This diversity of views, which I have endeavoured to describe, used to give rise, as I have already stated, to numerous animated discussions.
I used to listen to these collisions of intellect, during the evenings we passed together, with much interest; and when I could see my way through the pros and cons, was wont sometimes to venture an opinion, to which the captain and his sister always listened with eagerness, as if anxious to know how the matter would strike on my young and unsophisticated mind.
Some of these discussions, that is, the substance of them, I still remember, and had I space, and were this the place for them, I might here be tempted to record.
Lest my reader may be inclined to think otherwise, I must here state, in justice to the good captain, now no more, that he was no leveller; he considered perfect equality as impracticable as to construct a perfect column without a base and a capital, and that the fabric of society must ever fine away to a point, but that instead of being, as at present, founded, in great part, on misery, prejudice, indigence, and ignorance, it might be made to rest on the solid basis of virtue and happiness.
His grand axiom was—and he used frequently to repeat it to his sister—“If by reading, observation, and reflection, I have learnt anything respecting my fellow-creatures, it is this: that eight-tenths of their sufferings have been and are entirely of their own creation, and that it is within the powers of the human mind to diminish the amount of moral and physical evil to an incalculable extent. The upper classes appear to govern the world, but in reality it is the ignorance and prejudice of the ‘tyrant majority’ which rule it. In these, the more educated find what physically Archimedes sought—the fulcrum to move the world: the head is the governing part of the body, but we all know how a disordered stomach will affect it.”
I had but little more intercourse with the good captain and his sister during my stay in India, though we met now and then, and maintained an occasional correspondence. He, poor fellow, was never destined to revisit his native land, for after saving a small competence, and just as he was preparing to return, death, by one of its most appalling agents—cholera-lodged a detainer against him, and instead of enjoying the easy evening of life he had fondly anticipated amongst the scenes of his boyhood, he was destined to fill a cold tenement, six feet by two, in St. John’s churchyard, Calcutta.
’Tis not for me to describe Miss Belfield’s feelings on this occasion; indeed, who can describe the anguish of heart, the utter desolation, which the loss of a brother or a sister, endeared by union of sentiment and every tender association of youth, necessarily occasions? I learnt that she almost sunk under the blow; and a few, very few lines, which she wrote me shortly after, told forcibly the extent of her sorrows, and indicated the gratifying fact that she considered I had a right to participate in them.
Well, years rolled away. I returned home, with a broken constitution, and a lack of rupees, in the English sense of the term;[[46]] and some time after that event received the following letter:—
“Swines-Norton, June 10th, 18—.
“My dear Captain Gernon,