“Yes,” said Birger, “if they do—but a good deal depends on that little particle;—however, even if citizens could be got, whenever wanted, to do their duty for their duty’s sake, which I doubt; distinctions, which of course involve precedence, are useful in themselves. In your country, people are always jealously guarding their position in society; you are always on the look out, lest some interloper should thrust you out, or refuse you the honour you consider your due. This is what makes you Englishmen so unsociable and exclusive; you are always on guard, walking sentry over your own honour. Now look at our people—our barons and our tradesmen, our princes and our farmers, all meet together without fear of losing caste, because every one has his position secured to him, beyond the possibility of invasion. You dare not do this.”
“Do not say, ‘you,’” broke in the Captain, “I, thank God! am a gentleman born, and have not to work for my daily dignity.”
“That is only another instance of what I assert—‘a gentleman born!’ you can afford to do what we all do, because, by birth or by accident, you find yourself in the very position in which we Swedes are all placed by the customs of our country.”
“That is all very true,” said the Parson; “for the amenities of life, I grant your system is by far the best; men live happier and more contentedly under it; and it certainly does produce a much more genial and social intercourse among all classes, that men are dependent for their dignity on something else than their wine merchant and their pastry-cook. Still, yours is not the condition of progress; your people live content, perhaps happy, in their fixed position; but every man of ours, who is working for his daily dignity, as the Captain calls it, is, in a very unpleasant and uncomfortable manner, pressing onward and improving his own condition. Now, that nation in which every man is continually excited to improve his condition, is nationally progressive; that, in which every man is content in his own place, is nationally stationary. I do not say which is the best principle, only, there is something to be said on the other side. One thing is certain, our principle is not the same as yours; and it is excusable, when we do borrow from the continent, if we make a generous blunder in a science which we do not understand, and in the largeness of our heart, give medals to runaway Belgians, without remembering that the honour of the medal lies not in the silver, but in the action which the silver commemorates, and that, in truth, what we have given to the cowards who ran, we must have filched from the brave fellows who had earned for that medal its value.”
“So far, at all events, you are right,” said Birger, “that your nation does not understand the science of decorations any more than ours. You helped to spoil your own Waterloo medal much more than ever the Belgians spoiled it, and that not altogether from your largeness of heart. If I had been a pink-faced ensign of that day, I should have been ashamed to wear my medal in the presence of a Peninsular veteran, who had done five hundred times as much as I. It was a better feeling than that of being ranked with the Belgians that made your people shy of their Waterloo medals. And now that you begin to distribute your decorations, you do not know how to do it: first of all you give it for any little trumpery affair, like sticking those Chinese pigs, and then you give it to all who have seen the smoke of the gunpowder.”
“We presume that every one present does his duty, and that none can do more,” said the Captain.
“A very pretty poetical fiction,” said Birger, “pity that it is a fiction. However, one thing is certain—that will never be prized that is shared by all alike; you see that at once in our case—it is equally true in you own.”
Just then the Stockholm steamer, Daniel Thunberg, hove in sight, with her light blue pennant of smoke, so unlike the black volumes that roll from the chimneys of coal-burning Englishmen.
“They have got something on board for us,” said Moodie; “that calico concern on her foremast is their best Swedish imitation of our English jack, and they always hoist it whenever they have got a letter or parcel for me. There goes a gun; those rascals are always glad of any opportunity for making a bang. Hallo, there! Nils!” continued he, in Swedish, to the master of his yacht, who had gone to sleep against the heel of the bowsprit, with his pipe in his mouth; “answer that signal, and send a boat on board the steamer.”
He spoke as if he had a frigate’s crew at his command. Nils started up, and as he happened, at that moment at least, to be the captain and the whole ship’s company in his own person, he proceeded to obey both orders personally—in a few minutes was alongside the gay little craft, and returned with a letter, the writer of which, to judge from the superscription he placed upon it, must have considered Moodie a very great man indeed, so many titles did he prefix to his name—High-born and Illustrious were the very least of them.