This is true, and hence, let us judge leniently of the lad living within the sound of Bow Bells. Nature is
the best and truest teacher a man can have—and it is little of nature that the cockney sees, or hears, and feels. He goes to Richmond, but, instead of studying the finest panorama in the world, he stupifies himself with doubtful port; he visits the Crystal Palace, but it is for the sake of the lobster-salad; he runs down to Greenwich, not to revel in that park, beautiful still in spite of the attacks of London on its purity, but to eat white-bait; he takes, it may be, the rail or the steamboat to Gravesend, but merely that he may dance with milliners at Tivoli. The only idea of a garden to a London gent, is a place where there is dancing, and drinking, and smoking going on. And this is a type of his inbred depravity. He has no rational amusements. In the winter time shut up the casinos, and do away with the half-price at the theatres, and the poor fellow is hors de combat, and has nothing left him but suicide or delirium tremens. Literary and Scientific Institutions don’t answer in London—even a place like the Whittington Club, where any respectable young man belonging to the middle classes may find a home, is by no means (so I have understood) a success.
Tom Moore says there is not in the world so stupid or boorish a congregation as the audience of an English play-house. I fear there is some truth in this as regards London. The regular cockney is not a fine sample of the genus homo, in the first place he is very conceited, and when a man is that, it is little that will do him good; in the second place, he thinks only of business and pleasure, he lives well, dresses well, goes to church once
on the Sunday, and laughs at new-fangled opinions, and wonders why people grumble, and believes all he reads in the Times. If you want to start any successful agitation you must begin it in the provinces. The Anti-Corn Law League had its seat at Manchester, the Reform agitation had its head quarters at Birmingham. The wisest thing done by the United Kingdom-Alliance, was to plant themselves in Manchester rather than in London. Sydney Smith said it required a severe surgical operation to make a Scotchman understand a joke, it is almost as difficult to get a Londoner to understand anything new; he is slow to recognise worth or virtue, and if any of his own connection rise, he exclaims, with the writing-master, who would not believe Newton was a good mathematician, “the fool, he is an hour over a sum in the rule of three.”
The truth is we are a city of shopkeepers; and if intellectual pursuits be denied to those engaged in trade, the consequence must be the popular opinion must be that of those who know little else than the business of the shop, and as a consequence a curse will go forth to the remotest corner of the land. Bigotry, prejudice, falsehood, and passion will be rampant and rife, and truth and reason will be trampled under foot. Just as manhood is forming, just as the moral and intellectual parts of our nature are developing themselves, just as life becomes a reality, and glimpses of the work to be done, and of the blessedness of doing it, catch and charm the youthful eye, the victim is compelled to stand
behind the counter, and is threatened with beggary if he fail practically to remember that the pursuit of money, to the utter exclusion of aught higher and nobler, is the end for which life is given man. No wonder such a system fearfully avenges itself—that the sensual is exalted—that we meet so little in accordance with principle and truth. Debarred from intellectual pursuits, what awaits our young men but frivolous excitement? Ignorant, with the feelings of our common nature unnaturally aroused—with minds enfeebled by lack of healthy exercise—our middle class—the class perhaps the most important in our land—stands by society in its conventionalism and falsehood and wrong, and we mourn and sigh over giant ills, that we cannot grapple with effectually because we go the wrong way to work.
A great want of our age is education for the middle classes. We want to have them taught to believe in something else than the shop or the desk. We want them to believe the mind as fully entitled to their care as the body, and the money-bag but poor and impotent compared with the well-spent life. We would publish the all-important truth—a truth that shall live and fructify when the great city in which we write shall have become a desert-waste—the truth that man was made in the image of his maker, and that the heart that beats within is capable of divinity itself. We may have drawn in dark colours our national state. We fear the picture is but too true; and that till something be done to burst the bonds of habit, and educate the youth in our shops,
the picture will continue to be true. We write not to deprecate the land of our birth; it is one dear to us by every remembrance of the past and hope for the future. Because we thus cling to it do we deplore and expose what we deem to be wrong, and that our social condition may be healthy, that our civilization may be complete that our faith may be a living leavening power, do we ask the emancipation of the sons and daughters of trade—that that long-looked-for hour may quickly come.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE LONDON VOLUNTEERS.
In spite of Lord Palmerston’s injudicious attempt to check the rifle movement in its infancy, there can be no doubt now but that it is a complete success. The appeal to the martial spirit—more or less strong in the hearts of all Englishmen—has been most cheerfully responded to. Something of the kind was evidently required to excite the energies and to occupy the leisure hours of our numerous youth. We are always in danger of becoming too peaceable a folk. Our avocations, all of a mercantile or professional character,—our amusements, less out-door, and more sedentary, than ought to be the case,—the very humane spirit which pervades all English society,—our enormous wealth; all tend to make us peaceably disposed. None can be alarmed at our warlike demonstrations. No nation in Europe need fear a British invasion. No foreign government can possibly pretend that the British government harbours designs of active hostility against any European power. Indeed, the naturally and necessarily peaceful intentions of this country are candidly