, and that by a manœuvre, which made it a creature and a slave of his ambition. When it revolted, he talked of Gallican liberties, but only for political purposes. Nor did the Restoration do any better. The church of St Louis was defunct. Gallican immunities were indeed asserted on paper; but, in effect, the Jesuits gained the day. The Orleans usurpation carried things further; for the priesthood, severed from the state, became more Ultramontane from apparent necessity, and lost, accordingly, their feeble hold on the remaining respect of the French people. Who was not startled, when the once devout Lamartine talked of "the new Christianity" of Liberty and Equality over the ruins of the Orleans dynasty, and thus betrayed the irreligion into which he had been repelled by the Christianity of French ecclesiastics! Thus always uncongenial to the national character, Ultramontanism has coated, like quicksilver, and eaten away those golden liberties which St Louis consecrated his life to preserve, and with which have perished the life and power of Christianity in France.
The history of France is emphatically a religious history. Every student must be struck with it. To understand even the history of its court, one must get at least an outline of what is meant by Jansenism and Molinism, and Ultramontanism, and the whole tissue of isms which they have created. No historian gives us an exemption from this amount of polemical information. The school of Michelet is as forward as that of de Maistre, in claiming a "religious mission" for France among the nations; and de Stael and Chateaubriand are impressed with the same idea. Her publicists, as well as her statesmen, have been always, in their own way, theologians; and, from Louis IX. to Louis XVI., the spirit of theology was, in some form or other, the spirit of every reign. Not only the Mazarins, but the Pompadours also, have made religion part of their craft; and religion became so entirely political under Louis XV., that irreligion was easily made political in its stead. In the court of France, in fact, theology has been the common trade; the trade of Condé and of Guise, of Huguenot and Papist, of Jansenist and Jesuit, of philosopher and poet, of harlots, and almost of lap-dogs. Even Robespierre must legislate upon the "consoling principle of an Etre Suprême," and Napoleon elevates himself into "the eldest son of the church." "A peculiar characteristic of this monarchy," says de Maistre, "is that it possesses a certain theocratic element, special to itself, which has given it fourteen centuries of duration." This element has given its colour to reigns and revolutions alike; and if one admit the necessity of religion to the perpetuity of a state, it deserves our attention, in the light of whatever contending parties have advanced upon the subject.
Let us begin with the revolutionists themselves. In the month of June 1844, Monsieur Quinet, "of the college of France," stood in his lecture-room, venting his little utmost against the "impassioned leaven of Reaction," which he declared to be fermenting in French society. His audience was literally the youth of nations; for, as I gather from his oratory, it embraced not only his countrymen, but, besides them, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and a sprinkling of negroes. Upon this interesting assembly, in which black spirits and white must have maintained the proportion, and something of the appearance, of their corresponding ebony and ivory in the key-board of a pianoforte, and which he had tuned to his liking by a series of preparatory exercises, he played, as a grand finale, a most brilliant experimental quick-step, which satisfied him that every chord vibrated in harmony with his own sweet voice. He was closing his instructions, and addressed his pupils, not as disciples, but as friends. His great object seems to have been to convince them of their own importance, as the illuminated school of a new gospel of which he is himself the dispenser, and through which, he promised them, they would become, with him, the regenerators of the world. Having fully indoctrinated them with his new Christianity, it was necessary to work them into fury against the old. He had already established the unity of politics and religion; he had shown, very artfully, that Christianity had identified itself with Ultramontanism, and that France must perish if it should triumph; and he had only to convince them of danger from that quarter, to influence the combustible spirits of his credulous hearers to the heat which his purpose required. This he did by bellowing Reaction, and anathematising Schlegel and de Maistre.
You were mistaken then, my Basil, in supposing this word Reaction altogether a bugbear, and in understanding it with reference only to the counter-spirit in favour of legitimacy, which has been generated by the revolution of last year. You see it was the hobgoblin of a certain class of fanatics, long before Louis Philippe had received his notice to quit. It was an "impassioned leaven" in French society five years ago, in the heated imagination, or else in the artful theory, of Quinet. What was really the case? There was, in his sober opinion, as much danger from the reaction at that time as from the Great Turk, and no more. He merely used it as an academic man-of-straw to play at foils with. He held it up to contempt as an exploded folly, and then pretended it was a living danger, only to increase his own reputation for daring, and to quicken the development of antagonist principles. He little dreamed the manikin would come to life, and show fight for the Bourbons and legitimacy. He cried Wolf for his own purposes, and the actual barking of the pack must be a terrible retribution! The reaction of 1848 must have come upon the professors like doomsday. I can conceive of him, at present, only as of Friar Bacon, when he stumbled upon the discovery of gunpowder. A moment since, he stood in his laboratory compounding the genuine elixir of life, and assuring his gaping disciples of the success of his experiment; but there has been a sudden detonation, and if the professor has miraculously escaped, it is only to find chaos come again, his admiring auditors blown to atoms, and nothing remaining of his philosophical trituration, except his smutty self, and a very bad smell. I speak of him as the personification of his system. Personally, he has been a gainer by the revolution. Guizot put him out of his place, and the Republic has put him back; but the Reaction is upon him, and his theories are already resolved into their original gases. "The college of France" may soon come to a similar dissolution.
Let us look for a while at foreign conservatism through Monsieur Quinet's glasses. I have introduced you to de Maistre, and de Maistre is to him what the Pope was to Luther. Quinet is, in his own way, another reformer; in fact, he announces his system, in its relations to Protestantism, as another noon risen upon mid-day. The theological character of foreign politics is as prominent in his writings as in those of his antagonists. Thus, to illustrate the character of the French Revolution, he takes us to the Council of Trent; and to demolish French Tories, he attacks Ultramontanism. This is indeed philosophical, considering the actual history of Europe, and the affinities of its Conservative party. Action and reaction are always equal. The cold infidelity of Great Britain was met by the cool reason of Butler, and sufficiently counteracted by even the frigid apologies of Watson, and the mechanical faith of Paley. But the passionate unbelief of the Encyclopædists produced the unbalanced credulity of the reaction; and Diderot, d'Alembert, and Voltaire, have almost, by fatality, involved the noble spirits of their correctors in that wrongheaded habit of believing, which shows its vigorous weakness in the mild Ballanche and the wavering Lamennais, and develops all its weak vigour in de Maistre and de Bonald. Thus it happens that Mons. Quinet gives to his published lectures the title of Ultramontanism; for he prefers to meet his antagonists on the untenable field of their superstition, and there to win a virtual victory over their philosophical and political wisdom. His book has reached me through the translation of Mr Cocks,[2] who has kindly favoured the literature of England with several similar importations from "the College of France," and who seems to be the chosen mouthpiece of the benevolent author himself, in addressing the besotted self-sufficiency of John Bull. So far, indeed, as it discusses Ultramontanism in itself, the work may have its use. It shows, with some force and more vociferation, that it has been the death of Spain, and of every state in which it has been allowed to work; and that, moreover, it has been the persevering foe of law, of science, and of morality. This is a true bill; but of him, as of his master Michelet, it may be said with emphasis, Tout, jusqu' à la vérité, trompe dans ses écrits. It does not follow, as he would argue, that political wisdom and Christian truth fall with Ultramontanism; nor does he prove it be so, by proving that de Maistre and others have thought so. The school of the Reaction are convicted of a mistake, into which their masters in Great Britain never fell. That is all that Quinet has gained, though he crows lustily for victory, and proceeds to construct his own political religion, as if Christianity were confessedly defunct. As to the style of the Professor, so far as I can judge it from a tumid and verbose translation, it is not wanting in the hectic brilliancy of rhetoric raised to fever-heat, or of French run mad. Even its argument, I doubt not, sounded logical and satisfactory, when its slender postulate of truth was set off with oratorical sophistry, enforced with professorial shrugs of the shoulders, or driven home with conclusive raps upon the auxiliary tabatière. But the inanimate logic, as it lies coffined in the version of Mr Cocks, looks very revolting. In fact, stripped of its false ornament, all its practical part is simply the revolutionism of the Chartists. Worse stuff was never declaimed to a subterranean conclave of insurgent operatives by a drunken Barabbas, with Tom Paine for his text, and a faggot of pikes for his rostrum. The results have been too immediate for even Mons. Quinet's ambition. From hearing sedition in the "College of France," his motley and party-coloured audience has broken up to enforce it behind the barricades. They turned revolutionists against reaction in posse, and reaction in esse is the very natural consequence.
"Every nation, like every individual, has received a certain mission, which it must fulfil. France exercises over Europe a real magistracy, which cannot be denied, and she was at the head of its religious system." So says de Maistre, and so far his bitter enemy is agreed. But, says de Maistre, "She has shamefully abused her mission; and since she has used her influence to contradict her vocation, and to debauch the morals of Europe, it is not surprising that she is restored to herself by terrible remedies." Here speaks the spirit of Reaction, and Quinet immediately shows fight. In his view she has but carried out her vocation. The Revolution was a glorious outbreak towards a new universal principle. In the jargon of his own sect, "it was a revolution differing from all preceding revolutions, ancient or modern, precisely in this, that it was the deliverance of a nation from the bonds and limits of her church, into the spirit of universality." The spirit of the national church, he maintains, had become Ultramontane; had lost its hold on men's minds; had made way for the ascendency of philosophy, and had tacitly yielded the sceptre of her sway over the intelligence and the conscience to Rousseau and Voltaire. Nor does the Professor admit that subsequent events have restored that sceptre. On the contrary, he appeals to his auditors in asserting that the priesthood have ceased to guide the French conscience. His audience applauds, and the enraptured Quinet catches up the response like an auctioneer. He is charmed with his young friends. He is sure the reaction will never seduce them into travelling to heaven by the old sterile roads. As for the réactionnaires, no language can convey his contempt for them. "After this nation," says he, "has been communing with the spirit of the universe upon Sinai, conversing face to face with God, they propose to her to descend from her vast conceptions, and to creep, crestfallen, into the spirit of sect." Thus he contrasts the catholicity of Pantheism with the catholicity of Romanism; and thus, with the instinct of a bulldog, does he fasten upon the weak points of foreign Conservatism, or hold it by the nose, a baited victim, in spite of its massive sinews and its generous indignation. This plan is a cunning one. He sinks the Conservative principles of the Reaction, and gives prominence only to its Ultramontanism. He shows that modern Ultramontanism is the creature of the Council of Trent, and reviews the history of Europe as connected with that Council. He proves the pernicious results of that Council in every state which has acknowledged it; shows that not preservation but ruin has been its inevitable effect upon national character; and so congratulates France for having broken loose from it in the great Revolution. He then deprecates its attempted resuscitation by Schlegel and de Maistre, and, falling back upon the "religious vocation" of France, exhorts his auditors to work it out in the spirit of his own evangel. This new gospel, it is almost needless to add, is that detestable impiety which was so singularly religious in the revolution of last February, profaning the name of the Redeemer to sanctify its brutal excesses, and pretending to find in the spirit of his gospel the elements of its furious Liberty and Equality. In the true sentiment of that revolution, an ideal portrait of the Messiah is elaborately engraved for the title-page of Mr Cock's translation! So a French quack adorns his shop with a gilded bust of Hippocrates! It is a significant hint of the humble origin of a system which, it must be understood, owes its present dignity and importance entirely to the genius of Mons. Quinet.
That the Reaction is thus identified with Ultramontanism, is a fact which its leading spirits would be the very last to deny. The necessity of religion to the prosperity of France is their fundamental principle; and religion being, in their minds, inseparable from Romanism, they will not see its defects; and their blind faith, like chloroform, makes them absolutely insensible to the sharp point of the weak spear with which Quinet pierces them. And it is but fair to suppose that Quinet and his colleagues are equally honest in considering Christianity and Ultramontanism synonymous. They see that the old religion of France has become, historically, a corrupt thing, and they propose a fresh Christianity in its place. Of one thing I am sure—they do not over-estimate the political importance of the Council of Trent. Let it be fairly traced in its connexions with kingdoms, with science, with letters, and with the conscience of nations, and it will be seen that Quinet is not far from correct, in taking it as the turning-point of the history of Europe. It produced Ultramontanism, or rather changed it from an abstraction into an organised system; and Ultramontanism, in its new shape, gave birth to the Jesuits. Christendom saw a new creed proposed as the bond of unity, and a new race of apostles propagating it with intrigue and with crime, and, in some places, with fire and sword. In proportion as the states of Europe incorporated Ultramontanism with their political institutions, they withered and perished. Old Romanism was one thing, and modern Ultramontanism another. Kingdoms that flourished while they were but Romanised, have perished since they became Tridentine.
Among English writers this distinction has not been generally made. Coleridge seems to have observed it, and has incidentally employed it in treating of another subject. But foreign literature is full of it, either tacitly implied or openly avowed, in different ways. Ultramontanism is, in Europe, a political and not merely a theological word,—its meaning results from its history. Before the Tridentine epoch, the national churches of Europe were still seven candle-sticks, in which glittered the seven stars of an essential personality and individual completeness. The "Church of Rome" still meant the Roman See, and, vast as were its usurpations over the national churches, it had neither reduced them to absolute unity in theology, nor absorbed their individuality into its own. The Roman Church, as we now understand it, was created by the Council of Trent, by a consolidation of national churches, and the quiet substitution of the creed of Pius IV. for the ancient creeds, as a test of unity. This fact explains the position of the Reformed before and after that extraordinary assembly. Till its final epoch, they had never fully settled their relations to the Papal See. The history of England is full of illustrations of this fact. Old Grostete of Lincoln spurned the authority of the Pope, but continued in all his functions as an English bishop till his death, in the thirteenth century. Wycliffe, in the fourteenth, was still more remarkable for resisting the papal pretensions, yet he died in the full exercise of his pastoral office, while elevating the host at Childermas. Henry VIII. himself had the benefit of masses for his pious soul at Notre Dame; and his friend Erasmus lived on easy terms with the Reformed, and yet never broke with the Vatican. Even the English prayer-book, under Elizabeth, was sanctioned by papal authority, with the proviso of her recognition of the supremacy, and for twelve years of her reign the popish party lived in communion with the Reformed Church of England. During all this period the dogmas of popes were fearlessly controverted by Cisalpine theologians, who still owned their supremacy in a qualified sense, and who boldly appealed to a future council against the decisions of the See of Rome. Ultramontanism had then, indeed, its home beyond the mountains, and when it came bellowing over its barrier, it was often met as "the Tinchel cows the game." But modern Ultramontanism is another thing. It is an organised system, swallowing up the nationalities of constituent churches, and giving them the absolute unity of an individual Roman church, in which Jesuitism is the circulating life-blood, and the Italian consistory the heart and head together. Such was the prodigy hatched during the seventeen years of Tridentine incubation. It appeared at the close of those interminable sessions, so different from all that had been anticipated, that it startled all Europe. It had quietly changed everything, and made Rome the sole church of Southern Europe. Quinet has not failed to present this fact very strongly. "That Council," says he, "had not, like its predecessors, its roots in all nations; it did not assemble about it the representatives of all Christendom. Its spirit was to give full sanction to the idea, which certain popes of the middle ages had established, of their pre-eminence over œcumenical assemblies. Thenceforward, what had been the effect of a particular genius, became the very constitution of the church. The great adroitness consisted in making the change without anywhere speaking of it. The church which was before tempered by assemblies convoked from all the earth, became an absolute monarchy. From that moment the ecclesiastical world is silent. The meeting of councils is closed, no more discussions, no more solemn deliberations; everything is regulated by bulls, letters, and ordinances. Popedom usurps all Christendom; the book of life is shut; for three centuries not one page has been added." One would think the school of the Reaction would feel the force of facts so efficiently urged, even in spite of their towering disgust at the purposes for which they are employed. In fact, their own maxims may be turned against them with great power, in this matter of Ultramontanism. De Maistre, in his argument for unwritten constitutions, speaks of the creeds of the church as furnishing no exception to his rule; for these, he argues, are not codes of belief, but they partake the nature of hymns—they have rhythmical beauty, they are chanted in solemn services, they are confessed to God upon the harp and organ. Now this is indeed true of those three ancient creeds which are still chanted in the service of the Church of England; but the creed of Pius IV., which is the distinguishing creed of the Roman church, is absolutely nothing else than a code of belief, and is the only creed in Christendom which lacks that rhythmical glory which he considers a test of truth! Even Quinet notices this liturgic impotence of the Ultramontane religion. "The Roman church," he says, "has lost in literature, together with the ideal of Christianity, the sentiment of her own poetry. What has become of the burning accents of Ambrose and Paulinus? Urban VIII. writes pagan verses to the Cavalier Berni;[3] and instead of Stabat mater or Salutaris hostia, the princes of the church compose mythological sonnets, at the very moment when Luther is thundering Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, that Te Deum of the Reformation."
No wonder France was reluctant to acknowledge a Council which had thus imposed a new creed on Christendom, and which dictated a new organisation to the ancient churches of Southern Europe. While other nations subscribed with artful evasions, she hesitated and submitted, but gave no formal assent. Rome had come over the Alps to absorb her, and she was loth to yield her birthright. She stood long in what Schlegel calls "a disguised half-schism," struggling against dissolution, the last lump to melt away in the Tridentine element. But where now is the church which St Louis left to France, strong in her anti-papal bulwarks? Where now are those bulwarks, the labour of his life, and the chief glory of a name which even Rome has canonised? As for Spain, Ultramontanism was riveted upon her by the Inquisition, and she is twice dead. One sees no more the churches of Western Christendom, fortified by Pragmatic Sanctions, and treated with as younger sisters, even by domineering Rome! They have disappeared; and the only light that lingers in their places is the sad sepulchral flame that owes its existence to decay.
Such is Ultramontanism. Follow its history, in connexion with political events in France, and you cannot fail to charge it with all the responsibility of French infidelity, and, consequently, of the present lamentable condition of the nation. Thrice has the spirit of France been in deadly collision with it—in the fire, in the wind, and in the earthquake. Its first antagonists were the Huguenots, and over them it triumphed by the persecutions of Louis XIV., following up the policy of Catherine de Medicis. It was next confronted by Jansenism under Louis XV., and that it overcame by intrigue and by ridicule. Under Louis XVI. it was obliged to meet the atheism of the Encyclopædists, which it had itself produced, and which terribly visited upon its head its own infernal inventions. To overwhelm the Port-Royalists, it had resorted to low caricatures and epigrams, and to philosophical satires upon their piety. Voltaire took from these the hint of his first warfare against Christianity. This was first a joke and a song, and then Ca Ira and A la lanterne; first the popguns of wit, then the open battery of Ecrasez l'infâme, and then the exploding mine of revolution. It merely reversed the stratagems of Ultramontanism, which began in massacre, and finished its triumphs with a jest; and both together have stamped the nation with its indelible character of half tiger and half monkey. The origin of such an issue of infamy cannot be concealed. France owes it all to her conduct in the crisis of the Reformation. Had the Gallic Church, under Henry of Navarre, fully copied the example of England, or had she even carried out her own instincts, repudiating the Council of Trent, and falling back upon the Pragmatic Sanction for a full defence of her independence, how different would have been her history, and that of the monarchy to which she would have proved a lasting support! Let the difference between Henri Quatre and Louis Quatorze, between Sully and Richelieu, illustrate the reply. Or it may be imagined, by comparing the campaigns of Cevennes with the peaceful mission of Fenelon to the Huguenots of Saintonge. Where now both church and state appear the mere materials of ambition to such as Mazarin and Dubois, or where even the purer genius of such as Bossuet and Massillon is exhibited in humiliating and disgraceful associations, the places of history might have been adorned by such bright spirits as were immured at Port-Royal, or such virtue as sketched the ideal kingdom of Télémaque, and rendered illustrious a life of uncomplaining sorrow in the pastoral chair of Cambray. Where the court can boast one Bourdaloue, there would have been, beside him, not a few like Pascal; and in the rural parishes there would have been many such as Arnauld and Nicole, training in simple piety and loyal worth the successive generations of a contented people. As for the palace, it would never have been haunted by the dark spirit of Jesuitism, which has so often hid itself in the robes of royalty, and reigned in the sovereign's name; and the people would have known it only as a fearful thing beyond the Pyrenees, whose ear was always in the confessional, and whose hand was ever upon the secret wires of the terrible Inquisition. The capital would have been a citadel of law, and the kingdom still a Christian state. Its history might have lacked a "Grand Monarque," and certainly a Napoleon; but then there would have been no dragonnades, and possibly no Dubarrydom; no Encyclopædie, and no Ca Ira! The bell of St Germain l'Auxerrois would have retained its bloody memory as the tocsin of St Bartholomew's massacre, but it would never have sounded its second peal of infamy as the signal for storming the Tuileries, and for opening those successive vials of avenging woe, in which France is expiating her follies and her crimes.
Bossuet, in his funeral oration upon Queen Henrietta, unhappily for his own cause, has challenged a comparison between the histories of France and England, which, if he were living in our days, he would hardly renew with pleasure. The Anglican Reformation was rashly charged by him with all the responsibility of the Great Rebellion; but facts have proved that revolutions are by no means confined to anti-papal countries, while history may be safely appealed to by Englishmen, in deciding as to the kind of religion which has best encountered the excesses of rebellion, and most effectually cured the disease. The Anglican Church survived the Great Rebellion, with fidelity to itself: the Gallic Church perished in the Revolution. Before the vainglorious taunt of Bossuet had passed from the memory of living men, all those causes were at work in France, which bred the whirlwind of infidelity, and which insured a revolution, not of fanaticism, but of atheism. The real power of the two churches, in moulding the character of a people, and retaining the loyalty of its noblest intellect, became, then, singularly apparent. In France, it was superstition to believe in God. In France, philosophers were afraid to own a great First Cause. In France, noblemen were ashamed to confess a conscience. In France, bishops and cardinals were foremost in apostasy, and claimed their sacerdotal rank only to become the high-priests of atheistic orgies. It is needless to cite, in comparison, the conduct of parallel classes during the Great Rebellion in England; while, at the very moment in which these things were transacting, the brightest genius in her Imperial Parliament could proclaim himself not only a believer, but a crusader for Christianity. It was a noble answer to the ghost of poor Bossuet, when such a man as Burke, addressing a gentleman of France, declared the adhesion of England to her Reformed religion to be not the result of indifference but of zeal; when he proudly contrasted the intelligent faith of his countrymen with the fanatical impiety of the French; and when, with a dignity to which sarcasm has seldom attained, he reminded a nation of atheists, that there was a people, every whit its peer, which still exulted in the Christian name, and among whom religion, so far from being relegated to provinces, and the firesides of peasants, still sat in the first rank of the legislature, and "reared its mitred front" in the very face of the throne. The withering rebuke of such a boast must be measured by the standard of the time when it was given. In Paris, the mitre had just been made the ornament of an ass, which bore in mockery, upon its back, the vessels of the holy sacrament, and dragged a Bible at its tail.
Thus the colossal genius of Burke stood before the world, in that war of elements, trampling the irreligion of France beneath his feet, like the Archangel thrusting Satan to his bottomless abyss. The spectacle was not lost. It was that beautiful and sublime exhibition of moral grandeur that quickened the noblest minds in Europe to imitative virtue, and produced the school of the Reaction. It was rather the spirit of British faith, and law, and loyalty, personified in him. The same spirit had been felt in France before: it had moulded the genius of Montesquieu, abstractly; but Burke was its mighty concrete, and he wrote himself like a photograph upon kindred intellect throughout the world. Before his day, the character of English liberty had been laboriously studied and mechanically learned; but he, as its living representative and embodiment, made himself the procreant author of an intellectual family. I fear you will regard this as a theory of my own, but I would not have ventured to say this on my mere surmise. One whose religion identifies him with Ultramontanism has made the acknowledgment before me. I refer to the English editor and translator of Schlegel's Philosophy of History. According to him, Schlegel at Vienna, and Goerres at Munich, were "the supreme oracles of that illustrious school of liberal conservatives, which numbered, besides those eminent Germans, a Baron von Haller in Switzerland, a Viscount de Bonald in France, a Count Henri de Merode in Belgium, and a Count de Maistre in Piedmont."[4] From the writings of these great men, in a greater or less degree, he augurs the future political regeneration of Europe; and yet, strongly warped as he is away from England, and towards Rome, as the source of all moral and national good, he does not conceal the fact that this splendid school of the Reaction was "founded by our great Burke." My hopes from the writings of these men are not so sanguine: but, so far as they are true to their original, they have been already of great service. They may hereafter be made still more powerful for good; and if, at the same time, the rising school of Conservatism, which begins to make itself felt in America, shall impart its wholesome influences to an off-shoot of England, so vast already, and of such grand importance to the future, then, and not till then, will be duly estimated the real greatness of those splendid services which Burke was created to perform, not for his country only, but for the human race.
Perhaps it could hardly have been otherwise; but it must always be deplored that the Conservatism of England was reproduced on the Continent in connexion with the Christianity of Ultramontanism. The conservatism of de Stael and of Chateaubriand, though repudiated by the réactionnaires, is indeed worthy of honourable mention, as their characters will ever be of all admiration; yet it must be owned to be deficient in force, and by no means executive. It was the Conservatism of impulse—the Conservatism of genius, but not the Conservatism of profound philosophy and energetic benevolence. The spirit that breathes in the Génie du Christianisme is always beautiful, and often devout, yet it has been justly censured, as recommending less the truth than the beauty of the religion of Jesus Christ; and though it doubtless did something to reproduce the religious sentiment, it seems to have effected nothing in behalf of religious principle. Its author would have fulfilled a nobler mission had he taught his countrymen, in sober prose, their radical defects in morality, and their absolute lack of a conscience. The Conservatives of the Reaction have at least attempted greater things. They have bluntly told the French nation that they must reform; they have set themselves to produce again the believing spirit: their mistake has been, that they have confounded faith with superstition, and taken the cause of the Jesuits into the cause of their country and their God. Nothing could have been more fatal. It arms against them such characters as Michelet,[5] with his Priests, Women, and Families, and makes even Quinet formidable with his lectures on "the Jesuits and Ultramontanism." Yet it must be urged in their behalf, that they have been pardonably foolish, for they drew their error with their mother's milk; and when even faith was ridiculed as credulity, it was an extravagance almost virtuous to rush into superstition. Such is the dilemma of a good man in Continental Europe: his choice lies between the extremes of corrupt faith and philosophic unbelief. This was the misfortune of poor Frederick Schlegel; and, disgusted with the hollow rationalism of Germany, he became a Papist, in order to profess himself a Christian. The mistake was magnanimously made. We cannot but admire the man who eats the book of Roman infallibility, in his hunger for the bread of everlasting life. Even Chateaubriand must claim our sympathies on this ground. Our feelings are with such errorists—our convictions of truth remain unaltered; and we cannot but lament the fatality which has thus attended European Conservatism like its shadow, and exposed it to successful assaults from its foes. I have shown how they use their opportunity. And no wonder, when this substitution of Ultramontanism for Christianity has involved de Maistre in an elaborate defence of the Inquisition—debased the Conservatism of de Bonald to slavish absolutism;[6] and when true to its deadening influence upon the conscience, it implicated von Haller in the infamous perjury which, though committed under the sanction of a Romish bishop, led to his ignominious expulsion from the sovereign council at Berne. Chateaubriand has not escaped an infection from the same atmosphere. It taints his writings. In such a work as the Génie du Christianisme, denounced as it is by the Ultramontanists generally, there is much that is not wholesome. The eloquent champion of faith wields the glaive as stoutly for fables as for eternal verities. The poet makes beauty drag decay in her train, and ties a dead corpse to the wings of immortality. Truth itself, in his apology, though brought out in grand relief, is sculptured on a sepulchre full of dead men's bones; and, unhappily, while we draw near to examine the perfection of his ideal, we find ourselves repelled by a lurking scent of putrefaction.
The career of de Maistre is, in epitome, that of his school. Disgusted with Jacobinism, and naturally delighting in paradox, it seemed to afford him relief to avow himself a papist, in an age of atheism. He was not only the author of the reactionary movement, but his character was itself the product of Reaction. Driven with his king to Sardinia, in 1792, by the invasion of Piedmont, his philosophical contempt for the revolutionists was exhibited in his Considerations sur la France, from which, in a former letter, I have made so long a quotation. In this work—in some respects his best—his Ultramontanism is far from extravagant: and not only his religious principles as they were then, but also the effect which everything English was then producing on his mind, is clearly seen in a comment upon the English Church, which, as it passed his review, and was printed again in 1817 with no retractation, must be regarded as somewhat extraordinary. "If ever Christians reunite," says he, "as all things make it their interest to do, it would seem that the movement must take rise in the Church of England. Calvinism was French work, and consequently an exaggerated production. We are pushed too far away by the sectarians of so unsubstantial a religion, and there is no mean by which they may comprehend us: but the Church of England, which touches us with one hand, touches with the other a class whom we cannot reach; and although, in a certain point of view, she may thus appear the butt of two parties, (as being herself rebellious, though preaching authority,) yet in other respects she is most precious, and may be considered as one of those chemical intermèdes, which are capable of producing a union between elements dissociable in themselves." He seldom shows such moderation; for the Greek and Anglican churches he specially hates. In 1804 he was sent ambassador to St Petersburg; and there he resided till 1817, fulfilling his diplomatic duties with that zeal for his master, and that devotion to conservative interests, which are the spirit of his writings. There he published, in 1814, the pithy Essai sur le principe générateur des Constitutions, in which he reduced to an abstract form the doctrines of his former treatise on France. His style is peculiarly relishable, sometimes even sportive; but its main maxims are laid down with a dictatorial dignity and sternness, which associate the tractate, in the minds of many, with the writings of Montesquieu. This essay, so little known in England, has found an able translator and editor in America, who commends it to his countrymen as an antidote to those interpretations which are put upon our constitutional law by the political disciples of Rousseau. I commend the simple fact to your consideration, as a sign of the more earnest tone of thinking, on such matters, which is beginning to be felt among us. The fault of the essay is its practical part, or those applications into which his growing Ultramontanism diverted his sound theories. His principles are often capable of being turned upon himself, as I have noticed in the matter of creeds. His genius also found a congenial amusement in translating Plutarch's Delays of Divine Justice, which he accompanied with learned notes, illustrating the influence of Christianity upon a heathen mind. On his return from St Petersburg in 1817, appeared his violent Ultramontane work, Du Pape, in which he most ingeniously, but very sophistically, uses in support of the papacy an elaborate argument, drawn from the good which an overruling Providence has accomplished, by the very usurpations and tyrannies of the Roman See. As if this were not enough, however, he closes his life and labours with another work, the Soirées de St Petersbourg, in which, with bewitching eloquence, he expends all his powers of varied learning, and pointed sarcasm, and splendid sophistry, upon questions which have but the one point of turning everything to the account of his grand theory of church and state. Thus, from first to last, he identifies his political and moral philosophy with religious dogmas essentially ruinous to liberty, and which, during three centuries, have wasted every kingdom in which they have gained ascendency. To the direct purpose of uprooting the little that remained of Gallicanism, he devoted a treatise, which accompanies his work Du Pape, and of which the first book is entitled, De l'Esprit d'opposition nourri en France contre le Saint-Siège. Its points may be stated in a simple sentence from the works of his coadjutor, Frederick Schlegel, who, in a few words, gives the theory which has been the great mistake of the Reaction. "The disguised half-schism of the Gallican church," says he,—"not less fatal in its historical effects than the open schism of the Greeks—has contributed very materially towards the decline of religion in France, down to the period of the Restoration."[7] He illustrates it by the disputes of Louis XIV. with the court of Rome, but forgets to say anything of his extermination of the Huguenots. In one sense, however, he is right. It was precisely the half-schism to which the mischief is attributable. This half-way work it was that enabled Louis XIV. to assert the Gallican theory against a semi-Protestant pope, for the very purpose of fostering genuine Ultramontanism and favouring the Jesuits; while under another pontiff he could repudiate Gallicanism, and force the clergy to retract what he had forced them to adopt! The schism of England was doubtless "an open schism," in the opinion of Schlegel, and if so, it should have been followed, on his theory, by worse effects; but Schlegel lives too long after the days of Bossuet to bring her example into view. The natural appeal would have been to that example, as its history is cotemporary; but he adroitly diverts attention from so instructive a parallel, and cunningly drags in "the open schism of the Greeks!" Thus, against a bristling front of facts, he drives his theory that France has not been Romish enough, and lends all his energies to render her less Gallican and more Tridentine. Were he now alive, he might see reason to amend his doctrine in the condition of Rome itself! But the condition of France is quite as conclusive. Since the Restoration, the French Church has been growing more and more Ultramontane, and the people are worse and worse. Gallicanism is extinct, but results are all against the Reactionary theory. France has no more a la Vendée; there will be no more Chouans; the present Church is incapable of reviving such things. It makes the infidels. I know there is less show of rampant atheism just now than formerly; but if there is less of paroxysm, there is less of life. France dies of a chronic atheism. The Abbé Bonnetat, writing in 1845 on The Religious and Moral Wants of the French Population, expresses nothing but contempt for the alleged improvement in religious feeling. According to him, almost a tenth of the male population, in any given district, not only do not believe in God, but glory in their unbelief. Half of all the rest make no secret of their infidelity as to the immortality of the soul; and their wives are equally sceptical, to the curse of their children's children! "The residue believe," says the Abbé, "only in the sense of not denying. They affirm nothing, but, as compared with the others, they lack the science of misbelief." To go on with his melancholy picture, the divine and salutary institution of the Lord's day no longer effects its purpose. In towns, the working classes and tradespeople scarcely ever enter the churches. In the rural districts, a tenth of the people never go to church at all; and of the rest, one half may hear a mass on the five great festivals, while the other half, though more frequent in attendance, are very irregular. One Sunday they perform the duty perfunctorily; the next they work in the fields; the next they stay at home, amuse themselves, and forget religion as part of "dull care." The young folk, in many places, receive their first and last communion at twelve or fourteen, and that is the end of their conformity. A worse feature yet in the domestic manners, resulting from this state of religion, is the fact that girls and boys are brought up very much in the same way, and are thrown promiscuously together, spending their evenings where they choose. Parents have ceased to ask their children—Why were you not at church? Were you at vespers? Were you at mass? and in fact are the first to corrupt their offspring, by their brutal irreligion, and coarse language, and shameless behaviour.[8]
Such is the moral picture of France. The Abbé has brightened his mass of shadow with here and there a reflection of light, but there is no mistaking his work for a Claude Lorraine. France is in a moral eclipse, and her portrait presents, of necessity, the chiaro 'scuro of a Rembrandt. One needs no more than these confessions of a French ecclesiastic to account for her false and fickle notions of liberty, and for her interminable émeutes and revolutions. Yet if Quinet has not wholly invented his assertions, the Conservatism of France is pledged to prescribe as remedies the same old poison from which the disease results. It would take the Christianity of the nation, at its last gasp, and dose it anew with Ultramontanism. They have adopted the sound principle, that Christianity moulds a people to enlightened notions of liberty, but they seem not to know that it does this by acting directly upon the conscience; and hence their political system is spoiled by their fatal substitution, for pure Christianity, of that spurious religion whose great defect is precisely this, that it does not undertake to cleanse and cure the conscience, but only to subject it, mechanically, to irrational authority. Montesquieu, in asserting the importance of Christianity, without question failed to detect this essential defect in Popery, but he instinctively taught his countrymen, by memorable example, to eschew Ultramontanism. In the closing scene of a life which, with all its blemishes, was a great life, and, in comparison with his times, a good one, he accepted with reverence the ministrations of his parish priest, but repulsed from his deathbed, with aversion and disgust, the officious and intrusive Jesuits.[9] De Maistre is more devout than Montesquieu, but he is less jealous of liberty, and his ideas of "what a people ought to will" are limited, if not illiberal. His more moderate ally, Ballanche, has not unjustly characterised him as "not, like Providence, merciful, but, like destiny, inexorable." It is impossible that a Conservatism, of which such is the sovereign genius, should achieve anything for the restoration of such a country as France. I have, indeed, predicted the restoration of the Bourbons, according to de Maistre's principles, by the sheer tenacity of life which belongs to a hereditary claim, and by which it outlasts all other pretensions. But I cannot think that either he or his disciples have done much to bring it about; and still less do I imagine that their system, as a system, can give permanence to the monarchy or prosperity to the state. On the contrary, let Mons. Berryer, or the Comte de Montalembert, attempt the settlement of the kingdom on the theory of the réactionnaires, and they will speedily bring it to that full stop which Heaven at last adjudges to princes as well as to people, "who show themselves untutored by calamity, and rebels to experience." They will, at best, prolong the era of revolutions to some indefinite epoch of futurity, and consign the nation to a fever, which will return periodically, like a tertian, and wear it out by shakings.
It will be well, then, if the imperial farce that must precede "the legitimate drama" shall prove somewhat protracted. The Legitimists, meantime, may become convinced of the blunder of the Reaction, and resolve upon a wiser and more sound conservatism. De Maistre hazards some predictions in his works, on which he stakes the soundness of his theories, and for which he challenges derision and contempt to his doctrines, if they fail. The position of Pio Nono, from the very outset of his career, has stultified those theories already; and if he remains permanently where he now is, it will be to good-breeding alone that de Maistre will owe his preservation from the contempt he has invoked, by staking his reputation on the conservative character of that very court of Rome, from which the democratic wildfire, that has inflamed all Europe, has proceeded! In any conceivable settlement of the Roman States, the Pontiff will hardly be to Europe what he has been during the former years of this century; and if he is to sink to a mere patriarchal primate, the grand dream of ultramontanism is dissipated.[10] It is to be hoped, then, that the restoration may be deferred till the Legitimists have been effectually taught the grand fallacy of ultramontane conservatism; and that Henry V. will ascend the throne, cured of the hereditary plague of his immediate ancestors, and willing to revert, for his example, to his great name-sake, Henri Quatre. He will need another Sully to restore France to a sound mind. His cause demands a minister who will not trust it to the tide of impulse on which it will come in, but who will labour with prudence and with foresight, to gain an anchorage before the ebb. Give but a minister to the restoration capable of that kind of patient and practical forecast, which sent Peter to the dock-yards; and let him begin with the parochial schools, to mould a new race of Frenchmen under the influences of true religion; and let him have the seventeen years which Louis Philippe wasted on steam-ships and bastions, and Montpensier marriages; and then, if it be "men that constitute a state," there is yet a future of hope for France. And forgive me for adding, Basil, that if England shall reverse this policy, and make the national schools the sources of disaffection to the national religion—then may she expect to see her Oxford and Cambridge degraded to such seats of sedition as "the College of France," and their ingenuous youth converted from gownsmen into blousemen, under such savans as Quinet. Remember, too, in connexion with what I have written, that Ireland is the most ultramontane of all nations under heaven, and you will be able to estimate the value of government measures for its relief! May God open the eyes of all who seek the prosperity of the British empire to the primary importance of a wholesome national religion, retaining its hold on the national heart, and moulding the national conscience to the grand political wisdom of the proverb—"My son, fear the Lord and the king, and meddle not with them that are given to change." Yours,
Ernest.
MADAME D'ARBOUVILLE'S "VILLAGE DOCTOR."
The readers of Blackwood can hardly have forgotten a charming French tale, of which an abridged translation appeared, under the title of "An Unpublished French Novel," in the number of the Magazine for December 1847. In the brief notice prefixed to it, we mentioned the existence of a companion story by the same authoress, which had obtained wider circulation than its fellow, through arbitrary transfer to the pages of a French periodical; and which, on that account, although of more convenient length than the Histoire Hollandaise, we abstained from reproducing. Having thus drawn attention to one of the most pleasing tales we in any language are acquainted with, we fully expected speedily to meet with it in an English version. Not having done so, our vivid recollection of the great merits of "Le Médecin du Village" now induces us to revoke our first decision—the more readily that we have repeatedly been solicited to give the English public an opportunity of appreciating a tale unprocurable in the form in which it was originally printed, and which few persons in this country are likely to have read in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The exquisite delineation of the erring, but meekly penitent Annunciata, and of the long-suffering and enthusiastically pious Christine, may well inspire a wish to become acquainted with other productions of the same delicate and graceful pen. The simple story of the Village Doctor will not disappoint expectation. We ourselves, deeply sensible of the fascinations of the Countess d'Arbouville's style, consider it her happiest effort; and although we once hinted a doubt of the probability of its crowning incident, we forget to play the critic when under the influence of her touching pathos and delightful diction. In our present capacity of translators we feel but too strongly the impossibility of rendering the artless elegance of her style, which flows on, smooth, fresh, and sparkling, like a summer streamlet over golden sands. And, with all her apparent simplicity, Madame d'Arbouville is a cunning artist, playing with skilful hand upon the chords of the heart, which vibrate at her lightest touch. The effects she produces are the more striking because seemingly unsought. But her merits will be better exhibited by this second specimen of her writings than by any praise we could lavish; and we therefore proceed, without further preamble, to the narrative of Eva Meredith's sorrows, as given by her humble friend,