There is something absolutely touching in the simplicity of the following incident, derived from Aelfric’s Colloquium, composed in the eleventh century. A teacher examines a ploughman on the subject of his occupation. “What sayest thou, ploughman; how dost thou perform thy work?” “O, my lord,” he answers, “I labour excessively: I go out at dawn of day, driving my oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plough: there is no weather so severe that I dare rest at home, for fear of my lord; but having yoked my oxen, and fastened the share and coulter to the plough, every day I must plough a whole field (acre?) or more.” The teacher again asks, “Hast thou any companion?” “I have a boy who urges the oxen with a goad, and who is now hoarse with cold and shouting.” “What more doest thou in the day?” “Truly, I do more yet. I must fill the oxen’s mangers with hay, and water them, and carry away their dung.” “O, it is a sore vexation!” “Yea, it is great vexation; because I am not free.”
The Anglo-Saxon clergy went so far as to make the giving of Freedom an Atonement for all Sins, by encouraging the manumission of theows gratuitously, as an action of merit in the eyes of the church. Among the early benefactors of the abbey of Ramsey, it is recorded that Athelstan Mannesone manumitted thirteen men in every thirty, “for the salvation of his soul,” taking them as the lot fell upon them, and “placing them in the open road, so that they were at liberty to go where they would.” Many, indeed, were freed, from feelings of piety. Thus it appears from the celebrated “Exeter book” in the cathedral, that, at Exeter, on the day when they removed the bodies of bishops Osbern and Leofric from the old minster to the new one, William, bishop of Exeter, “proclaimed Wulfree Pig free and sackless of the land at Teigtune,” and “freed him for the love of God and of St. Marie, and of all Christ’s saints, and for the redemption of the bishops’ souls and his own.” Sometimes a man who had no theow of his own, bought one of another person, in order to emancipate him, “for the love of God and the redemption of his soul.” Such were the fruits that ripened from Roman teaching in the olden time!—Archæologia, vol. xxx.
The Despot deceived.
Nothing can be more erroneous than the notion that the despot, though he may himself oppress his people, can prevent others from doing the same. He is cheated by his subordinates, and they cheat the people.—Archbishop Whately.
True Source of Civilization.
The killing of animals for food is, after all, merely the resource of the savage, and domesticated animals and cultivated plants are indispensable to the earliest advances of civilization. It may be safely averred, says Mr. Craufurd, that no people ever attained any great civilization without, for example, the possession of some cereal, and without having domesticated the horse, or the ox, or the buffalo. No evidence exists of a people emerging from barbarism whose food consisted of the cocoa-nut, the banana, the date, the bread-fruit, sago, the potato, the yam, or the batata. Such articles are too easily produced, require too little skill and ingenuity to raise; and when they fail, there is nothing to fall back upon—nothing between the people cultivating them and starvation. The higher, too, the cereal the better, wheat standing at the top of the list in temperate regions, and rice in warm ones. Thus, the cereals of Egypt, nurtured by the mud of the Nile, created a respectable civilization among a very inferior race. It was because the Egyptians, says Mr. Craufurd, besides the date, possessed wheat, barley, pulse, and the ox, and that nature dressed and irrigated their country, that the Egyptians became numerous and civilized.
The Lowest Civilization.
The South Sea Islanders who scalded their fingers in Captain Cook’s tea-kettle, and to whom pottery and warm water were luxuries also, were certainly low in the scale of civilization, but they were not nearly so low as the Terra del Fuegans at this moment. Mr. Darwin describes the state of these wretched creatures as the extreme of misery, and as affording him the most curious and interesting spectacle he had ever beheld. “I could not have believed,” says he, “how wide was the difference between savage and civilized men.” Their land, we should remember, is a land of rain, sleet, snow, and storms, unsheltered from the cold of the South Pole, and one thick murky mass of forest. The “climate (where gale succeeds gale, with rain, hail, and sleet) seems blacker than anywhere else. In the Straits of Magellan, looking due south from Port Famine, the distant channels between the mountains appear, from their gloominess, to lead beyond the confines of the world.” In this terrestrial limbo live human beings who are clad, for this inclement temperature, in a single otter-skin, which they lace across their breast by strings, and, according as the wind blows, shift from side to side. He pictures the state of these poor creatures at night, some half-a-dozen of them sleeping together naked on the wet ground coiled up like animals. “Whenever it is low water they must rise to pick shellfish from the rocks; and the women, winter and summer, either dive to collect sea-eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line jerk out small fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale is discovered, they are feasts. Such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi.” Mr. Snow, who brings us our latest reports from the Fuegans, visited them in 1855. At present, however, their condition in the scale of humanity is almost as low as it can be; for though they possess the capacity of kindling a fire by the friction of two sticks (an accomplishment of which, by the way, all savages that we know of are capable), and though they can form canoes by hollowing out logs of wood, they cultivate no plant and domesticate no animal, and have, as we see, no other art of civilized life.—Times journal.