49. GEOGRAPHY naturally follows Grammar; and you should begin with that of this kingdom, which you ought to understand well, perfectly well, before you venture to look abroad. A rather slight knowledge of the divisions and customs of other countries is, generally speaking, sufficient; but, not to know these full well, as far as relates to our own country, is, in one who pretends to be a gentleman or a scholar, somewhat disgraceful. Yet how many men are there, and those called gentlemen too, who seem to think that counties and parishes, and churches and parsons, and tithes and glebes, and manors and courts-leet, and paupers and poor-houses, all grew up in England, or dropped down upon it, immediately after Noah's flood! Surely, it is necessary for every man, having any pretensions to scholarship, to know how these things came; and, the sooner this knowledge is acquired the better; for, until it be acquired, you read the history of your country in vain. Indeed, to communicate this knowledge is one main part of the business of history; but it is a part which no historian, commonly so called, has, that I know of, ever yet performed, except, in part, myself, in the History of the PROTESTANT REFORMATION. I had read HUME'S History of England, and the Continuation by SMOLLETT; but, in 1802, when I wanted to write on the subject of the non-residence of the clergy, I found, to my great mortification, that I knew nothing of the foundation of the office and the claims of the parsons, and that I could not even guess at the origin of parishes. This gave a new turn to my inquiries; and I soon found the romancers, called historians, had given me no information that I could rely on, and, besides, had done, apparently, all they could to keep me in the dark.
50. When you come to HISTORY, begin also with that of your own country; and here it is my bounden duty to put you well on your guard; for in this respect we are peculiarly unfortunate, and for the following reasons, to which I beg you to attend. Three hundred years ago, the religion of England had been, during nine hundred years, the Catholic religion: the Catholic clergy possessed about a third part of all the lands and houses, which they held in trust for their own support, for the building and repairing of churches, and for the relief of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; but, at the time just mentioned, the king and the aristocracy changed the religion to Protestant, took the estates of the church and the poor to themselves as their own property, and taxed the people at large for the building and repairing of churches and for the relief of the poor. This great and terrible change, effected partly by force against the people and partly by the most artful means of deception, gave rise to a series of efforts, which has been continued from that day to this, to cause us all to believe, that that change was for the better, that it was for our good; and that, before that time, our forefathers were a set of the most miserable slaves that the sun ever warmed with his beams. It happened, too, that the art of printing was not discovered, or, at least, it was very little understood, until about the time when this change took place; so that the books relating to former times were confined to manuscript; and, besides, even these manuscript libraries were destroyed with great care by those who had made the change and had grasped the property of the poor and the church. Our 'Historians,' as they are called, have written under fear of the powerful, or have been bribed by them; and, generally speaking, both at the same time; and, accordingly, their works are, as far as they relate to former times, masses of lies unmatched by any others that the world has ever seen.
51. The great object of these lies always has been to make the main body of the people believe, that the nation is now more happy, more populous, more powerful, than it was before it was Protestant, and thereby to induce us to conclude, that it was a good thing for us that the aristocracy should take to themselves the property of the poor and the church, and make the people at large pay taxes for the support of both. This has been, and still is, the great object of all those heaps of lies; and those lies are continually spread about amongst us in all forms of publication, from heavy folios down to halfpenny tracts. In refutation of those lies we have only very few and rare ancient books to refer to, and their information is incidental, seeing that their authors never dreamed of the possibility of the lying generations which were to come. We have the ancient acts of parliament, the common-law, the customs, the canons of the church, and the churches themselves; but these demand analyses and argument, and they demand also a really free press, and unprejudiced and patient readers. Never in this world, before, had truth to struggle with so many and such great disadvantages!
52. To refute lies is not, at present, my business; but it is my business to give you, in as small a compass as possible, one striking proof that they are lies; and thereby to put you well upon your guard for the whole of the rest of your life. The opinion sedulously inculcated by these 'historians' is this; that, before the Protestant times came, England was, comparatively, an insignificant country, having few people in it, and those few wretchedly poor and miserable. Now, take the following undeniable facts. All the parishes in England are now (except where they have been united, and two, three, or four, have been made into one) in point of size, what they were a thousand years ago. The county of Norfolk is the best cultivated of any one in England. This county has now 731 parishes; and the number was formerly greater. Of these parishes 22 have now no churches at all; 74 contain less than 100 souls each: and 268 have no parsonage-houses. Now, observe, every parish had, in old times, a church and a parsonage-house. The county contains 2,092 square miles; that is to say, something less than 3 square miles to each parish, and that is 1,920 statute acres of land; and the size of each parish is, on an average, that of a piece of ground about one mile and a half each way; so that the churches are, even now, on an average, only about a mile and a half from each other. Now, the questions for you to put to yourself are these: Were churches formerly built and kept up without being wanted, and especially by a poor and miserable people? Did these miserable people build 74 churches out of 731, each of which 74 had not a hundred souls belonging to it? Is it a sign of an augmented population, that 22 churches out of 731 have tumbled down and been effaced? Was it a country thinly inhabited by miserable people that could build and keep a church in every piece of ground a mile and a half each way, besides having, in this same county, 77 monastic establishments and 142 free chapels? Is it a sign of augmented population, ease and plenty, that, out of 731 parishes, 268 have suffered the parsonage houses to fall into ruins, and their sites to become patches of nettles and of brambles? Put these questions calmly to yourself: common sense will dictate the answers; and truth will call for an expression of your indignation against the lying historians and the still more lying population-mongers.
LETTER II
TO A YOUNG MAN
53. In the foregoing Letter, I have given my advice to a Youth. In addressing myself to you, I am to presume that you have entered upon your present stage of life, having acted upon the precepts contained in that letter; and that, of course, you are a sober, abstinent, industrious and well-informed young man. In the succeeding letters, which will be addressed to the Lover, the Husband, the Father and the Citizen, I shall, of course, have to include my notion of your duties as a master, and as a person employed by another. In the present letter, therefore, I shall confine myself principally to the conduct of a young man with regard to the management of his means, or money.
54. Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to this matter; for it very frequently happens, it has happened to thousands upon thousands, not only to be ruined, according to the common acceptation of the word; not only to be made poor, and to suffer from poverty, in consequence of want of attention to pecuniary matters; but it has frequently, and even generally, happened, that a want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science, and of genius itself. A man, oppressed with pecuniary cares and dangers, must be next to a miracle, if he have his mind in a state fit for intellectual labours; to say nothing of the temptations, arising from such distress, to abandon good principles, to suppress useful opinions and useful facts; and, in short, to become a disgrace to his kindred, and an evil to his country, instead of being an honour to the former and a blessing to the latter. To be poor and independent, is very nearly an impossibility.
55. But, then, poverty is not a positive, but a relative term. BURKE observed, and very truly, that a labourer who earned a sufficiency to maintain him as a labourer, and to maintain him in a suitable manner; to give him a sufficiency of good food, of clothing, of lodging, and of fuel, ought not to be called a poor man; for that, though he had little riches, though his, compared with that of a lord, was a state of poverty, it was not a state of poverty in itself. When, therefore, I say that poverty is the cause of a depression of spirit, of inactivity and of servility in men of literary talent, I must say, at the same time, that the evil arises from their own fault; from their having created for themselves imaginary wants; from their having indulged in unnecessary enjoyments, and from their having caused that to be poverty, which would not have been poverty, if they had been moderate in their enjoyments.