My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education

by Hugh Miller

And lo! her pale and lo! her purple slaves."—Crabbe.

I was joined in the course of a few weeks, in Peggy Russel's one-roomed cottage, by another lodger—lodgers of the humbler class usually consociating together in pairs. My new companion had lived for some time, ere my arrival at Niddry, in a neighbouring domicile, which, as he was what was termed a "quiet-living man," and as the inmates were turbulent and unsteady, he had, after bearing a good deal, been compelled to quit. Like our foreman, he was a strict Seceder, in full communion with his Church. Though merely a common labourer, with not more than half the wages of our skilled workmen, I had observed, ere our acquaintance began, that no mason in the squad was more comfortably attired on week-days than he, or wore a better suit on Sunday; and so I had set him down, from the circumstance, as a decent man. I now found that, like my uncle Sandy, he was a great reader of good books—an admirer even of the same old authors—deeply read like him, in Durham and Rutherford—and entertaining, too, a high respect for Baxter, Boston, old John Brown, and the Erskines. In one respect, however, he differed from both my uncles: he had begun to question the excellence of religious Establishments; nay, to hold that the country might be none the worse were its ecclesiastical endowments taken away—a view which our foreman also entertained; whereas both Uncles Sandy and James were as little averse as the old divines themselves to a State-paid ministry, and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other Seceders engaged as masons at the work—more of the polemical and less of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the labourer; and they also used occasionally to speak, not merely of the doubtful usefulness, but—as they were stronger in their language than their more self-denying and more consistent co-religionists—of the positive worthlessness of Establishments. The Voluntary controversy did not break out until about nine years after this time, when the Reform Bill gave vent to many a pent-up opinion and humour among that class to which it extended the franchise; but the materials of the war were evidently already accumulating among the intelligent Dissenters of Scotland; and from what I now saw, its first appearance in a somewhat formidable aspect failed to take me by surprise. I must in justice add, that all the religion of our party was to be found among its Seceders. Our other workmen were really wild fellows, most of whom never entered a church. A decided reaction had already commenced within the Establishment, on the cold, elegant, unpopular Moderatism of the previous period—that Moderatism which had been so adequately represented in the Scottish capital by the theology of Blair and the ecclesiastical policy of Robertson; but it was chiefly among the middle and upper classes that the reaction had begun; and scarce any portion of the humbler people, lost to the Church during the course of the two preceding generations, had yet been recovered. And so the working men of Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, at this time, were in large part either non-religious, or included within the Independent or Secession pale.

John Wilson—for such was the name of my new comrade—was a truly good man—devout, conscientious, friendly—not highly intellectual, but a person of plain good sense, and by no means devoid of general information. There was another labourer at the work, an unhappy little man, with whom I have often seen John engaged in mixing mortar, or carrying materials to the builders, but never without being struck by the contrast which they presented in character and appearance. John was a plain, somewhat rustic-looking personage; and an injury which he had received from gunpowder in a quarry, that had destroyed the sight of one of his eyes, and considerably dimmed that of the other, had, of course, not served to improve his looks; but he always wore a cheerful, contented air; and, with all his homeliness, was a person pleasant to the sight. His companion was a really handsome man—grey-haired, silvery-whiskered, with an aristocratic cast of countenance, that would have done no discredit to a royal drawing-room, and an erect though somewhat petit figure, cast in a mould that, if set off more to advantage, would have been recognised as elegant. But John Lindsay—for so he was called—bore always the stamp of misery on his striking features. There lay between the poor little man and the Crawford peerage only a narrow chasm, represented by a missing marriage certificate; but he was never able to bridge the gulf across; and he had to toil on in unhappiness, in consequence, as a mason's labourer. I have heard the call resounding from the walls twenty times a day—"John, Yearl Crafurd, bring us anither hod o' lime."

I found religion occupying a much humbler place among these workmen of the south of Scotland than that which I had used to see assigned to it in the north. In my native district and the neighbouring counties, it still spoke with authority; and a man who stood up in its behalf in any society, unless very foolish or very inconsistent, always succeeded in silencing opposition, and making good its claims. Here, however, the irreligious asserted their power as the majority, and carried matters with a high hand; and religion itself, existing as but dissent, not as an establishment, had to content itself with bare toleration. Remonstrance, or even advice, was not permitted. "Johnnie, boy," I have heard one of the rougher mechanics say, half in jest, half in earnest, to my companion, "if you set yourself to convert me, I'll brak your face;" and I have known another of them remark, with a patronizing air, that "kirks werena very bad things, after a';" that he "aye liked to be in a kirk, for the sake of decency, once a twelvemonth;" and that, as he "hadna been kirked for the last ten months, he was just only waiting for a rainy Sabbath, to lay in his stock o' divinity for the year." Our new lodger, aware how little any interference with the religious concerns of others was tolerated in the place, seemed unable for some time to muster up resolution enough to broach in the family his favourite subject. He retired every night, before going to bed, to his closet—the blue vault, with all its stars—often the only closet of the devout lodger in a south-country cottage; but I saw that each evening, ere he went out, he used to look uneasily at the landlord and me, as if there lay some weight on his mind regarding us, of which he was afraid to rid himself, and which yet rendered him very uncomfortable. "Well, John," I asked one evening, speaking direct, to his evident embarrassment; "what is it?" John looked at old William the landlord, and then at me. "Did we not think it right," he said, "that there should be evening worship in the family?" Old William had not idea enough for conversation: he either signified acquiescence in whatever was said that pleased him, by an ever-recurring ay, ay, ay; or he grumbled out his dissent in a few explosive sounds, that conveyed his meaning rather in their character as tones than as vocables. But there now mingled with the ordinary explosions the distinct enunciation, given with, for him, unwonted emphasis, that he "wasna for that." I struck in, however, on the other side, and appealed to Peggy. "I was sure," I said, "that Mrs. Russel would see the propriety of John's proposal." And Mrs. Russel, as most women would have done in the circumstances, unless, indeed, very bad ones, did see the propriety of it; and from that evening forward the cottage had its family worship. John's prayers were always very earnest and excellent, but sometimes just a little too long; and old William, who, I fear, did not greatly profit by them, used not unfrequently to fall asleep on his knees. But though he sometimes stole to his bed when John chanced to be a little later in taking the book than usual, and got into a profound slumber ere the prayer began, he deferred to the majority, and gave us no active opposition. He was not a vicious man: his intellect had slept through life, and he had as little religion as an old horse or dog; but he was quiet and honest, and, to the measure of his failing ability, a faithful worker in his humble employments. His religious training, like that of his brother villagers, seemed to have been sadly neglected. Had he gone to the parish church on Sunday, he would have heard a respectable moral essay read from the pulpit, and would, of course, have slept under it; but William, like most of his neighbours, preferred sleeping out the day at home, and never did go to the church; and as certainly as he went not to the teacher of religion, the teacher of religion never came to him. During the ten months which I spent in the neighbourhood of Niddry Mill, I saw neither minister nor missionary. But if the village furnished no advantageous ground on which to fight the battle of religious Establishments—seeing that the Establishment was of no manner of use there—it furnished ground quite as unsuitable for the class of Voluntaries who hold that the supply of religious instruction should, as in the case of all other commodities, be regulated by the demand. Demand and supply were admirably well balanced in the village of Niddry: there was no religious instruction, and no wish or desire for it.

The masons at Niddry House were paid fortnightly, on a Saturday night. Wages were high—we received two pounds eight shillings for our two weeks' work; but scarce half-a-dozen in the squad could claim at settlement the full tale, as the Monday and Tuesday after pay-night were usually blank days, devoted by two-thirds of the whole to drinking and debauchery. Not often have wages been more sadly mis-spent than by my poor work-fellows at Niddry, during this period of abundant and largely-remunerated employment. On receiving their money, they set straightway off to Edinburgh, in parties of threes and fours; and until the evening of the following Monday or Tuesday I saw no more of them. They would then come dropping in, pale, dirty, disconsolate-looking—almost always in the reactionary state of unhappiness which succeeds intoxication—(they themselves used to term it "the horrors")—and with their nervous system so shaken, that rarely until a day or two after did they recover their ordinary working ability. Narratives of their adventures, however, would then begin to circulate through the squad—adventures commonly of the "Tom and Jerry" type; and always, the more extravagant they were, the more was the admiration which they excited. On one occasion, I remember (for it was much spoken about as a manifestation of high spirit) that three of them, hiring a coach, drove out on the Sunday to visit Roslin and Hawthornden, and in this way spent their six pounds so much in the style of gentlemen, that they were able to get back to the mallet without a farthing on the evening of Monday. And, as they were at work on Tuesday in consequence, they succeeded, as they said, in saving the wages of a day usually lost, just by doing the thing so genteelly. Edinburgh had in those times a not very efficient police, and, in some of its less reputable localities, must have been dangerous. Burke found its West Port a fitting scene for his horrid trade a good many years after; and from the stories of some of our bolder spirits, which, though mayhap exaggerated, had evidently their nucleus of truth, there was not a little of the violent and the lawless perpetrated in its viler haunts during the years of the speculation mania. Four of our masons found, one Saturday evening, a country lad bound hand and foot on the floor of a dark inner room in one of the dens of the High Street; and such was the state of exhaustion to which he was reduced, mainly through the compression of an old apron wrapped tightly round his face, that though they set him loose, it was some time ere he could muster strength enough to crawl away. He had been robbed by a bevy of women whom he had been foolish enough to treat; and on threatening to call in the watchman, they had fallen upon a way of keeping him quiet, which, save for the interference of my wild fellow-workmen, would soon have rendered him permanently so. And such was but one of many stories of the kind.

There was of course a considerable diversity of talent and acquirement among my more reckless associates at the work; and it was curious enough to mark their very various views regarding what constituted spirit or the want of it. One weak lad used to tell us about a singularly spirited brother apprentice of his, who not only drank, kept loose company, and played all sorts of very mischievous practical jokes, but even occasionally stole, out of warehouses; which was of course a very dauntless thing, seeing that it brought him within wind of the gallows; whereas another of our wild workmen—a man of sense and intelligence—not unfrequently cut short the narratives of the weaker brother, by characterizing his spirited apprentice as a mean, graceless scamp, who, had he got his deservings, would have been hung like a dog. I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentiousness; but it did form a not ineffectual protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices—such as theft, and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society: there have been accomplished ladies of wealth and rank who have indulged in a propensity for stealing out of drapers' shops; and gentlemen of birth and education who could not be trusted in a library or a bookseller's back-room; and what sometimes occurs in the higher walks must be occasionally exemplified in the lower also; but, judging from what I have seen, I must hold it as a general rule, that a good intellectual education is a not inefficient protection against the meaner felonies, though not in any degree against the "pleasant vices." The only adequate protection against both, equally, is the sort of education which my friend John Wilson the labourer exemplified—a kind of education not often acquired in schools, and not much more frequently possessed by schoolmasters than by any other class of professional men.

The most remarkable man in our party was a young fellow of three-and-twenty—at least as much a blackguard as any of his companions, but possessed of great strength of character and intellect, and, with all his wildness, marked by very noble traits. He was a strongly and not inelegantly formed man, of about six feet—dark-complexioned, and of a sullen cast of countenance, which, however, though he could, I doubt not, become quite as formidable as he looked, concealed in his ordinary moods much placidity of temper, and a rich vein of humour. Charles —— was the recognised hero of the squad; but he differed considerably from the men who admired him most. Burns tells us that he "often courted the acquaintance of the part of mankind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards;" and that, "though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues—magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty." I cannot say with the poet that I ever courted the acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labouring man may select his friends, he cannot choose his work-fellows; and so I have not unfrequently come in contact with blackguards, and have had opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of the class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. In this poor fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the nobler variety of the genus. Poor Charles did too decidedly belong to it. He it was that projected the Sunday party to Roslin; and he it was that, pressing his way into the recesses of a disreputable house in the High Street, found the fast-bound wight choking in an apron, and, unloosing the cords, let him go. No man of the party squandered his gains more recklessly than Charles, or had looser notions regarding the legitimacy of the uses to which he too often applied them. And yet, notwithstanding, he was a generous-hearted fellow; and, under the influence of religious principle, would, like Burns himself, have made a very noble man.

In gradually forming my acquaintance with him, I was at first struck by the circumstance that he never joined in the clumsy ridicule with which I used to be assailed by the other workmen. When left, too, on one occasion, in consequence of a tacit combination against me, to roll up a large stone to the sort of block-bench, or siege, as it is technically termed, on which the mass had to be hewn, and as I was slowly succeeding in doing, through dint of very violent effort, what some two or three men usually united to do, Charles stepped out to assist me; and the combination at once broke down. Unlike the others, too, who, while they never scrupled to take odds against me, seemed sufficiently chary of coming in contact with me singly, he learned to seek me out in our intervals of labour, and to converse on subjects upon which we felt a common interest. He was not only an excellent operative mechanic, but possessed also of considerable architectural skill; and in this special province we found an interchange of idea not unprofitable. He had a turn, too, for reading, though he was by no means extensively read; and liked to converse about books. Nor, though the faculty had been but little cultivated, was he devoid of an eye for the curious in nature. On directing his attention, one morning, to a well-marked impression of lepidodendron, which delicately fretted with its lozenge-shaped network one of the planes of the stone before me, he began to describe, with a minuteness of observation not common among working men, certain strange forms which had attracted his notice when employed among the grey flagstones of Forfarshire. I long after recognised in his description that strange crustacean of the Middle Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, the Pterygotus—an organism which was wholly unknown at this time to geologists, and which is but partially known still; and I saw in 1838, on the publication, in its first edition, of the "Elements" of Sir Charles Lyell, what he meant to indicate, by a rude sketch which he drew on the stone before us, and which, to the base of a semi-ellipsis, somewhat resembling a horse-shoe, united an angular prolongation not very unlike the iron stem of a pointing trowel drawn from the handle. He had evidently seen, long ere it had been detected by the scientific eye, that strange ichthyolite of the Old Red system, the Cephalaspis. His story, though he used to tell it with great humour, and no little dramatic effect, was in reality a very sad one. He had quarrelled, when quite a lad, with one of his fellow-workmen, and was unfortunate enough, in the pugilistic encounter which followed, to break his jawbone, and otherwise so severely to injure him, that for some time his recovery seemed doubtful. Flying, pursued by the officers of the law, he was, after a few days' hiding, apprehended, lodged in jail, tried at the High Court of Justiciary, and ultimately sentenced to three months' imprisonment. And these three months he had to spend—for such was the wretched arrangement of the time—in the worst society in the world. In sketching, as he sometimes did, for the general amusement, the characters of the various prisoners with whom he had associated—from the sneaking pick-pocket and the murderous ruffian, to the simple Highland smuggler, who had converted his grain into whisky, with scarce intelligence enough to see that there was aught morally wrong in the transaction—he sought only to be as graphic and humorous as he could, and always with complete success. But there attached to his narratives an unintentional moral; and I cannot yet call them up without feeling indignant at that detestable practice of promiscuous imprisonment which so long obtained in our country, and which had the effect of converting its jails into such complete criminal-manufacturing institutions, that, had the honest men of the community risen and dealt by them as the Lord-George-Gordon mob dealt with Newgate, I hardly think they would have been acting out of character. Poor Charles had a nobility in his nature which saved him from being contaminated by what was worst in his meaner associates; but he was none the better for his imprisonment, and he quitted jail, of course, a marked man; and his after career was, I fear, all the more reckless in consequence of the stain imparted at this time to his character. He was as decidedly a leader among his brother workmen as I myself had been, when sowing my wild oats, among my schoolfellows; but society in its settled state, and in a country such as ours, allows no such scope to the man as it does to the boy; and so his leadership, dangerous both to himself and his associates, had chiefly as the scene of its trophies the grosser and more lawless haunts of vice and dissipation. His course through life was a sad, and, I fear, a brief one. When that sudden crash in the commercial world took place, in which the speculation mania of 1824-25 terminated, he was, with thousands more, thrown out of employment; and, having saved not a farthing of his earnings, he was compelled, under the pressure of actual want, to enlist as a soldier into one of the regiments of the line, bound for one of the intertropical colonies. And there, as his old comrades lost all trace of him, he too probably fell a victim, in an insalubrious climate, to old habits and new rum.

Finding me incorrigible, I was at length left by my brother operatives to be as peculiar as I pleased; and the working portion of the autumnal months passed off pleasantly enough in hewing great stones under the branching foliage of the elm and chestnut trees of Niddry Park. From the circumstance, however, that the stones were so great, the previous trial had been an embarrassing one; and, though too proud to confess that I cared aught about the matter, I was now glad enough that it was fairly over. Our modern Temperance Societies—institutions which at this time had not begun to exist—have done much to shield sober working men from combinations of the trying character to which, in the generation well-nigh passed away, they were too often exposed. There are few working parties which have not now their groups of enthusiastic Teetotallers, that always band together against the drinkers, and mutually assist and keep one another in countenance: and a breakwater is thus formed in the middle of the stream, to protect from that grinding oppression of the poor by the poor, which, let popular agitators declaim on the other side as they may, is at once more trying and more general than the oppression which they experience from the great and wealthy. According to the striking figure of the wise old king, "it is like a sweeping rain, which leaveth no food." Fanaticism in itself is not a good thing; nor are there many quiet people who do not dislike enthusiasm; and the members of new sects, whether they be religious sects or no, are almost always enthusiasts, and in some degree fanatical. A man can scarce become a vegetarian even without also becoming in some measure intolerant of the still large and not very disreputable class that eat beef with their greens, and herrings with their potatoes; and the drinkers of water do say rather strong things of the men who, had they been guests at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, would have seen no great harm in partaking in moderation of the wine. There is a somewhat intolerant fanaticism among the Teetotallers, just as there is fanaticism amongst most other new sects; and yet, recognising it simply as strength, and knowing what it has to contend with, I am much disposed to tolerate it, whether it tolerate me or no. Human nature, with all its defects, is a wiser thing than the mere common sense of the creatures whose nature it is; and we find in it special provisions, as in the instincts of the humbler animals, for overmastering the special difficulties with which it is its destiny to contend. And the sort of fanaticism to which I refer seems to be one of those provisions. A few Teetotallers of the average calibre and strength, who take their stand against the majority in a party of wild dissipated mechanics, would require a considerable amount of vigorous fanaticism to make good their position; nor do I see in ordinary men, as society at present exists, aught at once sufficiently potent in its nature, and sufficiently general in its existence, to take its place and do its work. It seems to subsist in the present imperfect state as a wise provision, though, like other wise provisions, such as the horns of the bull or the sting of the bee, it is misdirected at times, and does harm.

Winter came on, and our weekly wages were lowered immediately after Hallow-day, from twenty-four to fifteen shillings per week. This was deemed too large a reduction; and, reckoning by the weekly hours during which, on the average, we were still able to work—forty-two, as nearly as I could calculate, instead of sixty—it was too great a reduction by about one shilling and ninepence. I would, however, in the circumstances, have taken particular care not to strike work for an advance. I knew that three-fourths of the masons about town—quite as improvident as the masons of our own party—could not live on their resources for a fortnight, and had no general fund to sustain them; and further, that many of the master-builders were not very urgently desirous to press on their work throughout the winter. And so, when, on coming to the work-shed on the Monday morning after the close of our first fortnight on the reduced scale, I found my comrades gathered in front of it in a group, and learned that there was a grand strike all over the district, I received the intelligence with as little of the enthusiasm of the "independent associated mechanic" as possibly may be. "You are in the right in your claims," I said to Charles; "but you have taken a bad time for urging them, and will be beaten to a certainty. The masters are much better prepared for a strike than you are. How, may I ask, are you yourself provided with the sinews of war?" "Very ill indeed," said Charles, scratching his head: "if the masters don't give in before Saturday, it's all up with me; but never mind; let us have one day's fun: there's to be a grand meeting at Bruntsfield Links; let us go in as a deputation from the country masons, and make a speech about our rights and duties; and then, if we see matters going very far wrong, we can just step back again, and begin work to-morrow." "Bravely resolved," I said: "I shall go with you by all means, and take notes of your speech." We marched into town, about sixteen in number; and, on joining the crowd already assembled on the Links, were recognised, by the deep red hue of our clothes and aprons, which differed considerably from that borne by workers in the paler Edinburgh stone, as a reinforcement from a distance, and were received with loud cheers. Charles, however, did not make his speech: the meeting, which was about eight hundred strong, seemed fully in the possession of a few crack orators, who spoke with a fluency to which he could make no pretensions; and so he replied to the various calls from among his comrades, of "Cha, Cha," by assuring them that he could not catch the eye of the gentleman in the chair. The meeting had, of course, neither chair nor chairman; and after a good deal of idle speech-making, which seemed to satisfy the speakers themselves remarkably well, but which at least some of their auditory regarded as nonsense, we found that the only motion on which we could harmoniously agree was a motion for an adjournment. And so we adjourned till the evening, fixing as our place of meeting one of the humbler halls of the city.