I shall have something soon to tell you of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, no less than Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. The following letter, though only a girl’s, contains so much respecting the Arcadia of Modern England which I cannot elsewhere find expressed in so true and direct a way, that I print it without asking her permission, promising however, hereby, not to do so naughty a thing again,—to her, at least; new correspondents must risk it.
“I wish people would be good, and do as you wish, and help you. Reading ‘Fors’ last night made me determined to try very hard to be good. I cannot do all the things you said in the last letter you wanted us to do, but I will try.
“Oh dear! I wish you would emigrate, though I know you won’t. I wish we could all go somewhere fresh, and begin anew: it would be so much easier. In fact it seems impossible to alter things here. You cannot think how it is, in a place like this. The idea of there being any higher law to rule all one’s actions than self-interest, is treated as utter folly; really, people do not hesitate to say that in business each one must do the best he can for himself, at any risk or loss to others. You do know all this, perhaps, by hearsay, but it is so sad to see in practice. They all grow alike—by constant contact I suppose; and one has to hear one after the other gradually learning and repeating the lesson they learn in town—to trust no one, believe in no one, admire no one; to act as if all the world was made of rogues and thieves, as the only way to be safe, and not to be a rogue or thief oneself if it’s possible to make money without. And what can one do? They laugh at me. Being a woman, of course I know nothing; being, moreover, fond of reading, I imagine I do know something, and so get filled with foolish notions, which it is their duty to disabuse me of as soon as possible. I should so like to drag them all away from this wretched town, to some empty, new, beautiful, large country, and set them all to dig, and plant, and build; and we could, I am sure, all be pure and honest once more. No, there is no chance here. I am so sick of it all.
“I want to tell you one little fact that I heard the other day that made me furious. It will make a long letter, but please read it. You have heard of ——,—the vilest spot in all the earth, I am sure, and yet they are very proud of it. It is all chemical works, and the country for miles round looks as if under a curse. There are still some farms struggling for existence, but the damage done to them is very great, and to defend themselves, when called upon to make reparation, the chemical manufacturers have formed an association, so that if one should be brought to pay, the others should support him. Of course, generally it is almost impossible to say which of the hundreds of chimneys may have caused any particular piece of mischief; and further frightened by this coalition, and by the expense of law,[7] the farmers have to submit. But one day, just before harvest-time this year, a farmer was in his fields, and saw a great stream, or whatever you would call it, of smoke come over his land from one of these chimneys, and, as it passed, destroy a large field of corn. It literally burns up vegetation, as if it were a fire. The loss to this man, who is not well off, is about £400. He went to the owners of the works and asked for compensation. They did not deny that it might have been their gas, but told him he could not prove it, and they would pay nothing. I dare say they were no worse than other people, and that they would be quite commended by business men. But that is our honesty, and this is a country where there is supposed to be justice. These chemical people are very rich, and could consume all this gas and smoke at a little more cost of working. I do believe it is hopeless to attempt to alter these things, they are so strong. Then the other evening I took up a ‘Telegraph’—a newspaper is hardly fit to touch nowadays—but I happened to look at this one, and read an account of some cellar homes in St. Giles’. It sent me to bed miserable, and I am sure that no one has a right to be anything but miserable while such misery is in the world. What cruel wretches we must all be, to suffer tamely such things to be, and sit by, enjoying ourselves! I must do something; yet I am tied hand and foot, and can do nothing but cry out. And meanwhile—oh! it makes me mad—our clergymen, who are supposed to do right, and teach others right, are squabbling over their follies; here they are threatening each other with prosecutions, for exceeding the rubric, or not keeping the rubric, and mercy and truth are forgotten. I wish I might preach once, to them and to the rich;—no one ought to be rich; and if I were a clergyman I would not go to one of their dinner-parties, unless I knew that they were moving heaven and earth to do away with this poverty, which, whatever its cause, even though it be, as they say, the people’s own fault, is a disgrace to every one of us. And so it seems to me hopeless, and I wish you would emigrate.
“It is no use to be more polite, if we are less honest. No use to treat women with more respect outwardly, and with more shameless, brutal, systematic degradation secretly. Worse than no use to build hospitals, and kill people to put into them; and churches, and insult God by pretending to worship Him. Oh dear! what is it all coming to? Are we going like Rome, like France, like Greece, or is there time to stop? Can St. George fight such a Dragon? You know I am a coward, and it does frighten me. Of course I don’t mean to run away, but is God on our side? Why does He not arise and scatter His enemies? If you could see what I see here! This used to be quite a peaceful little country village; now the chemical manufacturers have built works, a crowd of them, along the river, about two miles from here. The place where this hideous colony has planted itself, is, I am sure, the ugliest, most loathsome spot on the earth.” (Arcadia, my dear, Arcadia.) “It has been built just as any one wanted either works or a row of cottages for the men,—all huddled up, backs to fronts, any way; scrambling, crooked, dirty, squeezed up; the horrid little streets separated by pieces of waste clay, or half-built-up land. The works themselves, with their chimneys and buildings, and discoloured ditches, and heaps of refuse chemical stuff lying about, make up the most horrible picture of ‘progress’ you can imagine. Because they are all so proud of it. The land, now every blade of grass and every tree is dead, is most valuable—I mean, they get enormous sums of money for it,—and every year they build new works, and say, ‘What a wonderful place —— is!’ It is creeping nearer and nearer here. There is a forest of chimneys visible, to make up, I suppose, for the trees that are dying. We can hardly ever now see the farther bank of our river, that used to be so pretty, for the thick smoke that hangs over it. And worse than all, the very air is poisoned with their gases. Often the vilest smells fill the house, but they say they are not unhealthy. I wish they were—perhaps then they would try to prevent them. It nearly maddens me to see the trees, the poor trees, standing bare and naked, or slowly dying, the top branches dead, the few leaves withered and limp. The other evening I went to a farm that used to be (how sad that ‘used to be’ sounds) so pretty, surrounded by woods. Now half the trees are dead, and they are cutting down the rest as fast as possible, so that they can at least make use of the wood. The gas makes them useless. Yesterday I went to the house of the manager of some plate-glass works. He took me over them, and it was very interesting, and some of it beautiful. You should see the liquid fire streaming on to the iron sheets, and then the sparkling lakes of gold, so intensely bright, like bits out of a setting sun sometimes. When I was going away, the manager pointed proudly to the mass of buildings we had been through, and said, ‘This was all corn-fields a few years ago!’ It sounded so cruel, and I could not help saying, ‘Don’t you think it was better growing corn than making glass?’ He laughed, and seemed so amused; but I came away wondering, if this goes on, what will become of England. The tide is so strong—they will try to make money, at any price. And it is no use trying to remedy one evil, or another, unless the root is rooted out, is it?—the love of money.”
It is of use to remedy any evil you can reach: and all this will very soon now end in forms of mercantile catastrophe, and political revolution, which will end the “amusement” of managers, and leave the ground (too fatally) free, without “emigration.”
Oxford, 24th October.
The Third Fors has just put into my hands, as I arrange my books here, a paper read before a Philosophical Society in the year 1870, (in mercy to the author, I forbear to give his name; and in respect to the Philosophical Society, I forbear to give its name,) which alleges as a discovery, by ‘interesting experiment,’ that a horizontal plank of ice laid between two points of support, bends between them; and seriously discusses the share which the ‘motive power of heat’ has in that amazing result. I am glad, indeed, to see that the author “cannot, without some qualifications agree” in the lucid opinion of Canon Moseley, that since, in the Canon’s experiments, ice was crushed under a pressure of 308 lb. on the square inch, a glacier over 710 feet thick would crush itself to pieces at the bottom. (The Canon may still further assist modern science by determining what weight is necessary to crush an inch cube of water; and favouring us with his resulting opinion upon the probable depth of the sea.) But I refer to this essay only to quote the following passages in it, to prove, for future reference, the degree of ignorance to which the ingenuity of Professor Tyndall had reduced the general scientific public, in the year 1870:—
“The generally accepted theory proved by the Rev. Canon Moseley to be incorrect.—Since the time that Professor Tyndall had shown that all the phenomena formerly attributed by Professor Forbes to plasticity could be explained upon the principle of regelation, discovered by Faraday, the viscous theory of glacier-motion has been pretty generally given up. The ice of a glacier is now almost universally believed to be, not a soft plastic substance, but a substance hard, brittle, and unyielding. The power that the glacier has of accommodating itself to the inequalities of its bed without losing its apparent continuity is referred to the property of regelation possessed by ice. All this is now plain.”
“The present state of the question.—The condition which the perplexing question of the cause of the descent of glaciers has now reached seems to be something like the following. The ice of a glacier is not in a soft and plastic state, but is solid, hard, brittle, and unyielding.”
I hope to give a supplementary number of Fors, this winter, on glacier questions; and will only, therefore, beg my readers at present to observe that the opponents of Forbes are simply, in the position of persons who deny the flexibility of chain-mail because ‘steel is not flexible;’ and, resolving that steel is not flexible, account for the bending of an old carving-knife by the theory of ‘contraction and expansion.’
Observe, also, that ‘regelation’ is only scientific language for ‘freezing again;’ and it is supposed to be more explanatory, as being Latin.