1. In the first place, the number who received these gratuitous distributions was, as already shown, so small, when compared to the whole body of the grain-consuming population, that they could not materially have affected the market for agricultural produce in Italy. Not more than 150,000 persons received rations in Rome daily, and perhaps as many in the other cities of Italy. What was this in a peninsula containing at that period sixteen or eighteen millions of souls, and with 2,300,000 in its capital alone?[71] It is evident that the gratuitous distributions of grain, taking those at their greatest extent, could not have embraced a fiftieth part of the Italian population. What ruined the agriculturists, who used to feed the remaining forty-nine fiftieths? The unlimited importation of cheap grain from Spain, Egypt, Sicily, and Lybia, and nothing else.
2. In the next place, even if the gratuitous distributions of grain had embraced twenty times the number which they did, nothing can be clearer than that the effect on agriculture is the same, whether cheap foreign grain is imported by the private importer, or bought and distributed by the government. If the home-grower loses his market, it is the same thing to him whether he does so from the effects of private importation or public distribution; whether his formidable competitor is the merchant, who brings the Lybian grain to the Tiber; or the government, which exacts it as a tribute from Sicily or Egypt. The difference is very great to the urban population, whether they receive their foreign grain in return for their own labour, or get it doled out to them from the government store as the price of keeping quiet. But to the rural cultivator it is immaterial, whether destruction comes upon him in the one way or the other. It is the importation of foreign grain which ruins him; and the effect is the same, whether the price paid for is the gold of the capitalist, or the blood of the legions.
ELINOR TRAVIS.
A Tale in Three Chapters.
Chapter the First.
It is now forty years since I found myself, for the first time in my life, in the once fashionable city of Bath. I had accompanied thither from London a dear friend from whom I had parted two years before at Oxford; a man as noble as ingenuous, as gentle as he was brave. Few men could boast the advantages enjoyed by Rupert Sinclair. Born of noble blood, of a family whose peerage had been raised upon the foundation of a huge wealth, handsome in person, intellectual, well-informed, enthusiastic and aspiring, he bred a fascination around his existence which it was difficult to resist. I had already graduated when Rupert Sinclair entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner; I was, moreover, his senior by five years, yet from the moment I saw him until the hour of his decease—with one painful interregnum—we were firm and unflinching friends. He was sent to the university, like others of his rank, to acquire such knowledge of men and books as a temporary residence—and that alone—in an atmosphere of mingled learning and frivolity, is generally supposed to impart. His father looked upon all book knowledge as superfluous, except in a parson or schoolmaster; his lady mother would have been shocked to find him, whether at Oxford or elsewhere, any thing but the gay and fashionable nonentity which her taste and experience had taught her to regard as the perfection of God's fair creation. Lord Railton was a courtier, and affected to be a politician; her ladyship was a woman of fashion. It is surprising to me that, with their views of a nobleman's duties at Oxford, they should have thought it necessary to procure for their son the services of one who had nothing better to offer for his amusement, than the poor learning he had picked up at Eton and elsewhere, to dole out again to the best advantage, for the support of himself and widowed mother. I ought rather to say it was surprising to me then. I have grown wiser since. A tutor was necessary to the position of Lord Railton's son, and it was my happiness to be chosen the instructor of Rupert Sinclair. Every possible pains had been taken to ruin the intellect and impair the moral faculties of the youth. His earliest teachers had been strictly enjoined to give him no tasks which should subject him to the slightest inconvenience, and were forbidden, under pain of dismissal, to ruffle the serenity of his temper, or intercept the slightest movement of his mind, however cross or wayward. Rupert in his very cradle had been taught, both by precept and example, that his equals in rank were his fellow creatures, and that all below him were—creatures, it is true, but the fellows of one another, and not of him and such as he; that the men to whose virtue, discretion, and conduct he was confided—his TEACHERS—were—oh, mockery of mockeries!—his dependents and inferiors, and necessary to him as his nurse or footman, but not a whit more so! Lord Railton was a tyrant, self-willed and imperious by nature, and as cold-blooded and selfish as a superadded artistocratic education could render him. He saw little of his children, whom he terrified when he did see them, and busied himself in this world with little more than the intrigues and plots of the political junto to whom he was bound by a community of interests, rather than affectionately attached. It is my firm belief that miracles have not ceased upon the earth. Invisible angels interpose now, as did the living saints of old, to repair the faults and infirmities of nature, and by a suspension of our ordinary laws to proclaim the might and mercy of the Divinity. How but by a miracle could the character of Rupert Sinclair have belied the natural reasoning of all ordinary mortals, exhibiting the utter annihilation of the intimate connexion of cause and effect, and the independence of the infant soul, when God so wills it, of the machinations of the wicked, and the vicious trifling of the foolish? The good sense of the youth had strengthened and increased under the enervating system which would have destroyed a weaker brain and a less honest heart. I was the tutor of Sinclair, but I suffered him to sketch out his own plan of study. His mother had not failed to forward me the usual instructions respecting the treatment of her darling child; but had she been silent I should not have insisted upon a strict adherence to the college system with one who, neither in the university nor in the world, to which he was about to be summoned, would be tasked to remember or repeat one syllable of his lessons. Great is the temptation to dwell upon these early days of our attachment; for, alas! a pang must wait upon the pen when it traces the last record of a period unclouded by grief. An account of the earliest springtime that promised so fair a summer and harvest, is, it is true, not necessary to the main plot of the drama I have undertaken to write; but one of its chief characters can hardly be thoroughly understood without some reference to his conduct and pursuits previously to the commencement of the action. To say that I was prepossessed in favour of my pupil after my first conversation with him, is to say but little. I was at once surprised, delighted, and charmed. I had expected to receive a spoiled child of fortune; a giddy, self-willed, arrogant, and overbearing boy. I met with one whose demeanour was gentle, modest, and sedate. A childlike simplicity governed his manners; reflection and sound judgment his discourse. Long before the close of my young friend's academical career I had gained his entire confidence—he my heart; and at the close of it, I had not occasion to change one opinion or one sentiment entertained for my charge at the commencement of our friendship; so transparent are the minds of the ingenuous, and of those whom nature shelters from the baleful influences of life. It must, however, be stated, that in the all but perfect specimen of humanity presented to the world in the person of Rupert Sinclair, there existed one flaw to convict it of mortality, and to establish its relation with universal error. The simplicity spoken of as characteristic of the man, degenerated into weakness; faith in the goodness of his fellow-creatures into glaring credulity. It is a singular fact, and one that must be accounted for by those who have made the Mind an especial study, that whilst no man was quicker in detecting the slightest indication of his own imperfection in another, no one could be less conscious of its existence in himself, or less alive to imposition, the moment it was practised under his own eye, and against his own good-nature. How many times, during his residence in Oxford, Rupert Sinclair became the victim of the unprincipled and the sharper, I will not venture to say, prepared as I am to assert that no discovery of falsehood and imposture ever convinced him of the folly of his benevolence, or of the worthlessness of the objects upon whom his favours had been showered. The world is said to be divided into two classes; into those who suspect all men until they are proved honest, and those who believe all men honest until they are proved to be false. The name of Rupert Sinclair might be written in neither category. He not only believed the world to be good prior to experience, but he denied it to be bad, let experience succeed as it might in convicting it of evil.
It was exactly two years after Sinclair quitted Oxford, that I received a letter from him, requesting me to meet him in London as soon after the receipt of his letter as my engagements would permit. The long vacation had again commenced. Rupert was no longer a student, or, to speak more correctly, books had now become the solace and recreation of his leisure hours, rather than the business of his life. To please his fond and very foolish mother, he had accepted a commission in the Guards. The small ambition of Lady Railton was consummated the moment her noble boy appeared in her drawing-room "en grande tenue;" as for the peer, he was too absorbed in his own diplomacy to interfere with that of her ladyship, in whose knowledge of the world and sound discretion he placed unbounded faith. I attended to the summons of Sinclair without delay. Upon arriving in London I went to his hotel, and found him recovering from a fit of illness which at one period had threatened his life, but of which he had as yet kept his family in ignorance. He had been recommended by his physicians to try the waters and mild temperature of Bath; and he was willing to obey them, provided I would become his companion. My time was my own, and I loved Sinclair too well to throw an obstacle in his way, had not the offer itself been temptation enough to one who had passed so many months of physical inactivity, without one holiday, in the dusty gloominess of college rooms. In the course of two days our preparations were made, and we quitted London.
A week glided by in happy idleness. The invalid, compelled to keep his room for many hours of the day, was thrown upon his resources, and upon such as I could command for his amusement. The past is always a pleasant subject of discourse where the speakers are young, and the past is a day of sunshine, still lingering and warm. The days we had seen were bright enough, and to speak of them was to bring them back in all their recent freshness. Rupert was twenty-one, and he wondered at the ingratitude of man that called this world a scene of strife and misery. I was twenty-six, and as yet without a calamity. I had never known my father; and I had maintained my mother in comfort for many years. I had yet to part with her.
Another week, and the invalid was convalescent. The walks were extended and the prescriptions torn up. Invitations came and were accepted. A distant relative of Lady Railton was in Bath. Sinclair visited her, and was the next day a guest at her table. There was another guest there. Her name was Elinor Travis.