Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal

by Mary Lowell Putnam

"I could not learn there how to live here. And I do not pretend that we can understand you better than you can us. But, Borrow, you are hard to suit. You twit us with our waste and improvidence, and yet you are not better pleased with Rasey, who follows gain like a New-Englander."

"Rasey follows gain from the blind impulse of covetousness. The New-Englander's zeal is according to knowledge. Rasey's greed is the inherited hunger of a precarious race. The New-Englander thrives because he has always thriven. He has in his veins 'the custom of prosperity.'

"Fuller tells us, that, in his time, 'a strict inquiry after the ancient gentry of England' would have found 'most of them in the class moderately mounted above the common level'; the more ambitious having suffered ruin in the national turmoils, while these even-minded men, 'through God's blessing on their moderation, have continued in their condition.' It was from this old stock that the planters of New England were chiefly derived, mingled with them some strong scions of loftier trees."

"Do we not know that there is no such thing as birth in New England? There, even if a man had ancestry, he would not dare to think himself the better for it."

"Disabuse yourself; the New-Englander is perfectly human in this respect, and only a very little wiser than the rest of the world. But he disapproves waste, even of so cheap a thing as words: he does not speak of his blood, because his blood speaks for itself.

"Rasey thinks whatever is held by others to be so much withheld from him. To make what is theirs his is all his aim. He has no conception of a creative wealth, of a diffusive prosperity. To live and make live is an aristocratic maxim. Rasey, and such as he, grudge almost the subsistence of their human tools. With the New-Englander, parsimony is not economy. The aristocratic household law is a liberal one, and it is his. He lives up to his income as conscientiously as within it. Rasey and his like think what is theirs, enjoyed by another, wasted;—they think it wasted, enjoyed by themselves. The New-Englander's rule of personal indulgence is the same with that given to the Persian prince Ghilan by his father, the wise Kyekyawus, who, warning him against squandering, adds, 'It is not squandering to spend for anything which can be of real use to thee either in this world or the next.'

"Together with the inherited habit of property, the well-descended have and transmit an inherited knowledge of the laws which govern its acquisition and its maintenance: laws older than legislation; as old as property itself; as old as man; a part of his primitive wisdom; always and everywhere the common lore of the established and endowed. If Rasey had inherited or imbibed this knowledge, perhaps he would have been more cautious. 'Beware of unjust gains,' says an Eastern sage, an ancient member of our Aryan race; 'for it is the nature of such, not only to take flight themselves, but to bear off all the rest with them.' 'Do not think,' it is set down in the book of Kabus, a compendium of Persian practical wisdom, 'Do not think even a good use of what has been ill acquired can make it thine. It will assuredly leave thee, and only thy sin will remain to thee.'

"The well-born would not dare to amass a fortune by such means as Rasey uses; amassed, they would not expose it to such hazards. 'The same word in the Greek'—I am citing now an English worthy, the contemporary of our New-England fathers—'The same word in the Greek—ἰός—means both rust and poison; and a strong poison is made of the rust of metals; but none more venomous than the rust of the laborer's wages detained in his employer's purse: it will infect and corrode a whole estate.'

"A man's descent is written on his life yet more plainly than on his features. In New England you shall see a youth come up from the country to the metropolis of his State with all his worldly goods upon his back. Twenty years later you shall find him as much at ease in the position he has retaken rather than gained, as he was in the farm-house where he was born, or on the dusty road he trudged over to the scene of his fortunes. His house is elegant, not fine; it is furnished with paintings not bought on the advice of the picture-dealer, with a library not ordered complete from the bookseller. He is simple in his personal habits, laborious still, severe to himself, lenient and liberal to those who depend upon him, munificent in his public benefactions, in his kindly and modest patronage. If he enters public life, it is not because he wants a place there, but because there is a place that wants him. He takes it to work, and not to shine; lays it down when he can, or when he must; and takes hold of the nearest duty, great or small as may be, with the same zeal and conscience. Such a man is called a self-made man. He is what ages of culture and highest discipline have made him,—ages of responsibility and thought for others.

"Stealthy winning and sterile hoarding are the marks of a degraded and outlawed caste. When these tendencies show themselves in a member of an honest race, they have come down from some forgotten interloper. The Raseys are the true representatives of the transported wretches who, and whose progeny, have been a dead weight upon the States originally afflicted with them, and upon those into which they have wandered out. In their native debasement, they furnish material for usurpation to work upon and with; raised here and there into fitful eminence, they infect the class they intrude upon with meannesses not its own.