[CHAPTER XIII.]
MR. SMOOTH SEES A COUNTRY GREAT IN RESOURCES BLIGHTED BY A NARROW POLICY.
"Difficult is it for a man travelling in a country where everything seems crooked, to keep up straight ideas. I have said crooked, for where nature has been most profuse in her blessings, and no signs of the iron sinews of progress are seen; where no Mississippi steamboats move on in busy occupation, opening up the resources of a country; where no bright villages hold to light the charms of hardy industry; where the favored few gather the fruits of the husbandman's energy—something must indeed be crooked. Through countries enamelled of nature's best offerings, as fine as ever spread out before the eye of man, we travelled; but all seemed wasting away in the inertness of bad government. A narrow policy had spread weeds where fruitful vines would have hung blessings for mankind. Things called men revelled in what to them seemed luxury, but in poverty and wretchedness a people struggled; men walked to and fro in tattered garments, colored like unto their moral and physical degradation. But they heeded it not, and were careless because no one cared for them. There is no slavery so abhorrent as that of the menial who has no thought beyond the narrow sphere of his servitude, and the little pleasure which his light heart may transitorily enjoy. Here men saw no vitality in the hand that ruled: hence they maudled through that deadening scum of servile life that tramples better things beneath its feet.
"From the fertile bottoms of the Himalayas to the Indian ocean on one side, and from the Burmese boundary to wherever British rule extended on the other, there spread out the same sickly prospect. There, resigned, stood outlined the same apathy of spirit, the same result of misgovernment—the same soul-degrading influences; the same rebuking spectacle; the result of the same wealth-dredging principles practiced by a few. Cotton, corn, and sugar, would have repaid the hand of the husbandman tenfold, nature having given it germ for that purpose; but jungle grew in their stead, while bad government rioted in its follies. Nationality had no soul, energy no lifesprings, progress no railroads to move onward. The honorable John, having conquered, and very modestly enthroned himself, was strong to maintain his centralizing power, from which point he would make effectual his blighting policy. Notwithstanding this, John would have us believe him world-wide in his kindness, desire his power made known to mankind in general, and stood ever ready to have his philanthropy and his tears spent upon the sorrows of the American slave. Were they not more needed in his own Indian dominions? A peasant clothed in rags picks his little spot of sickly cotton as it falls from the bowl; but how valueless is it to the poor wretch ignorant of the first principles of trade! Yet, instead of providing for his improvement, this honorable dredging machine which so disgracefully governs a people flatters him into contentment with promises it never intended to fill. With his bag of cotton gathered, the humble subject is pointed to a path through a country infested by dangerous bands, over which he may seek a market some hundred miles distant. In its crude state he roughs it, and sweats it, puts it through—without a gin to give it market value!—all the various processes of damaging during the transit, and is surprised that India, with the best soil and climate in the world for such an object, cannot raise a good and sufficient supply of the raw material. What a look of pity the wretch might bestow upon the board of directors, sitting in pompous conclave in Leadenhall street! Happy is he, Jonathan, who, contented, knows not the things at his hand by which his own condition may be bettered. And how blind is that rule, which, having the power to do good, contents itself with dragging eagerly away the first compensation. The penalty of the crime of not developing what is given us by nature for a nation's good is the sacrifice of a people's happiness. My friend John reluctantly acknowledged the delinquency. Mark the contrast! Had this all-bountiful India been ours, a more liberal policy would have produced results widely different. No oligarch could have sacrificed it to its own avarice; associations would have sprung up for developing industry; a policy to make the resources of the state serve general interests would have been established, and the good of the many had been kept in view. Cotton-growing, and tobacco-planting, and rice-cultivating, had been encouraged and fostered. Those rich alluvial bottoms, so fertile and yet so uncultivated, had given out their rich harvests to some purpose—untaxed prosperity would have rewarded the hand of the hardy husbandman. India would then, besides proving herself the greatest exporting empire in the world, have clothed, fed and made happy her benighted millions.
"Had India been ours, Yankee enterprise had traversed it with plank roads; Yankee enterprise had laid down strap railroads until better ones had resulted from profits; Yankee energy had invented a species of Mississippi steamboat, wherewith to navigate its narrow water-courses to their source, and there develope the capabilities of the country. Yes, Yankee ingenuity had had a steamboat where there was scarce water for a duck to swim. But why pain the feelings with recapitulations like these? Its resources are of little value when government interposes a dogged obstinacy to improvements; nor is it much better where a people seem at a loss to know whose business it is to give out the incentive. So long as this state of things lasts will Cotton remain king, and Uncle John be its most servile and dependent subject. It matters little that his empire is so beautifully adapted to its cultivation. He must shake off his love of those very ancient and effeminating systems of his, and adopt the modern policy of improving and nourishing industry.
"John admitted things were not conducted on the most approved principle; but as the business belonged to the old gentleman, who was very testy in the exercise of his power, he was at a loss to conceive what we had to do with it. That became very easy to explain; for whereas Young America claims a right to dictate principles that will aid in working out manifest destiny, so also does he take upon himself the right of pointing out the evil of all political misgovernment that falls under his notice. It was not the honorable manner in which a government acquired new territory or incorporated weak provinces, that Mr. Smooth had to deal with, but the dishonorable government that followed. Wherever waste and misery meet the eye of an energetic man, who discovers the palpable cause at the door of wrong-headed government, his natural feelings revolt against the powers that be; and to an American, trained in the New England school of universal industry, the desolation seems calling upon him to take the initiative of working out its improvement.
"With me, a feeling, inspired by the best of motives, prompted the advancing some rules of improvement; but, conscious of Uncle John's obstinacy to being instructed by youth, and with a just sense of the obstacles my tattered garments would present, the inclination failed. Indeed, John, as dogged as he is old in experience, views his son Jonathan as a bold, reckless, and discontented fellow, whose notions of progress he would receive with the same cautious hand he would his, to him, preposterous principles of republicanism. He, while entertaining some good feeling for us, hath an inert prejudice which views us as levellers, always reforming or abusing reforms. Swelled, he says, by large notions of ourselves, generous in our expectations, and never ceasing in our love of excitements until we are safely landed in the grave, we are become dangerous to the great family compact. In the devil's department, says John, your Young America would prove his energetic nature by devising some new arrangement, addition, or modification of that gentleman's sin-roasting machinery. Failing in that, he would plan some enterprise, propose some joint-account operation with Mr. Jones, and content himself with 'truck-and-dicker,' or charcoal, for his half of the spoils. In heaven, your Young American would be discontented, unless he were devising some improvement, getting up spiritual intrigues, or laying the foundation of some new species of glory—perhaps claiming a right to entire possession.
"'You must understand, Mr. Smooth,' said John, 'we have long been meditating a new policy for this great and fertile empire, now so desolate; but we pursue ends most patiently, letting our thoughts have the benefit of time, before reducing them to practice. Manchester wants cotton—wants it free-grown—that she may relieve herself from the yoke of King Slavery; but she cannot yet solve the problem by which the throbbings of her manufacturing philanthropy may be set at rest. She thinks long and strong of it, but there it rests—and there's the rub. John is blind, and Cotton is king.'
"'With us it would present no rub; give us the means, as spread out to your hands, and the problem we would solve while you were pondering over its intricacy. We would pay good premiums to practical overseers of cotton plantations in Georgia and Alabama, who, with the inducement offered, would come as instructors—cotton-growing requires the application of the nicest agricultural science—in the art of cultivating the sensitive plant. And to encourage private enterprise we would offer bounties for the largest amount of best quality produced on the smallest space. By government encouraging the best staple, a rivalry would spring up which could not fail to produce much good; it would open up a spirited system of planting, as well as that enlarged intercommunication of commerce which must follow.' Let me take leave of this subject!