Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II

by Various

I have seen England twice in my life: the first time in 1822. It was the period when the Holy Alliance, recently victorious and proud of its victories over the spirit of conquest of Napoleon, struggled against the newly-born liberalism, and was only occupied in every where restoring ancient regimes and ancient ideas. The government of England, held at that time by the intelligent heirs of a great man (Mr. Pitt), was a veritable contradiction to the true nature of the country of liberty; it had taken up the cause of absolute sovereigns against the nations; it made of the free and proud citizens of England the support and soldier of the Holy Alliance; it blindly combated the revolution, with its spirit and institutions, at home and every where else. England, by no means comfortable under such a government, hardly recognized herself. She felt by instinct that she was made to play the part of the seide of despotism and of the church, in place of the part of champion of independent nationalities, and of the regulated liberty of thought which Mr. Pitt had conceived for her. Thus her tribunes, her public papers, her popular meetings, her very streets and public places rang with indignation against her government and her aristocracy. The ground trembled in London under the steps of the multitudes who assembled at the slightest appeal or opportunity; the language of the people breathed anger, their physiognomies hatred of class to class; hideous poverty hung up its tatters before the doors of the most sumptuous quarters; women in a state of emaciation, hectic children, and ghastly men were to be seen wandering with a threatening carelessness about shops and warehouses laden with riches; the constables and the troops were insufficient, after the scandalous prosecution of the queen, to bridle that perpetual sedition of discontent and of hunger. The painful consciousness of a tempest hanging over Great Britain was felt in the air. A cabinet, the author and victim of that false position, sank under the effort. A statesman sought in despair a refuge against the difficulties which he saw accumulating on his country, and which he could no longer dominate but by force. I avow that I myself, at that time young and a foreigner, and not yet knowing either the solidity or the elasticity of the institutions and the manners of England, was deceived, like every body else, by these sinister symptoms of a fall, and that I prognosticated, as every body else also did, the approaching decline and fall of that great and mysterious country. The ministry of Mr. Canning placed me happily in the wrong.

I saw England again in 1830, a few months after our revolution of July. At that time the political government of England was moderate, reasonable, and wise. It endeavored, as Lord Palmerston, as Sir Robert Peel, as the Duke of Wellington have done, after the revolution of February, to prevent a collision on the Continent between the revolution and the counter-revolution. It then refused, as it refused in 1848, to be a party to an anti-French or anti-republican coalition. It proclaimed not only the right and independence of nationalities, but also the right and independence of revolutions. It thus humanely avoided irritating the revolutionists. It spared Europe the effusion of much blood. But in 1830 it was the misery of the English and Irish proletaires that frightened the regards and brought consternation to the thoughts of observers. Ireland was literally dying of inanition. The manufacturing districts of the three kingdoms having produced more than the world could consume during the fifteen years of peace, left an overflow of manufactures—the masses emaciated, vitiated in body and mind, and vitiated by their hatred against the class of society who possess. The manufacturers had dismissed armies of workmen without bread. These black columns were to be seen, with their mud-colored jackets, dotting the avenues and streets of London, like columns of insects whose nests had been upset, and who blackened the soil under their steps.

The vices and brutishness of these masses of proletaires, degraded by ignorance and hunger—their alternate poverty and debaucheries—their promiscuousness of ages, of sexes, of dens of fetid straw, their bedding in cellars and garrets—their hideous clamors, to be met with at certain hours in the morning in certain lanes of the unclean districts of London—when those human vermin emerged into the light of the sun with howling groaning, or laughter that was really Satanic, it would have made the masses of free creatures really envy the fate of the black slaves of our colonies—masses which are abased and flogged, but, at all events loathed! It was the recruiting of the army of Marius; all that was wanting was a flag. Social war was visible there with all its horrors and its furies—every body saw it, and I myself forboded it like every body else. These symptoms struck me as such evidences of an approaching overthrow for a constitution which thus allowed its vices to stagnate and mantle, that, having some portion of my patrimony in England, I hastened to remove it, and to place it where it would be sheltered from a wreck which appeared to me to be inevitable. During this time the aristocracy and the great proprietary of England appeared insensible to these prognostics of social war, scandalized the eyes of the public by the contrast of their Asiatic luxury with these calamities, absented themselves from their properties during whole years, and were traveling from Paris to Naples and to Florence, while at the same time propagating speculative or incendiary liberalism with the liberals of the Continent. Who would not have trembled for such a country?

This time (September, 1850) I was struck, on visiting England, with an impression wholly opposed to the impressions which I have just depicted to you. I arrived in London, and I no longer recognized that capital, excepting by that immense cloud of smoke which that vast focus of English labor or leisure raises in the heavens, and by that overflowing without limit of houses, workshops, and chateaux, and agreeable residences, that a city of 2,600,000 inhabitants casts year after year beyond its walls, even to the depths of her forests, her fields, and her hills. Like a polypus with a thousand branches, London vegetates and engrafts, so to speak, on the common trunk of the city quarters on quarters, and towns upon towns. These quarters, some for labor, and others for the middle classes; some for the choice leisure of the literary classes, and others for the luxury of the aristocracy and for the splendor of the crown, not only attest the increase of that city which enlarges itself in proportion to its inhabitants, but they testify to the increase of luxury, of art, of riches, and of ease, of all which the characters are to be recognized in the disposition, in the architecture, in the ornaments, in the spaciousness, and in the comfort, sometimes splendid, sometimes modest, of the habitations of man. In the west two new towns—two towns of hotels and palaces—two towns of kings of civilization, as the Embassador of Carthage would have said—have sprung up. Toward the green and wooded heights of Hampstead—that St. Cloud of London—is a new park, including pastures, woods, waters, and gardens in its grounds, and surrounded by a circle of houses of opulent and varied architecture, each of which represents a building capital that it frightens one to calculate. Beyond this solitude inclosed in the capital other towns and suburbs have commenced, and are rapidly climbing these heights, step by step, and hillock after hillock. In these places arise chapels, churches, schools, hospitals, penitentiary prisons on new models, which take away from them their sinister aspect and significance, and which hold out moral health and correction to the guilty in place of punishment and branding. In these places are to be seen hedges of houses appropriated to all the conditions of life and fortune, but all surrounded by a court or a little garden, which affords the family rural recollections, the breathing of vegetation, and the feeling of nature present even in the very heart of the town.

This new London, which is almost rural, creeps already up these large hills, and spreads itself, from season to season, in the fields which environ them, to go by lower, more active, and more smoky suburbs, to rejoin, as far as the eye can see, the Thames, beyond which the same phenomenon is reproduced on the hills and in the plains on the other side. In surveying this the eye loses itself as if on the waves of the ocean. On every side the horizon is too narrow to embrace that town, and the town continues beyond the horizon; but every where also the sky, the air, the country, the verdure, the waters, the tops of the oaks, are mixed with that vegetation of stones, of marble, and of bricks, and appears to make of new London, not an arid and dead city, but a fertile and living province, which germinates at the same time with men and trees, with habitations and fields; a city of which the nature has not been changed, but in which, on the contrary, nature and civilization respect each other, seek for and clasp each other, for the health and joy of man, in a mutual embrace.

Between these two banks of the river, and between its steeples and its towers—between the tops of its oaks, respected by the constructors of these new quarters—you perceive a movable forest of masts, which ascend and descend perpetually the course of the Thames, and streak it with a thousand lines of smoke, while the steamers, loaded with passengers, stream out like a river of smoke above the river of water which carries them. But it is not in the newly constructed quarters alone that London has changed its appearance, and presents that image of opulence, of comfort, and of labor, with thriving—the city itself, that furnace at the same time blackened and infect of this human ebullition, has enlarged its issues, widened its streets, ennobled its monuments, extended and straightened its suburbs, and made them more healthy. The ignoble lanes, with their suspicious taverns, where the population of drunken sailors huddled together like savages in dregs and dust, have been demolished. They have given place to airy streets, where the passers-by, coming back from the docks, those entrepôts of the four continents, pass with ease in carriages or on foot—to spacious and clean houses, to modest but decent shops, where the maritime population find, on disembarking, clothes, food, tobacco, beer, and all the objects of exchange necessary for the retail trade of seaports: those streets are now as well cleaned from filth, from drunkenness and obscenity, as the other streets and suburbs of the city. One can pass through them without pity and without disgust; one feels in them the vigilance of public morality and the presence of a police which, if it can not destroy vice, can at all events keep it at a distance from the eyes of the passer-by, and render even the cloacæ inoffensive.

In the country districts and secondary towns around London the same transformation is observable. The innumerable railways which run in every direction all over England have covered the land with stations, coal depôts, new houses for the persons employed, elegant offices for the administration, viaducts, bridges over the lines to private properties; and all these things impart to England, from the sea to London, the appearance of a country which is being cleared, and where the occupants are employed in running up residences for themselves. Every thing is being built, and every thing is smoking, hurrying on, so perfectly alive is this soil; one feels that the people are eager to seize on the new sense of circulation which Providence has just bestowed on man.

Such is England in a physical sense, sketched broadly. As to political England, the following are the changes which struck me. I describe them as I reviewed them, with sincerity, it is true, but not unmixed with astonishment. The appearance of the people in the streets is no longer what filled me with consternation twenty years ago. In place of those ragged bands of beggars—men, women, and children—who swarmed in the narrow and gloomy streets of the manufacturing town, you will see well-dressed workmen, with an appearance of strength and health, going to work or returning peaceably from their workshop with their tools on their shoulders; young girls issuing without tumult from the houses where they work, under the superintendence of women older than themselves, or of a father or brother, who brings them back to their home; from time to time you see numerous columns of little children of from five to eight years of age, poorly but decently clad, led by a woman, who leaves them at their own doors, after having watched over them all day. They all present the appearance of relative comfort, of most exquisite cleanliness, and of health. You will perceive few, if any, idle groups on the public ways, and infinitely fewer drunken men than formerly; the streets appear as if purged of vice and wretchedness, or only exhibit those which always remain the scum of an immense population.

If you converse in a drawing-room, in a public carriage, at a public dinner table, even in the street, with men of the different classes in England; if you take care to be present, as I did, at places where persons of the most advanced opinions meet and speak; if you read the journals, those safety-valves of public opinion, you must remain struck with the extreme mildness of men's minds and hearts, with the temperance of ideas, the moderation of what is desired, the prudence of the Liberal Opposition, the tenderness evinced toward a conciliation of all classes, the justice which all classes of the English population render to each other, the readiness of all to co-operate, each according to his means and disposition, in advancing the general good—the employment, comfort, instruction, and morality of the people—in a word, a mild and serene air is breathed in place of the tempest blast which then raged in every breast. The equilibrium is re-established in the national atmosphere. One feels and says to one's self, "This people can come to an understanding with itself. It can live, last, prosper, and improve for a long time in this way. Had I my residence on this soil, I should not any longer tremble for my hearth."

I except, it must be understood, from this very general character of harmony and reconciliation, two classes of men whom nothing ever satisfies—the demagogues and the extreme aristocrats—two tyrannies which can not content themselves with any liberty, because they eternally desire to subjugate the people—the one by the intolerance of the rabble, the other by the intolerance of the little number. The newspapers of the inexorable aristocracy, and of the ungovernable radicalism, are the only ones that still contrast by their bitterness with the general mildness of opinions in Great Britain. But some clubs of Chartists, rendered fanatical by sophistry, and some clubs of diplomatists, rendered fanatical by pride, only serve the better to show the calm and reason which are more and more prevailing in the other parts of the nation. The one make speeches to the emptiness of places where the people are invited to meet, and the others pay by the line for calumnies and invective against France and against the present age. No one listens, and no one reads. The people work on. The intelligent Tories lament Sir Robert Peel, and accept the inheritance of his Conservative doctrines by means of progress.