RURAL RIDE FROM PETERSFIELD TO KENSINGTON.
Petworth,
Saturday, 12th Nov. 1825.
I was at this town in the summer of 1823, when I crossed Sussex from Worth to Huntington in my way to Titchfield in Hampshire. We came this morning from Petersfield, with an intention to cross to Horsham, and go thence to Worth, and then into Kent; but Richard’s horse seemed not to be fit for so strong a bout, and therefore we resolved to bend our course homewards, and first of all to fall back upon our resources at Thursley, which we intend to reach to-morrow, going through North Chapel, Chiddingfold, and Brook.
At about four miles from Petersfield we passed through a village called Rogate. Just before we came to it I asked a man who was hedging on the side of the road how much he got a day. He said, 1s. 6d.: and he told me that the allowed wages was 7d. a day for the man and a gallon loaf a week for the rest of his family; that is to say, one pound and two and a quarter ounces of bread for each of them; and nothing more! And this, observe, is one-third short of the bread allowance of gaols, to say nothing of the meat and clothing and lodging of the inhabitants of gaols. If the man have full work; if he get his eighteen-pence a day, the whole nine shillings does not purchase a gallon loaf each for a wife and three children, and two gallon loaves for himself. In the gaols the convicted felons have a pound and a half each of bread a day to begin with: they have some meat generally, and it has been found absolutely necessary to allow them meat when they work at the tread-mill. It is impossible to make them work at the tread-mill without it. However, let us take the bare allowance of bread allowed in the gaols. This allowance is, for five people, fifty-two pounds and a half in the week; whereas the man’s nine shillings will buy but fifty-two pounds of bread; and this, observe, is a vast deal better than the state of things in the north of Hampshire, where the day-labourer gets but eight shillings a week. I asked this man how much a day they gave to a young able man who had no family, and who was compelled to come to the parish-officers for work. Observe that there are a great many young men in this situation, because the farmers will not employ single men at full wages, these full wages being wanted for the married man’s family, just to keep them alive according to the calculation that we have just seen. About the borders of the north of Hampshire they give to these single men two gallon loaves a week, or, in money, two shillings and eight-pence, and nothing more. Here, in this part of Sussex, they give the single man seven-pence a day, that is to say, enough to buy two pounds and a quarter of bread for six days in the week, and as he does not work on the Sunday there is no seven-pence allowed for the Sunday, and of course nothing to eat: and this is the allowance, settled by the magistrates, for a young, hearty, labouring man; and that, too, in the part of England where, I believe, they live better than in any other part of it. The poor creature here has seven-pence a day for six days in the week to find him food, clothes, washing, and lodging! It is just seven-pence, less than one half of what the meanest foot soldier in the standing army receives; besides that the latter has clothing, candle, fire, and lodging into the bargain! Well may we call our happy state of things the “envy of surrounding nations, and the admiration of the world!” We hear of the efforts of Mrs. Fry, Mr. Buxton, and numerous other persons, to improve the situation of felons in the gaols; but never, no never, do we catch them ejaculating one single pious sigh for these innumerable sufferers, who are doomed to become felons or to waste away their bodies by hunger.
When we came into the village of Rogate, I saw a little group of persons standing before a blacksmith’s shop. The church-yard was on the other side of the road, surrounded by a low wall. The earth of the church-yard was about four feet and a half higher than the common level of the ground round about it; and you may see, by the nearness of the church windows to the ground, that this bed of earth has been made by the innumerable burials that have taken place in it. The group, consisting of the blacksmith, the wheelwright, perhaps, and three or four others, appeared to me to be in a deliberative mood. So I said, looking significantly at the church-yard, “It has taken a pretty many thousands of your fore-fathers to raise that ground up so high.” “Yes, Sir,” said one of them. “And,” said I, “for about nine hundred years those who built that church thought about religion very differently from what we do.” “Yes,” said another. “And,” said I, “do you think that all those who made that heap there are gone to the devil?” I got no answer to this. “At any rate,” added I, “they never worked for a pound and a half of bread a day.” They looked hard at me, and then looked hard at one another; and I, having trotted off, looked round at the first turning, and saw them looking after us still. I should suppose that the church was built about seven or eight hundred years ago, that is to say, the present church; for the first church built upon this spot was, I dare say, erected more than a thousand years ago. If I had had time, I should have told this group that, before the Protestant Reformation, the labourers of Rogate received four-pence a day from Michaelmas to Lady-day; five-pence a day from Lady-day to Michaelmas, except in harvest and grass-mowing time, when able labourers had seven-pence a day; and that, at this time, bacon was not so much as a halfpenny a pound: and, moreover, that the parson of the parish maintained out of the tithes all those persons in the parish that were reduced to indigence by means of old age or other cause of inability to labour. I should have told them this, and, in all probability a great deal more, but I had not time; and, besides, they will have an opportunity of reading all about it in my little book called the History of the Protestant Reformation.
From Rogate we came on to Trotten, where a Mr. Twyford is the squire, and where there is a very fine and ancient church close by the squire’s house. I saw the squire looking at some poor devils who were making “wauste improvements, ma’am,” on the road which passes by the squire’s door. He looked uncommonly hard at me. It was a scrutinizing sort of look, mixed, as I thought, with a little surprise, if not of jealousy, as much as to say, “I wonder who the devil you can be?” My look at the squire was with the head a little on one side, and with the cheek drawn up from the left corner of the mouth, expressive of anything rather than a sense of inferiority to the squire, of whom, however, I had never heard speak before. Seeing the good and commodious and capacious church, I could not help reflecting on the intolerable baseness of this description of men, who have remained mute as fishes, while they have been taxed to build churches for the convenience of the Cotton-Lords and the Stock-Jobbers. First, their estates have been taxed to pay interest of debts contracted with these Stock-jobbers, and to make wars for the sale of the goods of the Cotton-Lords. This drain upon their estates has collected the people into great masses, and now the same estates are taxed to build churches for them in these masses. And yet the tame fellows remain as silent as if they had been born deaf and dumb and blind. As towards the labourers, they are sharp and vigorous and brave as heart could wish; here they are bold as Hector. They pare down the wretched souls to what is below gaol allowance. But, as towards the taxers, they are gentle as doves. With regard, however, to this Squire Twyford, he is not, as I afterwards found, without some little consolation; for one of his sons, I understand, is, like squire Rawlinson of Hampshire, a police justice in London! I hear that Squire Twyford was always a distinguished champion of loyalty; what they call a staunch friend of Government; and it is therefore natural that the Government should be a staunch friend to him. By the taxing of his estate, and paying the Stock-Jobbers out of the proceeds, the people have been got together in great masses, and, as there are Justices wanted to keep them in order in those masses, it seems but reasonable that the squire should, in one way or another, enjoy some portion of the profits of keeping them in order. However, this cannot be the case with every loyal squire; and there are many of them who, for want of a share in the distribution, have been totally extinguished. I should suppose Squire Twyford to be in the second rank upwards (dividing the whole of the proprietors of land into five ranks). It appears to me that pretty nearly the whole of this second rank is gone; that the Stock-Jobbers have eaten them clean up, having less mercy than the cannibals, who usually leave the hands and the feet; so that this squire has had pretty good luck.
From Trotten we came to Midhurst, and, having baited our horses, went into Cowdry Park to see the ruins of that once noble mansion, from which the Countess of Salisbury (the last of the Plantagenets) was brought by the tyrant Henry the Eighth to be cruelly murdered, in revenge for the integrity and the other great virtues of her son, Cardinal Pole, as we have seen in Number Four, paragraph 115, of the “History of the Protestant Reformation.” This noble estate, one of the finest in the whole kingdom, was seized on by the king, after the possessor had been murdered on his scaffold. She had committed no crime. No crime was proved against her. The miscreant Thomas Cromwell, finding that no form of trial would answer his purpose, invented a new mode of bringing people to their death; namely, a Bill, brought into Parliament, condemning her to death. The estate was then granted to a Sir Anthony Brown, who was physician to the king. By the descendants of this Brown, one of whom was afterwards created Lord Montague, the estate has been held to this day; and Mr. Poyntz, who married the sole remaining heiress of this family, a Miss Brown, is now the proprietor of the estate, comprising, I believe, forty or fifty manors, the greater part of which are in this neighbourhood, some of them, however, extending more than twenty miles from the mansion. We entered the park through a great iron gateway, part of which being wanting, the gap was stopped up by a hurdle. We rode down to the house and all round about and in amongst the ruins, now in part covered with ivy, and inhabited by innumerable starlings and jackdaws. The last possessor was, I believe, that Lord Montague who was put an end to by the celebrated nautical adventure on the Rhine along with the brother of Sir Glory. These two sensible worthies took it into their heads to go down a place something resembling the waterfall of an overshot mill. They were drowned just as two young kittens or two young puppies would have been. And as an instance of the truth that it is an ill wind that blows nobody good, had it not been for this sensible enterprise, never would there have been a Westminster Rump to celebrate the talents and virtues of Westminster’s Pride and England’s Glory. It was this Lord Montague, I believe, who had this ancient and noble mansion completely repaired, and fitted up as a place of residence: and a few days, or a very few weeks, at any rate, after the work was completed, the house was set on fire (by accident, I suppose), and left nearly in the state in which it now stands, except that the ivy has grown up about it and partly hidden the stones from our sight. You may see, however, the hour of the day or night at which the fire took place; for there still remains the brass of the face of the clock, and the hand pointing to the hour. Close by this mansion there runs a little river which runs winding away through the valleys, and at last falls into the Arron. After viewing the ruins, we had to return into the turnpike road, and then enter another part of the park, which we crossed, in order to go to Petworth. When you are in a part of this road through the park you look down and see the house in the middle of a very fine valley, the distant boundary of which, to the south and south-west, is the South Down Hills. Some of the trees here are very fine, particularly some most magnificent rows of the Spanish chestnut. I asked the people at Midhurst where Mr. Poyntz himself lived; and they told me at the lodge in the park, which lodge was formerly the residence of the head keeper. The land is very good about here. It is fine rich loam at top, with clay further down. It is good for all sorts of trees, and they seem to grow here very fast.
We got to Petworth pretty early in the day. On entering it you see the house of Lord Egremont, which is close up against the park-wall, and which wall bounds this little vale on two sides. There is a sort of town-hall here, and on one side of it there is the bust of Charles the Second, I should have thought; but they tell me it is that of Sir William Wyndham, from whom Lord Egremont is descended. But there is another building much more capacious and magnificent than the town-hall; namely, the Bridewell, which, from the modernness of its structure, appears to be one of those “wauste improvements, Ma’am,” which distinguish this enlightened age. This structure vies, in point of magnitude with the house of Lord Egremont itself, though that is one of the largest mansions in the whole kingdom. The Bridewell has a wall round it that I should suppose to be twenty feet high. This place was not wanted, when the labourer got twice as much instead of half as much as the common standing soldier. Here you see the true cause why the young labouring man is “content” to exist upon 7d. a day, for six days in the week, and nothing for Sunday. Oh! we are a most free and enlightened people; our happy constitution in church and state has supplanted Popery and slavery; but we go to a Bridewell unless we quietly exist and work upon 7d. a day!
Thursley,
Sunday, 13th Nov.
To our great delight we found Richard’s horse quite well this morning, and off we set for this place. The first part of our road, for about three miles and a half, was through Lord Egremont’s Park. The morning was very fine; the sun shining; a sharp frost after a foggy evening; the grass all white, the twigs of the trees white, the ponds frozen over; and everything looking exceedingly beautiful. The spot itself being one of the very finest in the world, not excepting, I dare say, that of the father of Saxe Cobourg itself, who has, doubtless, many such fine places.
In a very fine pond, not far from the house and close by the road, there are some little artificial islands, upon one of which I observed an arbutus loaded with its beautiful fruit (quite ripe), even more thickly than any one I ever saw even in America. There were, on the side of the pond, a most numerous and beautiful collection of water-fowl, foreign as well as domestic. I never saw so great a variety of water-fowl collected together in my life. They had been ejected from the water by the frost, and were sitting apparently in a state of great dejection: but this circumstance has brought them into a comparatively small compass; and we facing our horses about, sat and looked at them, at the pond, at the grass, at the house, till we were tired of admiring. Everything here is in the neatest and most beautiful state. Endless herds of deer, of all the varieties of colours; and, what adds greatly to your pleasure in such a case, you see comfortable retreats prepared for them in different parts of the woods. When we came to what we thought the end of the park, the gate-keeper told us that we should find other walls to pass through. We now entered upon woods, we then came to another wall, and there we entered upon farms to our right and to our left. At last we came to a third wall, and the gate in that let us out into the turnpike road. The gate-keeper here told us, that the whole enclosure was nine miles round; and this, after all, forms, probably, not a quarter part of what this nobleman possesses. And is it wrong that one man should possess so much? By no means; but in my opinion it is wrong that a system should exist which compels this man to have his estate taken away from him unless he throw the junior branches of his family for maintenance upon the public.
Lord Egremont bears an excellent character. Everything that I have ever heard of him makes me believe that he is worthy of this princely estate. But I cannot forget that his two brothers, who are now very old men, have had, from their infancy, enormous revenues in sinecure places in the West Indies, while the general property and labour of England is taxed to maintain those West Indies in their state of dependence upon England; and I cannot forget that the burden of these sinecures are amongst the grievances of which the West Indians justly complain. True, the taxing system has taken from the family of Wyndham, during the lives of these two gentlemen, as much, and even more, than what that family has gained by those sinecures; but then let it be recollected, that it is not the helpless people of England who have been the cause of this system. It is not the fault of those who receive 7d. a day. It is the fault of the family of Wyndham and of such persons; and, if they have chosen to suffer the Jews and jobbers to take away so large a part of their income, it is not fair for them to come to the people at large to make up for the loss.
Thus it has gone on. The great masses of property have, in general, been able to take care of themselves: but the little masses have melted away like butter before the sun. The little gentry have had not even any disposition to resist. They merit their fate most justly. They have vied with each other in endeavours to ingratiate themselves with power, and to obtain compensation for their losses. The big fishes have had no feeling for them; have seen them sink with a sneer, rather than with compassion; but, at last, the cormorant threatens even themselves; and they are struggling with might and main for their own preservation. They everywhere “most liberally” take the Stock-jobber or the Jew by the hand, though they hate him mortally at the same time for his power to outdo them on the sideboard, on the table, and in the equipage. They seem to think nothing of the extinguishment of the small fry; they hug themselves in the thought that they escape; and yet, at times, their minds misgive them, and they tremble for their own fate. The country people really gain by the change; for the small gentry have been rendered, by their miseries, so niggardly and so cruel, that it is quite a blessing, in a village, to see a rich Jew or Jobber come to supplant them. They come, too, with far less cunning than the half-broken gentry. Cunning as the Stock-Jobber is in Change Alley, I defy him to be cunning enough for the country people, brought to their present state of duplicity by a series of cruelties which no pen can adequately describe. The Stock-Jobber goes from London with the cant of humanity upon his lips, at any rate; whereas the half-broken Squire takes not the least pains to disguise the hardness of his heart.
It is impossible for any just man to regret the sweeping away of this base race of Squires; but the sweeping of them away is produced by causes that have a wider extent. These causes reach the good as well as the bad: all are involved alike: like the pestilence, this horrible system is no respecter of persons; and decay and beggary mark the whole face of the country.
North Chapel is a little town in the Weald of Sussex where there were formerly post-chaises kept; but where there are none kept now. And here is another complete revolution. In almost every country town the post-chaise houses have been lessened in number, and those that remain have become comparatively solitary and mean. The guests at inns are not now gentlemen, but bumpers, who, from being called (at the inns) “riders,” became “travellers,” and are now “commercial gentlemen,” who go about in gigs, instead of on horseback, and who are in such numbers as to occupy a great part of the room in all the inns, in every part of the country. There are, probably, twenty thousand of them always out, who may perhaps have, on an average throughout the year, three or four thousand “ladies” travelling with them. The expense of this can be little short of fifteen millions a year, all to be paid by the country-people who consume the goods, and a large part of it to be drawn up to the Wen.
From North Chapel we came to Chiddingfold, which is in the Weald of Surrey; that is to say, the country of oak-timber. Between these two places there are a couple of pieces of that famous commodity, called “Government property.” It seems that these places, which have extensive buildings on them, were for the purpose of making gunpowder. Like most other of these enterprises, they have been given up, after a time, and so the ground and all the buildings, and the monstrous fences, erected at enormous expense, have been sold. They were sold, it seems, some time ago, in lots, with the intention of being pulled down and carried away, though they are now nearly new, and built in the most solid, substantial, and expensive manner; brick walls eighteen inches through, and the buildings covered with lead and slate. It appears that they have been purchased by a Mr. Stovell, a Sussex banker; but for some reason or other, though the purchase was made long ago, “Government” still holds the possession; and, what is more, it keeps people there to take care of the premises. It would be curious to have a complete history of these pretty establishments at Chiddingford; but this is a sort of history that we shall never be treated with until there be somebody in Parliament to rummage things to the bottom. It would be very easy to call for a specific account of the cost of these establishments, and also of the quantity of powder made at them. I should not be at all surprised, if the concern, all taken together, brought the powder to a hundred times the price at which similar powder could have been purchased.
When we came through Chiddingfold, the people were just going to church; and we saw a carriage and pair conveying an old gentleman and some ladies to the churchyard steps. Upon inquiry, we found that this was Lord Winterton, whose name, they told us, was Turnour. I thought I had heard of all the Lords, first or last; but, if I had ever heard of this one before, I had forgotten him. He lives down in the Weald, between the gunpowder establishments and Horsham, and has the reputation of being a harmless, good sort of man, and that being the case I was sorry to see that he appeared to be greatly afflicted with the gout, being obliged to be helped up the steps by a stout man. However, it is as broad, perhaps, as it is long: a man is not to have all the enjoyments of making the gout, and the enjoyments of abstinence too: that would not be fair play; and I dare say that Lord Winterton is just enough to be content with the consequences of his enjoyments.
This Chiddingfold is a very pretty place. There is a very pretty and extensive green opposite the church; and we were at the proper time of the day to perceive that the modern system of education had by no means overlooked this little village. We saw the schools marching towards the church in military order. Two of them passed us on our road. The boys looked very hard at us, and I saluted them with “There’s brave boys, you’ll all be parsons or lawyers or doctors.” Another school seemed to be in a less happy state. The scholars were too much in uniform to have had their clothes purchased by their parents; and they looked, besides, as if a little more victuals and a little less education would have done as well. There were about twenty of them without one single tinge of red in their whole twenty faces. In short I never saw more deplorable looking objects since I was born. And can it be of any use to expend money in this sort of way upon poor creatures that have not half a bellyful of food? We had not breakfasted when we passed them. We felt, at that moment, what hunger was. We had some bits of bread and meat in our pockets, however; and these, which, were merely intended as stay-stomachs, amounted, I dare say, to the allowance of any half-dozen of these poor boys for the day. I could, with all my heart, have pulled the victuals out of my pocket and given it to them; but I did not like to do that which would have interrupted the march, and might have been construed into a sort of insult. To quiet my conscience, however, I gave a poor man that I met soon afterwards sixpence, under pretence of rewarding him for telling me the way to Thursley, which I knew as well as he, and which I had determined, in my own mind, not to follow.
We had now come on the Turnpike road from my Lord Egremont’s Park to Chiddingfold. I had made two or three attempts to get out of it, and to bear away to the north-west, to get through the oak-woods to Thursley; but I was constantly prevented by being told that the road which I wished to take would lead me to Haslemere. If you talk to ostlers, or landlords, or post-boys; or, indeed, to almost anybody else, they mean by a road a turnpike road; and they positively will not talk to you about any other. Now, just after quitting Chiddingfold, Thursley lies over fine woods and coppices, in a north-west direction, or thereabouts; and the Turnpike road, which goes from Petworth to Godalming, goes in a north-north-east direction. I was resolved, be the consequences what they might, not to follow the Turnpike road one single inch further; for I had not above three miles or thereabouts to get to Thursley, through the woods; and I had, perhaps, six miles at least to get to it the other way; but the great thing was to see the interior of these woods; to see the stems of the trees, as well as the tops of them. I saw a lane opening in the right direction; I saw indeed, that my horses must go up to their knees in clay; but I resolved to enter and go along that lane, and long before the end of my journey I found myself most amply compensated for the toil that I was about to encounter. But talk of toil! It was the horse that had the toil; and I had nothing to do but to sit upon his back, turn my head from side to side and admire the fine trees in every direction. Little bits of fields and meadows here and there, shaded all over, or nearly all over, by the surrounding trees. Here and there a labourer’s house buried in the woods. We had drawn out our luncheons and eaten them while the horses took us through the clay; but I stopped at a little house, and asked the woman, who looked very clean and nice, whether she would let us dine with her. She said “Yes,” with all her heart, but that she had no place to put our horses in, and that her dinner would not be ready for an hour, when she expected her husband home from church. She said they had a bit of bacon and a pudding and some cabbage; but that she had not much bread in the house. She had only one child, and that was not very old, so we left her, quite convinced that my old observation is true, that people in the woodland countries are best off, and that it is absolutely impossible to reduce them to that state of starvation in which they are in the corn-growing part of the kingdom. Here is that great blessing, abundance of fuel at all times of the year, and particularly in the winter.
We came on for about a mile further in these clayey lanes, when we renewed our inquiries as to our course, as our road now seemed to point towards Godalming again. I asked a man how I should get to Thursley? He pointed to some fir-trees upon a hill, told me I must go by them, and that there was no other way. “Where then,” said I, “is Thursley?” He pointed with his hand, and said, “Right over those woods; but there is no road there, and it is impossible for you to get through those woods.” “Thank you,” said I; “but through those woods we mean to go.” Just at the border of the woods I saw a cottage. There must be some way to that cottage; and we soon found a gate that let us into a field, across which we went to this cottage. We there found an old man and a young one. Upon inquiry we found that it was possible to get through these woods. Richard gave the old man threepence to buy a pint of beer, and I gave the young one a shilling to pilot us through the woods. These were oak-woods with underwood beneath; and there was a little stream of water running down the middle of the woods, the annual and long overflowings of which has formed a meadow sometimes a rod wide, and sometimes twenty rods wide, while the bed of the stream itself was the most serpentine that can possibly be imagined, describing, in many places, nearly a complete circle, going round for many rods together, and coming within a rod or two of a point that it had passed before. I stopped the man several times, to sit and admire this beautiful spot, shaded in great part by lofty and wide-spreading oak trees. We had to cross this brook several times, over bridges that the owner had erected for the convenience of the fox-hunters. At last, we came into an ash-coppice, which had been planted in regular rows, at about four feet distances, which had been once cut, and which was now in the state of six years’ growth. A road through it, made for the fox-hunters, was as straight as a line, and of so great a length, that, on entering it, the farther end appeared not to be a foot wide. Upon seeing this, I asked the man whom these coppices belonged to, and he told me to Squire Leech, at Lea. My surprise ceased, but my admiration did not.
A piece of ordinary coppice ground, close adjoining this, and with no timber in it, and upon just the same soil (if there had been such a piece), would, at ten years’ growth, be worth, at present prices, from five to seven pounds the acre. This coppice, at ten years’ growth, will be worth twenty pounds the acre; and, at the next cutting, when the stems will send out so many more shoots, it will be worth thirty pounds the acre. I did not ask the question when I afterwards saw Mr. Leech, but, I dare say, the ground was trenched before it was planted; but what is that expense when compared with the great, the permanent profit of such an undertaking? And, above all things, what a convenient species of property does a man here create. Here are no tenants’ rack, no anxiety about crops and seasons; the rust and the mildew never come here; a man knows what he has got, and he knows that nothing short of an earthquake can take it from him, unless, indeed, by attempting to vie with the stock-jobber in the expense of living, he enable the stock-jobber to come and perform the office of the earthquake. Mr. Leech’s father planted, I think it was, forty acres of such coppice in the same manner; and, at the same time, he sowed the ground with acorns. The acorns have become oak trees, and have begun and made great progress in diminishing the value of the ash, which have now to contend against the shade and the roots of the oak. For present profit, and, indeed, for permanent profit, it would be judicious to grub up the oak; but the owner has determined otherwise. He cannot endure the idea of destroying an oak wood.
If such be the profit of planting ash, what would be the profit of planting locust, even for poles or stakes? The locust would outgrow the ash, as we have seen in the case of Mr. Gunter’s plantation, more than three to one. I am satisfied that it will do this upon any soil, if you give the trees fifteen years to grow in; and, in short, that the locusts will be trees when the ash are merely poles, if both are left to grow up in single stems. If in coppice, the locust will make as good poles; I mean as large and as long poles in six years, as the ash will in ten years: to say nothing of the superior durability of the locust. I have seen locusts, at Mr. Knowles’s, at Thursley, sufficient for a hop-pole, for an ordinary hop-pole, with only five years’ growth in them, and leaving the last year’s growth to be cut off, leaving the top of the pole three-quarters of an inch through. There is nothing that we have ever heard of, of the timber kind, equal to this in point of quickness of growth. In parts of the county where hop-poles are not wanted, espalier stakes, wood for small fencing, hedge stakes, hurdle stakes, fold-shores, as the people call them, are always wanted; and is it not better to have a thing that will last twenty years, than a thing that will last only three? I know of no English underwood which gives a hedge stake to last even two years. I should think that a very profitable way of employing the locust would be this. Plant a coppice, the plants two feet apart. Thus planted, the trees will protect one another against the wind. Keep the side shoots pruned off. At the end of six years, the coppice, if well planted and managed, will be, at the very least, twenty feet high to the tips of the trees. Not if the grass and weeds are suffered to grow up to draw all the moisture up out of the ground, to keep the air from the young plants, and to intercept the gentle rains and the dews; but trenched ground, planted carefully, and kept clean; and always bearing in mind that hares and rabbits and young locust trees will never live together; for the hares and rabbits will not only bite them off, but will gnaw them down to the ground, and, when they have done that, will scratch away the ground to gnaw into the very root. A gentleman bought some locust trees of me last year, and brought me a dismal account in the summer of their being all dead; but I have since found that they were all eaten up by the hares. He saw some of my refuse; some of those which were too bad to send to him, which were a great deal higher than his head. His ground was as good as mine, according to his account; but I had no hares to fight against; or else mine would have been all dead too.
I say, then, that a locust plantation, in pretty good land, well managed, would be twenty feet high in six years; suppose it, however, to be only fifteen, there would be, at the bottom, wood to make two locust PINS for ship-building; two locust pins at the bottom of each tree. Two at the very least; and here would be twenty-two thousand locust pins to the acre, probably enough for the building of a seventy-four gun ship. These pins are about eighteen inches long, and, perhaps, an inch and half through; and there is this surprising quality in the wood of the locust, that it is just as hard and as durable at five or six years’ growth as it is at fifty years’ growth. Of which I can produce an abundance of instances. The stake which I brought home from America, and which is now at Fleet-street, had stood as a stake for about eight and twenty years, as certified to me by Judge Mitchell, of North Hampstead in Long Island, who gave me the stake, and who said to me at the time, “Now are you really going to take that crooked miserable stick to England!” Now it is pretty well known, at least, I have been so informed, that our Government have sent to America in consequence of my writings about the locust, to endeavour to get locust pins for the navy. I have been informed that they have been told that the American Government has bought them all up. Be this as it may, I know that a waggon load of these pins is, in America itself, equal in value to a waggon load of barrels of the finest flour. This being undeniable, and the fact being undeniable that we can grow locust pins here, that I can take a seed to-day, and say that it shall produce two pins in seven years’ time, will it not become an article of heavy accusation against the Government if they neglect even one day to set about tearing up their infernal Scotch firs and larches in Wolmer Forest and elsewhere, and putting locust trees in their stead, in order, first to provide this excellent material for ship-building; and next to have some fine plantations in the Holt Forest, Wolmer Forest, the New Forest, the Forest of Dean, and elsewhere, the only possible argument against doing which being, that I may possibly take a ride round amongst their plantations, and that it may be everlastingly recorded that it was I who was the cause of the Government’s adopting this wise and beneficial measure?
I am disposed to believe, however, that the Government will not be brutish enough, obstinately to reject the advice given to them on this head, it being observed, however, that I wish to have no hand in their proceedings, directly or indirectly. I can sell all the trees that I have for sale to other customers. Let them look out for themselves; and as to any reports that their creatures may make upon the subjects I shall be able to produce proofs enough that such reports, if unfavourable, are false. I wrote, in a Register from Long Island, that I could if I would tell insolent Castlereagh, who was for making Englishmen dig holes one day and fill them up the next, how he might profitably put something into those holes, but that I would not tell him as long as the Borough-mongers should be in the state in which they then were. They are no longer in that state, I thank God. There has been no positive law to alter their state, but it is manifest that there must be such law before it be long. Events are working together to make the country worth living in, which, for the great body of the people, is at present hardly the case. Above all things in the world, it is the duty of every man, who has it in his power, to do what he can to promote the creation of materials for the building of ships in the best manner; and it is now a fact of perfect notoriety, that, with regard to the building of ships, it cannot be done in the best manner without the assistance of this sort of wood.
I have seen a specimen of the locust wood used in the making of furniture. I saw it in the posts of a bed-stead; and any thing more handsome I never saw in my life. I had used it myself in the making of rules; but I never saw it in this shape before. It admits of a polish nearly as fine as that of box. It is a bright and beautiful yellow. And in bedsteads, for instance, it would last for ever, and would not become loose at the joints, like oak and other perishable wood; because, like the live oak and the red cedar, no worm or insect ever preys upon it. There is no fear of the quantity being too great. It would take a century to make as many plantations as are absolutely wanted in England. It would be a prodigious creation of real and solid wealth. Not such a creation as that of paper money, which only takes the dinner from one man and gives it to another, which only gives an unnatural swell to a city or a watering place by beggaring a thousand villages; but it would be a creation of money’s worth things. Let any man go and look at a farmhouse that was built a hundred years ago. He will find it, though very well built with stone or brick, actually falling to pieces, unless very frequently repaired, owing entirely to the rotten wood in the window-sills, the door-sills, the plates, the pins, the door frames, the window frames, and all those parts of the beams, the joists, and the rafters, that come in contact with the rain or the moisture. The two parts of a park pailing which give way first, are, the parts of the post that meet the ground, and the pins which hold the rails to the post. Both these rot long before the pailing rots. Now, all this is avoided by the use of locust as sills, as joists, as posts, as frames, and as pins. Many a roof has come down merely from the rotting of the pins. The best of spine oak is generally chosen for these pins. But after a time, the air gets into the pin-hole. The pin rots from the moist air, it gives way, the wind shakes the roof, and down it comes, or it swags, the wet gets in, and the house is rotten. In ships, the pins are the first things that give way. Many a ship would last twenty years after it is broken up, if put together with locust pins. I am aware that some readers will become tired of this subject; and, nothing but my conviction of its being of the very first importance to the whole kingdom could make me thus dwell upon it.
We got to Thursley after our beautiful ride through Mr. Leech’s coppices, and the weather being pretty cold, we found ourselves most happily situated here by the side of an American fire-place, making extremely comfortable a room which was formerly amongst the most uncomfortable in the world. This is another of what the malignant parsons call Cobbett’s Quackeries. But my real opinion is that the whole body of them, all put together, have never, since they were born, conferred so much benefit upon the country, as I have conferred upon it by introducing this fire-place. Mr. Judson of Kensington, who is the manufacturer of them, tells me that he has a great demand, which gives me much pleasure; but really, coming to conscience, no man ought to sit by one of these fire-places that does not go the full length with me both in politics and religion. It is not fair for them to enjoy the warmth without subscribing to the doctrines of the giver of the warmth. However, as I have nothing to do with Mr. Judson’s affair, either as to the profit or the loss, he must sell the fire-places to whomsoever he pleases.
Kensington,
Sunday, 20th Nov.
Coming to Godalming on Friday, where business kept us that night, we had to experience at the inn the want of our American fire-place. A large and long room to sit in, with a miserable thing called a screen to keep the wind from our backs, with a smoke in the room half an hour after the fire was lighted, we, consuming a full bushel of coals in order to keep us warm, were not half so well off as we should have been in the same room, and without any screen, and with two gallons of coals, if we had our American fire-place. I gave the landlord my advice upon the subject, and he said he would go and look at the fire-place at Mr. Knowles’s. That was precisely one of those rooms which stand in absolute need of such a fire-place. It is, I should think, five-and-thirty, or forty feet long, and pretty nearly twenty feet wide. I could sooner dine with a labouring man upon his allowance of bread, such as I have mentioned above, than I would, in winter time, dine in that room upon turbot and sirloin of beef. An American fire-place, with a good fire in it, would make every part of that room pleasant to dine in in the coldest day in winter. I saw a public-house drinking-room, where the owner has tortured his invention to get a little warmth for his guests, where he fetches his coals in a waggon from a distance of twenty miles or thereabouts, and where he consumes these coals by the bushel, to effect that which he cannot effect at all, and which he might effect completely with about a fourth part of the coals.
It looked like rain on Saturday morning, we therefore sent our horses on from Godalming to Ripley, and took a post-chaise to convey us after them. Being shut up in the post-chaise did not prevent me from taking a look at a little snug house stuck under the hill on the road side, just opposite the old chapel on St. Catherine’s-hill, which house was not there when I was a boy. I found that this house is now occupied by the family Molyneux, for ages the owners of Losely Park, on the out-skirts of which estate this house stands. The house at Losely is of great antiquity, and had, or perhaps has, attached to it the great manors of Godalming and Chiddingfold. I believe that Sir Thomas More lived at Losely, or, at any rate, that the Molyneuxes are, in some degree, descended from him. The estate is, I fancy, theirs yet; but here they are, in this little house, while one Gunning (an East Indian, I believe) occupies the house of their ancestors. At Send, or Sutton, where Mr. Webb Weston inhabited, there is a Baron somebody, with a De before his name. The name is German or Dutch, I believe. How the Baron came there I know not; but as I have read his name amongst the Justices of the Peace for the county of Surrey, he must have been born in England, or the law has been violated in making him a Justice of the Peace, seeing that no person not born a subject of the king, and a subject in this country too, can lawfully hold a commission under the crown, either civil or military. Nor is it lawful for any man born abroad of Scotch or Irish parents, to hold such commission under the crown, though such commissions have been held, and are held, by persons who are neither natural-born subjects of the king, nor born of English parents abroad. It should also be known and borne in mind by the people, that it is unlawful to grant any pension from the crown to any foreigner whatever. And no naturalization act can take away this disability. Yet the Whigs, as they call themselves, granted such pensions during the short time that they were in power.
When we got to Ripley, we found the day very fine, and we got upon our horses and rode home to dinner, after an absence of just one month, agreeably to our original intention, having seen a great deal of the country, having had a great deal of sport, and having, I trust, laid in a stock of health for the winter, sufficient to enable us to withstand the suffocation of this smoking and stinking Wen.
But Richard and I have done something else, besides ride, and hunt, and course, and stare about us, during this month. He was eleven years old last March, and it was now time for him to begin to know something about letters and figures. He has learned to work in the garden, and having been a good deal in the country, knows a great deal about farming affairs. He can ride anything of a horse, and over anything that a horse will go over. So expert at hunting, that his first teacher, Mr. Budd, gave the hounds up to his management in the field; but now he begins to talk about nothing but fox-hunting! That is a dangerous thing. When he and I went from home, I had business at Reigate. It was a very wet morning, and we went off long before daylight in a post-chaise, intending to have our horses brought after us. He began to talk in anticipation of the sport he was going to have, and was very inquisitive as to the probability of our meeting with fox-hounds, which gave me occasion to address him thus: “Fox-hunting is a very fine thing, and very proper for people to be engaged in, and it is very desirable to be able to ride well and to be in at the death; but that is not ALL; that is not everything. Any fool can ride a horse, and draw a cover; any groom or any stable-fellow, who is as ignorant as the horse, can do these things; but all gentlemen that go a fox-hunting [I hope God will forgive me for the lie] are scholars, Richard. It is not the riding, nor the scarlet coats, that make them gentlemen; it is their scholarship.” What he thought I do not know; for he sat as mute as a fish, and I could not see his countenance. “So,” said I, “you must now begin to learn something, and you must begin with arithmetic.” He had learned from mere play, to read, being first set to work of his own accord, to find out what was said about Thurtell, when all the world was talking and reading about Thurtell. This had induced us to give him Robinson Crusoe; and that had made him a passable reader. Then he had scrawled down letters and words upon paper, and had written letters to me, in the strangest way imaginable. His knowledge of figures he had acquired from the necessity of knowing the several numbers upon the barrels of seeds brought from America, and the numbers upon the doors of houses. So that I had pretty nearly a blank sheet of paper to begin upon; and I have always held it to be stupidity to the last degree to attempt to put book-learning into children who are too young to reason with.
I began with a pretty long lecture on the utility of arithmetic; the absolute necessity of it, in order for us to make out our accounts of the trees and seeds that we should have to sell in the winter, and the utter impossibility of our getting paid for our pains unless we were able to make out our accounts, which accounts could not be made out unless we understood something about arithmetic. Having thus made him understand the utility of the thing, and given him a very strong instance in the case of our nursery affairs, I proceeded to explain to him the meaning of the word arithmetic, the power of figures, according to the place they occupied. I then, for it was still dark, taught him to add a few figures together, I naming the figures one after another, while he, at the mention of each new figure said the amount, and if incorrectly, he was corrected by me. When we had got a sum of about 24, I said now there is another line of figures on the left of this, and therefore you are to put down the 4 and carry 2. “What is carrying?” said he. I then explained to him the why and the wherefore of this, and he perfectly understood me at once. We then did several other little sums; and, by the time we got to Sutton, it becoming daylight, I took a pencil and set him a little sum upon paper, which, after making a mistake or two, he did very well. By the time we got to Reigate he had done several more, and at last, a pretty long one, with very few errors. We had business all day, and thought no more of our scholarship until we went to bed, and then we did, in our post-chaise fashion, a great many lines in arithmetic before we went to sleep. Thus we went on mixing our riding and hunting with our arithmetic, until we quitted Godalming, when he did a sum very nicely in multiplication of money, falling a little short of what I had laid out, which was to make him learn the four rules in whole numbers first, and then in money, before I got home.
Friends’ houses are not so good as inns for executing a project like this; because you cannot very well be by yourself; and we slept but four nights at inns during our absence. So that we have actually stolen the time to accomplish this job, and Richard’s Journal records that he was more than fifteen days out of the thirty-one coursing or hunting. Nothing struck me more than the facility, the perfect readiness with which he at once performed addition of money. There is a pence table which boys usually learn, and during the learning of which they usually get no small number of thumps. This table I found it wholly unnecessary to set him. I had written it for him in one of the leaves of his journal book. But, upon looking at it, he said, “I don’t want this, because, you know, I have nothing to do but to divide by twelve.” That is right, said I, you are a clever fellow, Dick; and I shut up the book.
Now, when there is so much talk about education, let me ask how many pounds it generally costs parents to have a boy taught this much of arithmetic; how much time it costs also; and, which is a far more serious consideration, how much mortification, and very often how much loss of health, it costs the poor scolded broken-hearted child, who becomes dunder-headed and dull for all his life-time, merely because that has been imposed upon him as a task which he ought to regard as an object of pleasant pursuit. I never even once desired him to stay a moment from any other thing that he had a mind to go at. I just wrote the sums down upon paper, laid them upon the table, and left him to tackle them when he pleased. In the case of the multiplication-table, the learning of which is something of a job, and which it is absolutely necessary to learn perfectly, I advised him to go up into his bed-room and read it twenty times over out loud every morning before he went a hunting, and ten times over every night after he came back, till it all came as pat upon his lips as the names of persons that he knew. He did this, and at the end of about a week he was ready to set on upon multiplication. It is the irksomeness of the thing which is the great bar to learning of every sort. I took care not to suffer irksomeness to seize his mind for a moment, and the consequence was that which I have described. I wish clearly to be understood as ascribing nothing to extraordinary natural ability. There are, as I have often said, as many sorts of men as there are of dogs; but I do not pretend to be of any peculiarly excellent sort, and I have never discovered any indications of it. There are, to be sure, sorts that are naturally stupid; but, the generality of men are not so; and I believe that every boy of the same age, equally healthy, and brought up in the same manner, would (unless of one of the stupid kinds) learn in just the same sort of way; but not if begun to be thumped at five or six years old, when the poor little things have no idea of the utility of anything; who are hardly sensible beings, and have but just understanding enough to know that it will hurt them if they jump down a chalk pit. I am sure, from thousands of instances that have come under my own eyes, that to begin to teach children book-learning before they are capable of reasoning, is the sure and certain way to enfeeble their minds for life; and, if they have natural genius, to cramp, if not totally to destroy that genius.
I think I shall be tempted to mould into a little book these lessons of arithmetic given to Richard. I think that a boy of sense, and of age equal to that of my scholar, would derive great profit from such a little book. It would not be equal to my verbal explanations, especially accompanied with the other parts of my conduct towards my scholar; but at any rate, it would be plain; it would be what a boy could understand; it would encourage him by giving him a glimpse at the reasons for what he was doing: it would contain principles; and the difference between principles and rules is this, that the former are persuasions and the latter are commands. There is a great deal of difference between carrying 2 for such and such a reason, and carrying 2 because you must carry 2. You see boys that can cover reams of paper with figures, and do it with perfect correctness too; and at the same time, can give you not a single reason for any part of what they have done. Now this is really doing very little. The rule is soon forgotten, and then all is forgotten. It would be the same with a lawyer that understood none of the principles of law. As far as he could find and remember cases exactly similar in all their parts to the case which he might have to manage, he would be as profound a lawyer as any in the world; but if there was the slightest difference between his case and the cases he had found upon record, there would be an end of his law.
Some people will say, here is a monstrous deal of vanity and egotism; and if they will tell me, how such a story is to be told without exposing a man to this imputation, I will adopt their mode another time. I get nothing by telling the story. I should get full as much by keeping it to myself; but it may be useful to others, and therefore I tell it. Nothing is so dangerous as supposing that you have eight wonders of the world. I have no pretensions to any such possession. I look upon my boy as being like other boys in general. Their fathers can teach arithmetic as well as I; and if they have not a mind to pursue my method, they must pursue their own. Let them apply to the outside of the head and to the back, if they like; let them bargain for thumps and the birch rod; it is their affair and not mine. I never yet saw in my house a child that was afraid; that was in any fear whatever; that was ever for a moment under any sort of apprehension, on account of the learning of anything; and I never in my life gave a command, an order, a request, or even advice, to look into any book; and I am quite satisfied that the way to make children dunces, to make them detest books, and justify that detestation, is to tease them and bother them upon the subject.
As to the age at which children ought to begin to be taught, it is very curious, that, while I was at a friend’s house during my ride, I looked into, by mere accident, a little child’s abridgment of the History of England: a little thing about twice as big as a crown-piece. Even into this abridgment the historian had introduced the circumstance of Alfred’s father, who, “through a mistaken notion of kindness to his son, had suffered him to live to the age of twelve years without any attempt being made to give him education.” How came this writer to know that it was a mistaken notion? Ought he not rather, when he looked at the result, when he considered the astonishing knowledge and great deeds of Alfred—ought he not to have hesitated before he thus criticised the notions of the father? It appears from the result that the notions of the father were perfectly correct; and I am satisfied, that if they had begun to thump the head of Alfred when he was a child, we should not at this day have heard talk of Alfred the Great.
Great apologies are due to the OLD LADY from me, on account of my apparent inattention towards her, during her recent, or rather, I may say, her present, fit of that tormenting disorder which, as I observed before, comes upon her by spells. Dr. M’Culloch may say what he pleases about her being “wi’ bairn.” I say it’s the wet gripes; and I saw a poor old mare down in Hampshire in just the same way; but God forbid the catastrophe should be the same, for they shot poor old Ball for the hounds. This disorder comes by spells. It sometimes seems as if it were altogether going off; the pulse rises, and the appetite returns. By-and-by a fresh grumbling begins to take place in the bowels. These are followed by acute pains; the patient becomes tremulous; the pulse begins to fall, and the most gloomy apprehensions begin again to be entertained. At every spell the pulse does not cease falling till it becomes lower than it was brought to by the preceding spell; and thus, spell after spell, finally produces the natural result.
It is useless at present to say much about the equivocating and blundering of the newspapers, relative to the cause of the fall. They are very shy, extremely cautious; become wonderfully wary, with regard to this subject. They do not know what to make of it. They all remember, that I told them that their prosperity was delusive; that it would soon come to an end, while they were telling me of the falsification of all my predictions. I told them the Small-note Bill had only given a respite. I told them that the foreign loans, and the shares, and all the astonishing enterprises, arose purely out of the Small-note Bill; and that a short time would see the Small-note Bill driving the gold out of the country, and bring us back to another restriction, OR, to wheat at four shillings a bushel. They remember that I told them all this; and now, some of them begin to regard me as the principal cause of the present embarrassments! This is pretty work indeed! What! I! The poor deluded creature, whose predictions were all falsified, who knew nothing at all about such matters, who was a perfect pedlar in political economy, who was “a conceited and obstinate old dotard,” as that polite and enlightened paper, the Morning Herald, called me: is it possible that such a poor miserable creature can have had the power to produce effects so prodigious? Yet this really appears to be the opinion of one, at least, of these Mr. Brougham’s best possible public instructors. The Public Ledger, of the 16th of November, has the following passage:—
“It is fully ascertained that the Country Banking Establishments in England have latterly been compelled to limit their paper circulation, for the writings of Mr. Cobbett are widely circulated in the Agricultural districts, and they have been so successful as to induce the Boobies to call for gold in place of country paper, a circumstance which has produced a greater effect on the currency than any exportation of the precious metals to the Continent, either of Europe or America, could have done, although it too must have contributed to render money for a season scarce.”
And, so, the “boobies” call for gold instead of country bank-notes! Bless the “boobies”! I wish they would do it to a greater extent, which they would, if they were not so dependent as they are upon the ragmen. But, does the Public Ledger think that those unfortunate creatures who suffered the other day at Plymouth, would have been “boobies,” if they had gone and got sovereigns before the banks broke? This brother of the broad sheet should act justly and fairly as I do. He should ascribe these demands for gold to Mr. Jones of Bristol and not to me. Mr. Jones taught the “boobies” that they might have gold for asking for, or send the ragmen to jail. It is Mr. Jones, therefore, that they should blame, and not me. But, seriously speaking, what a mess, what a pickle, what a horrible mess, must the thing be in, if any man, or any thousand of men, or any hundred thousand of men, can change the value of money, unhinge all contracts and all engagements, and plunge the pecuniary affairs of a nation into confusion? I have been often accused of wishing to be thought the cleverest man in the country; but surely it is no vanity (for vanity means unjust pretension) for me to think myself the cleverest man in the country, if I can of my own head, and at my own pleasure, produce effects like these. Truth, however, and fair dealing with my readers, call upon me to disclaim so haughty a pretension. I have no such power as this public instructor ascribes to me. Greater causes are at work to produce such effects; causes wholly uncontrollable by me, and, what is more, wholly uncontrollable in the long run by the Government itself, though heartily co-operating with the bank directors. These united can do nothing to arrest the progress of events. Peel’s Bill produced the horrible distresses of 1822; the part repeal of that bill produced a respite, that respite is now about to expire; and neither Government nor bank, nor both joined together, can prevent the ultimate consequences. They may postpone them for a little; but mark, every postponement will render the catastrophe the more dreadful.
I see everlasting attempts by the “Instructor” to cast blame upon the bank. I can see no blame in the bank. The bank has issued no small notes, though it has liberty to do it. The bank pays in gold agreeably to the law. What more does anybody want with the bank. The bank lends money I suppose when it chooses; and is not it to be the judge when it shall lend and when it shall not? The bank is blamed for putting out paper and causing high prices; and blamed at the same time for not putting out paper to accommodate merchants and keep them from breaking. It cannot be to blame for both, and, indeed, it is blameable for neither. It is the fellows that put out the paper and then break that do the mischief. However, a breaking merchant, whom the bank will no longer prop up, will naturally blame the bank, just as every insolvent blames a solvent that will not lend him money.
When the foreign loans first began to go on, Peter M’Culloch and all the Scotch were cock o’ whoop. They said that there were prodigious advantages in lending money to South America, that the interest would come home to enrich us; that the amount of the loans would go out chiefly in English manufactures; that the commercial gains would be enormous; and that this country would thus be made rich, and powerful, and happy, by employing in this way its “surplus capital,” and thereby contributing at the same time to the uprooting of despotism and superstition, and the establishing of freedom and liberality in their stead. Unhappy and purblind, I could not for the life of me see the matter in this light. My perverted optics could perceive no surplus capital in bundles of bank-notes. I could see no gain in sending out goods which somebody in England was to pay for, without, as it appeared to me, the smallest chance of ever being paid again. I could see no chance of gain in the purchase of a bond, nominally bearing interest at six per cent., and on which, as I thought, no interest at all would ever be paid. I despised the idea of paying bits of paper by bits of paper. I knew that a bond, though said to bear six per cent. interest, was not worth a farthing, unless some interest were paid upon it. I declared, when Spanish bonds were at seventy-five, that I would not give a crown for a hundred pounds in them, if I were compelled to keep them unsold for seven years; and I now declare, as to South American bonds, I think them of less value than the Spanish bonds now are, if the owner be compelled to keep them unsold for a year. It is very true, that these opinions agree with my wishes; but they have not been created by those wishes. They are founded on my knowledge of the state of things, and upon my firm conviction of the folly of expecting that the interest of these things will ever come from the respective countries to which they relate.
Mr. Canning’s despatch, which I shall insert below, has, doubtless, had a tendency (whether expected or not) to prop up the credit of these sublime speculations. The propping up of the credit of them can, however, do no sort of good. The keeping up the price of them for the present may assist some of the actual speculators, but it can do nothing for the speculation in the end, and this speculation, which was wholly an effect of the Small-note Bill, will finally have a most ruinous effect. How is it to be otherwise? Have we ever received any evidence, or anything whereon to build a belief, that the interest on these bonds will be paid? Never; and the man must be mad; mad with avarice or a love of gambling, that could advance his money upon any such a thing as these bonds. The fact is, however, that it was not money: it was paper: it was borrowed, or created, for the purpose of being advanced. Observe, too, that when the loans were made, money was at a lower value than it is now; therefore, those who would have to pay the interest, would have too much to pay if they were to fulfil their engagement. Mr. Canning’s State Paper clearly proves to me, that the main object of it is to make the loans to South America finally be paid, because, if they be not paid, not only is the amount of them lost to the bond-holders, but there is an end, at once, to all that brilliant commerce with which that shining Minister appears to be so much enchanted. All the silver and gold, all the Mexican and Peruvian dreams vanish in an instant, and leave behind the wretched Cotton-Lords and wretched Jews and Jobbers to go to the workhouse, or to Botany Bay. The whole of the loans are said to amount to about twenty-one or twenty-two millions. It is supposed, that twelve millions have actually been sent out in goods. These goods have perhaps been paid for here, but they have been paid for out of English money or by English promises. The money to pay with has come from those who gave money for the South American bonds, and these bond-holders are to be repaid, if repaid at all, by the South Americans. If not paid at all, then England will have sent away twelve millions worth of goods for nothing; and this would be the Scotch way of obtaining enormous advantages for the country by laying out its “surplus capital” in foreign loans. I shall conclude this subject by inserting a letter which I find in the Morning Chronicle, of the 18th instant. I perfectly agree with the writer. The Editor of the Morning Chronicle does not, as appears by the remark which he makes at the head of it; but I shall insert the whole, his remark and all, and add a remark or two of my own.—[See Register, vol. 56, p. 556.]
“This is a pretty round sum—a sum, the very naming of which would make anybody but half-mad Englishmen stare. To make comparisons with our own debt would have little effect, that being so monstrous that every other sum shrinks into nothingness at the sight of it. But let us look at the United States, for they have a debt, and a debt is a debt; and this debt of the United States is often cited as an apology for ours, even the parsons having at last come to cite the United States as presenting us with a system of perfection. What, then, is this debt of the United States? Why, it was on the 1st of January, 1824, this 90,177,962; that is to say dollars; that is to say, at four shillings and sixpence the dollar, just twenty millions sterling; that is to say, 594,000 pounds less than our ‘surplus capital’ men have lent to the South Americans! But now let us see what is the net revenue of this same United States. Why, 20,500,755, that is to say, in sterling money, three millions, three hundred and thirty thousand, and some odd hundreds; that is to say, almost to a mere fraction, a sixth part of the whole gross amount of the debt. Observe this well, that the whole of the debt amounts to only six times as much as one single year’s net revenue. Then, again, look at the exports of the United States. These exports, in one single year, amount to 74,699,030 dollars, and in pounds sterling £16,599,783. Now, what can the South American State show in this way? Have they any exports? Or, at least, have they any that any man can speak of with certainty? Have they any revenue wherewith to pay the interest of a debt, when they are borrowing the very means of maintaining themselves now against the bare name of their king? We are often told that the Americans borrowed their money to carry on their Revolutionary war with. Money! Aye; a farthing is money, and a double sovereign is no more than money. But surely some regard is to be had to the quantity; some regard is to be had to the amount of the money; and is there any man in his senses that will put the half million, which the Americans borrowed of the Dutch, in competition, that will name on the same day, this half million, with the twenty-one millions and a half borrowed by the South Americans as above stated? In short, it is almost to insult the understandings of my readers, to seem to institute any comparison between the two things; and nothing in the world, short of this gambling, this unprincipled, this maddening paper-money system, could have made men look with patience for one single moment at loans like these, tossed into the air with the hope and expectation of re-payment. However, let the bond-owners keep their bonds. Let them feel the sweets of the Small-note Bill, and of the consequent puffing up of the English funds. The affair is theirs. They have rejected my advice; they have listened to the broad sheet; and let them take all the consequences. Let them, with all my heart, die with starvation, and as they expire, let them curse Mr. Brougham’s best possible public Instructor.”
Uphusband (Hampshire),
Thursday, 24th Aug. 1826.
We left Burghclere last evening, in the rain; but as our distance was only about seven miles, the consequence was little. The crops of corn, except oats, have been very fine hereabouts; and there are never any pease, nor any beans, grown here. The sainfoin fields, though on these high lands, and though the dry weather has been of such long continuance, look as green as watered meadows, and a great deal more brilliant and beautiful. I have often described this beautiful village (which lies in a deep dell) and its very variously shaped environs, in my Register of November, 1822. This is one of those countries of chalk and flint and dry-top soil and hard roads and high and bare hills and deep dells, with clumps of lofty trees, here and there, which are so many rookeries: this is one of those countries, or rather, approaching towards those countries, of downs and flocks of sheep, which I like so much, which I always get to when I can, and which many people seem to flee from as naturally as men flee from pestilence. They call such countries naked and barren, though they are, in the summer months, actually covered with meat and with corn.
I saw, the other day, in the Morning Herald London “best public instructor,” that all those had deceived themselves, who had expected to see the price of agricultural produce brought down by the lessening of the quantity of paper-money. Now, in the first place, corn is, on an average, a seventh lower in price than it was last year at this time; and what would it have been, if the crop and the stock had now been equal to what they were last year? All in good time, therefore, good Mr. Thwaites. Let us have a little time. The “best public instructors” have, as yet, only fallen, in number sold, about a third, since this time last year. Give them a little time, good Mr. Thwaites, and you will see them come down to your heart’s content. Only let us fairly see an end to small notes, and there will soon be not two daily “best public instructors” left in all the “entire” great “British Empire.”
But, as man is not to live on bread alone, so corn is not the only thing that the owners and occupiers of the land have to look to. There are timber, bark, underwood, wool, hides, pigs, sheep, and cattle. All those together make, in amount, four times the corn, at the very least. I know that all these have greatly fallen in price since last year; but I am in a sheep and wool country, and can speak positively as to them, which are two articles of very great importance. As to sheep; I am speaking of Southdowns, which are the great stock of these counties; as to sheep they have fallen one-third in price since last August, lambs as well as ewes. And, as to the wool, it sold, in 1824, at 40s. a tod: it sold last year, at 35s. a tod; and it now sells at 19s. a tod! A tod is 28lb. avoirdupois weight; so that the price of Southdown wool now is 8d. a pound and a fraction over; and this is, I believe, cheaper than it has ever been known within the memory of the oldest man living! The “best public instructor” may, perhaps, think, that sheep and wool are a trifling affair. There are many thousands of farmers who keep each a flock of at least a thousand sheep. An ewe yields about 3lb. of wool, a wether 4lb., a ram 7lb. Calculate, good Mr. Thwaites, what a difference it is when this wool becomes 8d. a pound instead of 17d., and instead of 30d. as it was not many years ago! In short, every middling sheep farmer receives, this year, about 250l. less, as the produce of sheep and wool, than he received last year; and, on an average, 250l. is more than half his rent.
There is a great falling off in the price of horses, and of all cattle except fat cattle; and, observe, when the prospect is good, it shows a rise in the price of lean cattle; not in that of the meat which is just ready to go into the mouth. Prices will go on gradually falling, as they did from 1819 to 1822 inclusive, unless upheld by untoward seasons, or by an issue of assignats; for, mind, it would be no joke, no sham, this time; it would be an issue of as real, as bona fide assignats as ever came from the mint of any set of rascals that ever robbed and enslaved a people in the names of “liberty and law.”
East Everley (Wiltshire),
Sunday, 27th August, Evening.
We set off from Uphusband on Friday, about ten o’clock, the morning having been wet. My sons came round, in the chaise, by Andover and Weyhill, while I came right across the country towards Ludgarshall, which lies in the road from Andover to this place. I never knew the flies so troublesome, in England, as I found them in this ride. I was obliged to carry a great bough, and to keep it in constant motion, in order to make the horse peaceable enough to enable me to keep on his back. It is a country of fields, lanes, and high hedges; so that no wind could come to relieve my horse; and, in spite of all I could do, a great part of him was covered with foam from the sweat. In the midst of this, I got, at one time, a little out of my road, in, or near, a place called Tangley. I rode up to the garden-wicket of a cottage, and asked the woman, who had two children, and who seemed to be about thirty years old, which was the way to Ludgarshall, which I knew could not be more than about four miles off. She did not know! A very neat, smart, and pretty woman; but she did not know the way to this rotten borough, which was, I was sure, only about four miles off! “Well, my dear good woman,” said I, “but you have been at Ludgarshall?”—“No.”—“Nor at Andover?” (six miles another way)—“No.”—“Nor at Marlborough?” (nine miles another way)—“No.”—“Pray, were you born in this house?”—“Yes.”—“And how far have you ever been from this house?”—“Oh! I have been up in the parish and over to Chute.” That is to say, the utmost extent of her voyages had been about two and a half miles! Let no one laugh at her, and, above all others, let not me, who am convinced, that the facilities, which now exist, of moving human bodies from place to place, are amongst the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals, and, of course, of happiness. It is a great error to suppose, that people are rendered stupid by remaining always in the same place. This was a very acute woman, and as well behaved as need to be. There was, in July last (last month) a Preston-man, who had never been further from home than Chorley (about eight or ten miles), and who started off, on foot, and went, alone, to Rouen, in France, and back again to London, in the space of about ten days; and that, too, without being able to speak, or to understand, a word of French. N.B. Those gentlemen, who, at Green-street, in Kent, were so kind to this man, upon finding that he had voted for me, will be pleased to accept of my best thanks. Wilding (that is the man’s name) was full of expressions of gratitude towards these gentlemen. He spoke of others who were good to him on his way; and even at Calais he found friends on my account; but he was particularly loud in his praises of the gentlemen in Kent, who had been so good and so kind to him, that he seemed quite in an extasy when he talked of their conduct.
Before I got to the rotten-borough, I came out upon a Down, just on the border of the two counties, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Here I came up with my sons, and we entered the rotten-borough together. It contained some rashers of bacon and a very civil landlady; but it is one of the most mean and beggarly places that man ever set his eyes on. The curse attending corruption seems to be upon it. The look of the place would make one swear, that there never was a clean shirt in it, since the first stone of it was laid. It must have been a large place once, though it now contains only 479 persons, men, women, and children. The borough is, as to all practical purposes, as much private property as this pen is my private property. Aye, aye! Let the petitioners of Manchester bawl, as long as they like, against all other evils; but, until they touch this master-evil, they do nothing at all.
Everley is but about three miles from Ludgarshall, so that we got here in the afternoon of Friday: and, in the evening a very heavy storm came and drove away all flies, and made the air delightful. This is a real Down-country. Here you see miles and miles square without a tree, or hedge, or bush. It is country of green-sward. This is the most famous place in all England for coursing. I was here, at this very inn, with a party eighteen years ago; and the landlord, who is still the same, recognized me as soon as he saw me. There were forty brace of greyhounds taken out into the field on one of the days, and every brace had one course, and some of them two. The ground is the finest in the world; from two to three miles for the hare to run to cover, and not a stone nor a bush nor a hillock. It was here proved to me, that the hare is, by far, the swiftest of all English animals; for I saw three hares, in one day, run away from the dogs. To give dog and hare a fair trial, there should be but one dog. Then, if that dog got so close as to compel the hare to turn, that would be a proof that the dog ran fastest. When the dog, or dogs, never get near enough to the hare to induce her to turn, she is said, and very justly, to “run away” from them; and, as I saw three hares do this in one day, I conclude, that the hare is the swiftest animal of the two.
This inn is one of the nicest, and, in summer, one of the pleasantest, in England; for, I think, that my experience in this way will justify me in speaking thus positively. The house is large, the yard and the stables good, the landlord a farmer also, and, therefore, no cribbing your horses in hay or straw and yourself in eggs and cream. The garden, which adjoins the south side of the house, is large, of good shape, has a terrace on one side, lies on the slope, consists of well-disposed clumps of shrubs and flowers, and of short-grass very neatly kept. In the lower part of the garden there are high trees, and, amongst these, the tulip-tree and the live-oak. Beyond the garden is a large clump of lofty sycamores, and in these a most populous rookery, in which, of all things in the world, I delight. The village, which contains 301 souls, lies to the north of the inn, but adjoining its premises. All the rest, in every direction, is bare down or open arable. I am now sitting at one of the southern windows of this inn, looking across the garden towards the rookery. It is nearly sun-setting; the rooks are skimming and curving over the tops of the trees; while, under the branches, I see a flock of several hundred sheep, coming nibbling their way in from the Down, and going to their fold.
Now, what ill-natured devil could bring Old Nic Grimshaw into my head in company with these innocent sheep? Why, the truth is this: nothing is so swift as thought: it runs over a life-time in a moment; and, while I was writing the last sentence of the foregoing paragraph, thought took me up at the time when I used to wear a smock-frock and to carry a wooden bottle like that shepherd’s boy; and, in an instant, it hurried me along through my no very short life of adventure, of toil, of peril, of pleasure, of ardent friendship and not less ardent enmity; and after filling me with wonder, that a heart and mind so wrapped up in everything belonging to the gardens, the fields and the woods, should have been condemned to waste themselves away amidst the stench, the noise, and the strife of cities, it brought me to the present moment, and sent my mind back to what I have yet to perform about Nicholas Grimshaw and his ditches!
My sons set off about three o’clock to-day, on their way to Herefordshire, where I intend to join them, when I have had a pretty good ride in this country. There is no pleasure in travelling, except on horse-back, or on foot. Carriages take your body from place to place; and if you merely want to be conveyed, they are very good; but they enable you to see and to know nothing at all of the country.
East Everley, Monday Morning,
5 o’clock, 28th Aug. 1826.
A very fine morning; a man, eighty-two years of age, just beginning to mow the short-grass, in the garden: I thought it, even when I was young, the hardest work that man had to do. To look on, this work seems nothing; but it tries every sinew in your frame, if you go upright and do your work well. This old man never knew how to do it well, and he stoops, and he hangs his scythe wrong; but, with all this, it must be a surprising man to mow short-grass, as well as he does, at eighty. I wish I may be able to mow short-grass at eighty! That’s all I have to say of the matter. I am just setting off for the source of the Avon, which runs from near Marlborough to Salisbury, and thence to the sea; and I intend to pursue it as far as Salisbury. In the distance of thirty miles, here are, I see by the books, more than thirty churches. I wish to see, with my own eyes, what evidence there is that those thirty churches were built without hands, without money, and without a congregation; and thus to find matter, if I can, to justify the mad wretches, who, from Committee-Rooms and elsewhere, are bothering this half-distracted nation to death about a “surplus popalashon, mon.”
My horse is ready; and the rooks are just gone off to the stubble-fields. These rooks rob the pigs; but they have a right to do it. I wonder (upon my soul I do) that there is no lawyer, Scotchman, or Parson-Justice, to propose a law to punish the rooks for trespass.