This has been, with Richard, one whole week of hare-hunting, and with me, three days and a half. The weather has been amongst the finest that I ever saw, and Lord Caernarvon’s preserves fill the country with hares, while these hares invite us to ride about and to see his park and estate, at this fine season of the year, in every direction. We are now on the north side of that Beacon Hill for which we steered last Sunday. This makes part of a chain of lofty chalk-hills and downs, which divides all the lower part of Hampshire from Berkshire, though the ancient ruler, owner, of the former took a little strip all along on the flat, on this side of the chain, in order, I suppose, to make the ownership of the hills themselves the more clear of all dispute; just as the owner of a field-hedge and bank owns also the ditch on his neighbour’s side. From these hills you look, at one view, over the whole of Berkshire, into Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, and you can see the Isle of Wight and the sea. On this north side the chalk soon ceases, and the sand and clay begin, and the oak-woods cover a great part of the surface. Amongst these is the farmhouse in which we are, and from the warmth and good fare of which we do not mean to stir until we can do it without the chance of a wet skin.
This rain has given me time to look at the newspapers of about a week old. Oh, oh! The Cotton Lords are tearing! Thank God for that! The Lords of the Anvil are snapping! Thank God for that too! They have kept poor souls, then, in a heat of 84 degrees to little purpose after all. The “great interests” mentioned in the King’s Speech do not, then, all continue to flourish! The “prosperity” was not, then, “permanent,” though the King was advised to assert so positively that it was! “Anglo-Mexican and Pasco-Peruvian” fall in price, and the Chronicle assures me that “the respectable owners of the Mexican Mining shares mean to take measures to protect their property.” Indeed! Like protecting the Spanish Bonds, I suppose? Will the Chronicle be so good as to tell us the names of these “respectable persons”? Doctor Black must know their names; or else he could not know them to be respectable. If the parties be those that I have heard, these mining works may possibly operate with them as an emetic, and make them throw up a part at least of what they have taken down.
There has, I see, at New York, been that confusion which I, four months ago, said would and must take place; that breaking of merchants and all the ruin which, in such a case, spreads itself about, ruining families and producing fraud and despair. Here will be, between the two countries, an interchange of cause and effect, proceeding from the dealings in cotton, until, first and last, two or three hundred thousands of persons have, at one spell of paper-money work, been made to drink deep of misery. I pity none but the poor English creatures, who are compelled to work on the wool of this accursed weed, which has done so much mischief to England. The slaves who cultivate and gather the cotton are well fed. They do not suffer. The sufferers are these who spin it and weave it and colour it, and the wretched beings who cover with it those bodies which, as in the time of old Fortescue, ought to be “clothed throughout in good woollens.”
One newspaper says that Mr. Huskisson is gone to Paris, and thinks it likely that he will endeavour to “inculcate in the mind of the Bourbons wise principles of free trade!” What the devil next! Persuade them, I suppose, that it is for their good that English goods should be admitted into France and into St. Domingo with little or no duty? Persuade them to make a treaty of commerce with him; and, in short, persuade them to make France help to pay the interest of our debt and dead-weight, lest our system of paper should go to pieces, and lest that should be followed by a radical reform, which reform would be injurious to “the monarchical principle!” This newspaper politician does, however, think that the Bourbons will be “too dull” to comprehend these “enlightened and liberal” notions; and I think so too. I think the Bourbons, or, rather, those who will speak for them, will say: “No thank you. You contracted your debt without our participation; you made your dead-weight for your own purposes; the seizure of our museums and the loss of our frontier towns followed your victory of Waterloo, though we were ‘your Allies’ at the time; you made us pay an enormous Tribute after that battle, and kept possession of part of France till we had paid it; you wished, the other day, to keep us out of Spain, and you, Mr. Huskisson, in a speech at Liverpool, called our deliverance of the King of Spain an unjust and unprincipled act of aggression, while Mr. Canning prayed to God that we might not succeed. No thank you, Mr. Huskisson, no. No coaxing, Sir: we saw, then, too clearly the advantage we derived from your having a debt and a dead weight to wish to assist in relieving you from either. ‘Monarchical principle’ here, or ‘monarchical principle’ there, we know that your mill-stone debt is our best security. We like to have your wishes, your prayers, and your abuse against us, rather than your subsidies and your fleets: and so farewell, Mr. Huskisson: if you like, the English may drink French wine; but whether they do or not, the French shall not wear your rotten cottons. And as a last word, how did you maintain the ‘monarchical principle,’ the ‘paternal principle,’ or as Castlereagh called it, the ‘social system,’ when you called that an unjust and unprincipled aggression which put an end to the bargain by which the convents and other church-property of Spain were to be transferred to the Jews and Jobbers of London? Bon jour, Monsieur Huskisson, ci-devant membre et orateur du club de quatre vingt neuf!”
If they do not actually say this to him, this is what they will think; and that is, as to the effect, precisely the same thing. It is childishness to suppose that any nation will act from a desire of serving all other nations, or any one other nation, as well as itself. It will make, unless compelled, no compact by which it does not think itself a gainer; and amongst its gains it must, and always does, reckon the injury to its rivals. It is a stupid idea that all nations are to gain by anything. Whatever is the gain of one must, in some way or other, be a loss to another. So that this new project of “free trade” and “mutual gain” is as pure a humbug as that which the newspapers carried on during the “glorious days” of loans, when they told us, at every loan, that the bargain was “equally advantageous to the contractors and to the public!” The fact is, the “free trade” project is clearly the effect of a consciousness of our weakness. As long as we felt strong, we felt bold, we had no thought of conciliating the world; we upheld a system of exclusion, which long experience proved to be founded in sound policy. But we now find that our debts and our loads of various sorts cripple us. We feel our incapacity for the carrying of trade sword in hand: and so we have given up all our old maxims, and are endeavouring to persuade the world that we are anxious to enjoy no advantages that are not enjoyed also by our neighbours. Alas! the world sees very clearly the cause of all this; and the world laughs at us for our imaginary cunning. My old doggrel, that used to make me and my friends laugh in Long Island, is precisely pat to this case.
When his maw was stuffed with paper,
How John Bull did prance and caper!
How he foam’d and how he roar’d:
How his neighbours all he gored!
How he scrap’d the ground and hurl’d
Dirt and filth on all the world!
But John Bull of paper empty,
Though in midst of peace and plenty,
Is modest grown as worn-out sinner,
As Scottish laird that wants a dinner;
As Wilberforce, become content
A rotten burgh to represent;
As Blue and Buff, when, after hunting
On Yankee coasts their “bits of bunting,”
Came softly back across the seas,
And silent were as mice in cheese.
Yes, the whole world, and particularly the French and the Yankees, see very clearly the course of this fit of modesty and of liberality into which we have so recently fallen. They know well that a war would play the very devil with our national faith. They know, in short, that no Ministers in their senses will think of supporting the paper-system through another war. They know well that no Ministers that now exist, or are likely to exist, will venture to endanger the paper-system; and therefore they know that (for England) they may now do just what they please. When the French were about to invade Spain, Mr. Canning said that his last despatch on the subject was to be understood as a protest on the part of England against permanent occupation of any part of Spain by France. There the French are, however; and at the end of two years and a half he says that he knows nothing about any intention that they have to quit Spain, or any part of it.
Why, Saint Domingo was independent. We had traded with it as an independent state. Is it not clear that if we had said the word (and had been known to be able to arm), France would not have attempted to treat that fine and rich country as a colony? Mark how wise this measure of France! How just, too; to obtain by means of a tribute from the St. Domingoians compensation for the loyalists of that country! Was this done with regard to the loyalists of America in the reign of the good jubilee George III.? Oh, no! Those loyalists had to be paid, and many of them have even yet, at the end of more than half a century, to be paid out of taxes raised on us, for the losses occasioned by their disinterested loyalty! This was a masterstroke on the part of France; she gets about seven millions sterling in the way of tribute; she makes that rich island yield to her great commercial advantages; and she, at the same time, paves the way for effecting one of two objects; namely, getting the island back again, or throwing our islands into confusion whenever it shall be her interest to do it.
This might have been prevented by a word from us if we had been ready for war. But we are grown modest; we are grown liberal; we do not want to engross that which fairly belongs to our neighbours! We have undergone a change somewhat like that which marriage produces on a blustering fellow who while single can but just clear his teeth. This change is quite surprising, and especially by the time that the second child comes the man is loaded; he looks like a loaded man; his voice becomes so soft and gentle compared to what it used to be. Just such are the effects of our load: but the worst of it is our neighbours are not thus loaded. However, far be it from me to regret this, or any part of it. The load is the people’s best friend. If that could, without reform: if that could be shaken off, leaving the seat-men and the parsons in their present state, I would not live in England another day! And I say this with as much seriousness as if I were upon my death-bed.
The wise men of the newspapers are for a repeal of the Corn Laws. With all my heart. I will join anybody in a petition for their repeal. But this will not be done. We shall stop short of this extent of “liberality,” let what may be the consequence to the manufacturers. The Cotton Lords must all go, to the last man, rather than a repeal, these laws will take place: and of this the newspaper wise men may be assured. The farmers can but just rub along now, with all their high prices and low wages. What would be their state, and that of their landlords, if the wheat were to come down again to 4, 5, or even 6 shillings a bushels? Universal agricultural bankruptcy would be the almost instant consequence. Many of them are now deep in debt from the effects of 1820, 1821, and 1822. One more year like 1822 would have broken the whole mass up, and left the lands to be cultivated, under the overseers, for the benefit of the paupers. Society would have been nearly dissolved, and the state of nature would have returned. The Small-Note Bill, co-operating with the Corn Laws, have given a respite, and nothing more. This Bill must remain efficient, paper-money must cover the country, and the corn-laws must remain in force; or an “equitable adjustment” must take place; or, to a state of nature this country must return. What, then, as I want a repeal of the corn-laws, and also want to get rid of the paper-money, I must want to see this return to a state of nature? By no means. I want the “equitable adjustment,” and I am quite sure that no adjustment can be equitable which does not apply every penny’s worth of public property to the payment of the fund-holders and dead-weight and the like. Clearly just and reasonable as this is, however, the very mention of it makes the Fire-Shovels, and some others, half mad. It makes them storm and rant and swear like Bedlamites. But it is curious to hear them talk of the impracticability of it; when they all know that, by only two or three Acts of Parliament, Henry VIII. did ten times as much as it would now, I hope, be necessary to do. If the duty were imposed on me, no statesman, legislator or lawyer, but a simple citizen, I think I could, in less than twenty-four hours, draw up an Act that would give satisfaction to, I will not say every man, but to, at least, ninety-nine out of every hundred; an Act that would put all affairs of money and of religion to rights at once; but that would, I must confess, soon take from us that amiable modesty, of which I have spoken above, and which is so conspicuously shown in our works of free trade and liberality.