“Under this stone were laid the remains of John Barber, esq. alderman of London, a constant benefactor to the poor, true to his principles in church and state. He preserved his integrity, and discharged the duty of an upright magistrate. Zealous for the rights of his fellow citizens, he opposed all attempts against them; and, being lord mayor in the year 1733, he defeated a scheme of a general Excise, which, had it succeeded, would have put an end to the liberties of his country.”
Virtuous citizen! Happy was it that thou didst not live to suffer the mortification of seeing thy degraded country devoured by swarms of excisemen, and the third of its population fattening on the taxes collected from the other two-thirds. Too justly didst thou anticipate that the terrors and corruptions growing out of such an inquisition as the excise, would destroy that sturdy spirit of independence, which in thy day constituted the chief glory of the English country-gentleman and London merchant. Till it was broken or undermined by the evil genius of Taxation, that spirit served as the basis of Britain’s prosperity; but now, alas! it seems to be extinguished for ever.—Patriotic Lord-mayor of London! In thy day to watch with jealousy the never-ceasing encroachments of the regal prerogatives, and to render the ministers of the crown accountable at the bar of public opinion, were paths of honour leading to the highest civic distinctions! Many of the race that conducted to a wise end the glorious revolution of 1688 then survived—the genius of liberty continued to inspire the sons of Britain—the holy flame that punished two kings for trespassing on the rights of their people, was not entirely extinguished—the deadly paralysis of the Septennial Act had not then produced its blighting effects on the whole body politic. But London ceased to be influenced by the lost voice of Barber, and the Excise system triumphed—the barriers of freedom were passed—trial by jury was, in certain cases, either dispensed with, or nullified by well-trained special juries—the public judgment was misled by venal conductors of the public press—patriotism was deemed faction—liberty was held up as another name for rebellion—and, in consequence, FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF FOREIGN WAR have disgraced SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS of our annals, though thirty years of foreign war served in the preceding three hundred years to vindicate every British interest!—Venerated name of Barber! Where is the monument to be found in the public buildings of London, to record thy virtues for the example of others? Would it not be a worthy companion to the statues of Beckford and Chatham? And would it not keep in countenance the honest exertions of the Waithmans—Woods—and Goodbeheres—who in our days have trod in thy steps, and who, it may be hoped, will have a long line of successors in the same honourable career?
Being anxious to view the inside of Mortlake church, a boy undertook to fetch the key from the house of the sexton. In the mean time I examined around me the humble monuments raised by affection to the memory of the dead. Here were the pyramid, the obelisk, and the tumulus, in their most diminutive forms. Here lay decomposed the mineral parts of those ancestors from whom the contemporary generation have sprung. Yes, said I, we truly are all of one nature, and one family; and we suffer a common fate! We burst as germs into organization, we swell by a common progress into maturity, and we learn to measure by motion what we call Time, till, our motions and our time ceasing, we are thus laid side by side, generation after generation, serving as examples of a similar futurity to those who spring from us, and succeed us.
I reflected that, as it is now more than four hundred years since this ground became the depository of the dead, some of its earliest occupants might, without an hyperbole, have been ancestors of the whole cotemporary English nation. If we suppose that a man was buried in this church-yard 420 years ago, who left six children, each of whom had three children, who again had, on an average, the same number in every generation of thirty years; then, in 420 years, or fourteen generations, his descendants might be multiplied as under:
| 1st generation | 6 |
| 2nd | 18 |
| 3rd | 54 |
| 4th | 162 |
| 5th | 486 |
| 6th | 1458 |
| 7th | 4374 |
| 8th | 13122 |
| 9th | 39366 |
| 10th generation | 118098 |
| 11th | 354274 |
| 12th | 1062812 |
| 13th | 3188436 |
| 14th | 9565308 |
That is to say, NINE MILLIONS AND A HALF of persons; or, as nearly as possible, the exact population of South Britain, might at this day be descended in a direct line from any individual buried in this or any other church-yard in the year 1395, who left six children, each of whose descendants have had on the average three children! And, by the same law, every individual who has six children may be the root of as many descendants within 420 years, provided they increase on the low average of only three in every branch. His descendants would represent an inverted triangle, of which he would constitute the lower angle.
To place the same position in another point of view, I calculated also that every individual now living must have had for his ancestor every parent in Britain living in the year 1125, the age of Henry the First, taking the population of that period at 8,000,000. Thus, as every individual must have had a father and a mother, or two progenitors, each of whom had a father and a mother, or four progenitors, each generation would double its progenitors every thirty years. Every person living may, therefore, be considered as the apex of a triangle, of which the base would represent the whole population of a remote age.
That is to say, if there have been a regular co-mixture of marriages, every individual of the living race must of necessity be descended from parents who lived in Britain in 1125. Some districts or clans may require a longer period for the co-mixture, and different circumstances may cut off some families, and expand others; but, in general, the lines of families would cross each other, and become interwoven like the lines of lattice-work. A single inter-mixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the cotemporaries of every nation members of one expanded family, after the lapse of an ascertainable number of generations!
This principle is curious; and, though in one view it has been applied to calculations of increasing population, yet I am not aware that it has previously received the moral application which I draw from it, in regard to the commixture of the human race. My ideas may be better conceived, if any person draw two parallel lines to represent the respective contemporary populations of two distinct epochs; and then set up on the lower line an indefinite number of triangles. In this scheme we shall have a just picture of the progressive generations of every nation, and we may observe how necessarily, in spite of artifice and pride, they must, by intermarriages, be blended as one family and one flesh, owing to the individuals of each pair springing from a different apex, and to every side being necessarily crossed by the sides of other triangles. By a converse reasoning, or by tracing the lines from the apex to the base, we may trace the descent as well as the ascent; and, by a glance of the eye, ascertain not only that every individual of a living generation must be descended from the whole of the parents of some generation sufficiently remote, but that every parent in such remote generation must necessarily have been the ancestor of every individual of a contemporary generation.