But a comparison of our exports to Russia and Turkey respectively does not by any means meet the true facts of our position. Within the past few years we have been carrying on a vast and increasing trade with those Asiatic countries which draw their supplies of merchandise from the various ports of the Levant, and from the Adriatic. Smyrna has become a commercial station so important that we have at this moment three lines of powerful steamers running to it from the port of Liverpool alone; and a very valuable trade is also carried on by English houses in the port of Trieste. Egypt, too, is largely tributary to us commercially. There is, in fact, no portion of the world whose transactions with Great Britain have expanded so greatly in amount and value within the past few years as those very countries which Russia is seeking to grasp and bring within her own control. Our “Greek houses,” through whose agency the bulk of this trade is carried on, are now regarded throughout the manufacturing districts as second to none in the extent and importance of their business; and, what is more, that business must rapidly extend, as increased facilities of communication are provided from the shores of the Levant and the Black Sea with the interior countries of Asia. Notwithstanding all the faults of the Turkish character and rule, we are inclined to believe that from the reign of the present Sultan, Abdul Medjid, a vast amelioration of the condition of her people, and the cultivation by them of increased dealings and friendships with the more civilised communities of Western Europe will take place. Be these expectations, however, fulfilled or not, we cannot afford to lose such a trade as the following figures, which we take from Mr Burns’ Commercial Glance, show that we are at present carrying on with Turkey in the article of cotton goods alone:—
| Exports of Cotton Goods to Turkey and the Levant in 1851 to 1853. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1851. | 1852. | 1853. | ||
| Plain calicoes, | yards, | 49,337,614 | 57,962,893 | 51,224,807 |
| Printed and dyed do., | 40,433,798 | 39,394,743 | 47,564,743 | |
| Cotton yarn, | lbs. | 8,015,674 | 12,171,045 | 10,563,177 |
These markets, in fact, have taken, during the past year, one-sixteenth of our entire exports of plain calicoes, and one-eleventh of our exports of printed and dyed calicoes, whilst her imports of yarn—the article upon the production of which in this country the least amount of labour is expended—have been comparatively insignificant. The imports of cotton goods into Russia are, on the contrary, almost entirely confined to yarn for the consumption of the Russian manufacturer.
So far, therefore, as our export trade is likely to be affected during the coming struggle, we have manifestly got by the hands a more valuable customer than we are likely to lose in Russia; and we cannot discover in what way, with the means at present at her disposal, she can interrupt, or limit, that trade further than by destroying for a time the consuming power of those provinces of Turkey east of the river Pruth, which she has occupied with her troops. Our shipowners and manufacturers may lose for a time some portion of the valuable trade with the population of Wallachia and Moldavia which is carried on through the ports of Galatz and Ibrail upon the Danube. It will probably, however, be one of the earliest aims of the combined powers of England and France to clear that portion of Turkey of the presence of the invader, and to maintain the long-established inviolability of the two eastern mouths of the Danube—the St George’s and Sulina—as outlets for her commerce with neutral countries. The remainder of our trade with Turkey must remain impervious to the efforts of Russia, unless her fleet, at present shut up in Sebastopol, first achieve the exploit of destroying, or capturing, the magnificent navies which England and France have assembled in the Black Sea, or her Baltic fleet succeeds in forcing its passage through the Cattegat or the Sound, and in making its way to the shores of the Mediterranean. Neither of these contingencies can be regarded as very likely to be realised by Russia in the face of the superior power which will shortly be arrayed against her.
There is certainly the possibility that our commerce with Turkey may suffer to some extent through the drain upon the resources of her population, created by a necessarily large war-expenditure. No material symptoms of such suffering have occurred thus far, notwithstanding she has been for months past actually engaged in hostilities, the preparation for which must have been very costly. Her imports of textile fabrics fell off very little in 1853 from their amount in former years; and even this may in part be accounted for by the unsettled prices, in this country, which have resulted from strikes throughout our manufacturing districts, and other causes of an accidental or a purely domestic character. Moreover, to balance any such falling off in her ordinary imports, Turkey will most probably require from us large supplies of stores, munitions of war, arms, &c., as well as of produce of various kinds, to fill up the vacuum created by the partial interruption of her own foreign trade.
We have a further guarantee of commercial safety during this struggle, unless it should assume new features, in the fact that the commercial marine of Russia is blocked up, like her fleets, in the Baltic and the Black Sea. There is not at this moment a single Russian merchantman in the ports of Great Britain or France—the few vessels which were shut out from their usual winter quarters having been sold some time ago, to escape the risk of seizure. She is thus without the materials for inflicting the annoyance upon our colonial and foreign trade which she might have possessed, could she have armed any considerable portion of her mercantile navy for privateering purposes. It has been reported, indeed, that two of her cruisers have been met with somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Pacific, and suggested that their object may be to waylay and capture some of our gold ships. But that the report in question is not believed—and that any serious interference with our vessels engaged in the carrying trade, to and from the various ports of the world, is not feared by our best informed capitalists—is evident from the fact, that there has as yet been no marked advance in the rates of insurance upon such property. It has been reported, too, that Russian agents have been lately engaged in the United States of America in negotiating for the purchase, or building, of large ships capable of being converted into vessels of war. Be this so, although we greatly doubt the fact. We cannot be taken off our guard, in the event of any such purchase being made, or such conversion taking place. Our fast-sailing ocean steamers will bring us the necessary information quite in time to enable us to take the steps most proper for the occasion; and whilst mentioning those noble vessels, we must remark upon the important change which the application of steam to navigation will effect in all future struggles between maritime countries. We do not refer here to the power which it gives of taking fleets into action, or of making more rapid sail to the localities where their services are required, although the effect of this power is incalculable in value. We allude merely to the advantage which we shall derive in such struggles from the vastly increased rapidity and regularity with which we are at present supplied with information of an enemy’s movements, from all quarters of the world. We shall no longer have to witness the spectacle of rival fleets seeking each other in vain—proceeding from sea to sea only to discover that they have missed each other on the way. Traversed as the ocean is now in every direction by fast-sailing steamers, there can be little fear of such fleets, if their commanders are really anxious for an engagement, being unable to procure tolerably accurate information of each other’s whereabouts. We shall no longer require the aid of powerful fleets as convoys of our merchantmen, in seas where it can be so readily known that an enemy is not to be met with; and, as another result, we shall probably see an end put to the injurious system of privateering. Few parties will be found to risk life and property in assaults upon the commerce of a powerful maritime country, with the certainty before them that every movement which they make must be so promptly made known, and every offence which they commit must bring down upon them such speedy punishment.
There is, however, one element of commercial mischief which may make itself felt during the coming struggle, although such mischief, if it unfortunately should occur, could not be attributed properly to the mere fact of the existence of a state of war. It may, and very probably will, be proved that we cannot carry on a free-trade system, which involves the necessity of providing for enlarged imports concurrently with expensive military and naval operations both in the north and south of Europe, and possibly in Asia as well, with a currency restricted as ours is by the mistaken legislation of 1844. Already the note of alarm of this danger has been sounded from a quarter whose authority cannot be treated lightly on such a subject. Mr William Brown, the eminent American merchant, and member for South Lancashire, emphatically warned her Majesty’s Government, during the recent debate on the Budget, of the probability, and almost certainty, of a severe monetary crisis as the consequence of persistence in carrying out in their full stringency the measures passed, at the instigation of Sir Robert Peel, in that and the following year. But for the operation of those measures, Mr Brown contended that the calamity of 1847 would never have occurred. The country, he says, was paralysed by the effect which they produced; and the seven or eight millions sterling in bullion, held at the time in the coffers of the Bank, “might as well have been thrown into the sea,” as retained there unproductive during a period of pressure. Should the same state of things occur again, therefore, during the approaching struggle—should the commerce and industry of the country be prostrated, and the government be rendered incapable of prosecuting with the required energy a just war, to which we are bound alike by every consideration of national honour, sound policy, and good faith towards an oppressed ally—we must not be told that the suffering and degradation which will be brought down upon our heads are the results of a war expenditure merely, or have been caused by any natural interruption of our ordinary trading pursuits. The true cause of the calamity, it must become obvious to all the world, will be our dogged maintenance of an impracticable crotchet; and should the nation submit to be thus thwarted and fettered in its determination to maintain its high prestige—should it submit to sink down from its position as a leading power,—we may with reason be asked the question, “Of what avail is your possession of the noblest fleet which ever rode the seas in ancient or in modern days—of what avail is the possession of the best-disciplined and bravest soldiers which ever marched to battle—of what avail is your vast mercantile marine, your vast accumulations of capital, your almost limitless command over all the improved appliances which modern science and ingenuity have constructed for the purposes of war, if you cannot resent a national insult, or oppose the aggressions of an enemy, without commercial ruin, suspended industry, and popular disaffection and outrage being spread over the face of your whole empire?” We hope, however, for better things. We feel confident that a high-minded and honourable people will not submit to be thus stultified and degraded in the eyes of the world. We entertain, too, a reasonable hope that the unpatriotic faction, who would gladly involve the country in that degradation, will not be favoured in their unworthy efforts by the possession of the instrumentality—a suffering and dissatisfied working population—upon which they calculate to insure success. By the blessing of a bountiful Providence, clothing our fields and those of Western Europe and America with luxuriant harvests, we may this year be snatched from our position of dependence upon the growth of an enemy’s soil for the food of our people, and be enabled to enter upon a period of plenty and cheapness, instead of that scarcity and high prices of all the necessaries of life from which we have been suffering during the past twelve months—certainly without such suffering being attributable to a state of war, or to any but ordinary causes.
THE PUPPETS OF ALL NATIONS.[[1]]
The history of Puppets and their shows may at first appear but a trivial subject to fix the attention and occupy the pen of a learned academician and elegant writer. The very word history may seem misapplied to a chronicle of the pranks of Punchinello, and of the contortions of fantoccini. Puppet-shows! it may be said; troops of tawdry figures, paraded from fair to fair, to provoke the laughter of children and the grin of rustics—is that a theme for a bulky octavo at the hands of so erudite and spirituel an author as M. Charles Magnin? Had M. Magnin chosen to reply otherwise than with perfect candour to anticipated comments of this kind—the comments of the superficial and hastily-judging—he might easily have done so by saying that, whilst studying with a more important aim—for that history of the stage of which he has already published portions—he found the wooden actors so constantly thrusting themselves into the society of their flesh-and-blood betters, so continually intruding themselves, with timber joints, invisible strings, and piping voices, upon stages where human players strutted, that, to be quit of their importunity, he was fain to shelve them in a volume. This, however, is not the motive he alleges. He boldly breasts the difficulty, and stands up for the merits of his marionettes, quite deserving, he maintains, of a separate study and a special historian. He denies that time can be considered lost or lightly expended which is passed in tracing the vicissitudes of an amusement that, for three thousand years, has been in favour with two-thirds of the human race. And he summons to his support an imposing phalanx of great men—poets, philosophers, dramatists, musicians—who have interested themselves in puppets, taken pleasure in their performances, and even written for their mimic theatre. He reminds his readers how many pointed remarks and precious lessons, apt comparisons and graceful ideas, have been suggested by such shows to the greatest writers of all countries and ages, and heads the list of his puppets’ patrons with the names of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, Petronius, in ancient times; and with those of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Molière, Swift, Voltaire, and Goethe, amongst the moderns; to say nothing of Charles Nodier, Punchinello’s laureate, the assiduous frequenter of Parisian puppet-shows, who has devoted so many playful and sparkling pages to that favourite study of his literary leisure. M. Magnin begins to be alarmed at the shadows he has evoked. Is it not presumption, he asks himself, to enter a path upon which his predecessors have been so numerous and eminent? The subject, for whose frivolity he lately almost apologised, appears too elevated for his range when he reviews the list of illustrious names more or less connected with it, when he recalls the innumerable flowers of wit with which their fancy has wreathed it. So he marks out for himself a different track. Others have played with the theme; he approaches it in a graver spirit. “I am not so impertinent,” he exclaims, “as to seek to put (as the Greeks would have said) my foot in the dance of those great geniuses. Too well do I see the folly of attempting to jingle, after them, the bells of that bauble.” Following the example of the learned Jesuit, Mariantonio Lupi—who wrote a valuable although a brief dissertation on the Puppets of the Ancients—but allotting to himself a much broader canvass, M. Magnin purposes to write, in all seriousness, sincerity, and simplicity, a history of the “wooden comedians,” not only of antiquity, but of the middle ages, and of modern times.
A subject of far less intrinsic interest than the one in question could not fail to become attractive in the hands of so agreeable and skilful a savant as M. Magnin. But it were a mistake to suppose that the history of the Puppet family, from Euripides’ days to ours, has not a real and strong interest of its own. The members of that distinguished house have been mixed up in innumerable matters into which one would hardly have anticipated their poking their wooden noses and permanently blushing countenances. They have been alternately the tools of priestcraft and the mouthpiece of popular feeling. Daring improvisatori, in certain times and countries, theirs was the only liberty of speech, their voice the sole organ of the people’s opposition to its rulers. Their diminutive stature, the narrow dimensions of their stage, the smallness of their powers of speech, did not always secure impunity to their free discourse, which sometimes, as their best friends must confess, degenerated into license. So that we occasionally, in the course of their history, find the audacious dolls driven into their boxes—with cords cut and heads hanging—or at least compelled to revise and chasten their dramatic repertory. Sometimes decency and morality rendered such rigour incumbent upon the authorities; but its motive was quite as frequently political. It is curious to note with what important events the Puppet family have meddled, and what mighty personages they have managed to offend. At the present day, when the press spreads far and wide the gist and most salient points of a successful play, in whatever European capital it may be performed, allusions insulting or irritating to friendly nations and governments may be fair subject for the censor’s scissors. It was only the other day that a Russian official journal expressed, in no measured terms, its high indignation at the performance, at a fourth-rate theatre on the Paris boulevards, of a drama entitled “The Cossacks,” in which those warriors of the steppes are displayed to great disadvantage. The circumstances of the moment not being such as to make the French government solicitous to spare the feelings of the Czar, the piece continued to be nightly played, to the delight of shouting audiences, and to the no small benefit of the treasury of the Gaieté. One hundred and twenty-three years ago, Russian susceptibility, it appears, was held quite as easy to ruffle as at the present day. In 1731, the disgrace of Menschikoff was made the subject of a sort of melodrama, performed in several German towns by the large English puppets of Titus Maas, privileged comedian of the court of Baden-Durlach. The curious playbill of this performance ran as follows: “With permission, &c., there will be performed on an entirely new theatre, and with good instrumental music, a Haupt-und-Staatsaction, recently composed and worthy to be seen, which has for title—The extraordinary vicissitudes of good and bad fortune of Alexis Danielowitz, prince Menzicoff, great favourite, cabinet minister, and generalissimo of the Czar of Moscow, Peter I., of glorious memory, to-day a real Belisarius, precipitated from the height of his greatness into the most profound abyss of misfortune; the whole with Jack-pudding, a pieman, a pastrycook’s boy, and amusing Siberian poachers.” Titus Maas obtained leave to perform this wonderful piece at Berlin, but it was quickly stopped by order of Frederick-William I.’s government, for fear of offending Russia. In 1794 a number of puppet-shows were closed in Berlin—for offences against morality, was the reason given, but more probably, M. Magnin believes, because the tone of their performances was opposed to the views of the government. In what way he does not mention, but we may suppose it possible that the Puppenspieler had got infected with the revolutionary doctrines then rampant in France. The Prussian police still keeps a sharp eye on exhibitions of this kind, which at Berlin are restricted to the suburbs. In France we find traces of a regular censorship of the marionette theatres. Thus, in the Soleinne collection of manuscript plays is one entitled: The capture of a company of players by a Tunis rover, in the month of September 1840. This piece, whose name, as M. Magnin remarks, reads more like the heading of a newspaper paragraph than the title of a play, was performed in 1741 at the fair of St Germains, by the puppets of the celebrated Nicolet, and annexed to it is a permit of performance, bearing no less a signature than that of Crébillon. It is not improbable that the puppet-show had fairly earned its subjection to a censorship by the irreverence and boldness with which it took the most serious, important, and painful events as subjects for its performances. In 1686, D’Harlay, then attorney-general at the parliament of Paris, wrote as follows to La Reynie, the lieutenant of police:—“To M. de la Reynie, councillor of the king in his council, &c. It is said this morning at the palace, that the marionettes which play at the fair of St Germain represent the discomfiture of the Huguenots, and as you will probably consider this a very serious matter for marionettes, I have thought it right, sir, to advise you of it, that you may so act as in your prudence shall seem fit.” It does not appear what result this advice had; but as the date of the note is little more than three months later than that of the edict of revocation, when Louis XIV. was exulting in the downfall of heresy in France, and when those who still clung to Protestantism were looked upon as hardened sinners, no better than common malefactors, it is quite probable La Reynie thought it needless to interfere with the puppet-scoffers at the Huguenots. D’Harlay, it will be remembered, was intimate with some of the chiefs of the proscribed party, and a particular friend of the Marquis de Ruvigny, although he some years afterwards betrayed, according to St Simon, the trust that friend had reposed in him. But we are wandering from our wooden play-actors.