TRAVELS OF KERIM KHAN.
NO. II.
We left our friend the Khan, at length comfortably established in London, and pursuing his observations on the various novel objects of interest which every where presented themselves to his gaze. The streets lighted by gas (which the Persian princes call "the spirit of coals") are described in terms of the highest admiration—"On each side, as far as the eye could see, were two interminable lines of extremely brilliant light, produced by a peculiar kind of vapour here called gas, which made the city infinitely more interesting to look at by night than by day; but the most extraordinary thing in reference to the flame in the lamps was, that this appeared to be produced without the medium of either oil or wick, nor could I discern the cause of the lighting. The houses have from three to seven stages or stories, one of which is underground—each stage containing at least two rooms. The walls fronting the streets are of brick or stone, and the interior of woodwork; but the wood of the rooms inside is covered with a peculiar sort of paper of various colours and curious devices, highly elaborate and ingenious. The balconies outside were generally filled with flowers of various hues: but notwithstanding the wonders which surrounded me, and made me fancy myself in a world of talismanic creation, my spirits were for some time depressed, and this immense city seemed to me worse than the tomb; for I had not yet recovered from the bewilderment into which all that I had seen had thrown me."
The feeling of loneliness, resulting from this oppressive sense of novelty, wore off, however, as the Khan began to find out his friends, and accustom himself to the fashions of the country; and he was one day agreeably surprised by a visit from one of the suite of Moulavi Afzul Ali, an envoy to the Court of Directors from the Rajah of Sattarah;[1] "I need not say how delighted I felt, not having the least idea of meeting any of my countrymen so far from Hindustan." The 11th of August, the day fixed for the prorogation of Parliament by the Queen, now arrived; and the khan "accompanied some gentlemen in a carriage to see the procession, but it was with extreme difficulty that we got a place where we could see her Majesty pass; at last, however, through the kindness of a mounted officer, we succeeded. First came the Shahzadehs, or princes of the blood, in carriages drawn by six horses, and then the wazirs (viziers) and nobles, and the ambassadors from foreign states, in vehicles, some with six, and some with four horses. When all these had passed, there came the Queen herself in a golden carriage, drawn by eight magnificent steeds; on her right was Prince Arleta, and opposite her was Lord Melbourne, the grand wazir, (prime minister.) The carriage was preceded by men who, I was surprised to observe, were dressed in the Hindustani fashion, in red and gold, with broad sleeves.[2] But those nearest her Majesty, strange to say, wore almost exactly the costume of Hindustan, and to these my eyes were immediately directed; and I felt so delighted to see my own countrymen advanced to the honour of forming the body-guard of the sovereign, that I could scarcely believe the evidence of my senses, when I perceived on closer inspection, by their complexions, that they were English. Still I could not (nor can I even now) understand the reason of their adopting the Hindustani dress—though I was told on enquiry, that it was the ancient costume of the guard called yeomen." ...
"As the Queen approached the people took off their hats, nor was I less astonished[3] when I heard them begin to shout hurra! hurra! as she passed; which in their language seems to imply approbation. When her Majesty turned towards our carriage, I immediately made a salaam after the manner of my own country, which she graciously acknowledged, seeing, no doubt, that I was a native of a strange land!"
This fancied metamorphosis of the sturdy beef-eaters with their partisans, whose costume has never been altered since the days of Henry VII., into Hindustani peons and chuprassees, seems to show that the enthusiasm of the Khan must have been considerably excited—and after this cruel disappointment he dismisses the remainder of the procession in a few words. To a native of India, indeed, accustomed to see every petty rajah or nawab holding a few square miles of territory as the tenant of the Company, surrounded on state occasions by a crowd of the picturesque irregular cavalry of the East, and with a Suwarree or cavalcade of led horses, gayly caparisoned elephants, flaunting banners, and martial music, the amount of military display in attendance on the Queen of Great Britain must naturally have appeared inconsiderable—"The escort consisted of only some two hundred horsemen, but these were cased in steel and leather from head to foot, and their black horses were by far the finest I have yet seen in this country. But though the multitudes of people were immense, yet the procession tell much short of what I had expected from the monarch of so great and powerful a nation! I returned home, however, much gratified by the sights I had seen to-day."
The sight of this ceremony naturally leads to a digression on the origin and constitution of the English parliament, and its division into the two houses of Lords and Commons. The events leading to these institutions, and the antecedent civil wars between the king and the barons, in the reign of Henry III. and Edward I., are given by the Khan, on the whole, with great accuracy—probably from the information of his English friends since the knowledge of the ancient history and institutions of the country, which he displays both here and in other parts of his narrative, can scarcely have been acquired through the medium of a native education in Hindustan. The deductions which he draws, however, from this historical summary, are somewhat curious; since he assumes that the power of the crown, though limited in appearance by the concessions then made, and the legislative functions vested in parliament, was in truth only strengthened, and rendered more securely despotic:—"But this is entirely lost sight of by the people, who, even at the present day, imagine that the parliament is all-powerful, and the sovereign powerless. But I must be allowed to say, that those ancient monarchs acted wisely, and the result of their policy has not been sufficiently perceived.... For when parliament was constituted, the power of retaining armed vassals and servants, which the barons had enjoyed for so long a period, was abolished, and has never been resumed even by princes of the blood; so that they could no longer resist the authority of the king, who alone had the privilege of raising and maintaining troops—a right never conceded to parliament. Besides this the powers of life and death, and of declaring war, were identified with the person of the sovereign; and with respect to the latter, it is never, until it has been decided upon, even intimated to the parliament, which possesses only the power of collecting the taxes, from which the expenses of the war the king may enter into must be paid. The possession, therefore, of these two rights by the king, is equivalent to the tenure of absolute power." The possibility of the supplies being refused by a refractory House of Commons, seems either not to have occurred to the khan, or to have escaped his recollection at the moment of his penning this sentence; and though he subsequently alludes to the responsibility of ministers, he never seems to have comprehended the nature and extent of the control exercised by parliament over the finances of the nation, so fully as the Persian princes, who tell us, in their quaint phraseology, that "if the expenses that were made should be agreeable to the Commons, well and good—if not, the vizirs must stand the consequences; and every person who has given ten tomâns of the revenue, has a right to rise up in the House of Commons, and seize the vizir of the treasury by the collar, saying, 'What have you done with my money?'"—a mode of putting to the question which, if now and then practically adopted by some hard-fisted son of the soil, we have no doubt would operate as a most salutary check on the vagaries of Chancellors of the Exchequer.
It is strange that the Khan should not, in this case, perceive the fallacy of his own argument, or see that the power of the sword must always virtually rest with the holder of the purse; since immediately afterwards, after enlarging on the enormous amount of taxes levied in England, the oppressive nature of some of them, especially the window-tax, "for the light of heaven is God's gift to mankind," he proceeds—"In other countries it would perhaps cost the king, who imposed such taxes, his head; but here the blame is laid on the House of Commons, without any one dreaming of censuring the sovereign, in whose name they are levied, and for whose use they are applied;" citing as a proof of this the ease with which the insurrection of Wat Tyler and his followers, against the capitation tax, was suppressed by the promise of the king to redress their grievances. The subject of English taxation, indeed, both from the amount levied, and the acquiescence of the people in such unheard-of burdens, seems to have utterly bewildered the khan's comprehension.[4] "All classes, from the noble to the peasant, are alike oppressed; yet it is amusing to hear them expatiate on the institutions of their country, fancying it the freest and themselves the least oppressed of any people on earth! They are constantly talking of the tyranny and despotism of Oriental governments, without having set foot in any of those regions, or knowing any thing about the matter, except what they have gleaned from the imperfect accounts of superficial travellers—deploring the state of Turkey, Persia, and other Mahommedan countries, and calling their inhabitants slaves, when, if the truth were known, there is not a single kingdom of Islam, the people of which would submit to what the English suffer, or pay one-tenth of the taxes exacted from them."
Relieved, it is to be hoped, by this tirade against the ignominious submission of the Franks to taxation, the Khan resumes the enumeration of the endless catalogue of wonders which the sights of London presented to him. On visiting the Polytechnic Institution—"which means, I understand, a place in which specimens of every science and art are to be seen in some mode or other, there being no science or art of any other country unknown here"—he briefly enumerates the oxyhydrogen microscope, "by which water was shown so full of little animals, nay, even monsters, as to make one shudder at the thought of swallowing a drop"—the orrery, the daguerreotype, and the diving-bell, (in which he had the courage to descend,) as the objects principally deserving notice, "since it would require several months, if not years, to give that attention to each specimen of human industry which it demands, in order thoroughly to understand it." The effects of the electrical machine, indeed, "by which fire was made to pass through the body of a man, and out of the finger-ends of his right hand, without his being in any way affected by it, though a piece of cloth, placed close to this right hand, was actually ignited," seem to have excited considerable astonishment in his mind; but it does not appear that his curiosity led him to make any attempt in investigating the hidden causes of these mysterious phenomena. His apathy in this respect presents a strong contrast with the minute and elaborate description of the same objects, the mode of their construction, and the uses to which they may be applied, given in the journal of the two Parsees, Nowrojee and Merwanjee. "To us," say they, "brought up in India for scientific pursuits, and longing ardently to acquire practical information connected with modern improvements, more particularly with naval architecture, steam-engines, steam-boats, and steam navigation, these two galleries of practical science (the Adelaide and Polytechnic) seemed to embrace all that we had come over to England to make ourselves acquainted with; and it was with gratitude to the original projectors of these institutions that we gazed on the soul-exciting scene before us. We thought of the enchantments related in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and they faded away into nothingness compared with what we then saw."
But however widely apart the nonchalance of the Moslem, and the matter-of-fact diligence of the Parsee,[5] may have placed them respectively in their appreciation of the scientific marvels of the Polytechnic Institution, they meet on common ground in their admiration of the wax-work exhibition of Madame Tussaud; though the Khan, who was not sufficiently acquainted with the features of our public characters to judge of the likenesses, expresses his commendation only in general terms. But the Parsees, with the naïveté of children, break out into absolute raptures at recognising the features of Lord Melbourne, "a good-humoured looking, kind English gentleman, with a countenance, perhaps, representing frankness and candour more than dignity"—William IV., "looking the very picture of good-nature"—the Duke of Wellington, Lord Brougham, &c.; "indeed, we know of no exhibition (where a person has read about people) that will afford him so much pleasure, always recollecting that it is only one shilling, and for this you may stop just as long as you are inclined." Their remarks, on seeing the effigy of Voltaire, are too curious to be omitted. "He is an extraordinary-looking man, dressed so oddly too, with little pinched-up features, and his hair so curiously arranged. We looked much at him, thinking he must have had much courage, and have thought himself quite right in his belief, to have stood opposed to all the existing religious systems of his native land. He, however, and those who thought differently from him, have long since in another world experienced, that if men only act up to what they believe to be right, the Maker of the Deist, the Christian, and the Parsee, will receive them into his presence; and that it is the professor of religion, who is nothing but a professor, let his creed be what it may, that will meet with the greatest punishment from Him that ruleth all things." But before we quit the subject of this attractive exhibition, we must not omit to mention an adventure of the Persian princes, two of whom, having paid a previous visit, persuaded the third brother, on his accompanying them thither, that he was in truth in the royal palace, (whither he had been invited for one of the Queen's parties on the same evening.) and in the presence of the court and royal family! The embarrassment of poor Najef-Kooli at the morne silence preserved, which he interpreted as a sign of displeasure, is amusingly described, till, on touching one of the figures, "he fell down, and I observed that he was dead; and my brothers and Fraser Sahib laughed loudly, and said, 'These people are not dead but are all of them artificial figures of white wax.' Verily, no one would ever have thought that they were manufactured by men!"