After a while the company dispersed over the house to look at the rooms. There are all sorts of parlors and reception rooms, furnished with the same correct taste. Each room had its predominant color; among them blue was a particular favorite.
The carpets were all of those small figures I have described, the blue ones being of the same pattern with the green. The idea, I suppose, is to produce a mass of color of a certain tone, and not to distract the eye with the complicated pattern. Where so many objects of art and virtu are to be exhibited, without this care in regulating and simplifying the ground tints, there would be no unity in the impression. This was my philosophizing on the matter, and if it is not the reason why it is done, it ought to be. It is as good a theory as most theories, at any rate.
Before we went away I made a little call on the Lady Constance Grosvenor, and saw the future Marquis of Westminster, heir to the largest estate in England. His beautiful mother is celebrated in the annals of the court journal as one of the handsomest ladies in England. His little lordship was presented to me in all the dignity of long, embroidered clothes, being then, I believe, not quite a fortnight old, and I can assure you that he demeaned himself with a gravity becoming his rank and expectations.
There is a more than common interest attached to these children by one who watches the present state of the world. On the character and education of the princes and nobility of this generation the future history of England must greatly depend.
This Stafford House meeting, in any view of it, is a most remarkable fact. Kind and gratifying as its arrangements have been to me, I am far from appropriating it to myself individually, as a personal honor. I rather regard it as the most public expression possible of the feelings of the women of England on one of the most important questions of our day—that, of individual liberty considered in its religious bearings.
The most splendid of England's palaces has this day opened its doors to the slave. Its treasures of wealth and of art, its prestige of high name and historic memories, have been consecrated to the acknowledgment of Christianity in that form, wherein, in our day, it is most frequently denied—the recognition of the brotherhood of the human family, and the equal religious value of every human soul. A fair and noble hand by this meeting has fixed, in the most public manner, an ineffaceable seal to the beautiful sentiments of that most Christian document, the letter of the ladies of Great Britain to the ladies of America. That letter and this public attestation of it are now historic facts, which wait their time and the judgment of advancing Christianity.
Concerning that letter I have one or two things to say. Nothing can be more false than the insinuation that has been thrown out in some American papers, that it was a political movement. It had its first origin in the deep religious feelings of the man whose whole life has been devoted to the abolition of the white-labor slavery of Great Britain; the man whose eye explored the darkness of the collieries, and counted the weary steps of the cotton spinners—who penetrated the dens where the insane were tortured with darkness, and cold, and stripes; and threaded the loathsome alleys of London, haunts of fever and cholera: this man it was, whose heart was overwhelmed by the tale of American slavery, and who could find no relief from, this distress except in raising some voice to the ear of Christianity. Fearful of the jealousy of political interference, Lord Shaftesbury published an address to the ladies of England, in which he told them that he felt himself moved by an irresistible impulse to entreat them to raise their voice, in the name of a common Christianity and womanhood, to their American sisters. The abuse which has fallen upon him for this most Christian proceeding does not in the least surprise him, because it is of the kind that has always met him in every benevolent movement. When in the Parliament of England he was pleading for women in the collieries who were harnessed like beasts of burden, and made to draw heavy loads through miry and dark passages, and for children who were taken at three years old to labor where the sun never shines, he was met with determined and furious opposition and obloquy—accused of being a disorganizer, and of wishing to restore the dark ages. Very similar accusations have attended all his efforts for the laboring classes during the long course of seventeen years, which resulted at last in the triumphant passage of the factory bill.
We in America ought to remember that the gentle remonstrance of the letter of the ladies of England contains, in the mildest form, the sentiments of universal Christendom. Rebukes much more pointed are coming back to us even from, our own missionaries. A day is coming when, past all the temporary currents of worldly excitement, we shall, each of us, stand alone face to face with the perfect purity of our Redeemer. The thought of such a final interview ought certainly to modify all our judgments now, that we may strive to approve only what we shall then approve.