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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 76, No. 468, October, 1854
Author: Various
Release date: January 4, 2025 [eBook #75032]
Language: English
Original publication: en: William Blackwood & Sons, 1854
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 76, NO. 468, OCTOBER, 1854 ***
BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLXVIII. OCTOBER, 1854. VOL. LXXVI.
CONTENTS.
SPECULATORS AMONG THE STARS.—PART II., 371
KING OTHO AND HIS CLASSIC KINGDOM, 403
STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND.—PART II., 422
CIVILISATION.—THE CENSUS, 435
A RUSSIAN REMINISCENCE, 452
RECORDS OF THE PAST.—NINEVEH AND BABYLON, 458
THE OPENING OF THE GANGES CANAL, 475
THE USES OF BEAUTY, 476
SPANISH POLITICS AND CUBAN PERILS, 477
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;
_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed_.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLXVIII. OCTOBER, 1854. VOL. LXXVI.
SPECULATORS AMONG THE STARS.[1]
PART II.
Whatever we talk, Things are _as they are_—not as we grant, dispute,
or hope; depending on neither our affirmative nor negative.[2]—JEREMY
TAYLOR.
Let us bear in mind the above passage, pregnant with solemnising
reflection, while dealing with the question before us; always
remembering that it is one purely speculative, however interesting,
however exciting, to imaginative persons; but to weak and superficial
ones—to those of unsettled opinions—capable of becoming mischievous.
The state of that question is exactly this: The heavenly bodies around
us, some or all of them, are, or are not, in point of fact, the abodes
of intellectual and moral beings _like ourselves_—that is, be it
observed, consisting of body and soul. That there are other and higher
orders of intelligent existence, both the Christian and the mere
philosopher may, and the former must, admit as an article of his
“creed;” but what may be the mode of that existence, and its relations
to that physical world of which we are sensible, we know not, and
conjecture would be idle. That beings like ourselves exist elsewhere
than here, is not revealed in Scripture; and the question, consequently,
for us to concern ourselves with is, whether there nevertheless exist
rational grounds for believing the fact to be so. The accomplished and
eminent person who has so suddenly started this discussion, has, since
his _Essay_ appeared,[3] and in strict consistency with it, emphatically
declared—“I do not pretend to disprove a plurality of worlds; but I ask
in vain for any argument which makes the doctrine probable. And as I
conceive the unity of the world to be the result of its being the work
of one Divine Mind, exercising creative power according to His own
Ideas; so it seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that man, the being
which can apprehend, in some degree, those Ideas, is a creature unique
in the creation.” But what says Sir David Brewster, speaking of the
greatest known member of our planetary system, Jupiter?
“With so many striking points of resemblance between the Earth and
Jupiter, the unprejudiced mind cannot resist the conclusion, that
Jupiter has been created, like the Earth, for the express purpose of
being the seat of animal and intellectual life. The Atheist and the
Infidel, the Christian and the Mahommedan, men of all creeds, nations,
and tongues, the philosopher and the unlettered peasant, have all
rejoiced in this universal truth; and we do not believe that any
individual who confides in the facts of astronomy seriously rejects
it. If such a person exists, we would gravely ask him, for what
purpose could so gigantic a world have been framed?”[4]
I am such a person, would say Dr Whewell, and I declare that I cannot
tell why Jupiter was created. “I do not pretend to know for what purpose
the stars were made, any more than the flowers, or the crystalline gems,
or other innumerable beautiful objects.... No doubt the Creator might
make creatures fitted to live in the stars, or in the small planetoids,
or in the clouds, or on meteoric stones; but we cannot believe that he
_has_ done this, without further evidence.”[5] And as to the “facts of
astronomy,” let me patiently examine them, and the inferences you seek
to deduce from them. Besides which, I will bring forward certain facts
of which you seem to have taken no account.
As we foresaw, Dr Whewell’s _Essay_ is attracting increased attention in
all directions; and, as far as we can ascertain the scope of
contemporaneous criticism hitherto pronounced, it is hostile to his
views, while uniformly recognising the power and scientific knowledge
with which they are enforced. “We scarcely expected,” observes an
accomplished diurnal London reviewer,[6] “that in the middle of the
nineteenth century, a serious attempt would have been made to restore
the exploded ideas of man’s supremacy over all other creatures in the
universe; and still less that such an attempt would have been made by
any one whose mind was stored with scientific truths. Nevertheless a
champion has actually appeared, who boldly dares to combat against all
the rational inhabitants of other spheres; and though as yet he wears
his vizor down, his dominant bearing, and the peculiar dexterity and
power with which he wields his arms, indicate that this knight-errant of
nursery notions can be no other than the Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge.” The reviewer falls, it appears to us, into a serious error
as to the sentiments of Dr Whewell, when charging him with requiring us
“to assume that, in the creation of intelligent beings, Omnipotence must
be limited, in its operations, to the ideas which human faculties can
conceive of them: that such beings must be men like ourselves, with
similar powers, and have had their faculties developed by like means.”
In the very passage cited to support this charge, Dr Whewell will be
found thus exactly limiting his proposition so as to exclude so impious
and absurd a supposition:—“In order to conceive, on the Moon, or on
Jupiter, a race of beings intelligent _like man_, we must conceive there
colonies of men, with histories resembling, more or less, the histories
of human colonies: and, indeed, resembling the history of those nations
whose knowledge we inherit, far more closely than the history of any
other terrestrial nation resembles that part of terrestrial history.”[7]
In the passage which we have quoted in the preceding column, Dr Whewell
expressly declares, as of course he could not help declaring, that the
Creator no doubt might make creatures fitted to live on the stars, or
anywhere; but the passage misunderstood by the reviewer, appears to us
possessed of an extensive significance, of which he has hastily lost
sight, but which is closely connected with that portion of the author’s
speculations with which we briefly dealt in our last number, especially
that which regards Man as a being of progressive[8] development. To this
we shall hereafter return, reminding the reader of the course of Dr
Whewell’s argument as thus far disclosed—namely, that man’s
intellectual, moral, religious, and spiritual nature, is of so peculiar
and high an order, as to warrant our regarding him as a special and
unique existence, worthy of the station here assigned him in creation.
Intellectually considered, man “has an element of community with God:
whereupon it is so far conceivable that man should be, in a special
manner, the object of God’s care and favour. The human mind, with its
wonderful and perhaps illimitable powers, is something of which we can
believe God to be mindful:”[9] that He may very reasonably be thus
mindful of a being whom he has vouchsafed to make in his own Image,
after His likeness—the image and likeness of the awful Creator of all
things.
“The privileges of man,” observes Dr Whewell, in a passage essential
to be considered by those who would follow his argument,[10] “which
make the difficulty in assigning him his place in the Vast Scheme of
the universe, we have described as consisting in his being an
_Intellectual, Moral, and Religious_ creature. Perhaps the privileges
implied in the last term, and their place in our argument, may justify
a word more of explanation.... We are now called upon,” proceeds the
Essayist, after a striking sketch of the character and capacity of
man, especially as a spiritual creature, “to proceed to exhibit the
Answer which a somewhat different view of modern science suggests to
this difficulty or objection.”
—“The difficulty[11] appears great either way of considering it. Can
the earth alone be the theatre of such intelligent, moral, religious,
and spiritual action? Or can we conceive such action to go on in the
other bodies of the universe?... Between these two difficulties the
choice is embarrassing, and the decision must be unsatisfactory,
except we can find some further ground of judgment. But this, perhaps,
is not hopeless. We have hitherto referred to the evidence and
analogies supplied by one science, namely, Astronomy. But there are
other sciences which give us information concerning the nature and
history of the Earth. From some of these we may perhaps obtain some
knowledge of the place of the Earth in the scheme of creation; how far
it is, in its present condition, a thing unique, or only one thing
among many like it. Any science which supplies us with evidence or
information on this head, will give us aid in forming a judgment upon
the question under our consideration.”
Thus the Essayist reaches the second stage of his inquiry, entering on
the splendid domain of GEOLOGY. To this great but recently consolidated
science Dr Chalmers made no allusion in his celebrated “Discourses on
the Christian Revelation, viewed in connection with the Modern
Astronomy,”[12] which were delivered in the year 1817, nearly
thirty-seven years ago: and then he spoke, in his first Discourse, of
Astronomy as “the most certain and best established of the sciences.” Dr
Whewell, however, vindicates the claims of Geology, in respect of both
the certainty and vastness of her discoveries, in a passage so just and
admirable, that we must lay it before our readers.
“As to the vastness of astronomical discoveries, we must observe that
those of Geology are no less vast: they extend through time, as those
of Astronomy do through space; they carry us through millions of
years—that is, of the earth’s revolutions—as those of Astronomy
through millions of the earth’s diameters, or of diameters of the
earth’s orbit. Geology fills the regions of duration with events, as
Astronomy the regions of the universe with objects. She carries us
backwards by the relation of cause and effect, as Astronomy carries us
upwards by the relations of geometry. As Astronomy steps on from point
to point of the universe by a chain of triangles, so Geology steps
from epoch to epoch of the earth’s history by a chain of mechanical
and organical laws. If the one depends on the axioms of geometry, the
other depends on the axioms of causation.... But in truth, in such
speculations, Geology has an immeasurable superiority. She has the
command of an implement, in addition to all that Astronomy can use;
and one, for the purpose of such speculations, adapted far beyond any
astronomical element of discovery. She has, for one of her
studies,—one of her means of dealing with her problems,—the knowledge
of life, animal and vegetable. Vital organisation is a subject of
attention which has, in modern times, been forced upon her. It is now
one of the main parts of her discipline. The geologist must study the
traces of life in every form—must learn to decipher its faintest
indications and its fullest development. On the question, then,
whether there be, in this or that quarter, evidence of life, he can
speak with the confidence derived from familiar knowledge; while the
astronomer, to whom such studies are utterly foreign, because he has
no facts which bear upon them, can offer, on such questions, only the
loosest and most arbitrary conjectures, which, as we have had to
remark, have been rebuked by eminent men as being altogether
inconsistent with the acknowledged maxims of his science.”[13]
Before we proceed to state the singular and suggestive argument derived
from this splendid science,[14] we may apprise the reader that Dr
Whewell’s primary object is to show, that even “supposing the other
bodies of the universe to resemble the earth, so far as to seem, by
their materials, forms, and motions, no less fitted than she is to be
the abodes of life, yet that, knowing what we know of Man, we can
believe the earth to be tenanted by a race who are the _special_ objects
of God’s care.”[15] The grounds for entertaining, or rather impugning,
that supposition he subsequently deals with after his own fashion in
Chapters VII., VIII., IX., X.; but the two with which we are at present
concerned are the fifth and sixth, respectively entitled, as we
intimated in our last Number, “Geology,” and “The Argument from
Geology.”
The exact object at which this leading section of the Essay is aimed is,
in the Essayist’s words, this:—“A complete reply to the difficulty which
astronomical discoveries appeared to place in the way of religion:—the
difficulty of the opinion that Man, occupying this speck of earth but as
an atom in the universe, surrounded by millions of other globes larger,
and to all appearance nobler, than that which he inhabits, should be the
object of the peculiar care and guardianship of the favour and
government of the Creator of All, in the way in which religion teaches
us that he is.”[16]
What is that “complete reply?” The following passage contains a key to
the entire speculation of the Essayist, and deserves a thoughtful
perusal:—
“That the scale of man’s insignificance is _of the same order in
reference to time as to space_. That Man—the Human Race from its
origin till now—has occupied but an atom of time as he has occupied
but an atom of space.”... “If the earth, as the habitation of Man, is
a speck in the midst of an infinity of space, the Earth, as the
habitation of Man, is also a speck at the end of an infinity of time.
If we are as nothing in the surrounding universe, we are as nothing in
the elapsed eternity; or rather in the elapsed organic antiquity
during which the Earth has existed, and been the abode of life. If Man
is but one small family in the midst of innumerable possible
households, he is also but one small family, the successor of
innumerable tribes of animals, not possible only, but actual. If the
planets may be the seats of life, we know that the seas, which have
given birth to our mountains, were so. If the stars may have hundreds
of systems of tenanted planets rolling round them, we know that the
secondary group of rocks does contain hundreds of tenanted beds,
witnessing of as many systems of organic creation. If the Nebulæ may
be planetary systems in the course of formation, we know that the
primary and transition rocks either show us the earth in the course of
formation, as the future seat of life, or exhibit such life as already
begun.
“How far that which Astronomy thus asserts as possible, is
probable—what is the value of these possibilities of life in distant
regions of the universe, we shall hereafter consider; but in what
Geology asserts, the case is clear. It is no possibility, but a
certainty. No one will now doubt that shells and skeletons, trunks and
leaves, prove animal and vegetable life to have existed. Even,
therefore, if Astronomy could demonstrate all that her most fanciful
disciples assume, Geology would still have a complete right to claim
an equal hearing—to insist on having _her analogies_ regarded. She
would have a right to answer the questions of Astronomy, when she
asks, How can we believe this? And to have her answer accepted.”[17]
We regret that our space prevents our laying before the reader the
masterly and deeply interesting epitome of geological discoveries
contained in these two chapters. The stupendous series of these
revelations may be thus briefly indicated:—That countless tribes of
animals tenanted the earth for countless ages before Man’s advent; that
former ocean-beds now constitute the centres of our loftiest mountains,
as the results of changes gradual, successive, and long continued; that
these vast masses of sedimentary strata present themselves to our notice
in a strangely disordered state; that each of these rocky layers
contains a vast profusion of the remains of marine animals, intermingled
with a great series of fresh-water and land animals and plants endlessly
varied—all these being different, not only in species, but in kind!—and
each of these separate beds must have lasted as long, or perhaps longer,
than that during which the dry land has had its present form.
The careful prosecution of their researches has forced on the minds of
geologists and naturalists “the general impression that, as we descend
in this long staircase of natural steps, we are brought in view of a
state of the earth in which life was scantily manifested, so as to be
near its earliest stages.”[18]
In the opinion of the most eminent geologists, some of these epochs of
organic transition were also those of mechanical violence, on a vast and
wonderful scale—as it were, a vast series of successive periods of
alternate violence and repose. The general nature of such change is
vividly sketched by the Essayist, in a passage to which we must refer
the reader.[19] When, continues the Essayist, we find strata bearing
evidence of such a mode of deposit, and piled up to the height of
thousands and tens of thousands of feet, we are naturally led to regard
them as the production of myriads of years; and to add _new_ myriads, as
often as we are brought to new masses of strata of the like kind; and
again to interpolate new periods of the same order, to allow for the
transition from one group to another.[20]
The best geologists and naturalists are utterly at fault, in attempting
to account for the successive introduction of these numerous _new
species_, at these immense intervals of time, except by referring them
to the exercise of a series of distinct Acts of Creation. The chimerical
notion of some natural cause effecting a transmutation of one series of
organic forms into another, has been long exploded, as totally destitute
of proof: and “the doctrine of the successive CREATION of species,” says
the Essayist, “remains firmly established among geologists.”[21] There
is nothing known of the cosmical conditions of our globe, to contradict
the terrestrial evidence for its vast antiquity as the seat of organic
life,[22] says Dr Whewell: and then proceeds thus, in a passage which is
well worth the reader’s attention, and has excited the ire of Sir David
Brewster:—
“If, for the sake of giving definiteness to our notions, we were to
assume that the numbers which express the antiquity of these four
periods—the present organic condition of the earth; the tertiary
period of geologists which preceded that; the secondary period which
was anterior to that; and the primary period which preceded the
secondary—were _on the same scale_ as the numbers which express these
four magnitudes:—The magnitude of the earth; that of the solar system
compared with the earth; the distance of the nearest fixed stars
compared with the solar system; and the distance of the most remote
nebulæ compared with the nearest fixed stars,—there is, in the
evidence which geological science offers, nothing to contradict such
an assumption. And as the infinite extent which we necessarily ascribe
to space allows us to find room, without any mental difficulty, for
the vast distances which astronomy reveals, and even leaves us rather
embarrassed with the infinite extent which lies beyond our furthest
explorations; so the infinite duration which we, in like manner,
necessarily ascribe to past time, makes it easy for us, so far as our
powers of intellect are concerned, to go millions of millions of years
backwards, in order to trace the beginning of the earth’s
existence—the first step of terrestrial creation.”
To return, however, to the course of the argument. We hear the oppressed
observer asking, as he reascends this “long staircase of natural steps”
which had brought time down to the mystic origin of animal existence;
his eye dimmed with its efforts to “decipher,” in the picturesque
language of Sir David Brewster, “downwards, the pale and perishing
alphabet[23] of the Chronology of Life”—WHERE, ALL THIS WHILE, WAS MAN?
Were Europe at this moment to be submerged beneath the ocean, or placed
under a vast rocky stratum, what countless proofs would present
themselves to the exploring eyes of remote future geologists, of the
existence of both Man and his handiwork!—of his own skeleton, of the
products of his ingenuity and power, and the various implements and
instruments with which he had effected them!
The rudest conceivable work of human art would carry us to any extent
backward, but it is not to be found! Man’s existence and history
incontestably belong to the existing condition of the earth; and the
Essayist now addresses himself to the two following propositions:—
_First_, That the existence and history of man are facts of an Entirely
Different Order from any which existed in any of the previous states of
the earth.
_Secondly_, That his history has occupied a series of years which,
compared with geological periods, may be regarded as very brief and
limited.
Here opens the “Argument from Geology”—and with it Chapter VI.
That the existence of man upon the earth is an event of an order quite
different from any previous part of the earth’s history; and that there
is no transition from animals to MAN, in even his most degraded,
barbarian, and brutish condition, the Essayist demonstrates, with
affecting eloquence, and with great argumentative power. No doubt there
are kinds of animals very intelligent and sagacious, and exceedingly
disposed and adapted to companionship with man; but by elevating the
intelligence of the brute, we do not make it become that of the man; nor
by making man barbarous, do we make him cease to be man. He has a
capacity, not for becoming sagacious, but _rational_,—or rather he has a
capacity for PROGRESS, in virtue of his being rational.
After adverting to Language, as an awful and mysterious evidence of his
exalted endowments, and felicitously distinguishing instinct from
reason, the Essayist observes that we need not be disturbed in our
conclusions by observing the condition of savage and uncultivated
tribes, ancient or modern—the Scythians and Barbarians, the Australians
and Negroes. The history of man, in the earliest times, is as truly a
history of a wonderful, intellectual, social, political, spiritual
creature, as it is at present.[24] The savage and ignorant state is not
the state of nature out of which civilised life has everywhere emerged:
their savage condition is one rather of civilisation degraded and lost,
than of civilisation incipient and prospective. And even were it to be
assumed to be otherwise, that man, naturally savage, had a tendency to
become civilised, that TENDENCY is an endowment no less wonderful than
those endowments which civilisation exhibits.
When, however, we know not only what man is, but what he _may become_,
both intellectually and morally, as we have already seen; when we cast
our mind’s eye over the history of the civilised section of our race,
wherever authentic records of their sayings and doings exist, we find
repeated and radiant instances of intellectual and moral greatness,
rising into sublimity—such as compel us to admit that man is
incomparably the most perfect and highly endowed creature which appears
to have ever existed on the earth.
“How far previous periods of animal existence were a necessary
preparation of the earth as the habitation of man, or a gradual
progression towards the existence of man, we need not now inquire. But
this, at least, we may say, that man, now that he is here, forms a
climax to all that has preceded—a term incomparably exceeding in value
all the previous parts of the series—a complex and ornate capital to
the subjacent column—a personage of vastly greater dignity and
importance than all the preceding line of the procession.”[25]
If we are thus to regard man as the climax of the creation in space, as
in time, “can we point out any characters,” finally asks the Essayist,
“which may tend to make it conceivable that the Creator should thus
distinguish him, and care for him—should prepare his habitation, if it
be so, by ages of chaotic and rudimentary life, and by accompanying orbs
of brute and barren matter? If man be thus the head, the crowned head,
of the creation, is he worthy to be thus elevated? Has he any qualities
which make it conceivable that, with such an array of preparation and
accompaniment”—the reader will note the sudden introduction of these
elements of the question, the “_accompanying orbs!_”—“he should be
placed upon the earth, his throne? Does any answer _now_ occur to us,
after the views which have been presented to us? That answer,” continues
the Essayist, “is the one which has been already given:” “the
transcendent intellectual, moral, and religious character of man—such as
warrants him in believing that God, in very deed, is not only mindful of
him, but visits him.”[26]
This may be, the objector is conceived to say; but my difficulty haunts
and harasses me: that, while man’s residence is, with reference to the
countless glistening orbs revealed by Astronomy, scarcely in the
proportion of a single grain of sand to the entire terraqueous structure
of our globe, I am required to believe that the Almighty has dealt with
him, and with the speck in which he resides, in the awfully exceptional
manner asserted in the Scriptures. Let us here remind the reader of a
coarser, and an insolent and blasphemous, expression of this
“difficulty,” by Thomas Paine, already quoted:—[27]
“The system of a plurality of worlds renders the Christian faith at once
little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the
air: the two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind.” With
such an opponent Dr Whewell expressly states that he has no concern; he
deals with a “‘difficulty’ felt by a friend:” wishing “rather to examine
how to quiet the troubled and perplexed believer, than how to triumph
over the dogmatical and self-satisfied unbeliever.”
“Let the difficulty,” he says, “be put in any way the objector pleases.”
I. Is it that it is unworthy of the greatness and majesty of God,
according to our conception of Him, to bestow such peculiar care on so
SMALL A PART of His creation?[28]
But a narrow inspection of the atom of space assigned to man, proves
that He _has_ done so. He has made the period of mankind, though only a
moment in the ages of animal life, the only period of Intelligence,
Morality, Religion. If it be contrary to OUR! conception of Him, to
suppose Him to have done so, it is plain that these conceptions are
wrong. God has not judged as to what is worthy of Him, as we have
presumed to judge. He has deemed it worthy of Himself to bestow upon man
this special care, though he occupy so small a portion of TIME:—why not,
then, though he occupy so small a portion of SPACE?
II. Is the difficulty this:—That supposing the earth, alone, to be
occupied by inhabitants, all the other globes of the universe are
WASTED?—turned to NO PURPOSE?[29]
Is “waste” of this kind to be considered unsuited to the character of
our Creator? But here again we have the like “waste” in the occupation
of this earth! All its previous ages, its seas and its continents, have
been “wasted” upon mere brute life: often, apparently, on the lowest,
the least conscious forms of life:—upon sponges, coral, shell-fish. Why,
then, should not the seas and continents of other planets be occupied
with life of this order, or with no life at all? Who shall tell how many
ages elapsed before this earth was tenanted by life at all? Will the
occupation of a spot of land, or a little water, by the life of a
sponge, a coral, or an oyster, save it from being “wasted”? If a spot of
rock or water be sufficiently employed by its being the mere seat of
organisation, of however low and simple a type,—why not, by its being
the mere seat of attraction? cohesion? crystalline power? All parts of
the universe appear pervaded by attraction, by forces of aggregation and
atomic relation, by light and heat: why may not these be sufficient, in
the eyes of the Creator, to prevent the space from being “wasted,” as,
during a great part of the earth’s past history, and over vast portions
of its mass in its present form, they are actually held by Him to be
sufficient? since these powers, or forces, are all that occupy such
portions. This notion, therefore, of the improbability of there being in
the universe so vast an amount of “waste” spaces, or “waste” bodies, as
is implied in the notion that the earth alone is the seat of life, or of
intelligence, is confuted by matter-of-fact, existing, in respect of
vast spaces, waste districts, and especially waste times, upon our own
earth. The _avoidance_ of such “waste,” according to our notions of
waste, is no part of the economy of creation, so far as we can discern
that economy in its most certain exemplification.
III. Is the difficulty this:—That giving such a peculiar dignity and
importance to the earth is CONTRARY TO THE ANALOGY OF CREATION?[30]
This objection, be it observed, _assumes_ that there are so many globes
similar to the earth, and like her revolving,—some accompanied as she
is, by satellites,—on their axis, and that therefore it is reasonable to
suppose the destination and office of all, the same;—that there are so
many stars, each, like our sun, a source of light, probably also of
heat; and that it is consequently reasonable to suppose their light and
heat, like his, imparted, as from so many centres of systems, to uphold
life;—and that all this affords strong ground for believing all such
planets, as well those of our own as of other systems, inhabited like
our planet.
But the Essayist again directs the eye of the questioner to the state of
our own planet, as demonstrated by Geology, in order to show the
precariousness, if not futility, of supposing such an analogy to exist.
It would lead us to a palpably false conclusion—viz., that during all
the vast successive periods of the Earth’s history, that Earth was
occupied with life of the same order—nay, even, that since the Earth is
now the seat of an intelligent population, it must have been so in all
its former conditions. For it was then able, and adapted, to support
animal life, and that of creatures pretty closely resembling man[31] in
physical structure. Nevertheless, if evidence go for anything, the Earth
did not do so! “Even,” says Dr Whewell, “those geologists who have dwelt
most on the discovery of fossil monkeys, and other animals nearest to
man, have not dreamed that there existed, before him, a race of
rational, intelligent, and progressive creatures.”[32] Here, however, he
is mistaken, as we shall presently see Sir David Brewster revelling in
such a dream. As, then, the notion that one period of time in the
Earth’s history must resemble another in the character of its
population, because it resembles it in physical conditions, is negatived
by the history of the Earth itself; so the notion that one part _of the
universe_ must resemble another in its population, because it has a
resemblance in physical conditions, is negatived, as a law of creation.
Analogy really affords no support to such a notion.
IV. Nay, continues Dr Whewell,[33] we may go further: instead of the
analogy of creation pointing to such entire resemblance of similar
parts, it points in the opposite direction: it is not entire
resemblance, but universal difference, that we discover: not the
repetition of exactly similar cases, but a series of cases perpetually
dissimilar, presents itself: not constancy, but change—perhaps advance;
not one permanent and pervading scheme, but preparation, and completion
of successive schemes:—not uniformity, and a fixed type of existences,
but progression and a climax.
Viewing the advent of Man, and what preceded it, it seems the analogy of
nature that there should be inferior, as well as superior, provinces in
the universe, and that the inferior may occupy an immensely larger
portion of Time than the superior. Why not, then, of Space?
“The earth was brute and inert, compared with its present condition;
dark and chaotic, so far as the light of reason and intelligence are
concerned, for countless centuries before man was created. Why then
may not other parts of creation be still in this brute and inert and
chaotic state, while the earth is under the influence of a higher
exercise of creative power? If the earth was for ages a turbid abyss
of lava and of mud, why may not Mars or Saturn be so still?... The
possibility that the planets are such rude masses, is quite as
tenable, on astronomical grounds, as the possibility that the planets
resemble the earth, in matters of which astronomy can tell us nothing.
We say, therefore, that the example of geology refutes the argument
drawn from the supposed analogy of one part of the universe with
another; and suggests a strong suspicion that the force of analogy,
better known, may tend _in the opposite direction_.”[34]
We have now gone through a large portion, embracing two of the three
sections into which we had divided this startling _Essay_; presenting as
full and fair an account of it as is consistent with our limits. Though
the author professes that he “does not pretend to disprove the Plurality
of Worlds, but to deny the existence of arguments making the doctrine
probable,” his undisguised object is to assign cogent reasons for
holding the opposite to be the true doctrine—the Unity of the World.
What has gone before is, moreover, on the assumption that the other
bodies of the universe are fitted, equally with the Earth, to be the
abodes of life. Before passing on, however, to the remaining section of
the _Essay_, which is decidedly hostile to that assumption, let us here
introduce on the scene Dr Whewell’s only hitherto avowed antagonist, Sir
David Brewster.
Though it is impossible to treat otherwise than with much consideration,
whatever is published by this gentleman, we must express our regret that
he did not more deliberately approach so formidable an opponent as Dr
Whewell, and, as we are compelled to add, in a more calm and courteous
spirit. We never read a performance less calculated than this _Essay_,
from its modesty and moderation of tone, and the high and abstract
nature of the topics which it discusses with such powerful logic, and
such a profusion of knowledge of every kind, to provoke an acrimonious
answer. It is happily rare, in recent times, for one of two philosophic
disputants, to speak of the other’s “exhibiting an amount of knowledge
so massive as occasionally to smother his reason;”[35] “ascribing his
sentiments only to some morbid condition of the mental powers, which
feeds upon paradox, and delights in doing violence to sentiments deeply
cherished, and to opinions universally believed;”[36] characterising
some of his reasonings as “dialectics in which a large dose of banter
and ridicule is seasoned with a little condiment of science;”[37] and an
elaborate argument, of great strength and originality, whether sound or
not, as “the most ingenious, though shallow piece of sophistry, which
_we!_ (Sir David Brewster) have encountered in modern times;”[38]
referring his “theories and speculations to no better a feeling than a
love of notoriety.”[39] It is not to be supposed that Sir David was not
perfectly aware who his opponent was,[40] which occasions extreme
surprise at the tone adopted throughout _More Worlds than One_. In his
preface, he explains as a cause of his anger, that he found that “the
author” of the _Essay_, “under a title calculated to mislead the public,
had made an elaborate attack upon opinions consecrated, as Sir David had
thought, by reason and revelation,”—that the author had not only adopted
a theory (the Nebular) so universally condemned as a dangerous
speculation, “but had taken a view of the condition of the solar system
calculated to disparage the science of astronomy, and throw a doubt over
the noblest of its truths.” We dismiss this topic with a repetition of
our regret, that so splendid a subject was not approached in a serener
spirit; that greater respect was not shown by one of his contemporaries
for one of the most eminent men of the age; and that sufficient time was
not taken, in order to avoid divers surprising _maculæ_ occurring in
even the composition, and certain rash and unguarded expressions and
speculations.
If Dr Whewell may be regarded as (_pace tanti viri!_) a sort of
Star-Smasher, his opponent is in very truth a Star-Peopler. Though he
admits that “there are some difficulties to be removed, and some
additional analogies to be adduced, before the mind can admit the
startling proposition[41] that the Sun, Moon, and all the satellites,
are inhabited spheres”—yet he believes that they are:[42] that all the
planets of their respective systems are so; as well as all the single
stars, double stars, and nebulæ, with all planets and satellites
circling about them!—though “our _faltering reason utterly fails_ us!”
he owns,[43] “when called on to believe that even the _Nebulæ_ must be
surrendered to life and reason! Wherever there is matter _there must_ be
life!” One can by this time almost pardon the excitement, the alarm
rather, and anger, with which Sir David ruefully beheld Dr Whewell go
forth on his exterminating expedition through Infinitude! It was like a
father gazing on the ruthless slaughter of his offspring. Planet after
planet, satellite after satellite, star after star, sun after sun,
single suns and double suns, system after system, nebula after nebula,
all disappeared before this sidereal Quixote! As for Jupiter and Saturn,
the pet planets of Sir David, they were dealt with in a way perfectly
shocking. The former turned out, to the disordered optics and unsteady
brain of the Essayist, to be a sphere of water, with perhaps a few
cinders at the centre, and peopled “with cartilaginous and glutinous
monsters—boneless, watery, pulpy creatures, floating in the fluid;”
while poor Saturn may be supposed turning aghast on hearing that, for
all his grand appearance, he was little else than a sphere of vapour,
with a little water, tenanted, if at all, by “aqueous, gelatinous
creatures—too sluggish almost to be deemed alive—floating in their
ice-cold waters, shrowded for ever by their humid skies!” But talk after
this of the pensive Moon! “She is a mere cinder! a collection of sheets
of rigid slag, and inactive craters!” This could be borne no longer; so
thus Sir David pours forth the grief and indignation of the Soul
Astronomic, in a passage fraught with the spirit, and embodying the
results, of his whole book, and which we give, as evidently laboured by
the author with peculiar care.
“Those ungenial minds that can be brought to believe that the earth is
the only inhabited body in the universe, will have no difficulty in
conceiving that it also might have been without inhabitants. Nay, if
such minds are imbued with geological truth, they must admit that for
millions of years the earth was without inhabitants; and hence we are
led to the extraordinary result, that for millions of years there was
not an intelligent creature in the vast dominions of the universal
King; and that before the formation of the protozoic strata, there was
neither a plant nor an animal throughout the infinity of space! During
this long period of universal death, when Nature herself was
asleep—the sun, with his magnificent attendants—the planets, with
their faithful satellites—the stars in the binary systems—the solar
system itself, were performing their daily, their annual, and their
secular movements unseen, unheeded, and fulfilling no purpose that
human reason can conceive; lamps lighting nothing—fires heating
nothing—waters quenching nothing—clouds screening nothing—breezes
fanning nothing—and everything around, mountain and valley, hill and
dale, earth and ocean, all meaning nothing.
‘The stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space.’
To our apprehension, such a condition of the earth, of the solar
system, and of the sidereal universe, would be the same as that of our
own globe if all its vessels of war and of commerce were traversing
its seas with empty cabins and freightless holds; as if all the
railways on its surface were in full activity without passengers and
goods; and all our machinery beating the air and gnashing their iron
teeth without work performed. A house without tenants, a city without
citizens, present to our minds the same idea as a planet without life,
and a universe without inhabitants. Why the house was built, why the
city was founded, why the planet was made, and why the universe was
created, it would be difficult even to conjecture. Equally great would
be the difficulty were the planets shapeless lumps of matter, poised
in ether, and still and motionless as the grave. But when we consider
them as chiselled spheres, and teeming with inorganic beauty, and in
full mechanical activity, performing their appointed motions with such
miraculous precision that their days and their years never err a
second of time in hundreds of centuries, the difficulty of believing
them to be without life is, if possible, immeasurably increased. To
conceive any one material globe, whether a gigantic clod slumbering in
space, or a noble planet equipped like our own, and duly performing
its appointed task, to have no living occupants, or not in a state of
preparation to receive them, seems to us one of those notions which
could be harboured only in an ill-educated and ill-regulated mind—a
mind without faith and without hope: but to conceive a whole universe
of moving and revolving worlds in such a category, indicates, in our
apprehension, a mind dead to feeling and shorn of reason.”[44]
“It is doubtless possible,” observes Sir David, however, a little
further on,[45] as if with a twinge of misgiving, “that the Mighty
Architect of the universe may have had other objects in view,
incomprehensible by us, than that of supporting animal and vegetable
life in these magnificent spheres.” Would that Sir David Brewster would
allow himself to be largely influenced by this rational and devout
sentiment! His book is, on the contrary, crammed with assertions from
beginning to end, and of a peremptory and intolerant character unknown
to the spirit of genuine philosophy.
The Essayist, however, is not incapable of quiet humour: and the
following pregnant passage is at least worthy to stand side by side with
that which we have just quoted from his indignant and eloquent
opponent:—
“Undoubtedly, all true astronomers, taught caution and temperance of
thought by the discipline of their magnificent science, abstain from
founding such assumptions upon their discoveries. They know how
necessary it is to be upon their guard against the tricks which fancy
plays with the senses; and if they see appearances of which they
cannot interpret the meaning, they are content that they should have
no meaning for them, till the due explanation comes. We have
innumerable examples of this wise and cautious temper in all periods
of astronomy. One has occurred lately. Several careful astronomers,
observing the stars by day, had been surprised to see globes of light
glide across the field of view of their telescopes, often in rapid
succession, and in great numbers. They did not, as may be supposed,
rush to the assumption that these globes were celestial bodies of a
new kind, before unseen, and that, from the peculiarity of their
appearance and movement, they were probably inhabited by beings of a
peculiar kind. They proceeded differently. They altered the focus of
their telescopes, looked with other glasses, made various changes and
trials; and finally discovered that these globes of light were the
winged seeds of certain plants, which were wafted through the air, and
which, illuminated by the sun, were made globular by being at
distances unsuited to the focus of the telescopes!”[46]
Before proceeding to give our readers some idea of the mode in which Sir
David Brewster encounters Dr Whewell, let us offer a general observation
concerning both these eminent gentlemen. While the latter exhibits
throughout his Essay a spirit of candour and modesty, without one harsh
expression or uncharitable insinuation with reference to the holder of
doctrines which he is bent upon impugning with all his mental power and
multifarious resources; the former, as we have seen, uses language at
once heated, uncourteous, and unjustifiable: especially where he more
than insinuates that his opponent, whose great knowledge and ability he
admits, either deliberately countenances doctrines tending really to
Atheism, or may be believed “_ignorant_ of their tendency, and to have
forgotten the truths of Inspiration, and even those of Natural
Religion.”[47] To venture, however circuitously, to hint such
imputations upon an opponent whom he had the slightest reason to suspect
being one of such high and responsible academic position, is an offence
equally against personal courtesy and public propriety; as we think Sir
David Brewster would, on reflection, acknowledge. Both Dr Whewell and
Sir David Brewster must excuse us, if, scanning both through the cold
medium of impartial criticism, their speculations, questions, or
assertions appear to us disturbed and deflected by a leading
prepossession or foregone conclusion, which we shall indicate in the
words of each.
Dr WHEWELL.—“The Earth is really the largest Planetary body in the
Solar system; its domestic hearth, and the Only World [_i. e._
collection of intelligent creatures] in the Universe.”[48]
Sir DAVID BREWSTER.—“Life is almost a property of matter.... Wherever
there is Matter, there must be Life:—Life physical, to enjoy its
beauties; Life Moral, to worship its Maker; and Life Intellectual, to
proclaim His wisdom and His power.... Universal Life upon Universal
matter, is an idea to which the mind instinctively clings.... Every
star in the Heavens, and every point in a nebula which the most
powerful telescope has not separated from its neighbour, is a sun
surrounded by inhabited planets like our own.... In peopling such
worlds with life and intelligence, we assign the cause of their
existence; and when the mind is once alive to this great Truth, it
cannot fail to realise the grand combination of infinity of life with
infinity of matter.”[49]
The composition of Sir David Brewster, though occasionally too
declamatory and rhetorical, and so far lacking the dignified simplicity
befitting the subjects with which he deals, has much merit. It is easy,
vivid, and vigorous, but will bear retrenchment, and lowering of tone.
As to the substantial texture of his work, we think it betrays, in
almost every page, haste and impetuosity, and evidence that the writer
has sadly under-estimated the strength of his opponent. Another feature
of _More Worlds than One_, is a manifest desire _provocare ad populum_—a
greater anxiety, in the first instance, to catch the ear of the million,
than to convince the “fit audience, though few.” Now, however, to his
work; and, as we have already said, on him lies the labouring oar of
proof. All that his opponent professes to do, is to ask for arguments
“rendering probable” that “doctrine” which Sir David pledges himself to
demonstrate to be not only the “_hope_” of the Christian, but the
_creed_ of the philosopher: as much, that is, an article of his belief,
as the doctrines of attraction and gravitation, or the existence of
demonstrable astronomical facts.
He commences with a brief introduction, sketching the growth of the
belief in a plurality of worlds—one steadily and firmly increasing in
strength, till it encountered the rude shock of the Essayist, whose
“very remarkable work” is “ably written,” and who “defends ingeniously
his novel and extraordinary views:” “the direct tendency of which is to
ridicule and bring into contempt the grand discoveries in sidereal
astronomy by which the last century has been distinguished.” In his next
chapter, Sir David discusses “the religious aspect of the question,”
representing man, especially the philosopher, as always having pined
after a knowledge of the scene of his future being. He declares that
neither the Old nor the New Testament contains “a single expression
incompatible with the great truth that there are other worlds than our
own which are the seats of life and intelligence;” but, on the contrary,
there are “other passages which are inexplicable without admitting it to
be true.” He regards, as we have seen, the noble exclamation of the
Psalmist, “What is man,” as “a positive argument for a plurality of
worlds;” and “cannot doubt” that he was gifted with a plenary knowledge
of the starry system, inhabited as Sir David would have it to be! Dr
Chalmers, let us remark, in passing, expressed himself differently, and
with a more becoming reserve: “It is not for us to say whether
inspiration revealed to the Psalmist the wonders of the modern
astronomy,” but “even though the mind be a perfect stranger to the
science of these enlightened times, the heavens present a great and an
elevating spectacle, the contemplation of which awakened the piety of
the Psalmist”—a view in which Dr Whewell concurs. Sir David then comes
to consider the doctrine of “Man, in his future state of existence,
consisting, as at present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal
frame.” We must, therefore, find for the race of Adam, “_if not for the
races which preceded him_!”[50] “a material home upon which he may
reside, or from which he may travel to other localities in the
universe.” That house, he says, cannot be the earth, for it will not be
big enough—there will be such a “population as the habitable parts of
our globe could not possibly accommodate;” wherefore, “_we can scarcely
doubt_ that their future abode must be on some of the primary or
secondary planets of the solar system, whose inhabitants have ceased to
exist, like those on the earth; or on planets which have long been in a
state of preparation, as our earth was, for the advent of intellectual
life.” Here, then, is “the creed of the philosopher,” as well as “the
hope of the Christian.” Passing, according to the order adopted in this
paper, from the first chapter (“Religious Aspect of the Question”), we
alight on the seventh, entitled “_Religious Difficulties_.” We entertain
too much consideration for Sir David Brewster to speak harshly of
anything falling from his pen; but we think ourselves justified in
questioning whether this chapter—dealing with speculations of an awful
nature, among which the greatest religious and philosophical intellects
tremble as they “go sounding on their dim and perilous way”—shows him
equal to cope with his experienced opponent, whom every page devoted to
such topics shows to have fixed the DIFFICULTY with which he proposed to
deal, fully and steadily before his eyes, in all its moral,
metaphysical, and philosophical bearings, and to have discussed it
cautiously and reverently. We shall content ourselves with briefly
indicating the course of observation on that “difficulty” adopted by Sir
David Brewster, and leaving it to the discreet reader to form his own
judgment whether Sir David has left the difficulty where he found it, or
removed, lessened, or enhanced it.
Dr Whewell, in his _Dialogue_, thus temperately and effectively deals
with this section of his opponent’s lucubrations:—
“His own solution of the question concerning the redemption of other
worlds appears to be this, that the provision made for the redemption
of man by what took place upon earth eighteen hundred years ago, may
have extended its influence to other worlds.
“In reply to which astronomico-theological hypothesis three remarks
offer themselves: In the first place, the hypothesis is entirely
without warrant or countenance in the revelation from which all our
knowledge of the scheme of redemption is derived; in the second place,
the events which took place upon earth eighteen hundred years ago,
were connected with _a train of events in the history of man_, which
had begun at the creation of man, and extended through all the
intervening ages; and the bearing of this whole series of events upon
the condition of the inhabitants of other worlds must be so different
from its bearing on the condition of man, that the hypothesis needs a
dozen other auxiliary hypotheses to make it intelligible; and, in the
third place, this hypothesis, making the earth, insignificant as it
seems to be in the astronomical scheme, the centre of the theological
scheme, ascribes to the earth a peculiar distinction, quite as much at
variance with the analogies of the planets to one another, as the
supposition that the earth alone is inhabited; to say nothing of the
bearing of the critic’s hypothesis on the other systems that encircle
other suns.”[51]
“In freely discussing the subject of a Plurality of Worlds,” says Sir
David, “there can be no collision between Reason and Revelation.” He
regrets the extravagant conclusion of some, that the inhabitants of all
planets but our own, “are sinless and immortal beings that never broke
the Divine Law, and enjoying that perfect felicity reserved for only a
few of the less favoured occupants of earth. Thus chained to a planet,
the lowest and most unfortunate in the universe, the philosopher, with
all his analogies broken down, may justly renounce his faith in a
Plurality of Worlds, and rejoice in the more limited but safer creed of
the anti-Pluralist author, who makes the earth the only world in the
universe, and the special object of God’s paternal care.”[52] He
proceeds, in accordance with “men of lofty minds and undoubted piety,”
to regard the existence of moral evil as a necessary part of the general
scheme of the universe, and consequently affecting all its Rational
Inhabitants.[53] He “rejects the idea that the inhabitants of the
planets do not require a Saviour; and maintains the more rational
opinion, that they stand in the same moral relation to their Maker as
the inhabitants of the earth; and seeks for a solution of the
difficulty—how can there be inhabitants in the planets, when God had but
One Son, whom He could send to save them? If we can give a satisfactory
answer to this question, it may destroy the objections of the Infidel,
while it relieves the Christian from his difficulties.”[54]... “When our
Saviour died, the influence of His death extended backward, in the Past,
to millions who never heard His name; in the Future, to millions who
never will hear it ... a Force which did not vary with any function of
the distance.[55]... Emanating from the _middle_ planet of the system.”
——The _earth_ the _middle_ planet of the system? How is this? In an
earlier portion of his book (p. 56), Sir David had demonstrated that
“our earth is neither the _middle_ [his own italics] planet, nor the
planet _nearest_ the sun, nor the planet furthest from that luminary:
that therefore the earth, as a planet, has no pre-eminence in the solar
system, to induce us to believe that it is the only inhabited world....
_Jupiter_ is the _middle_ planet (p. 55), and is otherwise highly
distinguished!” How is this? Can the two passages containing such direct
contradictions have emanated from the same _scientific_
controversialist?—To resume, however:
—“Emanating from the middle planet of the system, why may it not have
_extended to them all_, ... to the Planetary Races in the Past, and to
the Planetary Races in the Future?... But to bring our argument more
within the reach of an ordinary understanding”—he supposes our earth
split into two parts! the old world and the new (as Biela’s comet is
supposed to have been divided in 1846), at the beginning of the
Christian era![56]—“would not _both fragments_ have shared in the
beneficence of the Cross—the penitent on the shores of the Mississippi,
as richly as the pilgrim on the banks of the Jordan?... Should this view
prove unsatisfactory to the anxious inquirer, we may suggest another
sentiment, even though we ourselves may not admit it into our creed....
May not the Divine Nature, which can neither suffer, nor die, and which,
in our planet, _once_ only clothed itself in humanity, _resume elsewhere
a physical form, and expiate the guilt of unnumbered worlds_?”[57]
We repeat, that we abstain from offering any of the stern strictures
which these passages almost extort from us.
He proceeds to declare himself incompetent to comprehend the Difficulty
“put in a form so unintelligible” by the Essayist—that of a kind of
existence, similar to that of men, in respect of their intellectual,
moral, and spiritual character, and its _progressive_ development,
existing in any region occupied by other beings than man. He denies that
Progression has been the character of the history of man,[58] but rather
frequent and vast retrogressions ever since the Fall; and asks “which of
these ever-changing conditions of humanity is the _unique_ condition of
the Essayist—incapable of repetition in the scheme of the Universe?”[59]
Why may there not be an intermediate race between that of man and the
angelic beings of Scripture, where human reason shall pass into the
highest form of created mind, and human affections into their noblest
development?—
“Why may not the intelligence of the spheres be ordained for the study
of regions and objects unstudied and unknown on earth? Why may not
labour have a better commission than to earn its bread by the sweat of
its brow? Why may it not pluck its loaf from the bread-fruit tree, or
gather its manna from the ground, or draw its wine from the bleeding
vessels of the vine, or _inhale its anodyne breath from the paradise
gas of its atmosphere_?”[60]
And Sir David thus concludes the chapter:—
“The difficulties we have been considering, in so far as they are of a
religious character, have been very unwisely introduced into the
question of a Plurality of Worlds. We are not entitled to remonstrate
with the sceptic, but we venture to doubt the soundness of that
philosopher’s judgment who thinks that the truths of natural religion
are affected by a belief in planetary races, and the reality of that
Christian’s faith who considers it to be endangered by a belief that
there are other Worlds than his own.”
This last paragraph induces us to go so far as to doubt whether Sir
David Brewster has addressed his understanding deliberately, to the
subject to which so large a portion of the most elaborate reasonings of
Dr Whewell have been directed.
Sir David does not quarrel with the Essayist’s account of the
constitution of man; and we must now see how he deals with the
Essayist’s arguments drawn from Geology.
Sir David “is not disposed to grudge the geologist even periods so
marvellous” as “millions of years required for the formation of strata,
provided they be considered as merely hypothetical;” and admits that
“our seas and continents have nearly the same locality, and cover nearly
the same area, as they did at the creation of Adam;” but demurs to the
conclusion that the earth was prepared for man by causes operating so
gradually as the diurnal change going on around us. “Why may not the
Almighty have deposited the earth’s strata, during the whole period of
its formation, by a _rapid_ precipitation of their atoms from the waters
which suspended them, so as to reduce the period of the earth’s
formation to little more than the united generations of the different
orders of plants and animals constituting its organic remains? Why not
still further shorten the period, by supposing that plants and animals,
requiring, in our day, a century for their development, may in primitive
times have shot up in rank luxuriance, and been ready, in a few _days!_
or months! or years, for the great _purpose of exhibiting_, by their
geological distribution, the progressive formation of the earth?”[61]
These questions, of which a myriad similar ones might be asked by any
one, we leave to our geological readers; and hasten to inform them, that
in involuntary homage to the powerful reasonings of his opponent, Sir
David Brewster is fain to question the “inference that man did not exist
during the period of the earth’s formation;”[62] and to suggest that
“there may have existed intellectual races in present unexplored
continental localities, or the immense regions of the earth now under
water!”—“The future of geology may be pregnant with startling
discoveries of the remains of intellectual races, even _beneath_ the
primitive Azoic[63] formations of the earth!... Who can tell what sleeps
beyond? Another creation may be beneath! more glorious creatures may be
entombed there! the mortal coils of beings more lovely, more pure, more
divine than man, may yet read to us the unexpected lesson that we have
not been the first, and may not be the last of the intellectual
race!”[64] Is he who can entertain and publish conjectures like these,
entitled to stigmatise so severely those of other speculators—as
“inconceivable absurdities, which no sane mind can cherish—suppositions
too ridiculous even for a writer of romance!” This wild license given to
the fancy may not be amiss in a poet, whose privilege it is that his
“eye in a fine phrenzy rolling” may “give to airy nothing a local
habitation, and a name:”—but when set in the scale against the solemnly
magnificent array of facts in the earth’s history established by
Geology, may be summarily discarded by sober and grave inquirers.
The Essayist’s suggested analogy between man’s relation to time and to
space appears to us not understood, in either its scope or nature, by
Sir David Brewster. At this we are as much surprised, as at the
roughness with which he characterises the argument, as “the most
ingenious though shallow piece of sophistry he has ever encountered in
modern dialectics.” The Essayist suggests a comparison between the
numbers expressing the four magnitudes and distances,—of the earth, the
solar system, the fixed stars, and the nebulæ—and the numbers expressing
the antiquity of the four geological periods “_for the sake of giving
definiteness to our notions_.” Sir David abstains from quoting these
last expressions, and alleges that the Essayist, “quitting the ground of
analogy,” founds an elaborate argument on the mutual relation of an atom
of time and an atom of space. The “argument” Sir David thus presents to
his readers, the capital and italic letters being his own: “That is,
_the earth, the_ ATOM OF SPACE, _is the only one of the planetary and
sidereal worlds that is inhabited, because it was so long without
inhabitants, and has been occupied only an_ ATOM OF TIME.”[65] “If any
of our readers,” he adds, “see the force of this argument, they must
possess an acuteness of perception to which we lay no claim. To us, it
is not only illogical; it is a mere sound in the ear, without any sense
in the brain.” This is the language possibly befitting an irritated
Professor towards an ignorant and conceited student, but hardly suitable
when Sir David Brewster is speaking of such an antagonist as he cannot
but know he has to deal with. It does not appear to us the Essayist’s
attempt, or purpose, to establish any arbitrary absolute _relation_
between time and space, or definite proportions of either, as concurring
or alternative elements for determining the probability of a plurality
of worlds. But he says to the dogmatic astronomical objector to
Christianity, Such arguments as you have hitherto derived from _your_
consideration of SPACE, MULTITUDE, and MAGNITUDE, for the purpose of
depressing man into a being beneath his Maker’s special notice, I
encounter by arguments derived from recent disclosures concerning
another condition of existence—DURATION, or TIME. Protesting that
neither Time nor Space has any true connection with the subject,
nevertheless I will turn your own weapons against yourself. My argument
from Time shall at least neutralise yours from Space: mine shall involve
the conditions of yours, fraught with their supposed irresistible force,
and falsify them in fact, as forming premises whence may be deduced
derogatory inferences concerning man. The Essayist’s ingenious and
suggestive argument is intended not to prove an opinion, but _to remove
an objection_; which, according to the profound thinker, Bishop Butler,
is the proper office of analogy. It is asked, for instance, _how_ can
you suppose that man, such as he is represented to be, occupies only an
immeasurably minute fraction of existing matter? and it is answered, I
find that man occupies only an immeasurably minute fraction of elapsed
time: and this is, to me, an answer to the “_How_,” as concluding
improbability. _How_ is balanced against _How_: Difficulty against
difficulty: they neutralise each other, and leave the great question,
the great reality, standing as it did before either was suggested, to be
dealt with according to such evidence as God has vouchsafed us. We,
therefore, do not see that the Essayist is driven to say, as Sir David
Brewster alleges he is, either that because man has occupied only an
atom of space, he must live only an atom of time on the earth;[66] or
that because he has lived only an atom of time, he must occupy but an
atom of space. In dismissing this leading portion of the Essayist’s
reasonings, we shall say only that we consider it worthy of the
attention of all persons occupied in speculations of this nature, as
calculated to suggest trains of novel, profitable, and deeply
interesting reflection.
Thus far the Essayist, as followed by his opponent, on the assumption
that the other bodies of the universe are fitted, equally with the
earth, to be the abodes of life. _But are they?_ Here we are brought to
the last stage of the Essayist’s speculations—What physical EVIDENCE
have we that the other bodies of the Solar System, besides the Earth,
the Fixed Stars, and the Nebulæ, are structures capable of supporting
human life, of being inhabited by Rational and Moral Beings?
The great question, in its physical aspect, is now fully before us: Is
there that analogy on which the pluralist relies?
For the existence of Life several conditions must concur; and any of
these failing, life, so far as we know anything about it, is impossible.
Not air, only, and moisture, but a certain temperature, neither too hot
nor too cold, and a certain consistence, on which the living frame can
rest. Without the other conditions, an atmosphere alone does not make
life possible; still less, prove its existence. A globe of red-hot
metal, or of solid ice, however well provided with an atmosphere, could
not be inhabited, so far as we can conceive. The old maxim of the
logicians is true: that it requires _all_ the conditions to establish
the affirmative, but that the negative of any _one_ proves the
_negative_.
First, as to the smallest tenants of our system, the thirty[67]
planetoids, some of which are certainly no larger than Mont Blanc.
Sir David Brewster dare not venture to suggest that they are inhabited,
or in any condition to become so, any more than meteoric stones, which
modern science regards as masses of matter, moving, like the planets, in
the celestial spaces, subject to the gravitating attraction of the Sun;
the Earth encountering them occasionally, either striking directly upon
them, or approaching to them so closely that they are drawn by the
terrestrial attraction, first within the atmosphere, and afterwards to
the earth’s surface.[68] Here our Essayist gives a thrust at his
Pluralist opponent not to be parried, asking him why he shrunk from
asserting the planetoids and meteoric stones to be inhabited? If it be
because of their being found to be uninhabited, or of their smallness,
then “the argument that they _are_ inhabited _because_ they are planets
fails him.”[69]
“There is, then,” says elsewhere the wary Essayist,[70] “a degree of
smallness which makes you reject the supposition of inhabitants. But
where does that degree of smallness begin? The surface of _Mars_ is
only one-fourth that of the Earth. Moreover, if you allow all the
planetoids to be uninhabited, those planets which you acknowledge to
be probably uninhabited far outnumber those with regard to which even
the most resolute Pluralist holds to be inhabited. The majority swells
every year; the planetoids are now thirty. The fact of a planet being
inhabited, then, is, at any rate, rather the exception than the rule;
and therefore must be proved, in each case, by special evidence. Of
such evidence I know not a trace!”
We may add, also, that Dr Lardner, vouched by Sir David Brewster, as we
shall soon see, to be a thoroughly competent witness, gives up the
planetoids as seats of habitation for animal life.[71]
Let us now, would say our Essayist, proceed on our negative tour, so to
speak, and hasten to pay our respects to the Moon, our nearest
neighbour, and whose distance from the Sun is admitted to adapt her, so
far, for habitation.[72] If it appear, by strong evidence, that the Moon
is not inhabited, then there is an end of the general principle, that
_all_ the bodies of the solar system are inhabited, and that we must
begin our speculation about each with this assumption. If the Moon be
not inhabited, then, it would seem, the belief that each special body in
the system _is_ inhabited, must depend upon reasons specially belonging
to that body, and cannot be taken for granted without these reasons.[73]
Now, as to the Moon, we have latterly acquired the means of making such
exact and minute inquiries, that at the meeting of the British
Association at Hull last year, Mr Phillips, an eminent geologist, stated
that astronomers can discern the shape of a spot on the Moon’s surface,
only a few hundred feet in breadth. Passing by, however, the Essayist’s
brief but able account of the physical condition of this satellite of
ours, we will cite the recent testimony of one accredited by Sir David
Brewster[74] as “a mathematician and a natural philosopher, who has
studied, more than any preceding writer, the analogies between the Earth
and the other planets”—Dr Lardner, who, in the third volume (published
since our last Number appeared) of the work placed at the head of this
article, thus concludes his elaborate account of the Moon, as now
regarded by the most enlightened astronomers—after proving it to be “as
exempt from an atmosphere as is the utterly exhausted receiver of a good
air-pump!”
“In fine, the entire geographical character of the moon, thus
ascertained by long-continued and exact telescopic surveys, leads to
the conclusion, that no analogy exists between it and the earth which
could confer any probability on the conjecture that it fulfils the
same purposes in the economy of the universe; and we must infer, that
whatever be its uses in the solar system, or in the general purposes
of creation, it is not a world inhabited by organised races such as
those to which the earth is appropriated.”[75]
We must leave Sir David and Dr Lardner to settle their small amount of
differences together; for Sir David will have it that “the moon exhibits
such proofs of an atmosphere that we have a new ground from analogy for
believing that she either has, or is in a state of preparation for
receiving, inhabitants;”[76] whom, “with monuments of their hands,” he
“hopes may be discovered with some magnificent telescope which may be
constructed!”[77] And he is compelled to believe that “all the other
unseen satellites of the solar system are homes to animal and
intellectual life.”[78] The Essayist would seem not to have deemed it
necessary to deprive the sun of inhabitants; but our confident Pluralist
will not surrender the stupendous body so easily. His friend Dr Lardner
properly regards it “as a vast globular furnace, the heat emitted from
each square foot of which is seven times greater than the heat issuing
from a square foot of the fiercest blast-furnace: to what agency the
light and heat are due, no one can do more than conjecture. According to
our hypothesis, it is a great ELECTRIC LIGHT in the centre of the
system;”[79] and “entirely removed from all analogy with the
earth”—“utterly unsuited for the habitation of organised tribes.”[80]
Nevertheless Sir David believes that “the sun is richly stored with
inhabitants”—the probability “being doubtless greatly increased by the
simple consideration of its enormous size”—a “domain so extensive, so
blessed with perpetual light;” but it would seem that “if it be
inhabited,” it is probably “occupied by the highest orders of
intelligence!”[81] who, however, are allowed to enjoy their picturesque,
and, it must be owned, somewhat peculiar, but doubtless blessed
position, only by peeping every now and then through the sun’s spots,
and so “seeing distinctly the planets and stars”—in fact, “large
portions of the heavens!”[82] Perhaps it may be thought that this is not
a very handsome way of dealing with such exalted beings!
The Essayist has now our seven principal sister-planets to deal with—the
two _infra_-terrestrial, Mercury and Venus, and the five
_extra_-terrestrial—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune;—and as
to all these, the question continues, do they so _resemble_ the earth in
physical conditions, as to lead us safely to the conclusion that they
resemble it in that other capital particular, of being the habitations
of intellectual and moral beings? Here, be it observed, that every
symptom of unlikeness which the Essayist can detect, greatly augments
the burthen of proof incumbent upon his opponents.
When it was discovered that the old planets in certain important
particulars resembled the earth, being opaque and solid bodies, having
similar motions round the sun and on their own axis, some accompanied by
satellites, and all having arrangements producing day and night, summer
and winter, who could help wondering whether they must not also have
inhabitants, reckoning and regulating their lives and employments by
days, months, and years? This was, at most, however, a mere guess or
conjecture; and whether it is now more probable than then, depends on
the intervening progress of astronomy and science in general. Have
subsequent discoveries strengthened or impugned the validity of the
conjecture? The limits of our system have been since vastly extended by
the discovery of Uranus and Neptune; and the planetary sisterhood has
also increased in number by thirty little and very eccentric ones.
Now, as to NEPTUNE, says the Essayist, in substance, what reason has a
sensible person for believing it peopled, as the earth is, by human
beings—_i. e._ consisting of body and soul? He is thirty times further
than we are from the sun, which will appear to it a mere star—about the
size of Jupiter to us; and Neptune’s light and heat will be nine hundred
times less than ours![83] _If_ it, nevertheless, contain animal and
intellectual life, we must try to conceive how they get on with such a
_modicum_ of those useful elements!
But have we general grounds for assuming _all_ the planetary bodies
inhabited? Beginning with the moon, we have encountered a decided
negative. If any planet, however, have sufficient light, heat, clouds,
winds, and a due adjustment of gravity, and the strength of the
materials of which organisation consist, there _may_ be life of some
sort or other. Now we can measure and weigh the planets, exactly, by the
law of gravitation, which embraces every particle of matter in our
system, and find the mass of our earth to be only five times heavier
than water. Comparing it with JUPITER—the bulk of which is 1331 times
greater than that of the Earth—his density is, as a whole, only a
quarter of that of the Earth—not greater than it would be as a sphere of
water; and he is _conjectured_ to be such, and the existence of his
belts to be lines of clouds, fed with vapours raised by the sun’s action
on such a watery sphere—the lines of such clouds being of so steady and
determined a character, in consequence of his great rotatory velocity.
Equal bulk for equal bulk, he is lighter than the Earth, but of course
much heavier altogether; and as he is five times the Earth’s distance
from the Sun, he must get a proportionally smaller amount of light and
heat, and even that diminished by the clouds enveloping him to so great
an extent. What a low degree of vitality, and what kind of organisation
must animal existence possess, to suit such physical conditions,
especially with reference to gravity, which, at his surface, is nearly
two and a half times that on the Earth! Boneless, watery, pulpy
inhabitants of the cold waters; or they may be frozen so far as to
exclude the idea of animal existence; or it may be restricted to shallow
parts in a planet of ice.[84] But if this be so, to what end his
gorgeous array of satellites?—his four moons? “Precisely the same,”
answers our pertinacious Essayist, “as the use of our moon during the
countless ages before man was placed on the earth; while it was tenanted
by corals, madrepores, shell-fish, belemnites, the cartilaginous fishes
of the old red sandstone, or the Saurian monsters of the lias. With
these _differences_, it is asked, what becomes of analogy—of
resemblances justifying our belief that Jupiter is inhabited like
ourselves?”
To this answers Sir David Brewster—Jupiter’s great size “is alone a
proof that it must have been made for some _grand_ and _useful_
purpose:” it is flattened at its poles; revolves on its axis in nearly
ten hours; has different climates and seasons; and is abundantly
illuminated, in the short absence of the sun, by its four moons, giving
him, in fact, “perpetual moonlight.” Why does the sun give it days,
nights, and years? Why do its moons irradiate its continents and seas?
Its equatorial breezes blow perpetually over its plains? To what purpose
could such a gigantic world have been framed, unless to supply the
wants, and minister to the happiness, of living beings? Still, it is
admitted,[85] “that certain objections or difficulties naturally present
themselves.” The distance of Jupiter from the sun precludes the
possibility of sufficient light and heat from that quarter, to support
either such vegetable or animal life as exists on the earth; the cold
must be very intense—its rivers and seas must be tracks and fields of
ice.[86] But it may be answered, that the temperature of a planet
depends on other causes—the condition of its atmosphere, and the
internal heat of its mass—as is the case with our earth; and such “may”
be the case in Jupiter; and, “if” so, may secure a temperature
sufficiently genial to sustain such animal and vegetable life as ours;
yet, it is owned, it cannot “increase the feeble light which Jupiter
derives from the sun; but an enlargement of the pupil of the eye, and
increased sensibility of the retina, would make the sun’s light as
brilliant to Jovians as to us.”[87] Besides, a brilliant phosphorescent
light “may” be excited in the satellites by the sun’s rays. Again, the
day of ten hours may be thought insufficient for physical repose; but,
it is answered, five hours’ repose are sufficient for five of labour. “A
difficulty of a more serious kind,[88] however, is presented by the
great force of gravity on so gigantic a planet as Jupiter;” but Sir
David gives us curious calculations to show that a Jovian’s weight would
be only double that of a man on the earth.
Struck by such a formidable array of differences, when he was in quest
of _resemblances_ only,
“Alike, but, oh! how different!”
Sir David rebukes the sceptic for forming so low an opinion of
Omnipotent Wisdom, as to assume that “the inhabitants of the planets
must be either men, or anything resembling them;—is it,” he asks,
“necessary that an immortal soul should be hung upon a skeleton of bone,
or imprisoned in a cage of cartilage and skin? Must it see with two
eyes, and hear with two ears, and touch with ten fingers, and rest on a
duality of limbs? May it not rest in a Polyphemus with one eyeball, or
in an Argus with a hundred? May it not reign in the giant forms of the
Titans, and direct the hundred hands of Briareus?[89] The being of
another world may have his home in subterranean cities, warmed by
central fires; or in crystal caves, cooled by ocean tides; or he may
float with the Nereids upon the deep; or mount upon wings as eagles; or
rise upon the pinions of the dove, that he may flee away, and be at
rest!”[90]
Let us pause at this point, and see how the question stands on the
showing of the respectively imaginative and matter-of-fact disputants
themselves. Sir David Brewster, being bound to show that analogy forces
us to believe Jupiter inhabited, is compelled to admit a series of
signal discrepancies in physical condition; expecting his opponent, in
turn, to admit such a series of essential alterations, both of inert
matter and organisation, as will admit of what?—_totally different_
modes of animal and intellectual existence—so different, as to drive a
philosopher into the fantastic dreams in which we have just seen him
indulging. Not so the Essayist, a master of the Inductive Philosophy. He
does not presume impiously to limit Omnipotence; but reverently owns His
power to create whatever forms and conditions of existence He pleases.
But when it is asserted that He has, in fact, made beings wholly
different from any that we see, “he cannot believe this without further
_evidence_.”[91] And on this very subject of the imaginary inhabitants
of Jupiter, he says, after reading what his heated and fanciful opponent
has advanced,—“You are hard,” he makes an objector say, “on our
neighbours in Jupiter, when you will not allow them to be anything
better than ‘boneless, watery, pulpy creatures.’” To which he answers,
“I had no disposition to be hard on them when I entered upon these
speculations. I drew, what appeared to me, probable conclusions from all
the facts of the case. _If the laws of attraction, of light, of heat,
and the like, be the same there as they are here, which we believe to be
certain, the laws of life must also be the same; and, if so, I can draw
no other conclusions than those which I have stated._”[92]
Says the Essayist, I know that my Maker _can_ invest with the intellect
of a Newton, each of
“The gay motes that people the sunbeams;”
but before I believe that he has done so, give me reasonable and
adequate evidence of so wonderful and sublime a fact; or I must believe
in any kind of nonsense that any one can imagine.
The planet Jupiter affords a fair sample of the procedure of the
Essayist and his opponent, with reference to all the other primary
planets of the Solar system. From Mercury, in red-hot contiguity to the
Sun, to Neptune, which is at thirty times the Earth’s distance from it,
and from which as we have seen it derives only _one nine-hundredth_ part
of the light and heat imparted to ourselves by the Sun,—Sir David
Brewster will have all inhabited, and the physical condition of each
correspondingly altered to admit of it: central heat, and eyes the
pupils of which are sufficiently enlarged, and the retina’s sensibility
sufficiently increased, to admit of seeing with nine hundred times less
light than is requisite for our own organs of sight! “Uranus and
Neptune,” concludes the triumphant Pluralist[93]—nothing daunted by the
overwhelming evidences of physical difference of condition—“are
_doubtless_”—with the Sun—“the abodes of Life and Intelligence: the
colossal temples where their Creator is recognised and worshipped—the
remotest watch-towers of our system, from which his works may be
_better_ studied, and his glories _more easily_ descried!”
Why, with such elastic principles of analogy as his, stop short of
peopling the Meteoric Stones with rational inhabitants? whom, and whose
doings, as in the case of the Moon, “some magnificent” instrument, yet
to be constructed, may discover to us?
Thus much for the planets,—before quitting which, however, we may state
that, according to Dr Lardner, about as staunch a Pluralist as his
admirer Sir David Brewster, a greater rapidity of rotation, and smaller
intervals of light and darkness, are among the characteristics
distinguishing the group of major planets from the terrestrial group. He
also adds that another “striking distinction” is the comparative
lightness of the matter constituting the former. The density of Venus,
Mars, and our earth, is nearly equal—about the same as that of
ironstone; while the density of the thoroughly-baked planet Mercury is
equal to that of gold. “Now it appears, on the contrary,” he continues,
“that the density of Jupiter very little exceeds that of water; that of
Uranus and Neptune is exactly that of water; while Saturn is so light,
that it would float in water like a globe of pine wood.... The seas and
oceans of these planets must consist of a liquid far lighter than water.
It is computed that a liquid on Jupiter, which would be analogous to the
terrestrial oceans, would be three times lighter than sulphuric ether,
the lightest known liquid; and would be such that cork would scarcely
float in it!”[94]
Commending these trifling discrepancies to Sir David’s attention, while
manufacturing his planetary inhabitants in conformity with them, shall
we now follow his flight beyond the solar system, and get among the
Fixed Stars? Here we are gazing at the Dog-Star! “I allow,” says a
pensive objector to the Essayist,[95] “that if you disprove the
existence of inhabitants in the planets of our system, I shall not feel
much real interest in the possible inhabitants of the Sirian system.
Neighbourhood has its influence upon our feelings of regard,—even
neighbourhood on a scale of millions of miles!”
Here our Pluralist is quite at home, and evidently in great favour. The
stars twinkle and glitter with delight at his gleeful approach, to
elevate them into moral and intellectual dignity, and at the same time,
perhaps, select “some bright particular” one, to be hereafter
distinguished as the seat of his own personal existence; whence he is to
spend eternity in radiating astronomical emanations throughout
infinitude.
“Then, unembodied, doth he trace,
By steps each planet’s heavenly way?
A Thing of Eyes, that all survey, ...
A Thought Unseen, yet seeing all!”[96]
He stands in the starry solitude, waving his wand, and lo! he peoples
each glistening speck with intellectual existence, with the highest
order of intelligence, as in the case of that little star, the sun,
which he has quitted. Now as to these same FIXED STARS, we can easily
guess the steps of Sir David’s brief and satisfactory argument. _If_ the
stars be suns, they are inhabited like our sun; and if they be suns,
each has its planets, like our sun; and if they have planets, they are
inhabited like our planets; and if they have satellites like some of
ours, they are also inhabited. But the stars _are_ suns, and they all
have planets, and at least some of these planets, satellites; therefore,
all the fixed stars, with their respective planetary systems, are
inhabited (Q. E. D.) Here are Sir David’s words:—“We are compelled to
draw the conclusion that wherever there is a sun, there must be a
planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary system, there must
be Life and Intelligence.”[97] This is the way in which, it seems, we
worms of the earth feel ourselves at liberty to deal with our Almighty
Creator: dogmatically insisting that every scene of existence in which
He may have displayed His omnipotence, is but a repetition of that
particular one in which we have our allotted place! As if He had but one
pattern for Universal Creation! Only one scheme for peopling and dealing
with infinitude! O, that _the clay_ should think thus of _Him that
fashioneth it_![98] Forgetting, in an exulting moment of blindness and
presumption, His own awful words, _My thoughts are not as your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways. For as the Heavens are higher than the
Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your
thoughts!_[99]
We are now, however, about to people the Fixed Stars. The only proof
that they are the centres of planetary systems, resides in the
assumption that these Stars are _like the Sun_; and as resembling him in
their nature and qualities, so having the same offices and
appendages:—independent sources of light, and thence probably of heat;
therefore having attendant planets, to which they may impart such light
and heat,—and these planets’ inhabitants living under and enjoying those
benign influences. Everything here depends on this proposition, that the
Stars are like the Sun; and it becomes essential to examine what
evidence we have of the exactness of their likeness.[100] In the Preface
to his Second Edition, the Essayist, whose scientific knowledge few will
venture to impugn, boldly asserts that “man’s knowledge of the physical
properties of the luminaries which he discerns in the skies, is, even
now, _almost nothing_;” and “such being the state of our knowledge, as
bearing on the doctrine of the plurality of worlds, the time appeared to
be not inopportune for a calm discussion of the question,—upon which,
accordingly,” he adds, “I have ventured in the following pages.” In the
same Preface he has ably condensed into a single paragraph his views on
the nature and extent of our present knowledge on the subject of the
Fixed Stars.[101]
In the opening of the chapter devoted to this subject (ch. viii.), he
admits “the special evidence,” as to the probability of these stars
containing, in themselves, or in accompanying planets, inhabitants of
any kind, “is, indeed, slight, _either way_.”
As to Clustered and Double stars, they appear to give us, he says, but
little promise of inhabitants. In what degree of condensation the matter
of these binary systems is, compared with that of our solar system, we
have no means whatever of knowing: but even granting that each
individual of the pair were a sun like ours, in the nature of its
material, and its state of condensation, is it probable that it
resembles our Sun also in having planets revolving about it? A system of
planets revolving about, or among, a pair of Suns, which are at the same
time revolving about one another, is so complex a scheme [apparently],
so impossible to arrange in a stable manner, that the assumption of the
existence of such schemes, without a vestige of evidence, can hardly
require refutation. No doubt, if we were really required to provide such
a binary system of Suns with attendant planets, this would be best done
by putting the planets so near to one Sun that they should not be
sensibly affected by the other; and this is accordingly what has been
proposed. For, as has been well said by Sir John Herschell, of the
supposed planets in making this proposal, “unless closely nestled under
the protecting wing of their immediate superior, the sweep of the other
Sun in his perihelion passage round their own, might carry them off, or
whirl them into orbits utterly inconsistent with the existence of their
inhabitants.” “To assume the existence of the inhabitants, in spite of
such dangers, and to provide against the dangers by placing them so
close to one Sun as to be out of the reach of the other, though the
whole distance of the two may not, and as we know in some cases does
not, exceed the dimensions of our solar system, is showing them all the
favour which is possible. But in making this provision, it is overlooked
that it may not be possible to keep them in permanent orbits so near to
the selected centre. Their Sun may be a vast sphere of luminous vapour,
and the planets plunged into this atmosphere may, instead of describing
regular orbits, plough their way in spiral paths through the nebulous
abyss of its central nucleus.”[102]
In dealing with the Single Stars, which are, like the Sun,
self-luminous, can they be proved, like him, to be definite dense
masses? [_His_ density is about that of water.] Or are they, or many of
them, luminous masses in a far more diffused state, visually contracted
to points through their immense distance? Some of those which we have
the best means of examining are one-third, or even less, in mass, than
he: and if Sirius, for instance, be in this diffused condition, though
that would not of itself prevent his having planets, it would make him
so unlike our Sun, as much to break the force of the presumption that he
must have planets as he has. Again: As far back as our knowledge of our
Sun extends, his has been a permanent condition of brightness: yet many
of the fixed stars not only undergo changes, but periodical, and
possibly progressive changes:—whence it may be inferred, perhaps, that
they are not, generally, in the same permanent condition as our Sun. As
to the evidence of their revolution on their axis, this has been
inferred from their having periodical recurrences of fainter and
brighter lustre; as if revolving orbs with one side darkened by spots.
Of these, five only can be at present spoken of by astronomers[103] with
precision. Nothing is more probable than that these periodical changes
indicate the revolution of these stellar masses on their axis—a
universal law, apparently, of all the large compact masses of the
Universe, but by no means inferring their being, or having accompanying
planets, inhabited. The Sun’s rotation is not shown, intelligibly,
connected with its having near it the inhabited Earth. In the mean time,
in so far as these stars are periodical, they are proved to be, not
like, but _unlike_ our Sun. The only real point of resemblance, then, is
that of being self-luminous, in the highest degree ambiguous and
inconclusive, and furnishing no argument entitled to be deemed one from
analogy. Humboldt deems the force of analogy to tend even in the
_opposite_ direction. “After all,” he asks,[104] “is the assumption of
satellites [attendant planets] to the fixed stars, so absolutely
necessary? If we were to begin from the outer planets, Jupiter, &c.,
analogy might seem to require that all planets have satellites:—yet this
is not so with Mars, Venus, Mercury;” to which may now be added the
thirty Planetoids—making a much greater number of bodies that have not,
than that have satellites. The assumption, then, that the fixed stars
are of exactly the same nature as the Sun, was originally a bold guess;
but there has not since been a vestige of any confirmatory fact:—no
planet, nor anything fairly indicating the existence of one revolving
round a fixed star, has ever hitherto been discerned;—and the subsequent
discovery of nebulæ; binary systems; clusters of stars; periodical
stars; of varied and accelerating periods of such stars,—all seem to
point the other way: leaving, though possibly facts small in amount, the
original assumption a mere guess, unsupported by all that three
centuries of most diligent, and in other respects, successful research,
have been able to bring to light. All the knowledge of times succeeding
Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, (who might well believe the stars to be
in every sense suns);—among other things, the disclosure of the history
of our own planet, as one in which such grand changes have been
constantly going on; the certainty that in by far the greatest part of
the duration of its existence it has been tenanted by creatures entirely
different from those which give an interest, and thence a
persuasiveness, to the belief of inhabitants in worlds appended to each
star; the impossibility of which appears, in the gravest consideration
of transferring to other worlds such interests as belong to our race in
this world;—all these considerations, it would seem, should have
prevented that old and arbitrary conjecture from growing up, among a
generation _professing philosophical caution and scientific discipline_,
into a settled belief. Finally, it will be time enough to speculate
about the inhabitants of the planets which belong to such systems, as
soon as we shall have ascertained that there are such planets,—or that
there is one such.[105]
In the _Dialogue_, written after the first edition of the “Essay” had
appeared, the Essayist greatly strengthened the position for which he
had contended in it, by an important passage containing the results of
the eminent astronomer _M. Struve’s_ recent examination of double stars,
and the result of his elaborate and comprehensive comparison of the
whole body of facts in stellar astronomy. Among the brighter stars, he
arrives at the conclusion, that _every_ FOURTH such star is physically
double; and that a completed knowledge of double stars may prove every
THIRD bright star to be physically double! And in the case of stars of
inferior magnitude, that the number of _insulated_ stars, though indeed
greater than that of such compound systems, is nevertheless only three
times, perhaps only twice as great. Thus the loose evidence of
resemblance between our Sun and the fixed stars becomes feebler the more
it is examined; and the assumption of stellar _planetary_ systems
appears, when closely scrutinised, to dwindle away to nothing.[106]
Now, to so much of the foregoing facts and speculations as are contained
in the Essay, from which we have faithfully and carefully extracted the
substance, in order that our readers may judge for themselves, Sir David
Brewster answers, in effect, and generally in words, thus:—
The greatest and grandest truth in astronomy, is the motion of the solar
system, advancing with all the planets and satellites in the heavens, at
the rate of fifty-seven miles a second, round some distant invisible
body, in an orbit of such inconceivable dimensions, that millions of
years may be required for a single orbit. When we consider that this
centre must be a sun with attendant planets like our own, revolving in
like manner round our sun, [?] or round their common centre of gravity,
the mind rejects, almost with indignation, the ignoble sentiment that
Man is the only being performing this immeasurable journey—and that
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with their bright array of regal
train-bearers, are but as colossal blocks of lifeless clay, encumbering
the Earth as a drag, and mocking the creative majesty of Heaven. From
the birth of man _to the extinction of his race_ [!] the system to which
he belongs will have described but an infinitesimal arc in that grand
cosmical orbit in which it is destined to move. This affords a new
argument for the plurality of worlds. Since every fixed star must have
planets, the fact of our system revolving round a similar system of
planets, furnishes a new argument from analogy; for as there is at least
one inhabited planet in the one system, there must for the same reason
be one in the other, and consequently as many as there are systems in
the Universe.[107] Thus our system is not absolutely fixed in space, but
is connected with the other systems in the Universe.
The Fixed Stars are suns of other systems, whose planets are invisible
from their distance, as are ours from the nearest fixed star. Every
_single_ star shining by its own native light is the centre of a
planetary system like our own—the lamp that lights, the stove that
heats, and the power that guides in their orbits, inhabited worlds like
our own. Many are _double_, with a system of planets round each, or the
centre of gravity of both. No one can believe that two suns would be
placed in the heavens, for no other purpose than to revolve round their
common centre of gravity. It is “highly probable,” that our Sun is one
of a binary system, and has at present an unseen partner; and we are
“entitled to conclude” that all the other binary systems have at least
an inhabited planet: wherever there is a self-luminous fixed or movable
Sun there must be a planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary
system, there must be life and intelligence.[108]
Apart from the assertion of his cardinal principle with which we are
familiar, namely, that since our Sun has an inhabited planet, all others
must; and also that all planets must be inhabited;—the argumentative
value of these two chapters seems to lie in this that they annihilate
one of the Essayist’s points of _unlikeness_ between our Sun and other
Fixed Stars, inasmuch as it, together with so many of them, is one of a
binary system: wherefore what is true of it, is true of them, _et vice
versa_. He bases this proposition, viz., that our Sun is one of a binary
system, on “high probability,” from “the motion of our own system round
a distant centre.”[109] The great truth of this motion, he says the
Essayist “has completely misrepresented, foreseeing its influence on the
mind as an argument for more worlds than one.”[110] What the Essayist
had said on the subject, was this:[111] he speaks of “the _attempt_ to
show that the Sun, carrying with it the whole solar system, is in
motion; and the further attempt to show the direction of that
motion;—and again, the hypothesis that the Sun itself revolves round
some distant object in space.” These minute inquiries and bold
conjectures, he says, “cannot throw any light on the question, whether
any part besides the earth _be inhabited_: any more than the
investigation of the movements of the ocean and their laws can prove or
disprove the existence of _marine plants and animals_. They do not, on
that account, cease to be important and interesting objects of
speculation, but they do not belong to our subject.” As to the Sun’s
motion, we are bound to say, that the Astronomer Royal has recently
declared that “every astronomer who has examined the matter carefully,
has come to the conclusion of Sir William Herschell, that the whole
solar system is moving towards a point in the constellation
Hercules.”[112] Before quitting this part of the subject, we may state
that the Essayist, in his second Preface,[113] points out the insecure
character of astronomical calculations as to the amount of absolute
light ascribed to some of the fixed stars. It has been estimated that
the illuminating power of _Alpha_ Centauri is nearly double that of the
Sun, placed at that distance, which is two hundred thousand times as far
off as is the Sun; but Sir John Herschell will not concur in more of the
calculation than attributes to the star the emission of _more_ light
than our Sun. Surely the critical and precarious character of such
calculations should not be lost sight of by candid inquirers, but
incline them to scan somewhat closely any pretensions tinctured by
astronomic dogmatism.
One immense step more, however,—and it is our last, brings to “the
outskirts of creation,” as the Essayist calls it,—the _Nebulæ_: and here
we find him once more confronted by his indefatigable and implacable
opponent. We must therefore take our biggest and best mental telescope
to behold these two Specks intellectual, so far off in infinitude,
wrangling about a faint cloud vastly further off than themselves. Do you
see how angry one of them looks, and how provokingly stolid the other?
’Tis all about the nature of that same cloud, or Nebula; and if we could
only hear what they said, we might catch a chord or two of the music of
the spheres! The Essayist is required, by his brother speck, to believe
that the faintly-luminous patch at which they are gazing—a thousandth
part of the visible breadth of our own Sun—contains in it more life than
exists in as many such systems as the unassisted eye can see stars in
the heavens on the clearest winter night:—a view of the greatness of
creation so stupendous, that the astounded speck, the Essayist, asks for
a moment’s time to consider the matter. “We are entitled to draw the
conclusion,” says the other, “that these _Nebulæ_ are clusters of stars,
at such an immense distance from our own system, that each star of which
they are composed is the sun or centre of a system of planets; and that
these planets are inhabited—like our Earth, the seat of vegetable,
animal, and intellectual life:”[114] that all the Nebulæ are resolvable
into stars; and appear as Nebulæ only because they are more distant than
the region in which they can appear as stars.[115] The conclusion,
however, at which the Essayist arrives, after an elaborate examination
of evidence, and especially of the latest discoveries in this dim and
distant region by Sir John Herschell and the Earl of Rosse, is—that
“Nebulæ are vast masses of incoherent or gaseous matter, of immense
tenuity, diffused in forms more or less irregular, but all of them
destitute of any regular system of solid moving bodies.... So far,
then,” he concludes, “as these Nebulæ are concerned, the improbability
of _their_ being inhabited appears to amount to the highest point that
can be conceived. We may, by the indulgence of fancy, people the summer
clouds, or the beams of the aurora borealis, with living beings of the
same kind of substance as those bright appearances themselves; and in
doing so, we are not making any bolder assertion than when we stock the
Nebulæ with inhabitants, and call them, in that sense, inhabited
worlds.”[116] The Essayist contends that the argument for the vastness
of the scheme of the Universe, suggested by the resolution of the
Nebulæ, is found to be untenable:—inasmuch as the greatest astronomers
now agree in believing Nebulæ to have _distances of the same order_ as
Fixed Stars. Their filmy appearance is a true indication of a highly
attenuated substance: so attenuated as to destroy all probability of
their being inhabited worlds. With this opinion as to the tenuity of
Nebulæ agrees the absence of all _observed_ motion among their parts;
while the extraordinary spiral arrangement of many of them, prove that
nevertheless many of them really _have_ motion, and suggests modes of
calculating their tenuity, and showing how extreme it is. “It is
probable,” said Lord Rosse, in a paper which we ourselves heard him read
not long ago, from the chair of the Royal Society, “that in the Nebular
systems, motion exists. If we see a system with a distinct spiral
arrangement, all analogy leads us to conclude that there has been
motion; and that if there has been motion, that motion still
continues.”... “Among the Nebulæ,” he says, “there are vast numbers,
much too faint to be sketched or measured with any prospect of
advantage: the most powerful instruments we possess showing in them
nothing of an organised structure, but merely a confused mass of
nebulosity, of varying brightness.”[117] The Essayist makes powerful
use, moreover, of Sir John Herschell’s celebrated observation of the
Magellanic Clouds, lying near the South Pole; exhibiting the
coexistence, in a limited compass, and in indiscriminate position, of
stars, clusters of stars, nebulæ regular and irregular, and nebular
streaks and patches, things different not merely to us, but in
themselves: nebulæ, side by side with stars and clusters of stars;
nebulous matter resolvable, close to nebulous matter irresolvable;—the
last and widest step by which the dimensions of the Universe have been
expanded, in the notions of eager speculators, being checked by a
completer knowledge, and a sager spirit of speculation.[118] In
discussing such matters as these, he finely observes—“It is difficult to
make men feel that so much ignorance can lie close to so much knowledge;
to make them believe that they have been allowed to discover so much,
and yet are not allowed to discover more.”[119]
In alluding to the Nebulæ, as subjects of our most powerful telescopic
observation, the Essayist speaks in a tone of sarcasm concerning the
“_shining dots_,”—the “_lumps of light_” which are rendered apparent
amidst them: asking, what are these lumps? (1.) How large? (2.) At what
distances? (3.) Of what structure? (4.) Of what use?—adding, he must be
a bold man who undertakes to answer the question, that each is a Sun,
with attendant systems of planets. Sir David, exceedingly irate, says,
“We accept the challenge, and appeal to our readers:”—(1.) The size of
the dot, or lump, is large enough to be a Sun. (2.) He cannot answer
this, for want of knowing ‘the apparent distance between the centres of
the dots.’ (3.) Like our Sun—‘It will consist of a luminous envelope,
enclosing a dark nucleus.’ (4.) Of no conceivable use, but to give light
to planets, or to the solid _nuclei_ of which they consist. In his turn,
he asks the Essayist—what is the size, distance, structure, and use of
the dots, upon his hypothesis? The Essayist, he observes, is
silent;[120] but in his Essay, he had said, distinctly enough, “Let us
not wrangle about words. By all means let these dots be stars, if we
know about what we are speaking: if a star mean, merely, a luminous dot
in the sky. But that these stars shall resemble, in their nature, Stars
of the First Magnitude, and that such stars shall resemble Our Sun, are
surely very bold structures of assumption, to build on such a basis.
Some nebulæ are resolvable into distinct points: but what would it
amount to? That the substance of all nebulæ is not continuous; separate,
and separable into distinct luminous elements:—nebulæ are, it would then
seem, as it were of a curdled or granulated texture; they have run into
_lumps_ of light, or been formed originally of such lumps.” And then
follow some very ingenious and refined speculations, into which we have
not space to enter; and indeed we may be well content with what we have
done, having travelled from a tolerable depth in the crust of our own
little planet, past planet after planet, star after star, till we
reached the nebulous “outskirts of creation;” accompanied by two Mentors
of Infinitude,—whispering into our ear—one, that life, animal,
intellectual, moral, was swarming around us at every step; the other,
that that life ceased with our own Earth, as far as we were able to
detect its existence, and giving us very solemn and mysterious reasons
why it should be so.
Our Essayist, however, is not exhausted by the efforts he has made in
his destructive career. If he be a “proud setter down” of cosmological
systems, he determines, in turn, to be a “putter up:” and so presents us
with his own _Theory of the Solar System_; and an explanation of the
mode in which all appearances in the Universe beyond may be reconciled
with it. “It may serve” he says, “to confirm his argument, if he give a
description of the system which shall continue and connect his views of
the constitution and peculiarities as to physical circumstances of each
of the planets. It will help us in our speculation, if we can regard the
planets as not only a collection, but a scheme;—if we can give not an
Enunciation only, but a Theory. Now, such a SCHEME, such a THEORY,
appears to offer itself to us.”[121] The scope of this scheme, or
theory, is, as we some time ago saw, to make our earth, in point of
astronomical fact and reality, the largest Planetary Body in the solar
system; its domestic hearth; the only part of the frame revolving round
the Sun which has become a “WORLD.” We must, however, make short work of
it.
The planets exterior to Mars—especially Jupiter and Saturn—appear
spheres of water, or aqueous vapour. The Earth has a considerable
atmosphere of air and of vapour; while on Venus or Mercury—so close to
the sun—we see nothing of a gaseous or aqueous atmosphere; they and Mars
differing little in density from the earth.
THE EARTH’S ORBIT, according to the Essayist’s theory, IS THE TEMPERATE
ZONE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, where only the play of hot and cold, moist and
dry, is possible. Water and gases, clouds and vapours, form, mainly, the
planets in the outer part of the solar system; while masses, such as
result from the fusion of the most solid materials, lie nearer the Sun,
and are found principally within the orbit of Jupiter. After a further
exposition of his “theory,” the Essayist observes that it agrees with
the nebular hypothesis, SO FAR as it applies to the _Solar System_;
exactly, and very sternly, repudiating that hypothesis as it applies to
the Universe in general.[122] “If we allow ourselves,” says he, “to
speculate _at all_ on physical grounds respecting the origin of the
Earth, the hypothesis, that it has passed through a fluid and a gaseous
condition, does not appear more extravagant than any other cosmogonical
hypothesis: not even if we suppose that the other bodies of the Solar
System have shared in the like changes. _But_, that all the stars and
the nebulæ have gone, or are going through, a series of changes such as
those by which the Solar System has been formed,—the nebular hypothesis,
as it applies to the _Universe_ in general, is precisely the doctrine
which I here reject, giving my reasons.”[123]
The whole of the Chapter devoted to “the Theory of the Solar System,” is
distinguished by remarkable ingenuity and originality. It is, however,
that entitled _the Argument from Design_, which, independently of all
connection with the speculations of the author as already laid before
our readers, is worthiest of consideration, by all interested in Natural
Theology. It touches many topics which must have occupied the
profoundest thoughts of mankind, and touches them with the utmost
caution and delicacy. In the 34th Section will be found a passage of
singular boldness and imaginative eloquence; but liable, in our opinion,
to serious misconception, and susceptible of misrepresentation—by those,
at least, who are either unable, or indisposed, to weigh the entire
chapter, and ascertain its real value and tendency. Some expressions
have startled us not a little, when reflecting that they relate to the
possible mode of action of Omniscient Omnipotence; and we shall be
gratified by seeing them vindicated or explained in the next edition of
his “Essay.”
Each of our speculators closes his book with a chapter devoted to “The
Future.” The ideas of Sir David concerning the duration of the human
race upon the earth (which Inspiration tells us is so awfully uncertain,
and will be cut short suddenly—in a moment—in _the twinkling of an
eye_), seem to be curiously definite; for we have seen that in his sixth
chapter he states that “from the birth of man to the extinction of his
race, the Solar System to which he belongs will have described but an
infinitesimal arc in that grand cosmical orbit in which it is destined
to move.” Without pausing to ask who told him this, let us intimate,
that in his final chapter he says that the scientific truths on which
depends the plurality of worlds are intimately associated with the
future destiny of man: he turns to the future of the sidereal systems,
as the hallowed spots in which is to be spent his immortal existence.
Scripture has not spoken articulately of the future locality of the
blest; but Reason has combined the scattered utterances of Inspiration,
and with an almost oracular voice declared that the Maker of the worlds
will place _in these_ the beings of his choice. In what region, reason
does not determine; but it is _impossible_ for man, with the light of
Revelation as his guide, to doubt for a moment that on the celestial
spheres his future is to be spent in lofty inquiries; social
intercourse; the renewal of domestic ties; and in the service of his
Almighty benefactor. The Christian’s future, not defined in his creed,
enwrapt in apocalyptic mysteries, evades his grasp: it is only Astronomy
that opens the mysterious expanse of the Universe to his eye, and
creates an intelligible paradise in the world to come: wherefore, says
Sir David, we must impregnate the popular mind with the truths of
natural science; teaching them in every school, and recommending, if not
illustrating, them from every pulpit: fixing in the minds and
associating in the affections, alike of age and youth, the great truths
in the planetary and sidereal universe, on which the doctrine of More
Worlds than One must respectively rest—the philosopher scanning with a
new sense the sphere in which he is to study; and the Christian the
temples in which he is to worship.—Such, in his own words, is Sir David
Brewster’s final and authoritative exposition of the CREED of the
philosopher, and the HOPE of the Christian:—of such a nature are to be
the _new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness_; and
such, henceforth, as he has indicated, becomes the duty of the Christian
teacher in the Family, in the School, in the Pulpit! So absolutely and
irrefragably, it seems, are demonstrated the stupendous facts of
astronomical science on which this Creed and this Faith depend: so
unerring are our telescopes and other instruments, that he who does not
receive this “Creed” is no philosopher, nor he who rejects the “Hope” a
Christian. But, in the mean time, how inconceivably embarrassing to such
a philosopher, and to such a Christian, is the possibility that many, or
a few years hence, such immense improvements may be made in telescopes,
or in other modes of acquiring a knowledge of the celestial structures,
as to demonstrate to the sense, as well as reason, of us impatient and
presumptuous tenants of the earth, that the planets are _not_ inhabited!
that the fixed stars are not suns, and have not a planet a piece—no, not
even a solitary planet among them! Thus rendering our astounded and
dismayed philosopher homeless and creedless, and the Christian helpless
and hopeless:—the former one of those who _professing themselves to be
wise become fools_;[124] the latter, _likened unto a foolish man which
built his house upon the sand_.[125]
The “_Future_” of the Essayist is of a different kind, and adumbrated
with becoming humility and diffidence. “I did not,” he says, “venture
further than to intimate, that when we are taught, that _as we have
borne the image of the Earthy, we shall also bear the image of the
Heavenly_, we may find, in even natural science, reasons for opening our
minds to the reception of the cheering and elevating announcement.”[126]
We have now placed before our readers the substance of the arguments for
and against a plurality of worlds, so far as developed in the essays of
Dr Whewell and Sir David Brewster. The former is a work so replete with
subtle thought, bold speculation, and knowledge of almost every kind,
used with extraordinary force and dexterity, as to challenge the patient
and watchful attention of the most thoughtful reader; and that whether
he be, or be not, versed in astronomical speculations. Great as are the
power and resources of the author, we detect no trace of dogmatism or
arrogance, but, on the contrary, a true spirit of fearless, but patient
and candid, inquiry. It is a mighty problem of which he proposes a
solution, and he does no more than propose it: in his Preface declaring
that, to himself at least, his arguments “appear to be of no small
philosophical force, though he is quite ready to weigh carefully and
candidly any answer which may be offered to them.”
We feel grateful to the accomplished Essayist for the storehouse of
authentic facts, and the novel combination of inferences from them, with
which he has presented us; and we are not aware that he has given us
just reason to regret confiding in his correctness or candour. And in
travelling with him through his vast and chequered course, we feel that
we have accompanied not only the philosopher and the divine, but the
gentleman: one who, while manifestly knowing what is due to himself, as
manifestly respects his intelligent reader. In several of his
astronomical assumptions and inferences we may be unable to concur,
particularly in respect of the nebulous stars. We may also well falter
at expressing a decisive “Aye” or “No,” to the great question proposed
by him for discussion, on scientific grounds, and independently of
Scriptural Revelation; yet we acknowledge that he has sensibly shaken
our opinion as to the validity of the reasons usually assigned for
believing in a plurality of worlds. He remorselessly ties us down to
EVIDENCE, as he ought to do; and all the more rigorously, because the
affirmative conclusion, at which many heedless persons are disposed to
jump, is one which, if well founded, occasions religious difficulties of
a grave character among the profoundest and perhaps even devoutest
thinkers. To suppose that Omnipotence may not have peopled already, or
contemplate a future peopling of the starry spheres with intelligent
beings, of as different a kind and order as it is possible for our
limited faculties to conceive, yet in some way involved in physical
conditions, altogether inexplicable to us, would be the acme of impious
presumption. When we look at Sirius, in his solitary splendour in the
midnight sky, pouring forth _possibly_ fifty times the light and heat of
our sun, upon a prodigiously greater planetary system than our own, it
is natural to conjecture whether, among many other _possibilities_, it
may be the seat of intelligence, perhaps of a transcendent character.
Here the imagination may disport itself as it pleases: yet we shall feel
ourselves compelled—those who can _think_ about the matter—to own, that
our imaginations are, as it were, “cabined, cribbed, confined,” by the
objects and associations to which we are at present restricted; and as
the late eminent Prussian astronomer, Bessel, observed, those who
imagine inhabitants in the moon and planets, “supposed them, in spite of
all their protestations, as like to _men_, as one egg to another.” But
when we proceed further, and insist on likening these supposed
inhabitants to ourselves, intellectually and morally, then it is that
both philosophy and religion concur in rebuking us, and enjoining a
reverent diffidence. We have probably read as much on these subjects as
many of our readers, and that with deep interest and attention; but we
never met with so cogent a demonstration as is contained in this Essay,
of the theological difficulties besetting the popular doctrine of a
plurality of worlds. Had God vouchsafed to tell us that it was so, there
would have been an end of the matter, and with it all difficulty would
have disappeared, to one whose whole life, as the Christian’s ought to
be, is one continued act of faith; but God has thought fit to preserve
an awful silence concerning his dealings with other scenes of physical
existence: while He has as distinctly revealed that of spiritual beings
whose functions are vitally connected with man, as he exists upon the
earth, the subject of a sublime economy, which, we are assured by
Inspiration, that _the angels desire to look into_. The Christian
implicitly believes that there IS a HEAVEN, where the presence of the
adorable Deity constitutes happiness, to the most exalted of His
ministers and servants, perfect and ineffable: happiness in which He has
solemnly assured us that we may hereafter participate: _for since the
beginning of the world, men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear,
neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside Thee, what He hath prepared for
him that waiteth for Him_.[127] This, our Maker has told us; he has not
told us the other, nor anything about it: no, not when He visited the
earth, unless we can dimly see such a significance in the words, “In my
Father’s house (οἰκίᾳ) are many _mansions_ (μοναι): if it were not so, I
would have told you. I go to prepare a place (τόπον) for you.” The word
μονη is used twice in the New Testament, and in the same chapter:[128]
in the verse already quoted, and in the 23d—“If a man love me, he will
keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him,
and make our abode (μονὴν) with him.” Here are the three words in the
same verse, οἰκια, μονη, τοπος. In my Father’s house there are μοναὶ
πολλαὶ, many places of _abode_. Heaven is the οικια, our common place,
and it has many subdivisions, room enough for angels, as well as for the
spirits of just men made perfect. It is possibly an allusion to the
temple, God’s earthly house, which had many chambers in it. But who
shall require us to believe that this μονη, was a star, or planet? It
may be so, it may not; there can be no sin in a devout mind conjecturing
on the subject; but the Essayist does not meddle with these solemn
topics: confining himself to the physical reasons for conjecturing, with
more or less probability, that the stars are habitations for human
beings. We take our leave of him with a quotation from his Dialogue,
couched in grave and dignified terms:—
“_U._ But your arguments are merely negative. You prove only that we
do not know the planets to be inhabited.
“_Z._ If, when I have proved that point, men were to cease to talk as
if they knew that the planets _are_ inhabited, I should have produced
a great effect.
“_U._ Your basis is too narrow for so vast a superstructure, as that
all the rest of the universe, besides the earth, is uninhabited.
“_Z._ Perhaps; for my philosophical basis is only the earth—the only
known habitation. But on this same narrow basis, the earth, you build
up a superstructure that other bodies ARE inhabited. What I do is, to
show that each part of your structure is void of tenacity, and cannot
stand.
“It is probable that when we have reduced to their real value all the
presumptions drawn from physical reasoning, for the opinion of planets
and stars being either inhabited, or uninhabited, the face of these
will be perceived to be so small, that _the belief of all thoughtful
persons on this subject will be determined by moral, metaphysical, and
theological consideration_.”[129]
“More Worlds than One” will not, we are constrained to say, in our
opinion, add to the well-earned reputation of Sir David Brewster. It is
a hasty and slight performance, entirely of a popular character; and
disfigured throughout, not only by an overweening confidence and
peremptoriness of assertion, but by tinges of personality and outbursts
of heat that are indeed strange disturbing forces in a philosophical
discussion. Dr Whewell’s Essay is a work requiring, in a worthy answer,
great consideration; and we do not think that “More Worlds than One”
evidences a tithe of such consideration. Nor does Sir David show a
proper respect for his opponent; nor has he taken a proper measure of
his formidable proportions as a logical and scientific disputant, one
who should be answered in a cold and exact spirit; or it were much
better to leave him alone. Sir David must forgive us if we quote a
sentence or two from devout old John Wesley, a man who had several
points of greatness in him:—
“Be not so _positive_, especially with regard to things which are
neither easy, nor necessary to be determined. When I was young, I was
_sure_ of everything. In a few years, having been mistaken a thousand
times, I was not half so sure of most things as before. At present, I
am hardly sure of anything, but what God has revealed to me!... Upon
the whole, an ingenious man may easily flourish on this head. How much
more glorious is it for the great God to have created innumerable
worlds than this little globe only!... Do you ask, then, what is This
Spot to the great God? Why, as much as millions of systems. GREAT and
LITTLE have place with regard to us; but before Him, they vanish
away!”[130]
Fontenelle has much to answer for, if we may judge from what has been
said concerning the extent and nature of the influence he has exercised
on thoughtless minds. That flippant but brilliant trifler, Horace
Walpole, for instance, declared that the reading Fontenelle had made him
a sceptic! He maintained, on the supposition of a plurality of worlds,
the impossibility of any revelation! That the reception of this opinion
was sufficient, with him, to destroy the credibility of all
revelation![131] This ground he has, if this report be true, the honour
of occupying with Thomas Paine.
Let us, however, think and speak and act differently, remembering
fearfully, how often _the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God_.
Is it, indeed, consistent with even mere worldly wisdom, on the ground
of an assumption with regard to inhabited planets, to reject a belief
founded on direct and positive proofs, such as is the belief in the
truths of Natural and Revealed Religion?
“Newton,” says Dr Chalmers, in his discourse on the Modesty of True
Science, “knew the boundary which hemmed him. He knew that he had not
thrown one particle of light on the moral or religious history of
these planetary regions. He had not ascertained what visits of
communication they received from the God who upholds them. But he knew
that the fact of a Real Visit to THIS PLANET had such evidence to rest
upon that it was not to be disposted by any aerial imagination.” Let
this noble and devout spirit be in us: both Faith and Reason assuring
us, that we stand, in Scriptural Truth, safe and immovable, like _a
wise man, which built his house upon a rock_.[132]
KING OTHO AND HIS CLASSIC KINGDOM.
The actual condition of Greece is a disgrace to the political
civilisation of Europe. There is hope for the Othoman Empire, for the
Turks are sensible that they have much to learn; but for the kingdom of
Greece there is no hope, unless the modern Hellenes lay aside the
self-conceit which induces them to boast of their superior orthodoxy
when the question relates to their practical ignorance. Englishmen and
Russians, despots and demagogues, princes and people, Europeans and
Americans, all agree in pronouncing King Otho’s kingdom a satire on
monarchical institutions, constitutional legislation, and central
administration. The valour and patriotism displayed by the Albanians of
Suli and Hydra, and by the Greeks of Messolonghi and Psara, were the
theme of well-merited praise, and were rewarded by liberal gifts of
money and other supplies from the friends of Greece in Germany,
Switzerland, France, England, and the United States of America. Greece
has great obligations to the people of Western Europe, whom she now
stigmatises as hostile Latins. It was the voice of the people that moved
the Cabinet of London to take the initiative in the negotiations which
caused the battle of Navarino, and conferred on Greece the rank of an
independent kingdom by the treaty of 1832.
No political experiment during the present century—fruitful as the
period has been in producing new States—excited higher expectations or
warmer wishes for its success. Twenty-two years have now elapsed since
Greece became a kingdom under the sceptre of Prince Otho of Bavaria. He
was then a minor, and he was selected to fill the new throne more for
his father’s merits than from any promise of superior talent in his own
person. King Louis of Bavaria loved art, and his want of political
capacity and military power removed any feelings of jealousy on the part
of the greater powers in Europe to the addition thus made to the dignity
of the house of Wittelsbach. King Otho was known to be a youth of very
moderate attainments; but his natural deficiencies being fortunately
united to an amiable disposition, it was expected that he would prove a
docile monarch, and listen to good counsellors. It has proved otherwise.
His limited capacity has not been more remarkable than his obstinacy and
perverseness in following a line of policy which has inflicted serious
injury on Greece. Notwithstanding a natural love of justice, and a good
moral character, his misgovernment has degenerated into corruption,
though it has not assumed a character of systematic tyranny. On the
whole, his incapacity to perform the duties of his station, and his
silly eagerness to assume the appearance of being a despotic sovereign,
while he was unable to make any use of the greater part of the
prerogatives willingly conceded to him by his subjects, have made him a
very apt regal type of the anarchical and rapacious nation he rules. The
result is, that the hopes of ardent Philhellenes, the expectations of
enthusiastic scholars, and the wishes of cautious statesmen, have all
been utterly disappointed by the government of King Otho. More than
this, while the King of Greece has shown himself a bad monarch, the
Greeks have displayed extreme ignorance in all their attempts to supply
his deficiencies. Instead of suggesting better principles for his
guidance, they have become the steady supporters of his system whenever
he condescended to purchase their support by places and pensions. It
seems as if the Bavarian monarchy had infused a morbid lethargy into
Romaic society, so rapidly has the central administration of Athens
quenched the fervour of patriotism throughout liberated Greece. The
Albanian population has lost its valour and perseverance; the Greek has
sunk back into that normal condition of rapacious imbecility which has
characterised the Hellenic race ever since the time of Mummius.
The revolution which freed Greece from the Turkish yoke broke out early
in the year 1821, so that the inhabitants of the kingdom have now
enjoyed the advantages of political independence for thirty-three years.
A generation has grown up to manhood in possession of a greater degree
of freedom than is possessed by most of the continental nations of
Europe. Municipal institutions existed, to some extent, under the Turks,
and they acquired considerable importance during the revolutionary war.
The fullest exercise of the liberty of the press has prevailed ever
since the first year of the revolution. Nor has this liberty been
greatly abused, though it has often been misused—a circumstance not to
be wondered at in a country so torn by faction as Greece has been ever
since she commenced her struggle for independence. This fact must be
weighed against the many vices and corruptions of the Greeks which it
will be our task to notice, for it affords decisive evidence that there
still exists among the mass of the population a sound basis of public
opinion.
The establishment of free and orthodox Greece as an independent State,
under the protection of Great Britain, France, and Russia, was a
conception of George Canning’s genius, and it received the sanction of
the Duke of Wellington. After Canning’s death, his enemies made it a
subject of reproach. It is said that, when his statue was erected in
Palace Yard, a royal duke, walking beside it with the late Lord Eldon,
began to pour out a diatribe of harmless accusations against the
honoured dead, which he summed up, saying, “He caused the battle of
Navarin, Eldon, and he was not nearly so big as that statue;” to which
the great Lord Chancellor, whose patience had been long tried, expanded
his bushy eyebrows, and exclaimed, “No, truly—nor so green:” the statue
being then, as some of our readers may remember, more remarkable for the
verdant colour of its patent verdigris than for its size. Whether the
battle of Navarin was absolutely necessary to save Greece from Ibrahim
Pasha and his Arabs, may still admit of dispute; but unquestionably it
was the battle of Navarin which did save Greece. When, however, the
business of selecting a king, and of organising the institutions of a
central administration on monarchical principles came to be performed,
the genius of Canning was represented by the torpor of Aberdeen, and the
sagacity of Wellington by the belligerent amenity of Palmerston.
The Russian sympathies of Capodistrias succeeded in delaying the final
settlement of the Greek question, with the hope of placing Greece in a
state of vassalage to the Czar. Lord Aberdeen combated the policy of the
Corfiote feebly and unsuccessfully. He barely succeeded in preventing
the execution of the Russian schemes, when the dagger of Mavromichalis
opened the way for making Greece an independent kingdom by the
assassination of Capodistrias.
The only candidate worthy of the throne of Greece was Leopold of
Saxe-Cobourg, the present King of Belgium. He was compelled to resign
his pretensions on account of the mutilated form of the territory
offered to him by Lord Aberdeen and the Duke of Wellington. Lord
Palmerston improved the territorial position of Greece by giving it a
better frontier than Lord Aberdeen, but it remained still a very bad
one, as Colonel Leake pointed out at the time. In 1832, moreover, Lord
Palmerston administered his antidote to an improved frontier, in the
shape of a Bavarian prince, whom, for some years, he supported with his
usual vigour and contempt of consequences. King Otho being a minor, a
regency accompanied him from Bavaria to Greece in 1833, to govern in his
name. This regency consisted of three statesmen of purblind views—men of
the limited political intelligence which distinguishes the artistic city
of Munich. Yet Lord Palmerston, in concert with the other protecting
powers, consented to strangle the Greek Chambers, in order to vest
unlimited power in the hands of these Bavarian regents. Count Armansperg
was chosen to do the honours, M. Maurer was intrusted with the duty of
organising the civil administration, and General Heideck was allowed to
sketch uniforms for the Greek army, and instructed to paint pictures for
the cabinet of King Louis. These three statesmen soon quarrelled among
themselves, and, with Teutonic _bonhomie_, called in the Greeks as
spectators of their contests. The foreign policy of the regency was
quite as ill-judged as their domestic behaviour. M. Maurer, who got the
upper hand for a year, was ultra-Gallican; Count Armansperg, who at last
succeeded in getting him shipped off to Bavaria, was ultra-Anglican. The
follies of the regency, however, did not prevent the three protecting
powers from heaping benefits on the Greek nation. A large loan,
amounting to two million four hundred thousand pounds, was placed at the
disposal of the Royal government. The object which the protectors of
Greece had in view, was to remove any difficulties which the finances of
Greece might have offered to a reform in the general system of taxation,
and at the same time to afford facilities for immediately commencing the
construction of roads, and other necessary improvements. The Greek
treasury was rendered completely independent of the receipts of the
annual revenues for the period necessary to effect a thorough
reorganisation of every branch of the public service, civil, military,
naval, and judicial. Greece had everything done for her which her
friends could desire. But the Greeks, instead of employing their
energies, and making use of the liberty of the press to restrain the
Bavarians from wasting the loan, aided them to dissipate it in every way
by which they could profit. The whole force of public opinion, it is
true, was employed in driving the Bavarians from profitable employments;
but when success attended the clamours of the Greeks, instead of
abolishing the offices which they had previously declared to be useless,
they installed themselves in the vacant places, and employed the
influence thus acquired to diminish even the scanty sum devoted to
national improvements by the Bavarians. Accordingly, we find that the
Bavarians did as much for improving Greece during their short period of
power, as the Greeks during their long subsequent administration. Yet
every traveller hears the Greeks constantly declaring that all the evils
in the country are caused by foreign interference. The only truth in
their observation is, that they were and are utterly unfit to be trusted
with the administration of any money beyond what they levy on themselves
in the way of taxation. Nothing, indeed, shows the moral obliquity of
the Greeks more than the ingratitude with which they receive every
public and private gift.
We consider _that_ ingratitude a sufficient excuse for recapitulating
some of the favours which the British Government has conferred on them
since Otho the beloved ascended the Hellenic throne. Nothing but the
blindest self-conceit, or the blackest ingratitude, can prevent their
acknowledging that the English Cabinet has done infinitely more for
advancing the commercial prosperity and extending the agricultural
industry of Greece, than King Otho’s ministers or the Greek Chambers.
The personal interest which several members of our Government took in
the success of the kingdom they had contributed to found, induced them
to conclude a reciprocity treaty with the King’s government at an early
period. To the same feeling we may ascribe the early repeal of the duty
on currants imported into the British dominions from the Greek kingdom.
This change of duty, by placing the currants, a most important product
of the Morea, on the same footing as those of Zante, was a direct boon
to the currant-growers of Achaia, a bounty on the cultivation of fruit
in the Greek kingdom, a premium to commerce at Patras, and a
considerable gift to King Otho’s treasury. Lord Palmerston was Foreign
Secretary during these changes, and we therefore request the public
writers at Athens, when they think fit to reproach him for quarrelling
with their beloved monarch, whom they believe is ever ready to sacrifice
his throne for their orthodoxy, to bear in mind that these measures have
done more for the agricultural and commercial prosperity of Greece, than
any which King Otho or the Greek Chambers have adopted since they freed
themselves from foreign domination.
For nearly five years—that is, from the beginning of 1833 to the end of
1837—the Bavarians continued to waste the loan granted by the three
powers, partly in large salaries to themselves, and partly in creating
places and jobs for the Greeks, to induce the most influential and
clamorous to consent to their mode of dissipating the public money.
Notwithstanding this, there can be no doubt that Greece received some
permanent benefit from the regency. The Greeks were not in a condition
to establish an equitable system of laws. M. Maurer endowed the country
with this invaluable boon. To him Greece owes its excellent judicial
organisation, and its code of civil procedure. Whatever were the defects
of M. Maurer as a statesman, he was an able legislator, practically
conversant with every detail of legal administration. The judicial
system he planted in Greece was so complete in all its parts, that it
has become an element in the political civilisation of the kingdom; and
it affords the strongest grounds of hope to those who look forward to
the Greek nation as the instrument for extending political civilisation
in the East. Count Armansperg governed Greece much longer than M.
Maurer, but his improvements were not so beneficial. He made court balls
and political bribery national institutions.
During the whole of the Bavarian domination, a well-filled treasury, a
number of foreign officers and native councillors of state, political
sycophants, dressed in handsome uniforms and speaking good French, a
hired press, and a liberal distribution of King Otho’s Order of the
Redeemer of Greece, with its ribbon and star, to foreign diplomatists
and English peers, concealed from Western Europe the discontent, civil
wars, and brigandage that fermented in the little kingdom. The bands of
robbers that infested Greece during this period became so numerous as to
give their system of plunder the character of a civil war. In the year
1835, during the administration of Count Armansperg, a body of about 500
brigands remained for more than a month levying contributions under the
walls of Lepanto, in which it kept the garrison blockaded until relieved
by a general from Athens with a strong detachment of Bavarian and Greek
regular troops. These armed bands repeatedly resisted the central
government, which drew all the money of the country to the capital
without making any improvements in the provinces. Several foreign
officers were charged with the task of re-establishing order. Generals
Schmaltz, Gordon, and Church, each made a campaign against the brigands,
who rendered Messenia, Etolia, Acarnania, Doris, and Phthiotis in turns
the scene of their skirmishes with King Otho’s troops. Besides this
extensive system of brigandage, a regular civil war was caused in Maina
by the same central rapacity and want of judgment on the part of the
Regency. In Maina, the Bavarian troops were defeated, and a considerable
number were compelled to lay down their arms.
During the whole of the Bavarian domination, the Greeks enjoyed the
liberty of the press. M. Maurer placed the newspapers under some
reasonable restraints, and Count Armansperg made one or two feeble
demonstrations against them, for he was timid in everything but emptying
the Greek treasury. His attacks were easily repulsed, and the Greeks
have the honour of retaining the liberty of the press by their own
exertions, though they have hitherto not rendered the privilege of much
use to the nation. At length, in the month of December 1837, the
Chevalier Rudhart, the last Bavarian prime-minister, resigned his
office, and from that time King Otho has governed his kingdom with Greek
or Albanian prime-ministers. This office has been more than once held by
men who could hardly read or write; but the individuals have invariably
been persons of some mark in the factions that divide the place-hunters
of Athens. The ignorance and want of education of his ministers, which
is often made a reproach to King Otho, ought to be considered as a
national disgrace, for the court would never have selected men so
destitute of administrative knowledge, had they not possessed
considerable influence and a numerous following.
Ever since the commencement of the year 1838, the Greeks have possessed
a predominant influence in King Otho’s cabinet. They are entirely
responsible for the faults of his government from that time; for if the
Greek ministers had used their power with a very little honesty, and one
single grain of patriotism, they might have retained the direction of
the internal administration in their own hands, and effected every
improvement the nation could desire. Indeed, if they had ever shown a
wish to improve the material condition of the population, it is probable
King Otho would have given them his support in their endeavours. But
when the King saw them intent only on profiting by office to enrich
themselves and create places for their partisans, in order to perpetuate
their tenure of office, he very naturally looked about for means to form
a royal party, and thus render the court independent of the ministers.
We shall soon explain to our readers how effectually his Hellenic
Majesty accomplished this object. The Greek ministers never made any
serious effort to diminish the weight of taxation, either by economy or
by improving the barbarous manner in which the agricultural taxes are
collected; they thought only of appropriating the national lands, and
creating new places to reward their supporters. Instead of establishing
systematic regulations for securing a respect to seniority and merit in
civil, judicial, and military appointments, they destroyed the system
the Bavarians had established, and disposed of the highest offices in
the most arbitrary and unprincipled manner. Judges have been appointed
in violation of the law, and men have been made generals who had never
served in a military capacity. Worthless politicians and intriguing
secretaries were decorated with military titles in order to enrich them
with high pay. These men may be seen at the balls in King Otho’s palace,
flaunting in vulgar embroidery, and imitating with Greek pertness the
sumptuous Albanian dress and Mussulman gravity of the chiefs who filled
the halls of Ali Pasha of Joannina. The Greeks alone have enjoyed the
profits of the corruption which has reigned in the administration since
the year 1838; they are consequently not entitled to throw the blame on
foreigners.
In consequence of the misconduct of the Greek ministers and the
servility of a council of state filled with official sycophants, the
Greek government became such a scene of corruption that the patience of
all ranks was exhausted, and an attempt was made to reform the vicious
system by a revolution in the year 1843. A representative chamber and an
imitation of Louis Philippe’s senate of officials, called in France a
House of Peers, were constituted. The deputies were chosen by universal
suffrage, but the election of the municipal authorities was left subject
to the oligarchical restrictions imposed by the Regency. Ten years have
now elapsed since the constitutional system was established, so that for
ten years the Greeks have made their own laws and voted their own
budgets. At the same time, the enjoyment of the fullest liberty of the
press, and the existence of sixteen newspapers at Athens, have enabled
every party and class to criticise the acts of the government with
unrestrained license. If corruption and venality have been the leading
features of political society in Greece during this period, it is
evident that the nation has been a party to the abuses, from its refusal
to punish the offenders. The mass of those whose superior knowledge and
rank have obtained for them the direction of public opinion in political
matters, have sacrificed the interests of the nation to advance their
own personal schemes of profit. The Greeks ought not to feel surprised
at the low estimation in which they are now held. It is entirely their
own fault. They have hawked about their nationality at Munich, Paris,
and St Petersburg, for illicit gains in a falling market at a very
unpatriotic price.
Yet we collect from the newspapers published at Athens, that a
considerable number of well-educated men of all parties, while they
acknowledge the degraded state of their country, assert that the whole
blame ought to be ascribed to the three protecting powers. Many of these
patriots, it seems, are nevertheless in the receipt of large salaries
from the public treasury; yet, though they feel that they are themselves
destitute of the patriotism necessary to lighten the burdens of their
country, they take the liberty of supposing that Lord Palmerston had the
power of making all Greeks honest men by the magic of a protocol. We are
not going to waste the time of our readers, as the Greek Senate and
House of Representatives have wasted the resources of the country, by
exposing the childishness of modern Greek political logic. If the
descendants of Lucian’s contemporaries can find relief in their present
degradation, by swallowing any dose of vanity they can mix for
themselves, we have no wish to deprive them of the solace. But we cannot
refrain from advising them to try some other remedy to remove the evils
that are undermining the national strength and character. Instead of
seeking for apologies to excuse their vices, they had better commence
reforming their vicious habits.
Nothing has so much retarded the progress of the Greek race as the
inconceivable vanity and unbounded presumption of the class who make
letters a profession. Those who believe in the unmixed purity of the
Hellenic blood might cite this besotted pride, after two thousand years
of national degradation, as a proof that the Greeks of the present day
are lineal descendants of those who sold their country to the
Macedonians and the Romans, as they have lately attempted to sell it to
the Russians. An admixture of foreign blood would probably have infused
into the people a wish to look forward to a glorious future, instead of
leaving them to gaze at a reflection of the past, distorted by their own
senile visual orbits, at moments when action, not contemplation, is
their business.
The strange manner in which the modern Greeks misrepresent history for
the gratification of their national vanity, is well displayed in their
ecclesiastical history. We will select one anecdote from the _History of
the Patriarchs of Constantinople_, written by Malaxos, one of the Greek
_logiotatọi_ of the sixteenth century. His work was first published by
Martin Crusius in his _Turco-Græcia_, and has lately been reprinted in
the new edition of the Byzantine historians, in the course of
publication at Bonn.
The Greeks are in the habit of boasting that their Church preserved
their nationality under the Turks. Considering the subserviency of the
great body of the Greek clergy during that period, and the readiness
with which they acted as spies and policemen for the Othoman government,
we own that we entertain a very different opinion. We think it would be
nearer the truth to assert that the people, having perpetuated their
existence by the toleration of their conquerors, preserved their
nationality by their municipal organisation, and that this preservation
of their nationality was the cause of their ecclesiastical establishment
surviving. Mohammed II. reconstituted the patriarchate of
Constantinople, after he had conquered the city, merely as a branch of
the Othoman administration. Mr Masson and other enthusiasts fancy they
can discern Presbyterian doctrines in the Greek Church. It may be the
case. We have heard that chemists find gold in strawberries; but the
gold rarely sits heavy on the stomachs of those who eat strawberries,
and we opine that the Presbyterian doctrines of the Greek Church never
prevent its votaries from worshipping images. So, in the anecdote we are
going to extract from the Patriarchal History, we find that the Greeks
regard violations of truth and honour as venial offences, if not
absolutely meritorious acts, whenever they are supposed to have turned
to the profit of their ecclesiastical establishment.
“During the reign of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, when Toulphi
Pasha was grand vizier,[133] the attention of the Sublime Porte was
called to the circumstance that the duty of the caliph of the Mohammedan
faith required the destruction of all places of worship belonging to
Infidels in every city which the true believers had taken with the
sword. Now, as Mohammed II. had taken Constantinople by storm, it was
the sultan’s duty to destroy all the Christian churches within the
walls; and all the plagues and fires which had desolated the city, and
which, it was observed, generally consumed more Turkish than Greek
property, evidently arose from the Divine anger at the neglect of this
important command of the Prophet. Sultan Suleiman was said to have
consulted the mufti on the necessity of only tolerating places of
worship for the Christians without the walls; and it was believed that
the mufti had delivered a fetva, authorising the destruction of all the
Greek churches in Constantinople. Sultan Suleiman then issued an order
to his grand vizier, commanding him to carry the fetva into execution.
At this time Jeremiah was patriarch of Constantinople.
“The patriarch heard the report, and, terrified at the news, mounted his
mule, and hastened to the palace of the grand vizier, who received him
with kindness. The two dignitaries discussed the matter of the sultan’s
order, and concerted together a mode of evading its execution. A meeting
of the divan was held, at which the grand vizier made a public
communication of the imperial decree to the patriarch Jeremiah. But the
head of the Greek Church gravely observed, that the circumstances of the
mufti’s fetva were not applicable to the city of Constantinople. He
declared that before Mohammed II. entered Constantinople, the Emperor
Constantine, finding the place no longer tenable, had gone out of the
city and presented the keys to the Sultan, who had admitted him to do
homage as a subject for himself and the Greek people, before the gates
were thrown open to admit the conqueror. On this ground he pleaded that
all the concessions made by Mohammed II. to the patriarchs and to the
Greek Church were lawful. Well might all the members of the divan wonder
at this strange tale concerning the conquest of Constantinople. But many
had received large presents from the patriarch, and many waited to hear
the opinion of the grand vizier before pretending to doubt its accuracy.
The grand vizier declared that the question was so important that it
would be proper to adjourn the business to a grand divan on the
following day.
“The report having spread among the whole population of Constantinople,
that the Government intended to destroy all the Christian churches,
every class of society was in movement. Long before the meeting of the
divan, crowds of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews assembled at the
Porte to hear the result of the deliberation. The whole space from the
gate of the serai to the court of St Sophia’s was filled with the
multitude. The Patriarch Jeremiah was waiting to be admitted to the
divan, and soon after the members had taken their places he was summoned
to enter. When he reached the centre of the hall, he made his
prostrations to the assembled viziers, and then, standing erect,
declared himself ready to answer for his church. All admired the dignity
of his presence. His white beard descended on his breast, and the sweat
fell in large drops from his forehead. The Greeks declared that he
emulated the passion of Christ, of whose orthodox church he was the
representative on earth. The archonts of the Greek nation stood
trembling beside him.
“At length the grand vizier spoke. ‘Patriarch of the Greeks, a fetva of
our law has been delivered, and an order of the padishah has been
issued, prohibiting the existence of any church in the cities which the
true believers have conquered sword in hand. This city was taken by
storm by the great Sultan Mohammed the conqueror. Therefore, let your
priests remove all their property from the churches in their possession,
and, after shutting them up, deliver the keys to our master’s officers,
that the churches may be destroyed.’ To this summons the patriarch
replied in a distinct voice, ‘I cannot answer, O grand vizier! for what
happened in other cities; but with regard to this city of Constantinople
I can solemnly affirm that the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos, with the
nobles, the clergy, and the people, surrendered it voluntarily to the
Sultan Mohammed.’ The grand vizier cautioned the patriarch not to assert
anything which he could not prove by the testimony of Mohammedan
witnesses, who were able to certify the truth of what he said. The
patriarch immediately engaged to produce witnesses, and the affair was
adjourned for twenty days.
“The Greeks were in great alarm. Everybody knew that the patriarch had
engaged to prove a lie; so that the only hope of safety appeared to be
in the perpetual adjournment of the question. To effect this, the
wealthiest Greeks—Phanariotes and merchants—offered to supply the
patriarch with the sums of money necessary to bribe the grand vizier and
the members of the divan.
“But the Patriarch Jeremiah and the grand vizier Toulphi did not wish to
admit any strangers into the secret of their proceedings. So the
patriarch sent men of experience to Adrianople, who met agents of the
grand vizier, and at last two aged Mussulmans were found who were
willing for a large bribe to testify that the patriarch had spoken the
truth. These witnesses were conducted to Constantinople, and presented
to the Patriarch Jeremiah, who embraced them, and took care that they
should be well fed, lodged, clothed, and carefully watched, until they
appeared before the divan. When they had rested from the fatigues of
their journey, they were conducted to the grand vizier, who spoke kindly
to them, told them the patriarch was his friend, and exhorted them to
give their evidence without fear.
“On the day appointed to hear the evidence, the Patriarch Jeremiah
presented himself before the divan. The grand vizier asked if he was
prepared to produce the evidence he had promised, and the Patriarch
replied that the witnesses were waiting without to be examined.
“Two aged Turks were now conducted into the hall. Their beards were
white as the purest snow, red circles surrounded their eyes, from which
the tears fell incessantly, while their hands and feet moved with a
continual tremor. The viziers gazed at them with astonishment, for two
men so far advanced in years had never been seen before on earth
standing side by side. They looked like two brothers whom death had
forgotten. The grand vizier asked their names, and encouraged them by
making some other inquiries. They replied that they were both about
eighteen years of age when Constantinople was taken by the Sultan
Mohammed the victorious. Since that time they knew that eighty-four
years had elapsed, and therefore they were aware that they had reached
the age of a hundred and two. They then gave the following account of
the conquest of Constantinople:—
“The siege was formed by land and sea, and long and bloody engagements
took place, but at last several breaches were made in the walls, and it
was evident that the place would soon be taken. Preparations were making
for a final assault, when the Emperor of the Greeks sent a deputation of
his nobles to the sultan to demand a capitulation. The sultan, wishing
to save the city from destruction, and to spare the blood of the true
believers, granted the infidels the following terms of capitulation,
which the witnesses pretended to remember with accuracy, because a copy
had been publicly signed by the sultan and read aloud to the troops: ‘I,
the Sultan Mohammed, pardon the Emperor Constantine and the Greeks, and
grant their petition to become my subjects, and live in peace under my
protection. I allow the nobles to retain their slaves and property, and
I declare that the people shall live free from all illegal exactions,
and that their children shall not be taken to be enrolled in the corps
of janissaries.[134] This charter shall be binding on me and my
successors for ever.’ With this charter the Greek deputation returned to
the emperor, who came out immediately, and falling on his knees before
Mohammed the Second, presented to him the keys of the city. The sultan
then raised Constantine, kissed him, and made him sit down on his right
hand. For three days the two princes rejoiced together, and then the
emperor led the sultan into the city.
“As soon as the members of the divan heard this account of the taking of
Constantinople from the two old men who had witnessed the events, they
drew up a report and transmitted it to Sultan Suleiman. The sultan,
convinced that everything must have happened as the old Mussulmans
deposed, immediately ordered that the Christians should be allowed to
retain possession of their churches, and that no man should molest the
patriarch of the Greeks under any pretext.”
Now, the whole of this tale is an absurd forgery. Moreover, the
ignorance of the Greeks who framed it is even more extraordinary than
their utter disregard for truth. The accomplished sultan, Suleiman the
Magnificent, and the learned grand vizier, Loufti Pasha, are represented
as stupid Turks, destitute of all knowledge of the history of the
Othoman Empire. Greek vanity is flattered by an exhibition of the way in
which Romaic genius nullifies the power of the padishah, by availing
itself of the corruption in the Turkish administration. But the
strangest feature in the fable is the moral obtuseness of the Hellenic
mind, which solicits admiration for the frauds and falsehoods of their
patriarch. The inventor of the tale had in all probability heard that
Loufti Pasha was an Albanian by birth, but was ignorant of the fact that
he was a man of learning. He could not have known that, when in exile at
Demotika, Loufti wrote a history of the Othoman Empire, which is still
preserved. Indeed, a comparison of the flourishing state of Turkish
literature with the degraded condition of Greek literature in the
sixteenth century contrasts in a singular manner with the contempt
displayed by the Greeks in their illiterate records for the accomplished
and warlike Othomans. But the Greeks have always viewed the history of
other nations through a mist of prejudices which has bewildered
themselves far more than their enemies.
This anecdote presents a faithful picture of the Hellenic mind, and of
Greek political and historical knowledge, three hundred years ago. We
shall now endeavour to place before our readers an equally correct
picture of their mode of thinking and acting at present.
The constitutional system of government has proved as complete a failure
in Greece as the absolute monarchy which terminated at the revolution of
1843. Our description of the actual condition of the country will
explain the particular causes which have corrupted the representative
system and the central administration. The court of King Otho is really
quite as much the predominant feature in the political condition of
Greece as his palace is in the landscape at Athens. Both are great
deformities in scenes of great interest. There is a grotesque mimicry of
royal state at the monster palace of the little capital of liberated
Greece. A marshal of the palace and a master of the ceremonies, a
grandmaîtresse, military and naval aides-de-camp, ordinance officers,
ladies of honour, and young ladies-in-waiting, courtiers who cannot
write, and courtiers who cannot ride; court carriages in a kingdom
without mail-coaches; royal steam-yachts, but no packets even with oars;
crosses, ribbons, and stars; salaries, places, and pensions;—everything
which ruins a government, and nothing which enriches a people.
The power of the crown is great. It is supported by a civil list of one
million of drachmas annually, in a state which has a net revenue of
twelve. The enormous amount of this civil list may be estimated from the
facts, that the salaries of the Greek ministers are only twelve thousand
drachmas a year, and of the Greek senators only six thousand. Besides
the influence which this exorbitant wealth confers on the monarch, he
possesses still greater social influence, for the whole of the upper
classes at Athens consist of paid officials, every one of whom is liable
to lose his place at a word from King Otho, who, with very little
exertion on the part of that royal memory on which kings pride
themselves, may recollect every man who resides at his capital qualified
to enter his palace. The desire of King Otho to extend his personal
influence, and centralise power in his own hands, is so great, that
every individual who receives a public appointment, however
insignificant, whether at Athens or in the provinces, is compelled to
wait on his majesty to thank him for the favour, which he naturally
pretends to consider as a reward for his attachment to the royal
Bavarian, not as a reward for his services to Greece. King Otho has been
an apt pupil of Louis Philippe in the political corruption that renders
the constitutional system subservient to the royal power in a thoroughly
centralised administration.
In one branch of political corruption King Otho may boast that he has
outdone all European sovereigns. It is true, he found in the Hellenic
mind a rich soil, but he may claim the merit of having worked it like a
first-rate farmer. The local institutions to which the friends of Greece
looked for a firm basis for liberal institutions, have in his hands been
rendered the instrument for converting popular elections into royal
nominations. When the Bavarian regency destroyed the communal system of
Greece, they replaced it by municipalities of greater extent, and
rendered the local authorities dependent on the Minister of the
Interior. King Otho availed himself of the central control created by
the municipal law, to make the mayor and local magistrates everywhere
dependent on his personal favour. The mayors are now agents and spies of
the court. This is effected in the following manner: By one of those
preposterous regulations, framed by statesmen to delude the people with
a show of conferring on them free institutions, the nomination of the
mayor is vested in the central government. An oligarchical college of
electors selects three members of the municipality, and from these his
majesty selects the most subservient to occupy the place. By availing
himself skilfully of this absurd law, King Otho has filled the towns of
Greece with magistrates entirely dependent on his will—men whom their
fellow-citizens, if universal suffrage prevailed in the municipal
elections of the mayors as it does in the more important elections of
deputies to the legislature, would not allow to remain an hour in
office. These nominees of the court are placed in possession of
considerable salaries by the will of the central government, and as they
are dependent on the court for their office, they act as its devoted
agents. The consequence is, that King Otho is enabled to employ the
funds of the Greek municipalities in maintaining a species of court
policemen over the whole country. The influence thus gained may be
estimated from the circumstance that upwards of two millions of drachmas
are thus withdrawn from their legitimate use, in making roads and
facilitating communications by land and water, and are devoted to pay a
band of royal _sbirri_. Many persons in England have felt astonished
that a man of such moderate talents as King Otho could render such
effectual service to Russia, as to agitate the whole of Greece by making
an invasion of Turkey appear a national movement. But the fact is, that
the power possessed by the central government through the municipalities
is so great, that we have to thank the extreme incapacity of King Otho
and the general corruption of the instruments he employed for rendering
the attack on Turkey as inefficient as it proved. The King gave the
signal for a general recruiting to aid the Russian cause, but his
instruments in the provinces employed the opportunity in attending to
their own interests, before giving themselves much trouble about making
a diversion for the profit of the Czar or the Bavarian. King Otho on
this occasion paid the usual penalty of those who work by corruption.
We must not blame King Otho too severely for making use of corrupt
persuasion as an instrument of parliamentary government. The proceedings
of our Ministers rise up before us as an apology for the Greek monarchy.
A Coalition of all the administrative talent of Britain cannot conduct
the non-centralised government of the empire without a little local
jobbery. Even Lord Aberdeen’s own department publicly owns the necessity
of throwing a few corrupt sops to a hungry and restive body of Liberal
representatives. In the Treasury report, recommending some reforms in
our post-office, the following words will be found,—it seems a very
plain statement of adherence to the principles on which King Otho
influences the Greek municipalities: “My Lords (of the Treasury—_i. e._,
Messrs Aberdeen & Co.) are of opinion that it is for the _public
interest_ that the appointments should be made as at present by my
Lords, after consulting, through the recommendation of the members for
the county or town, the convenience and wishes of the population.”
Population in this sentence, we presume, means the class who usually job
such matters, for we have never before heard it asserted that the mob
was the best judge of administrative capacity.
The fact that a man so notoriously deficient in political wisdom as King
Otho has succeeded in establishing a system, giving him a predominant
influence over the Greeks, is a sad evidence of the extreme venality of
Greek society; for there can hardly be a doubt that the Greeks suggested
to their King the employment of the national resources in purchasing the
service of individuals instead of devoting them to the improvement of
the nation.
We have but few observations to make on the late treacherous attack of
King Otho and his subjects on their neighbour and ally, the Sultan Abdul
Medjid. There could not be an act of greater folly; and even amidst the
incapable and cowardly exhibitions of modern times, it is the national
movement which has been conducted in the most incapable and cowardly
manner. Of the complicity of King Otho there never was a doubt, in spite
of the denials of the Greek and German press. The courts of London and
Paris have refrained from giving publicity to all the documents which
fell into the hands of the Turks proving this complicity, as it was not
their wish to increase the embarrassments of the hour by declaring the
throne of Greece vacant. Regarding the attack on Turkey, however, in the
light of a diversion for the advantage of Russia, it might have rendered
important assistance to the Czar. Had it been conducted with energy and
ability, it might have inflicted a serious blow on the Othoman Empire.
When King Otho violated the treaties to which he owed his throne, and
appealed to force as the arbiter of his future relations with Turkey, he
expected, not without some chance of success, to become master of the
line of fortresses that defend the frontiers of Turkey towards Greece.
Volo, Domoko, Arta, and Prevesa, were almost without garrisons; and it
was only by the extreme incapacity of the Greek leaders, and the
misconduct of those who invaded Turkey, that these fortresses escaped
capture. The court of Athens acted on the conviction that the Russian
army would force the Balkan in a few weeks, and appear before the walls
of Constantinople without encountering any serious resistance. It
consequently believed that it would not be in the Sultan’s power to
detach a force sufficient to protect Thessaly and Epirus. Once in
possession of the fortresses which command these provinces, the King
believed that England and France would be compelled to treat with him,
and leave him in possession of the spoil. Fortunately for the Othoman
Empire, both the Emperor Nicholas and King Otho are very bad generals.
Both appear to have calculated that the armed rabble of Greeks in
fustanello could perform the duties of an army. And King Otho now finds
that he has sacrificed the most valuable portion of his subjects’
commerce to Russian interests, without any advantage to his cherished
scheme of making himself an absolute monarch.
The political morality of King Otho, in his foreign as in his internal
affairs, deserves the severest condemnation. His behaviour to Turkey has
met with the most galling punishment. He retains his crown by the
sufferance of those whom he has betrayed. His folly has ruined the
commerce of his subjects, and transferred the neutral trade, which might
have enriched the Greeks, to the ships of the Austrians, Genoese, and
Neapolitans.
Let us now contrast the conduct of the Greek monarch with the behaviour
of the President of the United States in a similar case. Cuba is quite
as desirable a possession to the Americans as Thessaly and Epirus are to
the Greeks. In both countries a large part of the population eagerly
desires the conquest. There is, however, this difference: The Greeks
could not make any impression on their enemy, even though they took him
by surprise; but the Americans would probably soon gain possession of
Cuba, if their government only winked at the enterprises of private
citizens. Had the President of the United States been as impolitic and
selfish as King Otho, he might have encouraged piratical attacks on
Cuba. The position of General Pierce bore a strong resemblance to that
of the King of Greece, but his conduct was diametrically opposite. Even
though General Pierce is now engaged in demanding from Spain reparation
for acts of violence committed on the property of American citizens in
Cuba, and though it is possible that the disputes between the two
countries may soon lead to hostilities, the President of the United
States uses the following terms in his Message to the Senate:—
“The formal demand for immediate reparation (from Spain) has only served
to call forth a justification of the local authorities of Cuba, which
transfers the responsibility to the Spanish government.... Meanwhile
information was received that preparation was making within the limits
of the United States, by private individuals, under military
organisation, for a descent upon the island of Cuba, with a view to
wrest it from the dominion of Spain. International comity, the
obligations of treaties, and the express provisions of the law, alike
required, in my judgment, that all the constitutional power of the
executive should be exerted to prevent the consummation of such a
violation of positive law, and of that good faith on which mainly the
amicable relations of neighbouring nations must depend.
“In conformity with these convictions of public duty, a proclamation was
issued to warn all persons not to participate in the contemplated
enterprise, and to invoke the interposition in this behalf of the proper
officers of government. _No provocation whatever can justify private
expeditions of hostility against a country at peace with the United
States._”
Contrast these words with King Otho’s declaration to the ministers of
Great Britain and France, that his royal conscience would not allow him
to restrain the marauding forays and piratical expeditions of his
subjects against Turkey, and that rather than attempt it he would
himself march at their head. _International comity_ and _the obligations
of treaties_ now compel the two protecting powers to employ against King
Otho and the Greeks that force to which they appealed as arbiter of
their relations with Turkey, and they must be forcibly obliged to
observe _that good faith on which mainly the amicable relations of
neighbouring States must depend_. Unless, therefore, the Greek King and
the Greek nation can give ample security that no provocation will again
induce them to commence private acts of hostility against Epirus and
Thessaly while the Greek kingdom is at peace with the Othoman Empire,
the tranquillity of Europe requires that the independence of Greece
should be suspended, and the country remain in the power of a foreign
force, until a government be firmly established which will respect the
principles of the law of nations as laid down by the President of the
United States in his Message to the Senate.
The Greeks in general apologise for their treacherous attempt to
surprise the Turks, by declaring that the liberated territory is too
small to constitute an independent State. They seem to overlook the
corollary which the European cabinets may be inclined to deduce from
their violation of “international comity and the obligations of
treaties,” and extinguish their independence rather than increase their
territory. But the falsehood of the assertion is too apparent to deserve
refutation. The kingdom of Greece is more thinly peopled than any other
State in Europe; but this want of population is caused by its
communications, both by land and sea, being in a worse state than they
are in any other country. Idle clerks in public offices, and armed men
who frequent coffee-houses, form a numerous section of the town
population, and these men consume all the revenues of the State, which
ought to be devoted to public improvements. Indeed, the financial and
political condition of King Otho’s dominions is so bad, that it would be
an act of inhumanity to transfer any portion of the population of the
Sultan’s territory to the Greek government. If Chios or Samos were
annexed to Greece tomorrow, the inhabitants would find their financial
burdens greatly increased, and their trade very much diminished, without
any corresponding improvement in their political condition for the
present. The benefits they would acquire might nevertheless awaken hopes
of a better future. They would be placed in possession of the liberty of
the press, and of a good judicial system, so that when the corrupting
influence of the court of Athens, of the Phanariot place-hunters, and of
the palikari, ceases to exist, amendment may be expected by the
enthusiastic. Judging from actual appearances, King Otho’s dominions
seem to be much too large, both for the amount of the population, and
for the administrative capacity of the government. Even Athens, Syra,
Patras, Nauplia, and Chalcis, are little better than undrained dirty
towns, destitute of proper municipal organisation and local police,
while the other towns in the country are merely overgrown villages. With
the exception of a few drives for the court carriages round Athens, and
a road for the Austrian traffic across the isthmus of Corinth, there is
not a good cart-road in the kingdom, and very few tolerable bridle-roads
even from one town to another. Twenty islands of the Archipelago, each
containing a town, are not visited by any regular packets, and it
frequently happens that six weeks elapse without their receiving any
news from the capital. It is almost needless to say that a population
living in such a state of isolation must be in a stationary, if not in a
declining, condition. If the numbers are kept up, the buildings of past
times are allowed to fall to decay, and all the accumulated capital is
rapidly deteriorating. Every traveller who has visited the islands of
the Archipelago, and the towns in the interior of the Peloponnesus, must
have noticed many proofs of this decay, quite independent of the
dilapidation caused by the revolutionary war, or the civil broils which
followed it.
Other proofs of the incapacity of the existing government of Greece to
conduct the centralised system, as established in the limited territory
it now rules, may be found in the civil wars already noticed, in the
general anarchy and contempt for the rights of property that prevails,
and in the enormous numbers of criminals in all the prisons of the
kingdom. We have now before us Athenian newspapers of the month of July,
filled with complaints of acts of brigandage almost within sight of King
Otho’s palace. Some years ago a party of pleasure was robbed during a
picnic at Kephisia; and the newspapers have frequently recorded cases of
boiling oil having been poured on women to compel them to show the
robbers where the family hoards were concealed. We have seen an
occurrence of this kind recorded in Attica while the Chambers were in
session. The inference from these facts seems to be, that King Otho, the
Greek Chambers, and the existing central administration, are incompetent
to establish order and security for life and property in the territory
they now pretend to govern. We ask whether it is possible for Great
Britain and France to entertain the question of an augmentation of such
a kingdom?
We may now turn from examining the position of King Otho and the Greek
government in relation to their foreign policy, and take a glance at the
social and political condition of the nation. We must commence by
enumerating what the people have neglected to do. This will serve to
show how great the difficulties now are in the way of improving the
country. During the ten years of representative government which have
now elapsed, the Greek deputies have made no systematic efforts to
improve the condition of the agricultural population, though
three-quarters of the inhabitants of Greece are chiefly dependent on
agriculture for their subsistence. No attempt has been made to reform
the barbarous method of collecting the land-tax in kind, which retains
the population in the stationary condition into which it fell on the
decline of the Byzantine Empire. The municipalities have been allowed to
become the vehicles of court corruption, and no measures have been taken
to enforce regular publication of their receipts and expenditure. No
criminal statistics are published. Instead of appropriating annually a
sum of money for the construction of roads, bridges, quays, and
ferry-boats, which are so necessary in a mountainous and insular State,
the national interests are sacrificed to the gains of individual
senators and deputies. New places are annually created, and the trade of
Greece is transferred to Austrian and French steam-companies. The
greatest commercial advantages ever placed at the disposal of any people
have been neglected by the Greek nation, and perhaps completely thrown
away by their late devotion to Russia. Yet the Greeks, who see the
number of foreign steamers daily increasing in their ports, boast with
their usual childish vanity of their superiority over every other people
in naval skill. They even throw out hints in their political writings
that the real cause of Lord Palmerston’s dissatisfaction with King Otho
was founded on a reasonable jealousy of the Greek navy, and a patriotic
fear lest the subjects of that monarch should deprive England of her
commercial supremacy! Yet while boasting in this Hellenic strain, like
true descendants of the contemporaries of Juvenal and Lucian, they have
allowed the most profitable part of their own coasting trade to pass
into the hands of the Austrian Lloyd Steam Company.
A tendency to social and political disintegration is quite as much a
characteristic of the population of liberated Greece as it was of
ancient Hellas. National differences, municipal distinctions, local
interests, class prejudices, and individual pretensions, divide the
people.
The first great social division is one of race. Only about
three-quarters of the population of the Greek kingdom consists of
Greeks—the other quarter is composed of Albanians. These races rarely
intermarry, and few Greeks ever learn the Albanian language; yet the
Albanian race is rapidly acquiring political importance in the present
condition of the Othoman Empire. It enjoys two immense advantages over
the Greek race. Its geographical location concentrates the population,
and offers a strong barrier against any foreign conquerors; while its
military habits enables it to raise far larger and more efficient
armies. It is also physically as much superior to the Greek as it is
intellectually inferior. The bravest men and the most beautiful women in
the Greek kingdom are of the purest Albanian blood, unadulterated with
any admixture with the Hellenic race. Marko Botzaris, Miaoulis, and
Konduriottis were Albanians. If the Albanians should, like their
fellow-citizens the Greeks, become more eager to identify their
existence with an ideal past than with a promising future, there is no
reason for their being behind-hand in boasting. As descendants of the
Macedonians, they may proudly vaunt that they have repeatedly conquered
the Hellenes; and, as a section of the great Thracian people, they trace
their origin to a mightier source than the Greeks. Consequently, if race
is to become a determining cause in the formation of independent States,
or even national representations, within the limits of the Othoman
Empire, the warlike Albanians, in their inexpugnable mountains, are
likely to assume a more important position than the commercial Greeks,
dispersed in exposed seaports and defenceless islands. The application
of ethnology to politics, which the Greeks have strongly-advocated, is
extremely likely to operate forcibly in preventing any considerable
extension of their kingdom. A Greek empire would be an impossibility if
a natural ethnological development were adopted as a basis for
partitioning Turkey in Europe. The Vallachians, Sclavonians, and
Albanians are as able and willing to arrest the progress of the Greeks
to-day, as the Thracians, Macedonians, and Epirots were in ancient
times.
The next strongly-marked line of separation in the population of the
Greek kingdom is that between the agricultural population and the
inhabitants of the towns, whether the citizens live by orchard and
garden culture, or by trade and foreign commerce. About three-quarters
of the inhabitants of Greece live by agriculture; yet agricultural
industry remains in the rudest state. The Bavarian Regency, the Greek
King, and the representative Chambers, have hitherto done nothing to
improve the condition of the agricultural class, nor to increase the
produce of the country. The land which maintained one family four
hundred years ago, will only maintain one family at the present day; the
district which supported a thousand families under the Turks, can do no
more under King Otho. The absurd fiscal arrangements concerning the
collection of the land-tax in kind, prevent the peasantry from planting
trees; so that in the richest plains devoted to the cultivation of
cereals, the agricultural class is in the most miserable condition—as in
the fertile districts of Thebes and Messenia. There is also no
inducement to extend cultivation, as no roads exist; and a mule would,
in a large part of Greece, eat its load of barley before it reached the
nearest market. The agricultural class in Greece is poor, barbarous, and
industrious; the population of the towns, on the other hand, is in easy
circumstances, advanced in civilisation, and extremely idle. In no other
country are coffee-houses so numerous or so well filled. The great
number of persons living on places and pensions conferred by the central
government, or receiving pay from the municipalities with no duty to
perform, fills the streets of every town in Greece with an amount of
idle individuals which travellers view with wonder.
The third prominent feature in the social condition of the Greek
population is the existence of a military caste called Palikars. These
palikars are nothing more than the armed followers of certain military
chiefs who have secured to themselves an acknowledged position and
regular pay in the Greek kingdom. The palikars wear the Albanian dress,
and pretend to be professional soldiers, though neither they nor their
leaders know anything of military tactics or discipline. A small number
only are composed of the survivors of the irregular troops of the
revolutionary war. The greater part consists of idle young men who are
incapable of learning a trade, and disinclined to submit to discipline.
The utter uselessness of the palikars in military operations was
displayed in the ease with which they were defeated and dispersed by
Fuad Effendi. These armed bands, however, though they are useless
against an enemy, are extremely dangerous to the native peasantry. They
march about the Greek kingdom from one end to the other, living at free
quarters on the villagers, and consuming annually as large a portion of
the produce of the soil as is paid to the central government in the
shape of land-tax. In some disturbances which took place in the island
of Eubœa they were said to have consumed, in forced contributions from
the agricultural population, nearly one-third of the whole annual
produce of the island.
We do not intend to deny the services which the palikars rendered during
the war against the Turks. In a defensive warfare against an
undisciplined enemy like the Turks of 1821, or an ill-organised force
like the Bavarians of 1833, they were very efficient. But against the
French at Argos they were utterly useless, even though they had
intrenched themselves in a manner which they fancied would give them a
decided advantage over regular troops. The French carried all their
positions with the bayonet, and the palikars soon fled in dismay. The
revival of the system of palikarism is one of the many evils which Lord
Palmerston’s knavish protégé, Count Armansperg, bequeathed to Greece. M.
Maurer had broken up the hordes of these children of anarchy in a very
effectual manner, though perhaps with unnecessary violence and severity.
The object of Count Armansperg in restoring palikarism was to form for
himself a military party. By the formation of troops enrolled under
chiefs attached to his own person, he expected to be able to keep down
public opinion in the provinces; while, by a lavish distribution of
money and places, he knew he could silence it at Athens. The favoured
captains were allowed to collect bands of armed followers, almost
without any control on the part of the minister-of-war, and without the
men or the officers being subjected to any discipline. In the provinces,
these captains were intrusted with extraordinary powers, which they used
for party purposes; and the palikars became an organ of the government
for intimidating its opponents. The consequences of Count Armansperg’s
conduct were most injurious. Those captains who were unable to gain his
good-will collected bands of armed men, or joined the brigands, and
endeavoured to increase the number of their followers by levying
black-mail on the peaceful agriculturists, in the hope that the
government would eventually be compelled to purchase their services.
Their calculation proved correct; and Count Armansperg ended by taking
into his pay the very men against whom he had employed his generals.
King Otho adopted with delight the corrupt system of his regent, and
even extended its application. He filled his palace with palikars, and
neglected the regular troops. Men ignorant of all military service were
intrusted with military command in the provinces, where their services
were chiefly required to intimidate opposition, and secure the election
of court candidates as deputies and mayors. Koletti, the favourite
leader of the palikar class, became King Otho’s favourite minister; and
the influence of that worthless Vallachian Aspropotamite enabled the
count to nullify the constitution of 1844. By the influence of the
palikars, assisted, it is true, by his own anti-constitutional love of
administrative despotism, Mavrocordatos was driven from the ministry,
and King Otho re-established in absolute power, by the assistance of
palikarism and municipal corruption.
The late invasion of Turkey could hardly have taken place, if it had not
been in King Otho’s power to launch these irregular bands against his
neighbour’s frontier; for, with all his folly and imprudence, he would
not have ventured to march regular troops openly against the Sultan
without a declaration of war. On the other hand, it was fortunate for
Europe that the utter worthlessness of these undisciplined bands for all
military operations, except the defence of mountain passes, prevented
their capturing the frontier fortresses of Epirus and Thessaly, and
enabled Fuad Effendi to defeat their army with so much ease at Peta.
Never, certainly, did any troops make a more despicable military display
than the palikars of Greece in their late attack on Turkey. While these
invaders made their patriotism a pretext for plundering their
unfortunate countrymen who were subjects of the Othoman Empire, and
devoted their chief attention to carrying off cattle and sheep belonging
to Greeks and Christians, instead of attempting to storm the
ill-fortified holds of the Turks, the Othoman troops displayed one of
the highest characteristics in which the Greek race has always been
deficient—a sense of duty. They bravely defended the posts committed to
their care, and success crowned their good conduct.
We have now given an impartial account of the faults of King Otho, and
of the political vices of the Greek nation; we will proceed to enumerate
the virtues of the people with equal impartiality. The greatest enemies
of the Greeks cannot deny that they possess a high degree of patriotism.
Whatever its origin may be, and however much it may be disfigured by
vanity, it is a great virtue, and produces abundant good fruit. The sums
of money which have been employed by private individuals in the
construction of churches and school-houses over all Greece, the liberal
donations they annually remit to Athens for advancing the cause of
education, the munificent presents of books, medals, and philosophical
instruments to the University and to the Observatory, and the immense
contributions collected to aid the late impolitic attack on Turkey, all
prove that, under a better government, and with good guidance, the
patriotism of the Greeks might be rendered of great use in advancing the
moral improvement and material prosperity of their country. But their
patriotic feelings must be directed to the improvement of morality and
religion before much good can be effected. The importance of private
virtue is not sufficiently appreciated by the Greeks as a guarantee for
political honesty. Individual character has more influence as an element
of national strength and greatness, than the statesmen at Athens are
inclined to believe. Without citing historical examples, we may remind
them that a dispersed nation, mingled as the Greeks are with foreign
races, is much more amenable to the public opinion of other nations,
than a race pressed together in close geographical contiguity, and with
which foreigners rarely communicate.
The industry of the Greeks is attested by their commercial activity, and
by their laborious agricultural operations. The mass of the population,
it is true, derives so little benefit from their toils, that we might
pardon them if they were much idler than they are. Those who are most
successful in commerce are compelled to expatriate themselves, which is
always a great hardship to a Greek. Those who labour at the fields and
dig the vineyards are unable to live in tolerable ease; for the want of
roads prevents their finding a sale for their produce, and deprives them
of the power of purchasing the luxuries they most eagerly desire.
Another honourable feature in Greek society is the good feeling
displayed by the classes which live beyond the sphere of court and
political influence. If a Greek is neither a courtier, a government
official, nor a palikar, he is generally a tolerably honest man, and by
no means a bad fellow, unless he be an Ionian or a Phanariot. We may
mention an anecdote, which proves strongly the existence of virtue in
the great mass of the labouring classes, even on that most delicate of
all subjects, honesty in paying taxes. When the Bavarians arrived in
Greece, they had not time to take any strong measures for enforcing a
very strict collection of the national revenues. The probable amount was
estimated at four millions, but the revenues of the preceding year had
not reached that sum. As it was necessary to leave much to the
conscience of the people, Mr Gladstone might have been satisfied with
three millions and a half, with a few five-pound notes falling in from
time to time from the remorse of defaulters. But the Greeks paid down
seven millions within the year; and the experience of subsequent revenue
returns proves that they must have paid the full amount to which
government had any claim.
The state of the legal profession at Athens impresses strangers with a
favourable opinion of the educated classes, when uncorrupted by the
service of a corrupted central administration. The advocates form a body
of well-educated men, whose professional gains render them independent
of court influence, and whose talents and character give them great
power over public opinion on judicial matters. Hence they exercise a
salutary control over the minister of justice and the judges. This is
doubly necessary, from the circumstance that the judges hold their
offices only during the pleasure of King Otho, who has frequently
removed those who have displeased him from office, or sent them into a
dreary exile in some distant province in an inferior charge. The power
of public opinion, as exercised by the bar, is consequently of great
importance to insure some degree of equity in the courts, and control
the general administration of justice in civil affairs; and it has been
used in a manner highly honourable both to the Greek bar and to the
national character.
There is another quality which the Greeks possess in a high degree, and
which, if properly directed by a good government, would aid greatly in
raising them from their present state of political degradation. This is
their aptitude for public discussion. Concentrated as at present on
state affairs, concerning which they are naturally quite ignorant, it
becomes a mere waste of words. But if employed on their local and
municipal affairs, concerning every detail of which they are fully
informed, it would soon become the means of checking the corruptions of
the court and of the central administration. This aptitude for public
business enabled them to retain a large share in the local
administration of their provinces under the Turks, and to organise the
communal system to which we are inclined to attribute their success in
the revolutionary war. The various central governments which followed
one another in succession during the war with Turkey, never displayed
much talent, nor enjoyed much influence over the people. The naval
force, though admirably conducted by Miaoulis, was, in spite of the
gallant deeds of Kanaris, inadequate to secure a decisive victory. The
military force was without organisation, powerless for attack, and
extremely ill-directed. No general in Greece, native or foreigner,
displayed any great military talent. In the navy, on the contrary, the
name of Hastings, who first employed hot shot and shells from ship
artillery, ranks justly with the glorious names of Miaoulis and Kanaris.
The war on land was entirely supported by the indomitable perseverance
of the people. Their political and military leaders weakened their
powers of resistance by their intrigues, avarice, and incapacity, but
the energy of the people never failed. Glorious examples are
innumerable, though Mr Tricoupi, the Greek historian of the war, has not
the judgment to select them. Lord Byron describes their behaviour, in
speaking of the Spaniards—
“Back to the struggle; baffled in the strife,
War! war! was still their cry—war, even to the knife!”
Messolonghi attests its truth.
The friends of Greece,—and she has still some sincere friends, in spite
of all her faults—may look forward to her communal system and local
attachments as a basis on which political order and national prosperity
can be firmly established. But unless the restless activity of the
people be usefully occupied in the management of their local affairs,
they will employ it, as at present, injuriously, in profiting by the
corruption of the central government. The want of a proper sphere of
energy for a large class of the population is evidently preparing Greece
for a series of revolutions. A representative government and a free
press, linked to a centralised administration, without the control of a
municipal organisation, tends naturally to revolution. To remove a
parish grievance, it becomes necessary to overthrow a minister; and a
very little experience in such countries reveals the secret, that it is
easier to make a revolution than obtain a reform.
Such was the state of Greece when the French and English troops landed
at the Piræus in the month of June, to prevent King Otho from throwing
the country into a state of complete anarchy by his insane policy of
assisting Russia. The Greeks, who had invaded Turkey, were already
defeated, strong garrisons were already placed in all the Turkish
fortresses on the Greek frontier, and a fleet of Turkish steamers
commanded the Archipelago. The war had degenerated into a series of
forays by land and piratical expeditions by sea, in which the Greeks
carried off the cattle, and plundered the warehouses and barns of the
subjects of the Porte. On the other hand, the Othoman government, unable
to guard against these attacks, threatened to invade Greece, and occupy
the richest islands of the Archipelago as a material guarantee for
indemnity. The interference of the Allies was quite as necessary to
defend the Greek people as the Turkish provinces. A change was of course
immediately effected in the government. M. Alexander Mavrocordatos, then
Greek minister at Paris, was appointed Prime Minister. The name of
Mavrocordatos is well known to all who are acquainted with the history
of the Greek revolution. His merits and defects are correctly stated in
General Gordon’s excellent work. General Kalergy, another distinguished
name in Greek history, was intrusted with the war department. M. George
Psyllas, who for the last ten years has stood forward as the only
consistent supporter of liberal measures and communal interests in the
Senate, was named Minister of Religion and Public Instruction. He is an
Athenian, and represented Athens at the first National Assembly, held at
the commencement of the revolution, when the constitution of Epidaurus
was framed. These three men are undoubtedly the best men in Greece for
the offices committed to them. But their colleagues are not so well
selected. Kanaris is Minister of the Marine—no braver nor more patriotic
man breathes, but he is no better suited to be a minister than an
archbishop. The other ministers are positively very ill chosen. M.
Anastasios Londos, whose tergiversation and folly caused the quarrel
with Great Britain in 1850, and the blockade of the Piræus, is Minister
of Justice. He is as deficient in knowledge of law and judicial
administration, as he has shown himself ignorant of the principles of
political honesty, and destitute of sound judgment. The other
individuals may be left nameless.
The only question of interest in Great Britain is, whether these
ministers can do anything to improve the condition of the people, to
establish a greater degree of security for life and property than now
prevails, open new fields for commercial and agricultural industry, and
make Greece an improving and prosperous country; for these changes alone
can guarantee the tranquillity of the East.
The first step to be taken must be, to abolish the existing manner of
collecting the tenth of the gross produce of the land, as a land-tax.
There is no other means of getting quit of the numerous fiscal
regulations which deprive the agricultural classes of the power of
disposing of their labour in the way most conducive to their profit. The
next thing is, to restore life and energy to the municipal system, and
extend the independent sphere of action of the municipal authorities.
The present Minister of the Interior is perhaps as well fitted to do
this as he is to swallow a camel. The Greeks generally have shown that
they are deficient in the temper and capacity requisite to conduct a
central government. They still want the experience necessary to give
ordinary men a sense of the value of political honesty, and there is no
possibility of their gaining it in any school but that of their own
municipal practice. If they are incurably addicted to peculation, they
had better commit their acts of dishonesty at home, where the exact
amount of their frauds can easily be ascertained, and is sure to be made
public. Palikarism must be utterly rooted out. General Kalergy has
promptly commenced the work which no man is so well able to complete.
The army and navy must be reformed. A corps of pioneers must be formed
to build bridges; steam-packets, and galleys with oars, must facilitate
communications.
Now, is Alexander Mavrocordatos the man to do these things? We cannot
say. He has always shown himself too much the slave of bureaucratic
prejudices for us to feel any very firm confidence in his political
views. Nevertheless, at this moment, he is the only Greek who possesses
the political honesty and diplomatic experience necessary for preserving
friendly relations with the allies of Turkey, and at the same time
saving the national independence of his country: he has, therefore, our
best wishes for his success.
The time is one of great difficulty. A mighty revolution has commenced
in the East, which the Greek race has neither the energy nor the power
to direct. If well and wisely governed, it may profit by the course of
events; but if its national vanity force it into collision with any of
the great actors in the scene, it may be brushed rudely aside, and sink
back into the insignificant position it has held ever since the Franks
conquered Constantinople and founded principalities in Greece in 1204.
Hellenism and orthodoxy must yield to philanthropy and Christian
civilisation. To us the future is dark; but of one thing we are assured,
that the occupation of Greece by the allied troops was absolutely
necessary to enable any ministry to commence the task of improvement in
the kingdom of Greece.
STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND.
PART II.
Exemption from the authority of the ordinary legal or correctional
tribunals was one of the remarkable features of the ancient
universities, and the relics of it which have come down almost to the
present day in Scotland are very curious. The university was a state in
itself, where the administrators of the ordinary authority of the realm
had no more power than in a neighbouring independent republic. So
jealously was this authority watched and fenced, that usually when the
dispute lay between the liegemen of the university and those of the
State—between gown and town—the university haughtily arrogated the
authority over both. To be sure, it was very much the practice of the
age to adjust rights and privileges by balancing one against another—by
letting them fight out, as it were, every question in a general contest,
and produce a sort of rude justice by the antagonism and balance of
forces, just as in some Oriental states at this day the strangers of
each nation have the privilege of living under their native laws; a
method which, by pitting privilege against privilege, and letting the
stronger bear down the weaker, saves the central government much
disagreeable and difficult work in the adjustment of rights and duties.
So, in the middle ages, we had the ecclesiastical competing with the
baronial interests, and the burghal or corporate with both. Nay, in
these last there was a subdivision of interests, various corporations of
craftsmen being subject to the authority of their own syndics, deans, or
mayors, and entitled to free themselves from any interference in many of
their affairs by the burghal or even the royal courts. Ecclesiastical
law fought with civil law, and chancery carried on a ceaseless
undermining contest with common law; while over Europe there were
inexhaustible varieties of palatinates, margravates, regalities, and the
like, enjoying their own separate privileges and systems of
jurisprudence. But over this Babel of authorities, so complexly
established in France that Voltaire complained of changing laws as often
as he changed horses, what is conspicuous is the homage paid by all the
other exclusive privileges to those of the universities, and the
separation of these grand institutions by an impassable line of
venerated privileges from the rest of the vulgar world. Thus, the State
conceded freely to literature those high privileges for which the Church
in vain contended, from the slaughter of Becket to the fall of Wolsey.
In a very few only of the States nearest to the centre of spiritual
dominion, could an exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction extending to
matters both spiritual and temporal be asserted; and France, which
acknowledged the isolated authority of the universities, bade a stern
defiance to the claims of the priesthood.
It can hardly be said that, invested with these high powers, the
universities bore their honours meekly. Respected as they were, they
were felt to be invariably a serious element of turbulence, and a source
of instability to their respective governments. In the affairs of the
League, the Fronde, and the various other contests which, in former
days, as in the present, have kept up a perpetual succession of
conflicts in turbulent Paris, the position to be taken by the students
was extremely momentous, but was not easily to be calculated upon; for
these gentry imbibed a great amount both of restlessness and
capriciousness along with their cherished prerogatives. During the
centuries in which a common spirit pervaded the whole academic body, the
fame of a particular university, or of some celebrated teacher in it,
had a concentrating action over the whole civilised world, which drew a
certain proportion of the youth of all Europe towards the common vortex.
Hence, when we know that there were frequently assembled from one to ten
thousand young men, adventurous and high-spirited, contemptuous of the
condition of the ordinary citizen, and bound together by common objects
and high exclusive privileges—well armed, and in possession of edifices
fortified according to the method of the day—we hardly require to read
history to believe how formidable such bodies must have proved.
An incident in the history of a wandering Scotsman, though but a petty
affair in itself, illustrates the sort of feudal power possessed by the
authorities of a university. Thomas Dempster, the author of _Etruria
Regalis_, and of a work better known than esteemed in Scottish
Biography, in the course of his Continental wanderings found himself in
possession of power—as sub-principal, it has been said, of the college
of Beauvais, in the university of Paris. Taking umbrage at one of the
students for fighting a duel—one of the enjoyments of life which
Dempster desired to monopolise to himself—he caused the young
gentleman’s points to be untrussed, and proceeded to exercise discipline
in the primitive dorsal fashion. The aggrieved youth had powerful
relations, and an armed attack was made on the college to avenge his
insults. But Dempster armed his students and fortified the college walls
so effectively that he was enabled, not only to hold his post, but to
capture some of his assailants, and commit them as prisoners to the
belfry. It appears, however, that like many other bold actions this was
more immediately successful than strictly legal, and certain ugly
demonstrations in the court of the Chatelain suggested to Dempster the
necessity of retreating to some other establishment in the vast literary
republic of which he was a distinguished ornament—welcome wherever he
appeared. He had come of a race not much accustomed to fear consequences
or stand in awe of the opinion of society. His elder brother had, among
other ethical eccentricities—or, as they would now be justly deemed,
enormities—taken unto himself for wife his father’s cast-off mistress;
and when the venerable parent, old Dempster of Muiresk, intimated his
disapproval of the connection, he was fiercely attacked by a band of the
Gordon Highlanders, headed by his hopeful son. Defeated and put to
flight with some casualties, the heir hoisted the standard of an
independent adventurer in Orkney, where, setting fire to the bishop’s
palace, he rendered the surrounding atmosphere too hot for him. He made
his final exit in the Netherlands; and his conduct there must have been,
to say the least of it, questionable, since his affectionate brother,
whose conduct in Paris is the more immediate object of our notice,
records that his doom was to be torn to pieces by wild horses. In such a
family, flagellation would have little chance of being condemned as a
degrading punishment, inconsistent with the natural dignity of man.
Indeed, to admit the plain honest truth, the records of the Scottish
universities prove to us that this pristine discipline was inflicted on
its junior members; and it is especially assigned in Glasgow as the
appropriate punishment for carrying arms. Local peculiarities of costume
gave facilities for it in some instances, which were not so readily
afforded by the padded trunk-hose and countless ribbon-points of the
Parisian “swells” of Louis XIII.’s day. The Parisian aristocracy took
serious umbrage at the conduct of Dempster; and he had to take his vast
learning and his impracticable temper elsewhere.
This is a digression; but Thomas Dempster is a good type of those
Scotsmen who brought over to us, from their own energetic practice, the
observance of the Continental notions of the independence and power of
the universities. His experience was ample and varied. He imbibed a
tinge of the Anglican system at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Besides
serving and commanding in different colleges at Paris, he held office at
Louvain, Rome, Douay, Tournay, Navarre, Toulouse, Montpelier, Pisa, and
Bologna. A man who has performed important functions in all these places
may well be called a citizen of the world. At the same time, his
connections with them were generally of a kind not likely to pass from
the memory of those who came in contact with him. He was a sort of
roving Bentley, who, not contented with sitting down surrounded by the
hostility of nearly all the members of one university, went about like a
roaring lion, seeking whom he might attack and insult, and left behind
him wherever he went the open wounds of his sword, or of his scarcely
less direful pen, scattered thickly around him. He was one of those who,
as Anthony Arnaud said of himself, are to expect tranquillity only in a
removal from that sublunary world in which, like pieces of clockwork
wound up, they are doomed to a ceaseless motion during their vitality.
Thomas Dempster has many sins to answer for, and at this day the most
conspicuous of them is the cool impudence wherewith, in his _Historia
Literaria Gentis Scotorum_, he makes every man whose birthplace is not
notorious, and whose name gives any excuse for dubiety, a Scotsman—as,
for instance, Macrobius, who is claimed in virtue of his _Mac_, and in
forgetfulness that his is a Greek name, signifying long-lifed. Yet peace
to our countryman’s long dispersed ashes. He was a fine type of the
fervent, energetic, brave, enduring national character; and the
ungoverned waywardness of his career was an earnest of what his
countrymen might achieve when a better day should dawn upon their poor
distracted land.
But to return to the exclusive judicial authority of the universities,
and the relics of the system found in Scotland,—we do remember that on
the occasion of one of those great snowball _emeutes_, which at
intervals of years make the Edinburgh students frantic, the police had
entered the quadrangle of the College and captured some of their sacred
persons. The occurrence was improved on by the students of Aberdeen—then
in possession of an organ of no despicable ability, called the _Aberdeen
Magazine_—who maintained that their own academical edifices were sacred
from civic intrusion, and pointed the finger of scorn at their southern
brethren, who submitted without rebellion to invasion by a body of
glazed-hatted constables, under the leadership of a superintendent of
police. It was said, in retaliation, that the reason why the
universities of Aberdeen were exempt from the visitations of the police
was because there was no force of police constables in the northern
capital; and it was maintained that whenever they should make their
appearance there, they would pay no more respect to the precincts of the
university than to those of the old privileged religious houses—whose
boundaries, sacred some centuries ago from civic intrusion, are still
set forth in the title-deeds of burghal estates. We know not how the
matter may really stand, but we suspect that the broad-bonneted and
broad-shouldered gentry who now make so curiously conspicuous a police
in the streets of Aberdeen, are not sufficiently acquainted with the
privileges of Marischal College to pay them the due deference.
Still we do find curious practical relics of the privileges
of the universities. On the 19th of June 1509, a general
convocation—_congregatio generalis_—of the University of Glasgow was
held in the chapter-house of the cathedral—the now venerable University
edifices had not then been built. In that assembly solemn discussion was
held upon certain momentous matters, the first and most important of
which was a representation by the Chancellor and temporary Rector of the
University that the exclusive jurisdiction and adjudication of
causes—_jurisdictio_, _causarumque cognitio_—were falling into
desuetude, to the great prejudice of the University, and the no small
diminution of its valuable privileges. The next notice that one finds in
the _Records_ is a few years later—28th March 1522—but it is rather a
conflict between the privileges of two of the universities than between
the academic and the judicial authorities. In the general convocation of
the University, Peter Alderstoun is accused of having served a citation
from the Conservator of the Privileges (_Conservator Priviligiorum_) of
the University of St Andrews on a certain Mr Andrew Smyth—the
aristocratic spelling is older than we thought it had been in Scotland.
The breach of privilege was aggravated by its occurring in the
habitation of the Reverend David Kinghorn, Pensioner of Cross Raguel.
The bailiff, or whatever else he might be, pleaded ignorance of the
nature of the writ; but he was obliged, barehead, to seek pardon from
the injured party. We find nothing more bearing on the question of the
special university privileges, until, in the year 1670, a sudden and
singularly bold attempt appears to be made for their revival, a court of
justiciary being held by the University, and a student put on trial on a
charge of murder. The weighty matter is thus introduced:—
“Anent the indytment given in by John Cumming, wryter in Glasgow,
elected to be Procurator-Fiscal of the said University; and Andrew
Wright, cordoner in Glasgow, neirest of kin to umquhile Janet Wright,
servetrix to Patrick Wilson, younger, gairdner there, killed by the
shot of ane gun, or murdered within the said Patrick his
dwelling-house, upon the first day of August instant, against Robert
Bartoun, son lawful of John Bartoun, gairdner in the said burgh, and
student in the said University, for being guilty of the said horrible
crime upon the said umquhile Janet.”[135]
A jury was impannelled to try the question. The whole affair bears a
suspicious aspect of being preconcerted to enable the accused to plead
the benefit of acquittal; for no objection is taken on his part to the
competency of the singular tribunal before which he is to be tried for
his life; on the contrary, he highly approves of them as his judges, and
in the end is pronounced not guilty. The respectable burgesses who acted
as jurymen had, however, as it appears, their own grave doubts about
this assumption of the highest judicial functions; and we find them in
this curious little document, which we offer in full, expressing
themselves with that cautious and sagacious scepticism which is as much
a part of the national character as its ardour and enthusiasm.
“Patrick Bryce, chancellor, and remanent persons who passed upon the
said inquest, before they gave in their verdict to the said court,
desired that they might be secured for the future, lest they might be
quarrelled at any time hereafter for going on, and proceeding to pass
on an inquest of the like nature, upon ane warning by the officer of
the said University; and that in regard they declared the case to be
singular, never having occurred in the age of before to their
knowledge, and the rights and privileges of the University not being
produced to them to clear their privilege for holding of criminal
courts, and to sit and cognosce upon crimes of the like nature;
whereunto it was answered by the Rector and his assessors that they
opponed their being content to pass upon the said inquest _in initio_,
and their making faith without contraverting their privilege; but
notwithstanding thereof, for their satisfaction and _ex abundanti
gratia_, they declared themselves and their successors in office
enacted, bound, and obliged for their warrandice of all cost, skaith,
danger, and expenses they or ane or other of them should sustain or
incur through the passing upon the said inquest, or whilk could follow
thereupon, through the said University their wanting of their original
rights or writs for clearing to them the privilege and jurisdiction in
the like cases. Whereupon the said Patrick Bryce, as Chancellor, for
himself, and in name and in behalf of the haill remanent members of
the said inquest, asked acts of court.”[136]
Though we are not aware of any instance in Scotland where the academic
tribunals have arrogated, since the Reformation, so high a power, it is
not difficult to find other instances where exemption has been claimed,
even at a later period, from the ordinary powers that be. Thus the
_Glasgow Records_ of the year 1721 bear that—
“The faculty, being informed that some of the magistrates of Glasgow,
and particularly Bailie Robert Alexander, has examined two of the
members of the University—viz., William Clark and James Macaulay,
students in the Greek class—for certain crimes laid to their charge
some time upon the month of February last, and proceeded to sentence
against these students, contrary to and in prejudice of the University
and haill members, do therefore appoint Mr Gershom Carmichael, &c., to
repair to the said magistrates of Glasgow, and particularly Bailie
Alexander, and demand the cancelling of the said sentence, and protest
against the said practice of the said bailie or any of the magistrates
for their said practice, and for remeid of law as accords.”[137]
It was the principle, not the persons—the protection of their
privileges, not the impunity of their students—that instigated the
faculty on this occasion, since in their next minute they are found
visiting William Clark and James Macaulay with punishment for heavy
youthful offences. We offer no apology for quoting, on such an occasion,
these scraps from technical documents. It appears to us that when they
are not oppressively long, or too professional for ordinary
comprehension, there is no other way of affording so distinct a notion
of any very remarkable social peculiarity, such as we account the
exclusive liability of the members of universities to their own separate
tribunals to have been.
Although the Scottish universities never boasted of the vast concourse
of young men of all peoples, nations, and languages, which sometimes
flocked to the Continental schools, and thus with their great privileges
created a formidable _imperium in imperio_—yet naturally there has
existed more or less of a standing feud between the citizen class and
the student class. The records before us show repeated contests by the
authorities of universities, against an inveterate propensity in the
students to wear arms, and to use them. The weapons prohibited by the
laws of King’s College, Aberdeen, are so varied and peculiar that we
cannot venture to do their Latin names into English, and can only
derive, from the terms in which they are denounced, a general notion how
formidable a person a student putting the law at defiance must have
been. But for the difference in the Latinity, one might suppose himself
reading Strada’s celebrated account of the weapons in the Spanish
Armada.[138]
From some incidental causes, a slight tinge of the desperado habits,
indicated by such restrictions, lingered around the Scottish
universities, and perhaps was most loth to depart from that northernmost
institution to which the prohibitions specially applied. The main cause
of their continuance may be attributed to the exigencies of the
anatomical classes which gradually attached themselves to the schools of
medicine. In obtaining subjects there was a perpetual contest with
unmitigable prejudices; and as in the smaller university towns there
were few or no people who followed systematically the trade of the
resurrectionist, the students had to help themselves. It needed but the
very fact of their having an occasional “subject” in the dissecting-room
to expose them to an odious reputation, which no argument about the
blessed results of the healing art, and the necessity of studying it in
the structure of the human frame, could in the slightest degree
mitigate. The feud thus caused was of a kind which widened as the
progress of scientific acquirement enlarged the study of anatomy; and it
seemed as if a permanent and deadly hostility against the progress of an
essential science were daily deepening and widening, until public wrath,
concentrated and accumulated, might be expected at last to burst on the
devoted pursuit, and annihilate it. Though the students of anatomy were
generally among those who had passed through the ordinary curriculum of
studies, and no longer wore the distinguishing scarlet robe, yet their
younger brethren were, not entirely without cause, mixed up in their
misdeeds. Horrible stories of their waylaying children, and of their
clapping plasters on the mouths of grown men met in lonely byways, which
stopped the breath, and instantaneously extinguished life, were greedily
believed, and founded tales capable of superseding _Bluebeard_ and _The
One-handed Monk_ at the winter chimney-corner. Young lads in their early
blushing scarlet were sometimes savagely assaulted, as if the poor
innocents were ghouls in search of the horrible prey peculiar to their
order. The public frenzy reached its climax on the revelation of the
crimes of Burke and Hare. It almost as suddenly collapsed after the
passing of the Anatomy Act, which removed from dissection that odium
which previous legislation had factitiously imparted to it as part of
the punishment of murder, and accompanied the change with special
facilities for the obtainment of subjects. Hence more than twenty years
have passed since the habits of our students were tainted by this
incidental peculiarity, and its social effect must now be matter of
tradition.
It can easily, however, be believed that the revolting preliminary which
the votary of science had to undergo must have had an influence on his
habits very far from propitious. The nocturnal expedition was
occasionally joined by those who had not the excuse of scientific
ardour, and thus the influence of the practice spread beyond the limits
of the medical profession. The mysterious horrors surrounding the
reputation of such a pursuit were not without a certain fascination to
the young gownsmen, and some of them were supposed placidly to cultivate
rather than suppress charges which would have seriously alarmed their
more knowing and practical seniors. Though there was thus a good deal of
exaggeration and boasting both from without and from within, yet the
practice did exist among the senior students, while at the same time an
occasional junior, approved for his boldness and discretion, might be
admitted to act a subordinate part in a “resurrectionising affair.”
Possibly he, if not the others, might find it necessary to employ some
stimulant to brace his nerves for the formidable work in hand. Thus the
adventure which provided the theatre of anatomy with the means of
keeping a few students at hard work in one of the most important
departments of human knowledge, had probably occasioned more than one
night of fierce dissipation, and produced scenes which would have
considerably astonished the good old aunts, deprecating the exhausting
labours of their virtuous nephews in the nasty hospitals and that horrid
dissecting-room.
The excesses which concentrated themselves around this solemn and
cheerless pursuit, ramified themselves into others of a more fantastic
and cheerful character. Probably it is all changed now; but they are not
very old men who remember how the smaller university towns were subject
to fantastic superficial revolutions. Trees, gates, railings, street
lamps, summer-houses, shop signs, and other “accessories of the realty,”
as lawyers call them, disappearing or changing places like the shifting
of the side-slips in a theatre. Perhaps there may even be alive some who
have witnessed or participated in such divertisements. Is there any one
who will admit participation in that transmutation which scandalised the
bailie, by exhibiting his suburban mansion under the auspices of the
national achievement, as “licensed to sell spirits, porter, and ale,”
just at the moment when the licentiate of the Red Lion was lamenting the
disappearance of his insignia? Are none of those virtuous youths alive,
who called next day to express their horror of the deed, and hold
confidential communion with the bailie, thus obtaining access to his
arsenal, and receiving the comfortable secret information—valuable for
future conduct—that the blunderbuss, the musket, and the brace of
pistols, were loaded with powder only, “but he wad warrant the scounrels
wad get a fleg”? Who was it, we wonder, that, on the myrmidons of
justice coming to his chambers, under the well-warranted suspicion that
he possessed an extensive and varied collection of shop signs, had
recourse to his incipient Scripture knowledge by an apt quotation in
reference to those who seek what they do not succeed in obtaining? Is it
probable that in any private neuks in old dwelling-houses there may
exist relics of those prized museums not acquired without toil and
risk—and exhibited with much caution only to trusted friends—which
consisted mainly of watchmen’s rattles and battered lanterns? Lives
there yet one of that laborious group, who wished to illuminate the
mansion of Professor Blanc in proper style, and to that effect carried
out a cluster of street lamps, and planted them all alight in his
garden, so encountering labour and risk with no better reward than a
reflection on the professor’s puzzled countenance when he should awaken
and behold the phenomenon? _N.B._ Street lamps in those days were fed
with oil, and were supported on wooden posts, which it was not difficult
for a couple of strong youths to uproot.
But we are shocking the virtue and civilisation of the age by such
queries. They hint at practices which we believe to be entirely eschewed
by the superior class of young gentlemen who now frequent our
universities. If we have created a throb of terror in an amiable
parent’s breast, we humbly beg his pardon. He may take our word for it
that his hopeful son is incapable of such pranks. This is mainly an
antiquarian article, and the matter contained in it belongs more or less
to the past, and is founded on document or tradition.
The semi-monastic foundations by which the students live under the
discipline of colleges or halls, and assemble together at a common
table, are indissolubly connected in English notions with the idea of a
university. Yet the system arose as an adjunct to the original
universities, and, as late inquirers have shown, the parasites have so
overrun the parent stem that its original character is scarcely
perceptible beneath their more luxuriant growth. The origin of these
institutions is simple enough. When the great teachers brought crowds of
young men together from all parts of Europe, the primary question was
how they were to obtain food and shelter? and a second arose when these
needs were supplied—how could any portion of the discipline of the
parental home be administered to them among strangers? Certain
privileges were given to the houses inhabited by the students, and
streets and quarters sprung up for their accommodation, as we now see
the rows of red-tiled cottages sprout forth like lichens around the tall
chimney of a new manufactory. To prevent fluctuation, and preserve the
academic character wherever it had once established itself, it was a
frequent regulation that the houses once inhabited by students could be
let to no other person so long as the rents were duly paid. We find
traces of this expedient in the records of Glasgow, where there seems to
have been great difficulty in accommodating the students of the infant
university, on account of the extreme smallness of the town. Since the
house once occupied by the student was thenceforth dedicated to his
order, speculators were induced to build entirely with a view to the
accommodation of a certain number of young men living in celibacy, and
they naturally imitated the example set them in the construction of
monasteries. The edifice and its use thus suggested something like the
monastic discipline—and, indeed, an establishment filled with young men,
having their separate dormitories and common table, yet without any head
or system of discipline among them, would have been a social anomaly of
the most formidable character. The university required to give its
sanction to the well ordering of the separate institutions thus rising
around it. At the same time munificent patrons of learning left behind
them endowments for founding such institutions, indicating at the same
time the method in which the founders desired that they should be
governed, and appointing a portion of the funds to form stipendiary
allowances to office-bearers. So arose those great colleges and halls
which in England have buried the original constitution of the university
beneath them.
In the great Continental universities which contained separate colleges,
these were more strictly under the central control. In Scotland, the
wealth at the disposal of the academic institutions, and the numbers
attending them, were never sufficiently great to encourage the rise of
separate bodies, either independent or subordinate. The system of
monastic residence and a common table was adopted under the authority of
the university, but it is remarkable that while so many of the
fundamental features of the original institution have been preserved,
this subsidiary arrangement has totally disappeared. The indications of
its existence, however, as they are preserved in the records, have
naturally considerable interest as vestiges of a social condition which
has passed from the earth.
In the _Glasgow Records_ we have, of date 1606, a contract with Andrew
Henderson touching the Boarding of the Masters and Bursars, commencing
thus: “At Glasgow, the twenty-twa day of October, the year of God J^m
VJ^c and aucht yeares: it is appoyntit and aggreit betwix the pairties
following, viz., Mr Patrick Schairp, Principal of the College of
Glasgow, and Regentes thairof, with consent of the ordinar auditouris of
the said College compts, undersubscrivand on the ane part, and Andro
Hendersoun, Burges of the said burgh on the uther part, in manner
following.” Having afforded this initial specimen of the document, we
shall take the liberty of somewhat modifying the spelling of such parts
of the “manner following,” in quoting such portions of it as seem by
their curious character to demand notice; and herein we may observe that
we follow the example of a judicious Quaker we had once the pleasure of
being made known to, who, after a solicitous desire to know the
Christian name of his new acquaintance, with a few preliminary thee’s
and thou’s—as much as to say, you see the set I belong to—afterwards ran
into the usual current of conversation very much like a man of this
world. Well, the document, with much precision, continues to say:—
“The manner of the board shall be this: At nine hours upon the flesh
days—viz., Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—the said
Andrew shall prepare to the said masters, and others that pay as they
pay, ane soup of fine white bread, or ane portion of cold meat, as
best may be had, with some dry bread and drink. At twelve hours the
said Andrew shall cover ane table in the hall of the said College, and
shall serve them in brose, skink, sodden beef, and mutton, the best in
the market, rosted mutton or veel, as the commodity of the season of
the year shall serve, with a fowl, or the equivalent thereof, with
good wheat bread, the best in the market, without scarcity, and ‘gud
staill aill, aucht or ten dayis auld, that sall be bettir nor the
haill aill in the town,’ and at supper suchlike. And on fish days the
said Andrew shall furnish every ane in the morning ‘ane callour fresch
eg, with sum cauld meit or milk and breid, and sum dry breid and
drink; at noone, kaill and eggis, herring, and thrie course of fische,
give thai may be had, or the equivalent thairof in breid and milk,
fryouris with dry breid as of befoir,’ and at supper suchlike. The
mess of the bursars, which immediately follows, must be given
literatim: ‘On the fleshe dayis, in the morning, everie ane of thame,
ane soup of ait breid and ane drink; at noone, broois with ane tailye
of fresche beif, with sufficient breid and aill to drink; at evening,
on the said manner, ane tailye of fresche beif to everie meiss. On
fische dayis, breid and drink as in the flesche dayis; at disjoone,
ane eg; at noone, eggis, herring, and ane uther course; at evening
sicklyke.’”[139]
Probably such a bill of fare may dispel some notions about the sordid
living of our ancestors, and the privations especially of those who
dedicated themselves to a scholastic life. The existence of meagre
days—or fish days, as they are called—in the year 1608, suggests
explanations which we have not to offer. It would almost appear,
however, that, at least in the dietary of the superior class, a fish day
was one in which fish was added to a comfortable allotment of meat,
instead of being substituted for it. Another contract occurs in the year
1649, varying little from “the said Andrew’s,” except in the addition of
a few luxuries. The mess to be laid in the hall for dinner is to be
“broth, skink, sodden beef, and mutton, the best in the market, with
roasted mutton, lamb, veal, or hudderin, as the season of the year shall
serve, with wheat bread and good stale ale; and at supper suchlike, with
a capon or hen, or the equivalent.” The fish days continue to be
distinguished less by the diminution of flesh—since there is to be two
roasts in the day—than by the addition of fish. At supper there are to
be sweetmeats and “stoved plumdamas,” which may be interpreted stewed
prunes. Another article there introduced is called “stamped kaile.” The
application of the participle is new to us, though, as every one ought
to know, kail means broth, or what the French call _potage_; and a
critic in such matters suggests that the word stamped may refer to the
mashing of the materials. In the earlier of the contracts which we have
referred to, the board-money was—for the master’s table, £30 per
quarter, (Scots money, of course); and for the bursars’, £16. 13s. 4d.
The value of money had so far risen that in the next period the sums
were respectively £46 and £24. The master’s table was frequented by the
young aristocracy of Scotland, apparently in as ample a proportion as
those of England are now to be found at Oxford and Cambridge. Thus, in
an inventory of occupied rooms, apparently in one floor, the
aristocratic element has a decided preponderance in the nomenclature:
“Lord James’s chamber, Francis Montgomerie’s chamber, Kilmarnock’s
chamber, Richard Elphinstone’s chamber, George Smyth’s chamber, James
Fleming’s chamber, Joseph Gill’s chamber, James Simson’s chamber.”[140]
It is not perhaps generally known that the practice of a common table
was continued in St Andrews down to about the year 1820. In evidence
before the University Commission in 1827, Dr Hunter stated that “there
were two public tables; one of them, the higher table, was attended only
by boarders, and by the bursars on the Ramsay mortification; the board
was high, and the entertainment altogether was better: the other was the
bursars’ table. The college was induced to contract with an economist or
provisor to supply both tables; and if the boards fell short, or if the
expense increased from the articles of subsistence being dearer than
ordinary in any year, or exceeded the amount allowed by the contract,
the College often compensated to him that loss.” Having thus offered
some notices of the collegiate system in its full vitality, and traced
it to its last lurking-place, we cannot help giving a place to the
significant reflections which have occurred to the editor of the
_Glasgow Records_ on the extinction of the system.
“In all the universities in Scotland, the old collegiate life, so
favourable for scholastic discipline, has been abandoned. Perhaps the
increasing numbers rendered living in college under the masters’ eye
inconvenient; though some modification of the systems of living in the
universities and the great schools of England might meet the
difficulty. The present academic life in Scotland brings the master
and the student too little in contact, and does not enable the teacher
to educate in that which is more important than scholastic learning,
nor to study and train the temper, habits, and character. If the
alternative which has been chosen inferred that the student enjoyed
the benefit of parental or domestic care when out of the lecture-room,
the change might be less objectionable; but when we observe the crowds
of young men brought from distant homes to our universities, living at
large and altogether uncontrolled, except in the classroom, we may
look back with some regret to the time when the good regent of a
university, living among his pupils, came in the parent’s place as
well as the master’s.
“But it was not only the discipline of the university that was
benefited by the collegiate life. The spirit of fellowship that
existed among young men set apart for the common object of high
education, was on the whole favourable, though liable to exaggeration,
and often running into prejudice. Nearly all that common feeling of
the youth of a great university is gone. The shreds of it that are
preserved by the dress, scarcely honoured in the crowded streets of a
great city, and the rare occurrence of a general meeting of students,
serve only to suggest to what account it might be turned for exciting
the enthusiasm and raising the standard of conduct among the youth of
Scotland. If such collections as the present, in revealing the old
machinery of the scholar life, tend in any degree to the renewal of
the bond of common feeling among the younger students, and of sympathy
with their teachers, they will not be useless.”
We were led towards the vestiges of the collegiate system by the
observation, that while in England it had overshadowed and concealed the
original outline of the universities, it had in Scotland disappeared,
leaving the primitive institutions in their original loneliness. When we
contemplate, with this recollection, the decayed remains of the older
universities, it will be seen that they were not so inferior in wealth
and magnificence to those of our neighbours, as the mass of collegiate
institutions which these have gathered around the primitive university
might lead one to suppose. Undoubtedly Christ Church and King’s Chapel
are fine buildings; but the remains of the chapels of St Salvator at St
Andrews, and of King’s College in Aberdeen, are not to be despised. Of
the former, alas! there are little more than the truncated walls and
buttresses, with here and there a decoration to show what the edifice
was when it stood forth in all its symmetry. Near the end of last
century a suspicion was entertained that the roof was decayed and would
fall. So groundless was the supposition, that after the workmen who were
removing it had gone too far to recede, they found that they could not
take it to pieces, but must first weaken its connection with the wall
plates, and let it fall plump down. Of course it smashed to atoms nearly
every interior ornament, and it just left enough of the marble tomb of
its founder, Bishop Kennedy, to let us see what a marvellous group of
richly-cut Gothic work it must have originally been. Within it there
were found, among other ornaments, a heavy silver mace of Parisian
workmanship, wonderful as the tomb itself for the quaint intricacy of
its workmanship.
The chapel of King’s College has fared better. Like a modest northern
wild-flower, its beauties are hidden from the common gaze of the peering
tourist, but to the adepts who examine them they are of no ordinary
character. From the difficulty of working the indigenous granite, and
the cost of importing freestone, the Gothic builders of this district
seem to have been frugal in their stone decorations, so that the glory
of King’s College consists in its interior wood-work of carved oak,
worked in architectural forms, like fairy masonry. We question if there
is anywhere a collection of specimens of Gothic fretwork more varied and
delicate.
It is difficult to conceive anything more depictive of high and daring
educational aspirations than the planting of this beautiful edifice in
so distant a spot, as the place of worship of those students who were to
flock to it from the wild hills and dreary moors of the north. Its
founder was Bishop Elphinston, an ardent scholar, a traveller, and a
frequenter of the Continental universities, who might rather have been
expected, had he followed the dictates of his refined tastes instead of
his conscientious convictions, and his zeal for the spread of learning,
to have spent his days among the Continental scholars, than to have
carried their learning across the Grampians. The character of the
foundation may be derived from the following abstract of the Bull of
erection of 1495, prefixed to the Spalding edition of the _Fasti
Aberdonienses_.
“Bull of Pope Alexander VI., issued on the petition of James IV., King
of Scots, which sets forth that the north parts of his kingdom were
inhabited by a rude, illiterate, and savage people, and therefore
erecting in the City of Old Aberdeen a ‘Studium Generale’ and
University, as well for theology, canon and civil law, medicine, and
the liberal arts, as for any other lawful faculty, to be there studied
and taught by ecclesiastical and lay Masters and Doctors, in the same
manner as in the ‘Studia Generalia’ of Paris and Bologna, and for
conferring on deserving persons the degrees of Bachelor, Licentiate,
Doctor, Master, and all other degrees and honourable distinctions;
conferring on William, Bishop of Aberdeen, and his successors, the
office of Chancellor, empowering them, or, during the vacancy of the
See, the Vicar deputed by the Chapter, to confer these degrees in all
the faculties on such well-behaved scholars as shall, after due
examination, be deemed fit by the Rector, Regents, Masters, or Doctors
of the faculty in which the degree is sought; granting to such
graduates full power of teaching in this or any other _studium_,
without any other examination; giving power to the Chancellor or his
Vicar, the Rector for the time, and the resident Doctors, with the
assistance of a competent number of Licentiates in each faculty, and
of circumspect scholars of the said _studium_, and of two of the
King’s Councillors at the least, to make statutes for the good
government thereof; and conferring on the students and graduates
thereof all the privileges and immunities of any other University. 10
February, 1494–5.”
The character of the institution, and the extent to which it embodied
the matured practices of the foreign universities, will be more amply
understood by a document, dated a few years later, in the shape of a
collegiate endowment by the Bishop, applicable, along with the
foundation of a certain Duncan Scherar, to thirty-six members.
“Of the foresaid thirty-six persons, five to be Masters of Arts and
Students of Theology, exercising the functions of the priesthood, and
daily acting as readers and Regents in Arts, each having a stipend of
ten pounds, four of them being paid out of the lands and feu-duties
assigned by the Bishop, and the fifth out of the foundation of the
foresaid Duncan Scherar; thirteen to be scholars or poor clerks, fit
for instruction in speculative knowledge, and whose parents cannot
support them at scholastic exercises, twelve of them having each a
stipend of twelve merks from the revenues of the said churches, with
chambers and other college conveniences, and the thirteenth a stipend
of five pounds from the foundation of the said Duncan Scherar; the
five Students of Theology to be supported for seven years until they
are licensed, and one of these, of sweet temper, to be selected by the
Principal and Sub-principal to read and teach poetry and rhetoric to
the other Students; and the Students in Arts to be supported for three
years and a half until made Masters; at the end of which periods,
these Students of Theology and Arts, whether graduated or not, to be
removed, and others instituted in their stead; the Principal,
Canonist, Civilist, Mediciner, Sub-principal, and Grammarian, to be
nominated by the Bishop and his successors, Chancellors of the
University; the Students of Theology to be admitted by the Chancellor,
and nominated by the Rector, Dean of Faculty of the Arts, Principal
and Sub-principal; and the thirteen Scholars to be admitted in like
manner, and nominated by the above parties and the Regent of Arts; of
the thirteen Students in Arts, the two first to be of the name of
Elphinstoun, who, after being graduated in Arts, shall be admitted
among the Students of Theology, and three to be from the parishes of
Aberlethnot, Glenmyk, Abirgerny, and Slanis: all the members to have
their residence within the College, except the Canonist, Mediciner,
Grammarian, and Regent, who are to have manses without the College;
the Principal and the Students of Theology, after being made
Bachelors, to read Theology every reading-day, and to preach six times
a year to the people; and the Students, before being made Bachelors,
to preach by turns in Latin in the Chapter of the College on every
Lord’s day and holiday throughout the year before all the students;
the Regents in Arts to give instruction in the liberal sciences, like
the Regents of the University of Paris; and the Canonist, Civilist,
and Mediciner to read in proper attire every reading-day, after the
manner observed in the Universities of Paris and Orleans; the Rector
or (if he be a member of the College) the Dean of the Faculty of Arts,
and the Official of Aberdeen, to visit the College once a year, and to
mark defects in the persons and property of the College, an account of
which shall be written by four persons, deputed for that effect, and
presented to the Chancellor, who, with their advice, shall administer
correction; a Procurator to be selected from the College by the
Principal, Canonist, Civilist, Sub-principal, Cantor, and Sacrist, and
to have for his pains, in addition to his stipend, five merks; eight
Prebendaries and four youths, accomplished in singing, to be in the
College, and to celebrate matins, vespers, and mass, in surplices and
black copes, in the presence of the members of the college; the first
of these Prebendaries to be called the Cantor, and the second the
Sacrist, each with a stipend of twenty merks; the other prebendaries
(from among whom the Chancellor must appoint one who is a proficient
on the organ) having sixteen merks, and each of the youths five merks.
17 September 1505.”
It is curious to mark how distinctly the traces of its French origin
have remained in the northern University. In addition to some instances
in the preceding article, it is worthy of notice that the Students, and
even the common people, are still familiar with such words as Bejant and
Magistrand.
Can our chubby friend there, who blushes as brightly as the fresh
scarlet gown in which he has gone forth to attract the gaze, more
spiteful than admiring, of the untogaed schoolfellows whom he has left
behind him, tell why he is called a Bejant?
Ducange tells us that _Beanus_ means a new student who has just come to
the academy, and cites the statutes of the University of Vienna,
prohibiting all persons from cheating or overcharging the new-comers,
who are called Beani, or assailing them with other injuries or
contumelies. Lambecius, in the _Epistolæ Obscurorum_, finds Beanus in a
monogram—“Beanus est animal nesciens vitam studiosorum.” We come nearer
the mark, however, in France, the _Bejauni_ frequently occurring in
Bulleus’s massive History of the University of Paris. Thus, in the year
1314, a statute of the University is passed on the supplication of a
number of the inexperienced youths, _qui vulgo Bejauni appellebantur_.
Their complaint is an old and oft-repeated tale, common to freshmen,
greenhorns, griffins, or by whatever name the inexperienced, when
alighting among old stagers, are recognised. The statute of the
Universitas states that a variety of predatory personages fall on the
newly-arrived bejaune, demanding a _bejaunica_, or gratuity, to
celebrate a _jocundus adventus_; that when it is refused, they have
recourse to insults and blows; that there is brawling and bloodshed in
the matter, and thus the discipline and studies of the University are
disturbed by the pestiferous disease. It is thence prohibited to give
any _bejaunica_, except to the bejaun’s companions living in the house
with him, whom he may entertain if he pleases; and if any efforts are
made by others to impose on him, he is solemnly enjoined to give secret
information to the procurators and the deans of the faculties.[141]
The etymology attributed to the word bejaune is rather curious. It is
said to mean yellow neb—_béc jaune_—in allusion to the physical
peculiarity of unfledged and inexperienced birds, to whose condition
those who have just passed from the function of robbing their nests to
the discipline of a university are supposed to have an obvious
resemblance. “Ce mot,” says the _Trevaux_, “a été dit par corruption de
béc jaune, per métaphore de oisons et autres oiseaux niais qui ont le
béc jaune—ce qu’on a appliqué aux apprentis en tous les arts et
sciences.—_Rudis Tiro Imperitus._” Yet in the same dictionary there are
such explanations about the use of the words _begayer_, to stutter, and
_begayement_, stuttering, as might, one would think, have furnished a
more obvious origin than the ornithological. “Les enfans,” we are told,
“begayent en apprenant à parler. Ceux qui ont la langue grasse begayent
toute leur vie. Quand un homme a bû beaucoup il commence a _begayer_.”
But it is used also figuratively: “Des choses qu’on a peine d’expliquer,
ou de faire entendre—Ce commentateur n’a fait que begayer en voulant
expliquer l’Apocalypse.” Whatever were its remote origin, however, the
term was in full use in the University of Paris, whence it passed to
Aberdeen. We have now shown our scarlet friend the reason for his being
called a Bejant, but why the word should be corrupted into Benjie, and
still more why he should be called a “Buttery benjie,” are etymological
problems which we no more pretend to solve, than the reason why his
fellow freshman at Heidelberg is called a Leathery fox.
We could notice several other relics of ancient university phraseology
still clinging round the usages of our humble institutions in Scotland.
The Lauration is still preserved as the apt and classical term for the
ceremony of admission to a degree; and even Dr Johnson, little as he
respected any Scottish form, especially when it competed with the
legitimate institutions of England, has given in his dictionary the word
Laureation, with this interpretation attached thereto: “It denotes in
the Scottish universities the act or state of having degrees conferred,
as they have in some of them a flowery crown, in imitation of laurel
among the ancients.”
Elsewhere we are honoured in the same work with a more brief but still a
distinctive notice. Among the definitions of “Humanity,” after “the
nature of man,” “humankind,” and “benevolence,” we have
“Philology—grammatical studies; in Scotland, _humaniores literæ_.” The
term is still as fresh at Aberdeen as when Maimbourg spoke of Calvin
making his humanities at the College of La Mark. The “Professor of
Humanity” has his place in the almanacs and other official lists as if
there were nothing antiquated or peculiar in the term, though jocular
people have been known to state to unsophisticated Cockneys and other
foreign persons, that the object of the chair is to inculcate on the
young mind the virtue of exercising humanity towards the lower animals;
and we believe more than one stranger has conveyed away, in the title of
this professorship, a standing illustration of the elaborate kindness
exercised towards the lower animals in the United Kingdom, and in
Scotland especially.
A curious incidental matter calls us back to King’s College and its
connection with Paris. In his visit to Scotland in 1633, Charles I.
observed, or learned from his adviser, Archbishop Laud, who had more
prying eyes, that the ancient formalities of the Scottish universities
had fallen into disuse. It appears that his hopes of a restoration were
chiefly centred in Aberdeen, where he knew that the Presbyterian spirit
had its loosest hold, and he resolved to commence the work there. A
curious royal letter to Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen, and
Chancellor of the University, drops mysterious hints about having
“observed some things which we think fit to put in better ordour, which
we shall do as we shall find cause.” But in the mean time there is a
very strong reprehension of the unacademic practice of sending the
students “to the parish churches to service and sermon, and there sit
promiscuously with the rest of the audience, which loses much of the
honour and dignity of the Universities.”
The cause of University restoration, after such a kingly hint, naturally
received much local support; and at a sort of convocation of the
University dignitaries at the Bishop’s Palace on the 19th of December
1634, some investigations were made to obtain materials “for
re-establishing of this University in her jurisdiction, conservatorie,
and privileges, according to her ancient rights granted thereanent.”
Among the other methods of inquiry, there is sent “a special letter to
our native countryman and special good friend, Dr William Davidson,
Doctor of Physic, and resident in Paris in France, requesting him to
deal, in name of the said University of Aberdeen, with the rector and
University of Paris, for a just and perfect written double of the rights
and privileges of that University of Paris, for the better clearing and
setting in good order the rights and privileges belonging to this
University of Aberdeen.”[142]
A letter from Archbishop Laud is read to the meeting, showing that he
was in communication with the restorers. “For the business which you
have recommended to me,” he says, “Dr Gordon hath been with me, and
delivered me a copy of all those things which he hath to move the king.
I have already spoken with his majesty about them, and shall continue to
do him all the kindness I can to help on his despatch, and to show all
the favour I can to the University.”[143]
It would be interesting to know more than the printed documents show us
of the projects then under discussion. Laud was a meddler with many
things—in Scotland, unfortunately, with at least one too many. His
activity in university matters is sufficiently known to fame in the
Laudeian Code of Oxford. But it has been the fate of that system to be
charged with a subversion of the fundamental principles of the English
universities, while in Aberdeen the movement which its author seems to
have directed was towards the restoration of the old Parisian model. The
apparent difference, however, has been probably caused by unintended
practical results in England,—the object was doubtless the same in both
cases.
Among the projects of King Charles with which his adviser of course
interfered, was the union of King’s and Marischal Colleges in Aberdeen.
In fact, they are not only two colleges, but, in the literal sense of
the term, two universities; and thus, according to the statistical
distribution of these institutions, Aberdeen used to appear as well
supplied with the commodity as all England. Between the two
establishments, little more than a mile apart, there is, indeed,
unfortunately, a gulf, wider than the mileage between Oxford and
Cambridge. The one was founded before, the other after, the Reformation;
and there were elements so distinct and repulsive in the spirit of the
foundations, that nothing but great coercive force could bring the two
into union.
King Charles, who was too apt to suppose that fundamental changes could
be made by an Act of Visitation, or an Order in Council, professed to
unite them, and called them, in conjunction, the Caroline University.
But in reality they never were chemically fused into one. On the
contrary, the documents connected with the nominal union, which at this
juncture may perhaps be read with some interest, lead one to suppose
that the two bodies of office-bearers could hardly have met round the
same table without kicking each other’s shins. The senior institution
exhibits itself as overbearing and dictatorial—the junior as sensitive
to every slight. All latent hatreds seem to have sprung into vivid life
on the command to be united in peace. The juveniles appear to have taken
the matter up, and each college passes a law requiring that its students
shall not insult the professors of the other,—apparently with the same
effect, if not intention, as the Irish injunction not to duck the
bailiff in the horse-pond. We wonder if the same thing is to be repeated
in this day. We have heard it, indeed, maintained from a very grave
authority, that nearly all things are possible save the fusion of these
institutions; that it may have been easy to unite England and Scotland,
or Great Britain and Ireland, but that the eternal laws of the universe
show it to be impossible to unite the King’s College and University of
Aberdeen with the Marischal College and University thereof.
CIVILISATION.—THE CENSUS.
My dear Eusebius,—If you wonder at the speculations with which I have
amused myself and bewildered all within reach of inquiry, remember what
a celebrated phrenologist said, that I should never make a philosopher:
you remarked, So much the better, for that the world had too many
already. I am not sure that I was not piqued; and, owing a little spite
against these unapproachable superiors—philosophers—have rather
encouraged a habit of posing them; and finding so many in this my
experience inferior to the common-sense portion of mankind, I amuse
myself with them, and treat them as monkeys, now and then throwing them
a nut to crack a little too hard for them. Wry faces break no
syllogisms, so we laugh, and they gravitate in philosophy. What is
civilisation? Is that a nut?—a very hard one, indeed. I, at least,
cannot tell what it is, in what it consists, or how this _summum bonum_
is to be attained; but I am no philosopher. I have taken many a one by
the button, and plunged him head foremost into the chaos of thought, and
seen him come out flushed with the suffocation of his dark bewilderment.
Less ambitious persons will scarcely stay to answer the question—What is
civilisation? The careless, who cannot answer it, laugh, and think they
win in the game of foolishness. Perhaps no better answer can be given,
and the laughing philosopher, after all, may be as wise as the speaking
one. A neighbour, who had been acquainted with the money markets, told
me he did not exactly know what it was, but he thought its condition was
indicated by the Three-per-cent Consols. An economist of the new school,
who happened to be on a visit to him, preferred as a test “American
bread-stuffs.” He argued that such stuffs were the staff of life,
supported life, and were, therefore, both civilisation and the end and
object of civilisation. My neighbour’s son Thomas, a precocious youth of
thirteen years of age, stepped forward, and said civilisation consisted
in reading, writing, and arithmetic: upon this, a parish boy, the
Inspector’s pet of the National School, said with rival scorn, “You must
go a great deal farther than that—it is knowledge, and knowledge is
knowing the etymologies of cosmography and chronology.” I asked the
red-faced plethoric Farmer Brown;—“What’s what!” quoth he, with a voice
of thunder, and, like a true John Bull, stalked off in scornful
ignorance. My next inquiry was of your playful little friend, flirting
Fanny of the Grove, just entering her fifteenth year. “What a question!”
said she, and her very eyes laughed deliciously—“the latest fashions
from Paris, to be sure.” Make what you please of it, Eusebius; put all
the answers into the bag of your philosophy, and shake them well
together, your little friend’s will have as good a chance as any of
coming up with a mark of truth upon it. The people that can afford to
invent fashions must have a large freedom from cares. There must be
classes who neither toil nor spin, yet emulate in grace, beauty, and
ornament the lilies of the field. If you were obliged to personify
civilisation, would you not, like another Pygmalion, make to yourself a
feminine wonder, accumulate upon your stature every grace, vivify her
wholly with every possible virtue, then throw a Parisian veil of dress
over her, and—oh, the profanation of your old days!—fall down and
worship her?
There is no better mark of civilisation than well-dressed feminine
excellence, to which men pay obeisance. Wherever the majority do this,
there is humanity best perfected. Homer teacheth that, when he exhibits
the aged council of statesmen and warriors on the walls of Troy paying
homage to the grace of Helen. The poet wished to show that the
personages of his Epic were not barbarians, and chose this scene to
dignify them. Ruminate upon the answer, “The latest fashions from
Paris.” What a mass of civilising detail is contained in these few
words!—the leisure to desire, the elegance to wear, the genius to
invent, the benevolent employment of delicate hands, the trades
encouraged, the soft influences—the very atmosphere breathes the most
delicate perfume of loves. It is not to the purpose to interpose that
this Paris of fashion suddenly turned savage, and revelled in brutal
revolution, sparing not man nor woman. It was because, in their
anti-aristocratic madness, the unhappy people threw off this reverential
respect that the uncivilised portion slaughtered the civilised. It was a
vile atheistical barbarism that waged war with civilisation. Think no
more of that black spot in the History of Humanity—that plague-spot.
Rather, Eusebius, turn your thoughts to your work, and fabricate, though
it be only in your imagination, your own paradise, and she shall be
named Civilisation. In case your imagination should be at this moment
dull, rest satisfied with a description of an image now before me, which
I think, as a personification, answers the question admirably; for
supposing it to be a portrait from nature, what a civilised people must
they be among whom such a wonder was born—not only born, but sweetly
nurtured, and arrayed in such a glory of dress! If you think this
indicates a foolish extravagant passion, know that this fair one must
have “died of old age” some centuries before I was born. There she is,
in all her pale loveliness, in a black japan figured frame, over the
mantelpiece of my bedroom at H——, where I am now writing this letter to
you. Mock not, Eusebius; she is, or rather was, Chinese. I look upon her
now as giving out her answer from those finely-drawn lips—“I represent
civilisation.” If I could pencil like that happy painter—happiest in
having such uncommon loveliness to sit to him—I would send you another
kind of sketch; it would be a failure. Be content with feeble words.
First, then, for dress: She wears a brown kind of hat, or cap, the rim a
little turned up, of indescribable shape and texture: the head part is
blue; around it are flowers, so white and transparent, just suffused
with a blush, as if instantaneously vitrified into china. Lovely are
they—such as botanical impertinences never scrutinised. On the right
side of this cap or hat two cock’s feathers, perfectly white, arch
themselves, as if they would coquet with the fairer cheek. You see how
firm they are, and would spring up strong from the touch, emblems of
unyielding chastity. The hair, little of which is seen, is of a
chestnut-brown; low down on the throat is a broad band of black,
apparently velvet, just peeping above which is the smallest edging of
white, exactly like the most modern shirt-collar, fastened above, where
it is parted, by a gold clasp. The upper dress is of a pink red, such as
we see in Madonna pictures; below this is a dark blue-green shirt-dress,
richly flowered to look like enamel; over the shoulders a Madonna
kerchief, fastened in a knot over the chest; it is of a clear brownish
hue, such as we see in old pictures. The upper red dress does not meet,
but terminates on each, side with a gold border, of a pattern centre,
with two lines of gold. Thus a rather broad space is left across the
bosom, which in modern costume is occupied by a habit-shirt; but such
word would ill describe either the colour or the texture here worn; it
is of a gossamer fabric, of a most delicately-greenish white, diapered
and flowered all over; nothing can be conceived more exquisite than
this. It would make the fortune of a modern _modiste_ to see and to
imitate it. A clasp of elegant shape fastens skirt to upper dress; the
sleeve of upper dress reaches only half-way down the arm; the lower
sleeve is of the rich blue-green, but altogether ample. Attitude,
slightly bent forward; over the left arm, which crosses the waist, is
suspended a fruit-basket of unknown material, and finely patterned,
brown in colour, in which are grapes and other fruit; expression,
sweetly modest; complexion—how shall it be described? Never was European
like it. It is finest porcelain, variegated with that under-living
immortal ichor of the old divinities. Eyes clear-cut or pencilled,
rather hazel in colour; background, rockwork garden, rising to a hill,
on which are trees—but such trees! Aladdin may have seen the like in his
enchanted subterranean garden. Then there is a lake, and a boat on it,
at a distance, with an awning. She is the goddess, or the queen, of this
Elysium, which her presence makes, and has enchanted into a porcelain
earth, whose flowers and trees are of its lustre.
Wherever, Eusebius, this portrait was taken, it was, and is, an epitome,
an emblem of high civilisation. It speaks so plainly of all exemption
from toil and care, of the unapproachableness of danger. There is living
elegance in a garden of peace. It is, in fact, the type of civilisation.
What! will the economist, the philosopher of our day, be ready to
say,—Civilisation amongst Chinese and Tartars! and that centuries
perhaps ago. Civilisation is “The Nineteenth Century!” The glory of the
Nineteenth Century is the Press. We are Civilisation. Very well,
gentlemen; nevertheless it would be pleasant if you could exhibit a
little more peace and quietness, a little less turmoil, a little more
unadulterating honesty, a little less careworn look in your streets, as
the mark of your boasted civilisation. You are doing wonders, and, like
Katerfelto with his hair on end, are in daily wonderment at your own
wonders. You steam—annihilate space and time. You have ripped open the
bowels of knowledge, and well-nigh killed her in search of her golden
egg. You are full, to the throat and eyes, of sciences and arts. You are
hourly astonishing yourselves and the world. Nevertheless, you have one
great deficiency as to the ingredients that make up civilisation; you
are decidedly too conceited; you lack charity; you count bygone times
and peoples as nothing and nobodies: yet you build a great Crystal
Palace, and boast of it, as if it were all your own; whereas the whole
riches of it, in the elegances of all arts, are imitations of the works
of those bygone times and peoples. Who is satisfied with your
model-civilisation? Eusebius, is not the question yet to be asked—What
is it? in what does it consist? how is it to be obtained? True
civilisation has no shams—we have too many, and they arise out of our
swaggering and boasting; so that we force ourselves to assume every
individual virtue, though we have it not. We are contemptuous; and
contempt is a burr of barbarism sticking to us still, even in this
“Nineteenth Century,” a phrase in the public mouth glorifying
self-esteem. I must, for the argument, go back to the Chinese lady in
her narrow japanned gilt frame. As I have drawn my curtains, Eusebius,
at the dawn of day, and that placid beauty (though not to be admitted in
any book of that name) has smiled upon me from lips so delicate, so
unvoracious—did she pick grains of rice, like Amine in the Arabian
tale?—I verily thought she must have lived in as civilised an age as
ours. Yes—perhaps she was not very learned, excepting in Chinese
romances, and very good learning that is: but neither you nor I,
Eusebius, lay very great stress upon knowledge, nor call it “Power,” nor
think that happiness necessarily grows out of it. One evil of it is,
that it unromances the age; and romance—why not say it?—romance is a
main ingredient in true, honest, unadulterated civilisation. You would
prefer being as mad as Don Quixote, and be gifted with his romance, to
being the aptest of matter-of-fact economists and material philosophers.
Romance, then, springs from the generous heart and mind;—methinks,
Eusebius, you are progressing, and reaching one of the ingredients of
this said desideratum, “Civilisation.” As a people, it may be doubted if
we are quite as romantic as formerly; if so, however we may advance in
knowledge and sciences, we are really retrograding from the _summum
bonum_ of social virtues. I remember once hearing a celebrated
physician, who knew as much as most men of mankind, their habits and
manners, speak of an American “gentleman,” adding, “and he was a
savage.” You can imagine it possible, that, in the presence and
impertinence of Anglo-Saxon vulgarity, the grave and courteous demeanour
of a so-called barbarian would be a very conspicuous virtue. I read the
other day, in Prince’s _Worthies of Devon_, a quaint passage to the
point, which much amused me for its singular expression. It relates to
Sir Francis Drake, who, touching at one of the Molucca Islands, was, as
the author words it, “by the king thereof, a true _gentleman pagan_,
most honourably entertained.” Of this “gentleman pagan” Prince adds,
that he told General Drake “that they and he were all of one religion,
in this respect, that they believed not in gods made of stocks and
stones, as did the Portuguese; and further, at his departure he
furnished him with all the necessaries that he wanted.” Yet, perhaps,
some of the habits of such gentlemen pagans had been scoffed at by
Europeans, and often met with worse usage than contempt. Whoever has no
consideration for others, no indulgence for habits contrary to his own,
though he may be born in nominally the most civilised nation under the
sun, is really a barbarian. It was well said that, upon the accidental
meeting of the finest drest gentleman, with a powdered head, and a
tatooed Indian, he who should laugh first would be the savage. The
well-known story of the horror expressed by different people at the
disposal of their deceased parents is curious, showing that opposite
actions arise from the same feelings. In this case it was of filial
piety. One party was asked if he would bury his father in the earth? He
was amazed at the question—shocked. Not for the world; as an act of
piety, he would eat him. The other, asked to eat his father, was hurt
and disgusted beyond measure. Let us be a little more even in our
judgments, and speak somewhat kindly, if we can, of these gentlemen
pagans all over the world. We may be often called upon to admire their
disinterested heroism, even when lavished upon mistaken objects. Here is
an example from the misnamed weaker sex—misnamed, for they are
wonderfully gifted with fortitude. I have been reading of a poor young
creature, widow of a chief among some cannibal race. She was to have
been immolated, according to custom, at the burial of her husband. Her
courage at the moment failed her: she was induced by, if I remember
rightly, some good missionaries, to fly, and they protected her. In the
night she repented of her irresolution, escaped, swam across a river,
and presented herself for the sacrifice and the feast. Scholars, you
read with love and admiration of Iphigenia at Aulis; her first
reluctance; her after self-devotion: you have imagined her youth, her
beauty, so vividly painted by the poet. Was Iphigenia more the heroine
than this poor girl whom we are pleased to pass unhistoried as a savage?
She gave herself up, not only to death, perhaps a cruel one, but with
the knowledge that she would be devoured also that night. Iphigenia was
certain of funeral honours, of immortal fame, and believed that her
sacrifice would insure victory to her father and the Greeks. We have
written exercises at school in praise of the suicide of Cato, whose act,
in comparison with this poor savage’s, was cowardice;—more than that, we
have been taught to mouth out with applause the blasphemy of the
celebrated hexameter, “Victrix causa Diis placuit sed victa Catoni.” Why
should we not be a little more even in our judgments? The poor gentlemen
pagans of the islands would cut as good a figure as heathen Cato, if
their names and deeds could be turned into tolerable Latin, and passed
off as of the classical age. Henley, in a letter to Swift, tells the
speech of a farmer, who said, “If I could but get this same breath out
of my body, I’d take care, by G—, how I let it come in again!” Henley
makes the pithy remark, “This, if it was put into fine Latin, I fancy
would make as good a sound as any I have met with.”
I did not mean to induce a belief, Eusebius, that the Chinese excelled
in the fine arts when I wrote down the description of the Chinese lady.
The portrait had its peculiarities, and would not have been hung upon
the line in the Royal Academy. I only chose it for its historical
expression, which spoke of civilisation of manners, of security, and as
containing in itself things which civilised people boast of. But there
the argument is not very much in favour of this our “Nineteenth
Century;” for the chiefest works of art in painting are of the _cinque
cents_. It is not pretended that we have thrown into oblivious shade the
masters of old celebrity; nor that we have made better statues than did
Phidias and Praxiteles; nor excelled the Greeks in architecture; nor
even the artist builders of the ages which we are pleased to style
“Dark;” so that we have at least lost some marks of civilisation. Nay,
to come to nearer times for comparison: It would be a hard thing for our
swaggerers to find a dramatist willing to be taken by the collar, and
contrasted face to face with the portraits of Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson, taking their plays as their representatives. There were worthies
of a high romance in the civilised days of the “Glorious Gloriana.” What
marks of essential civilisation are visible in the comedies of
Shakespeare—what delightful mixture of the real and unreal—the mind
springing from its own natural elasticity above the fogs and blight of
worldly business, that ever tend to keep the spirits from rising! And
why say comedies? Tragedies too. How fresh is the atmosphere mankind
seem then to breathe. Humanity is made lovable or dignified. If we might
judge of civilisation from the works of writers of that age, we might be
justified in pronouncing it most civilised, for it was governed by a
vivid and romantic spirit. Take as contrast the literature of Queen
Anne’s boasted time. It is quite of another spirit. There is a
descending, a degradation of the whole mind. There begins visible
worldliness. We see man taking his part in the affairs of the world for
what he can get as an individual. There is a prominence of the business,
and less made of the enjoyments of life;—the commercial spirit
predominating, which has since overwhelmed the imaginative faculties,
and buried the better, the more civilised pleasures of life, under the
weight of avarice. We are, my dear Eusebius, too money-loving and
money-getting to deserve the name of a thoroughly civilised people. Is a
true and just perception of the fine arts a sign of civilisation? What
is admired—what is eagerly purchased—what intellectual food do the
purchases convey? Is the mere visual organ gratified by the lowest
element of the arts—imitation—or the mind’s eye enlarged to receive and
love what is great and noble? In one sense, undoubtedly, the art of
living is better understood, because, the romance of life fading away,
personal comforts and little luxuries become exigencies, and engross the
thoughts, filling up the vacancies that romance has left. Shall I shock
you, my dear Eusebius, if I add my doubts if liberty is either
civilisation or a sign of it? Great things have been done in the world,
where there has been little of it enough, as well as where there has
been much. The fine arts are certainly not much indebted to it.
There is much in the question which yet remains to be considered. The
questioned may well ask, as did the heathen philosopher on one more
important, and of an infinite height and depth—another day of thought to
answer it, and each succeeding day another still. Is civilisation that
condition in which all the human faculties may be so continually
exercised, as to make the more intellectual moral and religious being?
when the plant humanity, like every other plant, shall by cultivation
assume a new character and even appearance? I fear this condition
necessarily implies a degradation also. For as in no state do the many
reach the high standard, equality must be destroyed, so that inferiority
will not only have its moral mark, but also its additional toil, far
above the share it would have supposing a state nearer equality.
But then, it may be answered, the question is not about the many, but
regards only examples, without considering number. Human plants may be
exhibited of extraordinary culture and beauty—beauty that must be seen
and admired—and, if so, imitated; and this law of imitation will draw in
the many, in process of time, to improvement. Very true, Eusebius; and
in a race naturally energetic, this imitation—while, on the whole, it
will improve general manners—creates a social vice, affectation—which is
vulgarity. The example of our Anglo-Saxon race is to the point—of
wondrous energy, but in no race under the sun is vulgarity so
conspicuous. If, then, the condition which forces all the human
faculties to exertion be that of civilising tendency, does it follow
that it is one of the greatest happiness? The history of the world says
manifestly that it is not one of peace, of quietness, of content, of
simplicity—alas! shall we say of honesty? For it must be confessed
civilisation acts upon the mixed character which every man has, and
therefore gives progression both to vice and virtue. Man is only made
great by trials; difficulties promote energies. It is the law of
preparation for this world and for the next. Long, steep, and arduous is
the way to excellence. The verse of Hesiod brings to mind a passage of
greater authority. The smooth and broad way, and ever-ready way, is not
so good.
“Τῆς δ’ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάριοθεν ἔθηκαν.
Λθάνατοι, μακρος δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος οἷμος ἐπ’ αὺτὴν,
Kαὶ τρηχὺς πρῶτον επην δ’εἰς ἄκρον ἵκηται
Ρηἴδίη δ’ἔπειτα πέλει, χαλεπή περ ἐοῦσα.”
—HESIOD.
Here we have toil, trouble, and a rough road.
Now for a little entanglement of the subject. Who will sit for this
aspirant for all the virtues—for civilisation? I look up to the portrait
of the Chinese lady, who first set my thoughts upon this speculation.
Surely she never got that placid do-nothing look from any long habit of
toil and trouble; she never worked hard. I confess, Eusebius, as I
question her, she does look a little more silly than I thought her. She
never went the up-hill rough road. How should she? She was never shod
for it; nay, were the truth told—for the painter has judiciously kept it
out of sight—she had no proper feet to walk withal. They had been
pinched to next to nothing. She never could have danced; would have been
a sorry figure in a European ball-room; and in the way she must have
stood, would have made but (as Goldsmith calls it) “a mutilated
curtsey.” It is hard to give up a first idea. I proposed her as an
emblem of civilisation—and why not? She does not represent civilisation
in its progress—in its work; but in its result—its perfection. For look
at her,—she stands not up with a bold impudence, like Luxury in the
“Choice of Hercules,” puffed up and enlarged in the fat of pride, and
redder and whiter than nature—a painted Jezebel. Quite the reverse. She
is most delicately slender; her substance is of the purity of the finest
China tea-cup. In fact, she seems to have been set up as the work of a
whole nation’s toil,—as a sign, a model, of their civilisation. They who
imagined such a creature, and set her upon her legs—yet I can hardly say
that, considering the feet—must have made many after the same model, or
seen many; and exquisite must have been the manners of such a piece of
life-porcelain.
Indeed, Eusebius, we have greatly mistaken these people, the Chinese. I
will believe their own account of themselves, and that they were a
polished people when the ancient Britons went naked, and painted
themselves with woad. Besides, here is another picture at hand, clearly
showing them to have been, as probably they are still, a sensible
people, for they evidently agree with the wisest man who said, “Spare
the rod and spoil the child.” Here they have pictured a school, and the
pedagogue is flogging a boy, and he has a very legitimate rod. If this
is not a _mark_ of civilisation—for it certainly leaves one, giving, as
it were, a bottomry bond of future wisdom—I should like to know what is.
Birch-buds are the smart-money of education, and wonderfully improve the
memory without touching the head, but reaching the brain by a harmless
and distant sympathy. I am sure the Chinese must be a people well worth
studying; and, with all our national conceit, we may learn a good deal
from them. If we scatter them about with our artillery, and stick them
upon bayonets, and despise them because they are innocent, or have been
till recently, in the arts of destruction, who are the most savage—the
slaughtered or the slaughterers? Are we to call war, civilisation?
Perhaps it may be the “rough way” it has to pass. Ask the Czar to answer
the question. He will undoubtedly say, that it is cutting the throats of
the Turks and filching their property; and he will show you one
undoubted proof of the highest civilisation of modern times, consummate
hypocrisy—committing murder by wholesale in the name of religion.
Shall I advance a seeming paradox? Civilisation is impeded by
knowledge—that is, by the modern demand for it. The memory becomes
crammed, till there be no room in the brain for legitimate thought to
work in. Hence a bewilderment, a confusion of other men’s ideas, and
none of our own; a general perplexity, and little agreement among people
in sentiment, for they have no time left to consider upon their
differences. The world is overstocked with the materials of knowledge,
and yet there is ever a demand for more. The time of man’s best wisdom
was when he was not overburthened with books. Happy are scholars that so
many of the classics are lost. Were all that have been written extant,
the youth that should graduate in honours would be the miracle of a
short time, and an idiot the remainder of his life. Then our own
literature: it is frightful to see the bulky monthly catalogue of
publications. Had I to begin the world, I should throw down the list in
despair, and prefer being a literary fool, with a little common sense.
Besides, the aspirant in education must learn all modern languages also.
What a quantity! I made a note from a paper published, November 1851.
Here is a quotation. A letter from Leipsic says—“The catalogue for the
book fair of St Michael has been just published. It results from it that
during the short space of time which has elapsed since the fair of
Easter last, not fewer than three thousand eight hundred and sixty new
books have been published in Germany, and that one thousand one hundred
and fifty others are in the press. More than one-half of these works are
on scientific subjects.” Mercy on the brains of the people!—they will be
inevitably addled. What with all this learning and reading, summing and
analysing, and making book-shelves of themselves, they are retrograding
in natural understanding, which ought to be the strong foundation of
civilisation. And there is the necessity growing up of reading all the
daily papers beside. Better, Eusebius, that the human plant should grow,
like a cucumber, to belly, and run along the common ground, than shoot
out such head-seed as is likely to come out of such a hotbed under a
surfeit of dry manure. Verily it must shortly come to pass, that
Ignoramus will be the wisest if not the knowingest among us. He may have
common sense, a few flights of imagination unchoked with the dust of
learning, or many wholesome prejudices, a great deal of honest feeling,
and with these homespun materials keep his morals and religion pure,
and, walking in humbleness, reach unawares the summit of civilisation.
If you think him an imaginary being, wed him to the Chinese Purity in
the japan frame, and no one will write the epithalamium so happily as my
friend Eusebius. I might here have ended my letter, rather expecting to
receive a solution to the great question than pretending to offer one.
But having written so far, and about to add a concluding sentence, I
received a visit from our matter-of-fact friend B., whom people
hereabout call the Economist General: he is a professed statist, great
in all little things. He is alway at work, volunteering unacceptable
advices and schemes to boards of guardians and the Government. I told
him I was writing to you, and the subject of my letter,—“Then,” said he,
“I can assist you. The census newly come out is the thing. In that you
will learn everything. You will, in fact, find civilisation depicted
scientifically. I will send it to you.” We conversed an hour; I promised
to read his census return in the course of the day. He smiled strangely,
but said nothing. I soon understood what the smile meant, when I saw a
labouring man take out of a little cart a huge parcel, which upon
opening I found to contain the Census in nineteen volumes or books,
varying in shapes and sizes, some of which being very bulky, I judged to
contain heavy matter. The idea of reading over and digesting the Census
in an afternoon appeared now so ridiculous that I could not refrain from
laughing myself. Nineteen books to examine in an afternoon! It was
evident there would be six months’ toil, and as many hands as Briareus
wanted to turn over the leaves; to say nothing of the number of heads to
hold the matter. What horsepower engine in the brain to work up a
digested process equal to the task! I was, however, being somewhat idle,
curious to see what could have made our friend such an enthusiast; I
therefore looked into some of the books—became interested—read more and
more, though in a desultory manner. It is wonderful to see society so
daguerreotyped in all its phases. What could have given rise to so much
varied ingenuity?—What schemes, what contrivances for getting at
everything!—the commissioners must have been Titans in ingenuity. Was it
the necessity of the case that induced so much elaboration? I have read
that the cost of the Census exceeds £120,000. That accounts for it,
Eusebius; such a sum is not to be clutched without some inventive
powers. Our friend thinks the Census will help to solve the question of
civilisation; so pray borrow the volumes of an M.P. If you cannot get at
the marrow of the thing you want, you will find much for after
speculation. There is something frightful, Eusebius, in the idea that no
class of men, no individuals, can henceforth escape the eye of this
Great Inquisitor-General—a Census commission. There is no conceivable
thing belonging to man, woman, or child that may not come under the
inspection, and be in the books, of this great Gargantuan Busybody. In
truth, he was born a gigantic infant in 1801. Hermes, in the Homeric
hymn, leaped out of his cradle upon mischievous errands almost as soon
as born: so did our big Busybody. Ere he was six months old he took to
knocking at people’s doors, and running[144] away. He soon grew bolder,
stood to his knock, and asked if Mr Thompson did not live there. Then he
had the trick of getting into houses like the boy Jones, and counted the
skillets in the scullery, the pap-dishes in the nursery, turned over the
beds in the garrets, and booked men and maids who slept in them before
they could put their clothes on. With a thirst for domestic knowledge,
he insisted upon knowing who were married and who not. He would burst in
upon a family at their prayers, and note what religion they were of. He
would know every one’s age, condition, business, and be very particular
as to sex female, why they married or why they lived single; he could
tell to a day when any would lie in. The most wonderful thing was the
paper case he carried with him wherever he went. It would have made
Gargantua himself stare with astonishment, for it is said, upon
competent authority, to have weighed “nearly forty tons.” This paper
case contained particulars noted down of every one’s possible concerns.
He had another at home, in which he kept circulars for distribution,
demanding further information. It was said to be bigger still;[145] as
he grew robust and bold, of course it took more to feed Busybody. It is
almost incredible what a number of the people’s loaves he ate up in one
year; but that there is the baker’s bill to vouch for it, no one would
believe it. The quantity of food required for himself and his numerous
retainers has already made him look about with some anxiety to foist
upon the country a scheme for sure agricultural statistics, to ascertain
the number of loaves to the acre. It cannot be said of him, as of many,
that his eye is bigger than his belly, for the former cannot as yet see
“bread-stuffs” enough to fill the latter. Besides, he has quite an army
to maintain of officials, enumerators, and registrars, who all, after
the manner of benchers, must eat their way into the universal knowledge
required of them. Such is Busybody. In my afternoon nap, I have dreamed
of him, Eusebius, and offer you this description of him—his birth, life,
habits, and manners—as by a dreaming intuition I received them. What
think you of the monster? As perilous a beast as the Wooden Horse of
Troy.
“Inspectura domos, venturaque desuper urbi.” It would not be surprising
if Irish mothers, when they find that all their babes are registered,
age and sex noted down, were to take into their heads that they are to
be fattened; and Swift’s scheme, which a popular author has unwisely
characterised as serious cannibalism, is at length to be realised, and
thus Bigmouth of the old fair and puppet-show will appear as
Busybody-General. Perhaps the “King of the Cannibal Islands,” since we
have taught him to read and write, will avail himself of this new
registration system; for with him all is alike meat in the market. I
have been reading an account of such a people’s doings, and find the
only difference between human and other is, that the former is sold as
“long pig,” the other short pig.
I mentioned the ingenuity displayed in the Census—turn to the maps and
diagrams. You will see a map of England and Wales, shaded so that the
depth of colour shall denote the density of the population: there are
figures also to tell the number of persons to a square mile, and towns
and cities are represented by round dots, larger or smaller, according
to the number of inhabitants. It is a very curious and pretty plaything;
but of what imaginable use? It is like the shadowing on the maps of the
moon. London looks awful—a horrible black pit—and must give children,
who will be delighted with the plaything, a notion that our great
metropolis must be a sink of iniquity. Cobbett’s notion of the “great
wen” was by no means agreeable; to make it such a black pit of
destruction is far less flattering. There are diagrams also showing, by
the closeness of dots, the density of population at various periods. It
was certainly a very ingenious contrivance of the inventor, for the
enlargement and continuance of his work and employment; in a matter,
too, where, at first view, so little was required to be done. If not
more profitable, it at least provides as much amusement as Diogenes
afforded when he rolled his tub about, to show that he must be busy. The
inventor was, however, wiser than the philosopher; for the philosopher
aimed at satire only, the inventor of the maps and diagrams at pay and
profit. Everything should nowadays be turned into the channel of
education; it might be suggested to the educational purveyors, and to
masters and inspectors of schools, who stand a chance of wanting
something to teach, to have these maps and diagrams printed cheaply on
thick or board paper, that, even in their recreation hours, the scholars
may learn something, and the favourite “game of goose,” of ominous name,
be profitably superseded. The two diagrams of London, the one for the
year 1801, the other 1851, may serve quite as well as the “Chinese
puzzle” to exercise growing or dull memories, having a like advantage of
not burthening the mind, already too full, with any useful knowledge
whatever. For instance, it will be quite sport to learn by heart that,
as to density of London in 1801, “on an average, there were nearly 394
square yards of land to every person, 2784 square yards to every
inhabited house.” As to proximity in 1801, that, “on an average, the
mean distance from house to house (inhabited) was nearly 57 yards; from
person to person 21 yards.” That, as to density in 1851, “on an average,
there were nearly 160 square yards of land to every person; 1234 square
yards to every inhabited house.” As to proximity, that in 1851, “on an
average, the mean distance from house to house (inhabited) was nearly 38
yards; from person to person 14 yards.” So that every person is
approaching his neighbour in person, but not probably in love or liking,
so rapidly, as that he has already seven yards of the area of his
liberty taken from him since 1801. It will be comfortably and
philosophically answered, that most of those who enjoyed that liberty in
1801, more than half a century ago, cannot complain, for they are now
silent, and in less space, that of six feet by four; and that the
present generation easily accommodate themselves in less space, having
the better liberty of making more noise. These are the trifles, the
games, and the plays that amuse children six feet high. Let them by all
means roll about their tub in the streets, if they will remain contented
with their sport and their wages. They have, however, we may both of us
surmise and fear, done far less innocent work. It is not pleasant to
know that the pure, chaste secresy of your house has been invaded, taken
possession of, and is no longer exclusively yours; that you are in name
or in number, as No. 1 or No. 2, put away in a pigeon-hole somewhere in
that black pit you have seen in the map, to be drawn out, one of these
days, at the will of any impertinent official, and further questioned,
perhaps, as the phrase is, _squeezed_, when anything is to be got out of
you. You may have a commission sent down to your house, and take
possession of it, for some scrutiny or other, while you are taking your
morning walk; on your return, you will find two or three commissioners
have coolly taken your joint off the spit, and are politely drinking
your health out of your choicest sherry; and as an excuse of
extraordinary business, question you about the age and property of your
great-grandmother deceased. How do you or I know what use will be made
of all these registered particulars about us? It would be far pleasanter
to be let alone. I have an antipathy to curious questioning people. Dr
Franklin, when he came to a strange place, knowing the inquisitive
disposition of the people, used to say at once, “My name is Benjamin
Franklin; I come from such a place, and am going to such a place; age so
and so, and on such business; and now let me have out a horse.” I should
for one like to compound with this scrutinising government, on condition
of exemption from place in their books, to put out weekly posted to my
door the names, ages, and sex of every inmate, with a diary of their
employments the six days; requesting not to be called to account for my
time on the hallowed seventh. There is no chance of such a composition
being accepted on their part; for you will see, Eusebius, there is
nothing they are so busy about as to know what religion you are of.
There is a separate book for this very purpose; nay, they go
farther—they have superseded all known authorities in these matters, and
have dictated what shall be your creed, giving you only a latitude of
“_Churches_”—such they call every denomination in their Report presented
to Parliament, and her Majesty, who as yet happily has recognised but
one Church of England, in which matter the Report is undoubtedly at
variance with the fundamental law of the Constitution, and passes a kind
of insulting suggestion upon her Majesty’s highest prerogative, her very
crown and dignity. This is a matter for other consideration; the
religious Report must be examined; I only see at present, and note the
fact, that the Church of England is put down as but one of the sects.
“Increase and multiply” was at the beginning, and from the beginning to
this day is, the Divine command. Some would infer that there must be a
blessing attending obedience to it, others would in part abrogate the
law, and, with Malthus, admit no crowding at the bountiful table which
nature supplies. The presumption fairly is, that as security to life and
happiness is the main cause of increase; viewing this world only, such
increase must be a great good, and it implies advancement in
civilisation, which possibly may not be ill defined as the art of
promoting life and happiness. It includes moral advancement. But the
beneficence of our Maker allows us to look beyond this world. Hence, the
awful thought, and the responsibility incurred by its increase of
population, is an increase of immortal souls. There is a depth in this
argument beyond my scope. It is a curious fact which this Census shows.
In 1801, the population of Great Britain was 10,578,956; in 1851, it had
reached 20,959,477. Thus the population has nearly doubled in fifty
years. But further, “The population of the United Kingdom, including the
army, navy, and merchantseamen, was 21,272,187 in 1821, and about
27,724,849 in 1851; but in the interval 2,685,747 persons emigrated,
who, if simply added to the population of the United Kingdom, make the
survivors and descendants of the races within the British Isles in 1821,
now 30,410,595.”
Perhaps, Eusebius, you never considered that you have only right and
title to a certain limited area, to live and breathe in, in this your
beloved country. Your area is becoming more circumscribed every day.
People are approximating fearfully. You may come to touch very
disagreeable people; at present you are only a few yards apart. There
are two things, according to this Census, threatening you—“density” and
“proximity.” For “density” a French writer proposes “specific population
after the analogy of specific gravity,” so that if there be an
accelerating ratio, you may be run in upon and crushed by your
neighbours, after the annihilating principle of some of our railroads. I
remember when a boy hearing an old gentleman make a curious calculation,
equalising rights to the air we breathe. He came to the conclusion that
a man who smoked tobacco took up more room in the atmosphere than he had
any right to. This, now that we are so rapidly approximating, ought, you
will think, to come under the consideration of the Legislature. See your
danger—“the people of England were on an average one hundred and
fifty-three yards asunder in 1801, and one hundred and eight yards
asunder in 1851.” Thus the regular goers, the world-walkers, are coming
in upon you; but there are some as erratic as comets, whose contiguity
you will dread. I say this is your danger, for you do not suppose such
infinite pains would have been taken, and such vast expense incurred,
merely out of idle curiosity to give you this information. Perhaps it is
kindly meant to give you a hint that your room would be preferred to
your company. “Tempus abire tibi est.” More than this—not only persons,
but houses are encroaching upon each other. “The mean distance apart of
their houses was three hundred and sixty-two yards in 1801, and two
hundred and fifty-two yards in 1851.” You see, then, you must not only
set yourself in order to depart, but you must “set your house in order”
also. It is really astonishing that the Census Commission should have
taken such a world of trouble in making calculations which, at first
sight, look so puerile; we must only conclude, that somehow or other the
labour is as much worth the hire, as the labourer is worthy _his_ hire.
I dare to say, among your ignorances, you are ignorant of this, that the
British Isles are at least five hundred in number. “Five hundred islands
and rocks have been numbered, but inhabitants were only found and
distinguished on the morning of March 31, 1851, in _one hundred and
seventy-five_ islands, or groups of islands.” I cannot very well tell
what is meant by “_distinguished_,” but you will perceive that there is
a chance, if you fear the “crushing density and proximity” of escape to
one of these islands, as yet uninhabited, where you may exist without
contact or contagion, as a very “_distinguished_” individual. You may be
another Alexander Selkirk, and “monarch of all you survey,” and have the
honour of a distinction, in the next census, now enjoyed by a lone lady.
You will be enumerated as, and as solely taking care of, number one.
There are British isles that have each but two inhabitants. “Little
Papa” has but one—a woman; and “Inchcolm one solitary man.” What think
you of this “last man” and this “last woman,” each upon his or her
“_ultima Thule_?” The motherless man-hating woman, in contempt of the
parental name, alone treading under foot “Little Papa.” The “solitary
man,” if, as is likely he be, brutish, may live out of the fear of a
recent Act of Parliament. For if he disdains the marital luxury, he
cannot be punished for beating his wife.
The writer of these statistics, aware that there is a good deal of dry
matter, prudently sprinkles it with a little saltwater poetry. Thus, as
a kind of preface to these British islands, he says, “The Scandinavian
race survives in its descendants round the coasts of the British Isles,
and the soul of the old Viking still burns in the seamen of the British
fleet, in the Deal boatmen, in the fishermen of the Orkneys, and in that
adventurous, bold, direct, skilful, mercantile class, that has encircled
the world by its peaceful conquests. What the Greeks were in the
Mediterranean Sea, the Scandinavians have been in the Atlantic Ocean. A
population of a race on the islands and the island coasts, impregnated
with the sea, in fixing its territorial boundaries would exhibit but
little sympathy with the remonstrating Roman poet, in his Sabine farm
over the Mediterranean:
‘Nequidquam Deus abscidit
Prudens _occano dissociabili_
Feras, si tamen impiæ
Non tangenda rates trausiliunt vada.’”
A writer or compiler of statistics should ride his own hobby. Pegasus is
hard-mouthed to his hand; if he attempts the use of the curb, he is
thrown, and thus is sure to be run away with. So here he has got quite
beyond the ground of matter-of-fact. By the Vikings’ soul in the British
seamen—the burning soul too—he declares himself of the Pythagorean
philosophy, quite gratuitously; and in the following sentence carries
his transmigration notions to a strange but practical conclusion, for he
tells us of a race “_impregnated with the sea_,” imaging sailors’
mothers and wives as mermaids—that is, previous to the marine and
marital alliances; by which unaccountable flight of poetic diction, I
presume, he means only that the sea was rather a rough nursing-mother:
and how could he imagine that such an untutored race ever read, or could
read, a syllable of what Horace wrote? Doubtless, he must have been
weary, counting up these five hundred mostly barren islands, and, coming
in the list to “_Rum_,” it must have made for him a comfortable
suggestion; and in consequence, a pretty stiff tumbler set all his ideas
at once afloat, and poetically, “half seas over” among the islands,
steering, however, steadily, as he was bound towards Mull Port, and the
more pleasant hospitality of its 7485 inhabitants. Having descended from
this marine Pegasus, the author proceeds in his statistics.
The number of inhabited houses in Great Britain in 1801 amounted to
1,870,476; in 1851, to 3,648,347: these contained 4,312,388
families—persons, 20,816,351. Thus it is seen that the number of houses
since 1801 is nearly doubled. How commonly we boast, Eusebius, of things
that have passed away! You hear it now often said that an Englishman’s
house is his castle, the garrison of which has been hitherto supposed to
be known only to himself. There has been an idea that not only the
master, but all down to the very scullion, are ready to stand with spits
and skillets to keep out unwelcome invaders; whereas the truth is, as
shown in this Census, that the castle has its government inspector, who
notes down and registers the numbers, ages, names, sexes, and
occupations of every individual the said castle contains. Houses are a
very nice tangible property for the convenience of government taxation;
by judicious scrutiny, of which the Census Commission provides ample
means, it will be easily ascertained what each family has to live upon;
or, what is quite the same thing for the getting the taxation, what on
“an average” the Commissioners may think the said family ought to have
to live upon; thus the income-tax is facilitated in computation and
collection. These are surely encroachments, that, by little and little,
are domineering over the subjects’ liberty. There are other Acts of
Parliament also which affect this liberty in the “castle;” some general,
some local. In few places can a man make alterations in his building,
inside or out, without an application for consent, and of course a fee
to some commissioner or other. If he succeeds, there is a further
penalty upon his improvements, though they may have been required for
the very health of his family. He has, through this Census scrutiny, to
pay a tax upon his improvements, nor is he allowed any deduction for
repairs. This Englishman’s castle, then, you see, is as much besieged as
Bomarsund! At first it was pretty well thrown out of its own windows by
the window-tax, and is always at the mercy of commissions, whether it
shall or shall not be turned out of doors. Many a one is there that has
a ten-pound battery playing upon it all the year round. If, weary of
watching your besiegers, you turn yourself out of house, and live a
rambling, roving life how you can, you will not so easily escape; you
will have an inspector after you with note-book and ink-horn, and you
will be booked and pigeon-holed for further use when wanted. “Finally,
there is the population sleeping in barns, in tents, and in the open
air, comprising, with some honest, some unfortunate people out of
employment, or temporarily employed, gypsies, beggars, strollers,
vagabonds, vagrants, outcasts, criminals. The enumeration of the
houseless population, unsettled in families, is necessarily imperfect,
and the actual number must exceed the 18,249 returned; namely, 9972 in
barns, and 8277 in the open air.” The poor strollers! why should they be
stigmatised and classed with vagabonds, vagrants, outcasts, and
criminals? are they not following their lawful vocation, and doing
something, as it is hoped they are, towards civilising the people
through legitimate amusement? Is the compiler of these statistics a
descendant of the old Puritans, and still retaining an unwarrantable
prejudice? It were better he had the charity of the chimney-sweeper boy,
who remonstrated with a brother sweep, who pointed his finger at Garrick
in the streets, and said, “There be one of the player-folk.” “Don’t say
so,” said the discreet one, “for thee dostn’t know what thee and I may
come to.” But I know, as you rather patronise gypsies, you will be
pleased to hear that one tribe of them baffled the officials. “It is
mentioned in one instance that a tribe of gypsies struck their tents,
and passed into another parish in order to escape enumeration.”
The great king whom we read of in history, who, in the excess of his
felicity, thought it needful to have a flapper appointed to remind him
every day that he was mortal, though he was made the example of many a
theme in our school days, I look upon now as a very silly fellow. I have
often heard you express your dislike of any impertinent _memento
moris_—you have even thought it irreligious, and unthankful for present
good; and tending to chill the life-blood, the little that is left in
the old, and to throw a wet blanket over the cheerfulness of the young,
out of which cheerfulness elastic manhood is to spring, and to take upon
itself to do the manly responsible duties of life vigorously. I repeat
that you have always maintained, that to thrust a _memento mori_ in
every man’s face, or to carve it upon his walking-stick, is irreligious,
because it is essential unthankfulness.
It is not pleasant, certainly, to have one’s days numbered by other
people, and sent to you in circulars. I knew one of these
life-calculators; a clergyman called to condole with him on the recent
death of his wife. All he could get from him was partly a submission to
a necessity, and partly a congratulation that death had not taken him.
“Yes, sir,” said he, “if A does not die, in all probability B will; and
if neither A nor B die, C must.” You will be indignant, but your
philosophy will have the pleasure of its indignation, if I pointed out
to your notice Busybody’s table of mortality. When last he knocked at
your door, and booked your age, did his eyebrows arch with surprise?
Eusebius, that look meant to tell you that you had no right whatever at
that moment to be alive. He longed to filch your name out of his
pigeon-hole of life. You are a hale man, and will, I hope, doing so much
good as you do, outlive a couple of censuses yet. Have your eye upon
Busybody when he next appears; not like Death, with one of his warnings,
but ready to receive a certificate of burial. There is a table showing
how very few who were alive in 1801 are now living, and so on, at every
succeeding census. “By the English Life Table it is shown that the half
of a generation of men of all ages passes away _in thirty years_, and
that more than three in every four of their number die in half a
century.” But I pass by this unwelcome subject—nor will I be the one to
say to you or to any man, “Proximus ardet, Ucalegon.” Let Ucalegon’s
house escape if it can.
It is more agreeable to contemplate births than deaths. There is
something very curious in that hidden law which evidently regulates the
proportion of the sexes to each other. It has been commonly thought that
the males have exceeded the females, in order to make allowance for the
greater waste of life to which the males are subject by wars and the
elements. But the facts show the contrary. “The number of the male
population of Great Britain was 10,386,048, of the female population
10,735,919; the females exceeded the males by 349,871; and the males at
home were 10,223,558; consequently the females exceeded by 512,361 the
males _in_ Great Britain. To every 100,000 females the males were
96,741, including 1538 males abroad, the exclusion of whom leaves 95,203
males at home. The excess of females over males was nearly the same
proportionally in 1801 and 1851. Thus, in 1801, to every 100,000 males
there were 103,353 females; in 1851, the females were 103,369 to the
same number of males. The proportion in both periods was nearly 30 males
to 31 females.” It may be inferred from this that there is rather a
greater waste of female life than of male. It would be worth while to
ascertain how long this excess has been found to have taken place; I am
inclined to suspect that the unhealthy employments of young women, to so
large an extent, may have been the cause; for it seems to be the law of
nature to make a supply for the greater waste. Humanity requires a
strict scrutiny into the healthy or deleterious employments of young
women, especially in our manufacturing districts, to account for this
excessive supply, that as far as is possible some remedial measures may
be adopted. That all is regulated by a law of Providence, there can be
no doubt in any mind. My present knowledge of the Census is entirely
confined to the Report No. 1 of 1851. I shall look to the second Part
for an elucidation of this problem.
It is surprising, however, on the whole, to see how evenly the sexes are
balanced; it would be a speculation not uninteresting to see what causes
may have induced occasional variations. Thus speaks the Report:
“The sexes have apparently increased at different rates in certain
decennaries, but the average annual rates of increase through the whole
period have been so nearly the same (males 1.328, females 1.329 per
cent) as to cause a slight difference only in the third decimal place,
and have differed little from 1⅓ annually. The decennial rates of
increase were, males 14.108, females 14.111.” The “law of population,”
as it relates to proportion of sexes, is a mystery. No human polity can
provide for that. It is plain to see, however, that there is a wise,
benevolent, superintending power which makes and maintains the law in a
just equilibrium. Whether people shall marry or no may depend on human
laws and civil institutions; whether due encouragement be given, or the
reverse.
We learn from Herodotus that among the Sauromatæ, a people in the
northern parts of Europe and Asia, the women dressed in the habits of
men, and, like them, engaged in battle; that none were allowed to marry
till she shall first have killed her man. Hence it happened, we are
further told, that many died old maids, never having been able to fulfil
the conditions. How any population could be kept up under the existence
of such a law, no one now can question the historian. I suppose, from
the necessity of the case, that a reform was demanded, and more peaceful
marriages were the first-fruits of a free trade. It must have been an
adventurous thing for a man to marry a woman who had once killed her man
to obtain one husband; he might have lived in continual fear that she
might kill a second man to have another husband.
It appears that marriage, though it is nominally free, is under
restriction; were it otherwise, the increase of population would be far
greater. “In ordinary times a large proportion of the marriageable women
of every country are unmarried.” The writer might have spared his ink;
but he adds: “And the most direct action on the population is produced
by their entering the marriage state.” As one example may serve a
general purpose, the Census gives that of the south-eastern division,
comprising Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hants, and Berks, in which “the number
of women of the age of 20, and under 45, amounted at the last Census to
290,209, of whom 169,806 were wives, and 120,403 were spinsters or
widows. 49,997 births were registered in the same counties during the
year 1850, or 10 children were born in 1850 to every 58 women living in
1851.” It is to be presumed that among matrimonial chances every lot is
a prize. The difficulty of a choice, where multitudes assemble,
maintains a law of hesitation—of indecision—by which it happens that
celibacy becomes wise, and is fond of repeating the philosopher’s advice
as to the time to marry: if young, not yet; if middle-aged, wait; if
old, never. Let us see how the reverse operates where the choice is very
limited. St Kilda, in the parish of Harris, is 70 miles away from the
mainland in the Western Hebrides; the population is 110—48 males, 62
females; 32 families in 32 houses. “There are 19 married couples on the
island, 2 widowers, 8 widows. _Five unmarried men, 5 unmarried women of
the age of 20, and under 46._” One would imagine these had only to meet
and to marry. Five is no great choice; the greater haste, you would
suppose, to take a partner. Is the solution to be found in this
extraordinary fact, that there is no clergyman to unite the couples
resident on the island? The five couples must wait; and as the clergyman
on the mainland may hesitate to go 140 miles to marry one couple, he is
probably waiting for all five to come to a decision. It must have been
some such unfortunate place as St Kilda which supplied the wit to the
epigrammatist upon the question of marriages ceasing elsewhere, the
priest asserting that women are not to be found there; the reply being—
“Women there are, but I’m afraid
They cannot find a priest.”
“On St Kilda,” says the Census, “there is a manse and a church, but no
medical man—no clergyman resident on the island.”
Will the world be better, Eusebius, for all these statistics; will
civilisation be one jot advanced, by _registering_ our tailors as well
as their paletots?—by knowing how many tinkers there are in the world to
mend our kettles? They will, be sure of it, trudge about just the same,
and do their work as badly or as well as before. All trades will be
governed by their own instincts, without the least difference; unless,
indeed, statistics take a more useful turn, and fix their stigma upon
the adulterators of goods. We may have reason to say something in favour
of the ScrutinizerGeneral, when he can tell us where the wines called
port are manufactured that never came from Portugal, and who make them;
who adulterates our drugs, so that people are dying for lack of the
genuine; who, in fact, poison all we eat and drink, and put devils’-dust
on our backs for woollen cloth. It is very little to the purpose to have
the number of thieves and rascals that infest the world, if the Augean
stable of crime is left uncleansed. If dishonesty should ever be driven
out of common trades, which it has so notoriously infected, a great
thing would be done; and we might bear with a grateful quietude more
numbering and registering of us and all our concerns than we quite like;
although it surely is not necessary for this to carry on such espionage
as this Census contains. Perhaps even its absurdity is dangerous, for it
induces people to fix their minds upon that, not upon its ulterior
purposes. While men are laughing at things, wilily ridiculous in
themselves, they know not what mischief is secretly brewing. I maintain
that it is a great offence in any way to touch the sanctity of the
hearth—that what economists and statistic inventors may please to call
public liberty, should be allowed to destroy home liberty. It is
something monstrous that every one should be obliged to give an account
of every inmate in his house, their ages, conditions, and their
relationship. It is better to let some of the peccadilloes of life
escape notice, than register them and the house. If Miss or Mrs Debora
Wilkins shall receive under her hospitality a big nephew, it is very
hard upon her to be obliged to certify the exact relationship, or induce
her into the great error of writing down a falsehood. Men may be a
little more careless in such matters, but feminine nicety is touched to
the quick. I remember once an Irishman walking into a drawing-room, and
introducing to the lady of the house a tall youth, as, “Give me leave to
introduce my nephew;” then putting his hand aside of his mouth, he
added, in a whisper which may be truly termed Irish, for it was quite as
loud as the first introduction, “he’s my son.” Could you, having any
bowels of compassion, extort a like confession from such an unprotected
female as Miss Debora? A registration commission might, if encouraged,
hereafter ransack her unfortunate boxes to find baby-linen. Is there to
be nothing but one rigid rule—no charity shown to sex and age—but the
unsparing discovery of both on that fatal 30th of March? Must no female,
then, escape to her lover’s arms in male attire—no “lubberly boy” pass
for a sweet Anne Page, that sweet Anne Page fall not to the lot of a
fool? Must foibles, frailties, and follies be all registered in
damnatory schedules? Surely there might be a little decent connivance,
such as would spare the two village ladies, who, being born in the same
_anno Domini_, annually visited each other to determine what should be
their ages for the ensuing year. Their only comfort will be in bribery
and corruption, which they will be thankful is not yet put down, and a
fee will spare what uncharitable census would expose. There may be
something in attacking crimes and discovering frauds which touch the
whole community. These are not much harboured in homes, but in
public-houses, and in shops, which are not homes, but as having a public
character, and giving public invitation to all to enter them, ought to
come under some kind of surveillance; but when the citizen shuts his
street-door, let none force an entrance. Let no Asmodeus take off his
roof, and publish the within little histories, nor make gimlet-holes in
walls and ceilings. Such doings are but, as at present, a slight
exaggeration or caricature of a census. Let there be a police, and a
good one; even with much secret scrutiny allowed them,—it is for the
public safety; but there let it end in its admitted authority. Make not
a police of a census commission, nor let the one interfere with or usurp
the office of the other. Let a census be content to number the people—a
police take crime under its cognisance. The undying, ever-seeing, and
acting arrangement of a police is one of the most curious phenomena of
society. For revolutions that appear to overturn everything, scarcely
touch a well-ordered police; the excellence of which is, that it lives
and moves unseen, unfelt, by the good—that it is a protector.
I remember years ago reading an anecdote showing the perfection of the
old Parisian police. A gentleman had sojourned in Paris a week or two,
when one day he was requested to attend at the police-office. He was
surprised when told how he had occupied himself since he had been in
Paris—what houses he had frequented, what friends visited, what business
he had transacted. He was finally asked the home-question, “Are you a
man of courage—can you rely upon yourself?” He thought he might. Then he
was told that there was a plot to murder him in his bed that night—that
his own servant was in conspiracy with others for that purpose. He was
desired to go to bed as usual, and, if he did not sleep, to appear to
sleep, and to fear nothing. In the night he heard his room-door open, a
person or persons enter—he knew steps were softly approaching his bed—he
fancied the arm uplifted to murder him. His reliance and his courage
failed him not. Under his bed, and elsewhere in his room, soldiers had
been secreted. To make the story short, his servant and the accomplices
were taken. The census which a police quietly makes has an object of
general safety. It has its one pursuit. It has its particular game, and
we may well give it its license. By it we sleep safely in our beds. It
does its complicated but defined work silently; whereas the other census
is perpetually knocking at every man’s door, to ask impertinent
questions. It is a perpetual warning to “beware the Ides of March;” for
then it will come and toss the clothes off your bed at earliest dawn,
lest you should rise and escape; and you must give an account of all the
beds, and all who slept in them. And what is all this disturbance for?
For no earthly good that any of the persecuted can yet see, but all
mistrust the end. Must every one of us have a ticket and number on his
back? It is the same thing, if he and his concerns, and all the
relations of his life, are down in Busybody’s book. There he sits in his
Centralisation Office, with his millions of electric wires passing
underground, and coming up unseen in every man’s house. He means to have
his hook in every man’s nose, nay, every man’s, woman’s, and child’s,
and to draw them in when he wills, as a big spider does his flies, and
perhaps to leave them sucked as dry, suspended in his million-threaded
web. And has he not as many eyes as that ugly creature, and as many ways
of spreading out his ubiquitous legs—backward, forward, or circular? Oh,
this Busybody!—he means to have a line in every one’s mouth, and to draw
all after him as Gulliver did the diminutive fleet. But I say, Eusebius,
that, Liliputians as we are in his eyes, it is hard if we cannot
combine, get our multitudinous toils round his legs, and with a long
pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether, throw him on his back,
tie him down hands and feet, search his pockets for his hooks, and then
shoot our sharpest arrows into the body of this Quintus Flestrin. We
will not be any more gulled by this huge Gulliver. He is the Great
Humbug and Deceiver, cajoling silly ones into a belief in the marvel of
his arithmetic; that all the commonest things of life must be done by
his mystical numbers, or will be done ill; that they must count and
think of how many joints, bones, muscles, and sinews they have in their
toes, before venturing their feet a single step.
What is become of civilisation all this while, Eusebius? This Census,
which was to tell so much, has not thrown light upon the question. Yet,
perhaps, after all, it is a more simple one than you or I thought it to
be. I go back to the placidity of the Chinese lady in the picture. I am
now gazing on her expressive trustfulness—upon a complexion that, if
there be many such, justifies the title of “Celestial Empire.” She, the
feminine representative of a nation, the prized pearl of the Romance of
the Porcelain Empire, the very “Gentilezza,” the embodied purity of a
people’s best thoughts, the endowed growth of a perfection above nature,
for so much worship as humanity may, for its improvement in
civilisation, be allowed to set up in the garden of imaginary virtues,
the very Goshen where grow plants and flowers, and sweet waters glide
unknown to working nature, and all courting the enchanting and enchanted
beauty.
“L’acqua la terra in suo favor s’inchina.” Not to be tedious with you in
this fancied passion, Eusebius, I come to the point I aim at. She is the
emblem of civilisation, and that is feminine influence. Its ideal has
beautified that porcelain world, as it will ever beautify every other
where it is felt and maintained.
Yes, Eusebius, civilisation, like common sense, aptly called mother-wit,
comes from the mother. He who, as child and boy, loved and reverenced
for all her purity, truth, and goodness, a mother, when he becomes man
will ever do his part in civilising the world. From the first romance of
mother’s love groweth every other romance; for romance is a noble and
delicate sentiment. To propagate this is to propagate civilisation. But
if any lack this reverence, from whatever cause, and would palm upon
society, as better than its romance, an idle knowledge, a low spirit of
calculation, an accumulation of mere facts and figures, trust him not
with the secrets of your breast; all his doings tend to selfishness and
rebarbarism. A mother to him is but as poor old Mrs Bounderby ignored.
For my own part, Eusebius, when I see such glib statistical calculators
boasting of their practical knowledge, I bethink me of the learned dog
in the show, who with perseverance has acquired the trick of putting his
paw upon letters and numbers, and of arithmetising required ages. Take
heed to your pocket on such occasions; for though you have paid your
admission-ticket, there remains the last acquirement, the last main
trick to be exhibited, the going round the company with the hat in his
mouth.
A RUSSIAN REMINISCENCE.
Upon one of the coldest days of February 1853, I left Paris by the
Orleans Railway. The weather was extremely severe, the frozen snow lay
thick in the streets, the asphalt of the boulevards was slippery as
glass, sledges scoured the Champs Elysées and Bois de Boulogne. An icy
wind whistled round the train as we quitted the shelter of the station,
and I regretted, as I buttoned myself to the chin, and shrank into my
corner, that the carriage was not full, instead of having but one
occupant besides myself.
Opposite to me sat a hale man of about sixty-five, with a quick bright
eye, an intelligent, good-humoured countenance—somewhat
weather-beaten—and the red rosette of the Legion of Honour in his
button-hole. During the first half-hour he pored over a letter, whose
contents, judging from the animated expression of his physiognomy,
interested him strongly. He seemed scarcely aware of my presence. At
last he put up the letter, and then for the first time looked me in the
face. I had been but a few days out of a sick-bed, and was sensitive to
the cold, and doubtless my appearance was chilly and woebegone enough,
for I detected a slight approach to a smile at the corners of the
stranger’s mouth. To one or two commonplace remarks he replied
courteously but laconically, like a man who is neither unsociable nor
averse to conversation, but who prefers his own thoughts to that bald
talk with which travellers sometimes weary each other rather than sit
silent. So our dialogue soon dropped. The cold increased, my feet were
benumbed, and I stamped them on the floor of the carriage to revive the
circulation. My companion observed my proceedings with a comical look,
as if he thought me a very tender traveller.
“This carriage must be badly closed,” I remarked. “It is bitter cold to
the feet.”
“For that discomfort I have little pity,” replied the Frenchman. “A ride
on the railway is soon over, and a good fire or a brisk walk is a quick
and easy remedy. Mine is a different case. For forty years I have never
known warm feet.”
“For forty years?” I repeated, thinking I had misunderstood him.
“Yes, sir, forty years; since the winter of 1812—the winter of the
Russian campaign.”
“You were in that terrible campaign?” I inquired, in a tone of interest
and curiosity. My companion, previously taciturn, suddenly became
communicative.
“All through it, sir,” he replied; “from the Niemen to the Kremlin, and
back again. It was my first campaign, and was near being my last. I was
in others afterwards; in Germany in 1813, when the combined Germans and
Russians drove us before them, for want of the brave fellows we had left
in Muscovy’s snows; in France in 1814, when the Emperor made his gallant
struggle against overwhelming forces; and at the closing scene in
Flanders: but not all those three campaigns put together, nor, as I
believe, all that this century has witnessed, can match the horrors of
that dreadful winter in Russia.”
He paused, and, leaning back in his corner, seemed to revolve in his
mind events of powerful interest long gone by. I waited a while, in
hopes he would resume the subject. As he did not do so, I asked him to
what arm he belonged when in Russia.
“I was assistant-surgeon in a regiment of hussars,” he answered, “and in
my medical capacity I had abundant opportunity to make acquaintance with
the horrors of war. On the 7th of September, for instance, at the
Moskwa—Heavens! what a shambles that was! Ah, it was fine to see such
valour on both sides—for the Russians fought well—gallantly, sir, or
where would have been the glory of beating them? But Ney! Ney! Oh! he
was splendid that day! His whole countenance gleamed, as he again and
again led the bloody charge, exposing himself as freely as any corporal
in the ranks. And Eugene, the Viceroy, with what vigour he hurled his
masses against that terrible redoubt! When at last it was his, what a
sight was there! The ground was not strewn with dead; it was heaped,
piled with them. They had been shot down by whole ranks, and there they
lay, prostrate, in line as they had stood.”
The surgeon paused. I thought of Byron’s beautiful lines, beginning,
“Even as they fell, in files they lay;” but I said nothing, for I saw
that my companion was now fairly started, and needed no spurring.
“_Monsieur_,” he presently resumed, “all those things have been brought
strongly to my mind by the letter you saw me just now reading. It is
from an old friend, a captain in 1812, a general now, who went through
the campaign, and whom I was so fortunate as to save from a grave in
those infernal plains where most of our poor comrades perished. I will
tell you how it happened. We were talking of the battle of Borodino.
Seventy thousand men, it is said, were killed and wounded in that
murderous fight. We surgeons, as you may well think, had our hands full,
and still could not suffice for a tithe of the sufferers. It was a rough
breaking-in for a young hand, as I then was. Such frightful wounds as
were there, of every kind and description—from shot, shell, and bullet,
pike and sabre. Well, sir, all the misery and suffering I then saw, all
that vast amount of human agony and bloodshed, whose steam, ascending to
Heaven, might well have brought down God’s malediction on His creatures,
who could thus destroy and deface each other, was nothing compared with
the horrible misery we witnessed on our retreat. I have read everything
that has appeared in France concerning that campaign—Ségur, Labaume, and
other writers. Their narratives are shocking enough, but nothing to the
reality. They would have sickened their readers had they told all they
saw. If anybody, who went through the campaign, could remember and set
down all he witnessed, he would make the most heart-rending book that
ever yet was printed, and would be accused of gross exaggeration.
Exaggeration, indeed! there was no need to heighten the horrors of the
winter of 1812. All that frost and famine, lead and steel, could
inflict, was then endured; all the crimes that reckless despair and
ruthless cruelty could prompt were then perpetrated.”
“And how,” I asked, “did you escape, when so many, doubtless as strong
and courageous, and more inured to hardship, miserably perished?”
“Under Providence, I owed my preservation to the trustiest and most
faithful servant ever master had. Paul had been several years in the
hussars—was an old soldier, in fact, although still a young man; and at
a time when all discipline and subordination were at an end, when
soldiers heeded not their officers, officers avoided their generals, and
servants and masters were all alike and upon a level, Paul proved true
as steel. As if cold and the Cossacks were not enough, hunger was added
to our sufferings: there was no longer a commissariat or distribution of
rations;—rations, forsooth!—dead horse was a luxury I have seen men
fight for till death, lean meat though it was, for the poor brutes were
as starved as their riders. What little there was to eat in the villages
we passed through fell to the share of the first comers. Empty
larders—often smoking ruins—were all that remained for those who came
behind. Well, sir, when things were at the worst, and provender at the
scarcest, Paul always had something for me in his haversack. One day it
would be a bit of bread, on the morrow a handful of grain or some edible
roots, now and then a slice of horse-beef—and how delicious that seemed,
grilled over our smoky scanty fires! There was never enough to satisfy
my hunger, but there was always a _something_—enough to keep body and
soul together. Paul, as I afterwards discovered, husbanded his stores,
for he well knew that if he gave me all at once I should leave nothing,
and then I must have fasted for days, and perhaps have fallen from my
horse for weakness. But think of the courage and affection of the poor
fellow, himself half-starved, to carry food about him day after day, and
refrain from devouring the share secretly set aside for me! There were
not many men in the army, even of general’s rank, capable of such
devotion to the dearest friend they had, for extreme misery had induced
a ferocious selfishness, which made us more like hyenas than
Christians.”
“I should think the cold must have been even worse to endure than
hunger,” said I, screwing up my chilly extremities, which the interest
of the doctor’s conversation had almost made me forget.
“It was, sir, harder and more fatal—at least a greater number died of
it; although, to say the truth, frost and famine there worked hand in
hand, and with such unity of action, that it was often hard to say which
was the cause of death. But it was a shocking sight, of a morning, to
see the poor fellows lying dead round the bivouac fires. Unable to
resist fatigue and the drowsy influence of the cold, they yielded to
slumber, and passed from sleep into death. For, there, sleep _was_
death.”
“But how then,” I asked, “did any ever escape from Russia, for all must
have slept at times?”
“I do not believe that any who escaped _did_ sleep, at least not of a
night, at the bivouac. We used to rouse each other continually, to
prevent our giving way, and then get up and walk as briskly as we could,
to quicken the sluggish circulation. We slept upon the march, in our
saddles, and, strange as it may seem to you, even those on foot slept
when marching. They marched in groups or clusters, and those in the
centre slept, propped and supported by their companions, and moving
their legs mechanically. I do not say that it was a sound, deep sleep,
but rather a sort of feverish dozing. Such as it was, however, it was
better than nothing, and assuredly saved some who would otherwise have
sunk. Others, who would have given way to weariness upon the long
monotonous march, were kept from utter despair and self-abandonment only
by the repeated harassing attacks of the Cossacks. The excitement of the
skirmish warmed their blood, and gave them, as it seemed, fresh hold
upon life. In one of those skirmishes, or rather in a sharp combat, a
dear friend of mine, a captain in the same regiment, had his left arm
carried off by a cannon-shot. After the affair was over, I came suddenly
upon him, where he lay moaning by the roadside, his face ashy pale, his
arm still hanging by the sinews. His horse had either galloped away, or
been taken by the fugitives.
“‘_Ah, mon ami!_’ he cried, when he saw me, ‘all is over—I can go no
further. I shall never see France again!’
“I saw that, like the majority of those who received severe wounds in
that retreat, his moral courage was subdued, and had given way to
despair. I was terribly shocked, for I felt how slight was his chance of
escape. I need hardly tell you there was very little dressing of wounds
during that latter part of the retreat; most of the surgeons were dead,
the hospital-waggons with medicine and instruments had been left on the
road; transport for the sick was out of the question. I assumed as
cheerful a countenance as I could.
“‘Why, Préville,’ I cried, ‘this will not do; we must get you along
somehow. Come! courage, my friend! You _shall_ see France again, in
spite of all.’
“‘Ah! doctor,’ replied he, in piteous tones, ‘it is no use. Here I shall
die. All you can do for me is to blow my brains out, and save me from
the Cossack lances.’
“By this time I had dismounted and was at his side. The intense cold had
stopped the bleeding of his wound. I saw that there was no lack of
vitality in him, and that, but for this mishap, few would have got out
of the campaign in better plight. Even now, his despondency was perhaps
his greatest danger. I reminded him of his wife and child (he had been
married little more than a year, and news of the birth of a daughter had
reached him on our forward march), of his happy home, his old mother—of
all the ties, in short, that bound him to life. Whilst speaking, I
severed the sinews that still retained his shattered arm, and bound it
up as best I might. He still despaired and moaned, but suffered me to do
as I would. He was like an infant in my hands—that man who, in the hour
of battle, was a very lion for courage. But long suffering and the
sudden shock—occurring, too, when we seemed on the verge of safety—had
overcome his fortitude. With Paul’s help I got him upon my horse. The
poor brute was in no case to carry double, so I walked and led it,
although at that time I could hardly hobble.
“‘It is all useless, my dear doctor,’ Préville said; ‘this is my last
day; I feel that. Far better shoot me, or leave me by the roadside, than
risk your life for my sake.’
“I took no heed, but tried to cheer him. Those unclean beasts, the
Cossacks, were hovering around us as usual, and at times the bullets
fell pretty thick. Not a quarter of an hour had elapsed since I set
Préville on my horse, when a shot struck his right eye—not entering the
head, but glancing across the globe, and completely destroying the
sight. Well, sir, then there occurred a physiological phenomenon which I
have never been able satisfactorily to account for. This man, whom the
loss of an arm had reduced to despair, seemed to derive fresh courage
from the loss of an eye. At any rate, from that moment he complained no
more of his fate, resumed his usual manly tone, and bore up like a hero.
Paul was lucky enough to catch a riderless horse, which I mounted. The
worst was over, and we soon got a respite. Without troubling you with
details, and incredible though it may seem to you, my poor friend
escaped with life, although with a limb and an eye the less.”
“There must have been many extraordinary escapes from that campaign,” I
remarked.
“Innumerable. There was a sergeant of dragoons, a former comrade of my
servant’s, who, for many days, marched beside me and Paul. He received a
severe wound. There were some vehicles still with us at that time, and
we got him a place in one of them, and made him as comfortable as we
could. The following night we stopped at a town. In the morning, as we
were about to march, the Cossacks came down. There was great confusion;
several baggage-carts were captured in the street, and some of the
wounded were abandoned in the houses where they had passed the night.
Amongst these was Sergeant Fritz. Not many houses in the town were still
in good condition—most of them had been burned and knocked to pieces by
the soldiers. The house in which Fritz lay had still its doors and
windows, and was one of the most comfortable in the place, on which
account it had been converted into a temporary hospital. Well, the
Russians came in, brought their wounded, and turned out our poor fellows
to make room for them. Some, who could not move quickly enough, were
brutally pitched through a low window into a garden behind the house,
there to perish miserably. Fritz was one of these. Only just able to
crawl, he made his way round the garden, seeking egress. He reached a
gate communicating with another garden. It was locked, and pain and
weakness forbade his climbing over. He sat close to the gate, propped
against it, and looking wistfully through the bars at the windows of a
house, and at the cheerful glow of a fire, when he was perceived by a
young girl. She came out and opened the gate, and helped him into the
house. Her father was a German clockmaker, long settled in Russia, and
Fritz, a Swiss, spoke German well. The kind people put him to bed, hid
his uniform, and tended him like a son. When, in the following spring,
his health was restored, and he would have left them, the German
proposed to him to remain and assist him in his trade. He accepted the
offer, married the German’s daughter, and remained in Russia until his
father-in-law’s death, when he was taken with a longing to revisit his
native mountains, and returned to Switzerland with his wife and family.
I met him since at Paris, and he told me his story. But although his
escape was narrow, and romantic enough, there must have been others much
more remarkable. Most of the prisoners made by the Russians, and who
survived severe cold and harsh treatment, were sent to Moscow, to labour
at rebuilding the city. When the fine season came, some of them managed
to escape, and to make their way, in various disguises, and through
countless adventures, back to their own country.”
I have set down but the most striking portions of our conversation—or
rather, of the doctor’s narrative, since I did little but listen; and
occasionally, by a question or remark, direct his communicativeness into
the channel I wished it to take. We were now near Orleans.
“The letter I was reading when we started,” said my companion, “and
which has brought back to my memory all that I have told you—at risk,
perhaps, of wearying you,” he added with a slight bow and smile, “and a
host of other circumstances, to me of thrilling and everlasting
interest, is from General Préville, who lives in the south of France,
but has come unexpectedly to Orleans to pass a month with me. That is
his way. He lives happily with a married daughter; but now and then the
desire to see an old comrade, and to fight old battles over again, comes
so strongly upon him, that he has his valise packed at an hour’s notice,
and takes me by surprise. He knows well that ‘The General’s Room’ and an
affectionate reception always await him. I received his letter—full of
references to old times—yesterday evening, and am now hurrying back to
Orleans to see him. He may very likely be waiting for me at the station;
and you will see that, for a man who gave himself up for dead forty
years ago in the snows of Russia, and begged, as a favour, a bullet
through his brain, he looks tolerably hearty and satisfied to live.”
“There is one thing, _Monsieur le Docteur_,” I said, “which you have not
yet explained to me, and which I do not understand. Did you mean
literally what you said, that since the Russian campaign you have never
had your feet warm?”
“Literally and truly, sir. When we got to Orcha, where Jomini was in
command, and where the heroic Ney, who had been separated from the army,
rejoined us with the skeleton of his corps—having cut his way, by sheer
valour and soldiership, through clouds of Platoff’s Cossacks—we took a
day’s rest. It was the 20th of November, the last day of anything
approaching to comfort which we were to enjoy before crossing the
Russian frontier. True, we made one more halt, at Molodetschino, whence
Napoleon dated his bulletin of our terrible disasters, but then only a
portion of us could find lodging; we were sick, half-frozen, and numbers
died in the streets. At Orcha we found shelter and tranquillity; the
governor had provided provisions against our passage, the enemy left us
quiet, and we enjoyed a day of complete repose. My baggage had long
since been lost, and my only pair of boots were torn to shreds. I had
been riding with fragments of a soldier’s jacket tied round my feet,
which I usually kept out of the stirrups, the contact of the iron
increasing the cold. At Orcha, the invaluable Paul brought me a Jew (the
Jews were our chief purveyors on that retreat) with boots for sale. I
selected a pair and threw away my old ones, which for many days I had
not taken off. My feet were already in a bad state, sore and livid. I
bathed them, put on fresh stockings and my new boots, and contrived with
a pair of old trousers, a sort of leggings or overalls, closed at the
bottom, and to be worn over the boots. From that day till we got beyond
the Niemen, a distance of one hundred and ten leagues, which we took
three weeks to perform, I never took off any part of my dress. During
that time I suffered greatly from my feet; they swelled till my boots
were too tight for me, and at times I was in agony. When we at last were
comparatively in safety, and I found myself, for the first time since I
left Orcha, in a warm room, with a bed to lie upon and water to wash, I
called Paul to pull off my boots. Sir, with them came off my stockings,
and the entire skin of both feet. A flayer’s knife could hardly have
done the thing more completely. For a moment I gave myself up as lost. I
had seen enough of this kind of thing to know that my feet were on the
verge of mortification. There was scarcely time to amputate, had any
been at hand to do it, and had I been willing to preserve life at such a
price. Only one thing could save me, and I resolved to try it. I ordered
Paul to bring a bottle of brandy; I put a piece of silver between my
teeth, and bade him pour the spirits over my feet. I can give you no
idea of the excruciating torture I then endured. Whilst it lasted,
assuredly no martyr’s sufferings ever exceeded mine. It was agony—but it
was safety. I bit the florin nearly in two, and broke this tooth.” (Here
the doctor drew up his lip and exhibited a defective tooth, in company
with some very white and powerful grinders.) “The martyrdom saved me; I
recovered, but the new integuments, which in time covered my scarred
feet, seem chilled by the recollection of their predecessors’
sufferings, and from that day to this I have never had my feet otherwise
than cold. But here we are at Orleans, sir, and yonder as I expected
stands my old Préville.”
The train stopped as he concluded, and a fine-looking veteran, with
white hair, an empty sleeve, and a silken patch over one eye, peered
inquisitively into the carriages. Like most Englishmen, I have a
particular aversion to the Continental fashion of men kissing and
hugging each other, but I confess I beheld with interest and sympathy
the cordial embrace of these two old comrades, who then quickly
separated, and, with hands grasped, looked joyously and affectionately
into each other’s faces, whilst a thousand recollections of old kindness
and long comradeship were evidently swelling at their hearts. In his
joy, my travelling companion did not forget the attentive listener,
whose journey he had so agreeably shortened. Turning to me, he presented
me to the general, as an Englishman and a new acquaintance, and then
cordially invited me to pass the rest of the day at his house. But the
business that took me to Orleans was urgent, and my return to Paris must
be speedy. And had it been otherwise, I think I still should have
scrupled to restrain, by a stranger’s presence, the first flow of
intimate communion to which the two friends evidently looked forward
with such warm and pleasurable feelings. So I gratefully declined, but
pledged myself to take advantage of the doctor’s hospitality upon my
next visit to Orleans. When that occurs, I shall hope to glean another
Russian Reminiscence.
RECORDS OF THE PAST.—NINEVEH AND BABYLON.
History must ever possess an undying fascination for the minds of men,
for its subject is the story of their race, and its interest is ever
human to the core. Its burden is now a song of rejoicing at the
triumphs, or a wail of lamentation over the errors and sufferings, of
mankind. How history, in gifted hands, exults as it reaches those
blooming points in a nation’s career—those eras of Pericles, of
Augustus, of Haroun-Alraschid, or of our own Elizabeth,—or, piercing
back through the veil of time, discerns with joy the brilliant era of a
Vicramaditya in the old world of the Hindoos,—the grandeur of a Rameses,
or still remoter monarchs in Egypt—or a rule of then unequalled justice
and beneficence extending back for countless ages in the early history
of secluded China. And how it saddens to see these old empires pass
away,—to behold Rome, and Greece, and Nineveh, and Egypt, Susa and
Persepolis, and the grand old cities of India, withered, rolled up like
a scroll, and vanishing from the face of the earth. Yet with what quiet
hopefulness, with what assured resignation, does it contemplate all
those changes. “Passing away,” it knows, is written from the first upon
the brow of empires as well as of men; and even when the mighty fabrics
of human power are seen crumbling into dust beneath internal decay or
external assault,—when the stores of knowledge, the monuments of art—in
fact, a whole civilisation—seems rushing into oblivion before an
onslaught of barbarism, the philosophic historian, with an assuredness
of faith stronger than other men’s, knows that the human race is but on
the eve of some new and higher development—that all is ordered by One
without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and that from out of the
present chaos will emerge new kingdoms and communities of men, purged
from the dross of the old, yet inheriting the larger portion of their
wisdom.
“All changes, naught is lost. The forms are changed,
And that which has been, is not what it was,—
Yet that which has been, is.”
History has a grand work yet before it,—one which mankind is just
beginning to long for, and which will yet one day be accomplished.
History must grow wider in its scope and nobler in its aims as the
career of our race advances. It must rise above the colourings of
national bias, and the prejudices of particular eras. It must cease—and
some day it will cease—to reflect but one phase at a time of that
many-sided thing Truth, and will seize and set forth for the instruction
of mankind the priceless gem under whatever form it appear, however
attired in the strange costume of distant times or foreign countries. It
must tell to man a continuous story of his existence. It must recognise
the truth that in all those various nations that have flourished and
passed away, there has been enshrined the self-same human soul, which
the great Creator made in His own image, and which, however manifold in
its aberrations, will still be found, on the whole, to reflect more of
truth than of error.
Nothing is more elevating than the study of the human race through its
successive phases of existence. Therein is to be discovered the scheme
of God’s Providence among the nations, slowly raising the race from one
stage of progress to another and higher. The world advances slowly,—but
still “it moves!” Severed into distinct nations, and divinely placed or
led into climes congenial to the peculiar development of each,—secluded
behind mountain chains, deserts, or seas, each section of mankind has
been left to develop a civilisation of its own—forms of government,
religion, art, science, philosophy, more or less peculiar to itself.
Through long ages this birth of nations has been going on, each learning
for itself the lessons of life. And each of those nations, whether
ancient or modern, has attached itself in a peculiar manner to some one
of the many forms of truth, carrying it to greater perfection than the
other sections of the race. Every one knows that such was the case among
the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews,—but do not let it be
supposed that the wisdom of the ancient world ends here. Do not suppose
that nothing is to be learned from the old history and writings of
China—that land where social ethics and utilitarian science were first
carried to comparative perfection; or from the ancient Hindoos, who
first pre-eminently devoted themselves to the study of the spiritual
nature of man, and in whose lofty speculations may be found the germ of
almost every system of philosophy, whether true or false, to which the
European world has given birth. Hegel and Spinosa are but Hindoos
reviving in the eighteenth century. Auguste Comte, with his boasted new
science of Positivism, is but a systematiser of the doctrines of
Confucius and the old philosophers of China,—and what are magnetism,
clairvoyance, and suchlike researches at present making into the
spiritual powers of man, but unconscious repetitions of what has been
known or imagined in India for three thousand years?
Had the human race formed from the first but one nation—swayed by but
one great impulse, and enlightened but by its own single experience, how
comparatively stationary would have been the condition of the species!
But severed into separate communities, each seeking truth for itself,
and, as intercommunication became wider, comparing its experiences with
those of its neighbours, the march of mankind has been greatly
accelerated. There have been a hundred searchers after truth instead of
one. It is only now, however, in these latter days, that mankind are
beginning to perceive and reap the benefit of the beneficent scheme of
Providence which has so long kept them secluded in location and
antagonistic in feeling. It is in those days of running to and fro upon
the earth—when commerce, and railways, and steam-navigation are uniting
the most distant regions—that the varied stores of knowledge which have
been accumulating in private hoards through long centuries are now being
thrown into general circulation. The more advanced nations are teaching
the less enlightened. But the gain is not all on one side; and the
former will be unworthy of their high position, if they fail to perceive
in how very many things they may receive instruction from those whom
they regard as their inferiors. The whole tendency of the
rapidly-increasing communication between the various nations and
countries of the earth is to shake men loose from local prejudices, and,
by expanding the mind, to fit it for the reception of that pure and
entire truth, towards the attainment of which the human mind is
journeying, and to which the matchless plans of Divine Providence are
slowly but surely conducting the human race. To the eye of the
philosopher, the world is a prism through which Truth is shining—and the
nations are the various colours and hues of the spectrum into which that
light is broken. Hitherto mankind, split into sections, has only
exhibited those scattered and disunited, but brilliant, rays,—truth
refracted and coloured by the national mind through which it passed; but
now, in the fulness of time, the process is being reversed. The long
training of isolated nations is drawing to a close; the barriers of
space or feeling which shut them in are being thrown down; an
interchange of intellectual as well as material benefits is commencing;
and the dissevered rays of partial knowledge are beginning to be
reunited into the pure and perfect light of truth.
Let, then, some Newton or Humboldt of history—some one who grudges not a
lifetime of genius to the task, and to whom Providence may give length
of days,—let such an one take up the theme of those old nations. By the
might of his graphic pen let him evoke them and their crumbled empires
from the dust, and place them in their pristine glory before the eye of
the reader. Let him paint the people, the land in which they dwelt, the
temples in which they worshipped;—let him glance with graphic touch over
the leading points of their history, the master-spirits who influenced,
and the poets who adorned it;—let him depict the arts of life and the
arts of beauty which characterised them; and, hardest task of all, let
him dive into the depths of their religion and philosophy—not the
fantastic crust of superstition, but the more spiritual dogmas which lie
below; and, wasting but little time upon what was false, set himself to
eliminate the true, and place it once more before the world. In this way
let him paint the Chinese, stout, square-set, and supple,—ever labouring
contentedly in their rice-fields, and delighting in social intercourse;
but also, with a free and martial spirit, of which the world is now
incredulous, repelling with slaughter the nomade hordes of Central Asia
which subsequently overthrew the mighty empires of the West. Let him
depict the country covered with district-schools, and the people trained
in social morals by a Government system of education, centuries before
the birth of Christ. Let him set forth the practical good sense and
kindliness of spirit which characterised the inhabitants of that vast
empire, as well as their eminence in the social and industrial arts of
life; yet glance with brief but warning words at the materialistic
tendencies, alike in creed and practice, by which these good qualities
were in some degree counterbalanced. Or turn to the Hindoo, with his
slim and graceful figure, symbolising the fine and susceptible spirit
within. See him among the flowery woods, luxuriant vegetation, and
countless sparkling waters of the Indian land,—so spiritual and alive to
the impressions of the external world, that he feels bound in lively
sympathy with every living thing around him, whether it be beast or
bird, tree or flower,—and in the faith of the most imaginative pantheism
that the world ever saw, regarding himself and all created forms as
incarnations of the Deity, animated directly by the spirit of the great
Creator; and, a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, regarding
every object around him with plaintive tenderness, as possibly the
dwelling of the soul of some lost friend or relative. See him under his
master-sentiment of love. That passion, almost universally in the
ancient world, was a mere thirst of the senses; and the few instances in
which it figures in the literature of Greece and Rome, it is made to
strike its victims like a frenzy. But among the Hindoos we perceive it
often sweetened and refined by sentiment,—a spiritual as well as a
sensuous yearning,—purer, as ardent, more pervading than the
love-passion of contemporaneous nations. And the same spirituality of
nature which made the Hindoo thus, fitted him also for the subtlest and
loftiest flights of speculation,—savouring little of the utilitarian,
indeed, but tending to gratify the soul in many of its highest and
purest aspirations. Caste, unknown in China, was in India all-prevalent;
and there, also, we meet in its sternest form that spirit of devoted
asceticism by which the mystics of the East, and subordinately even in
the Christian Church, have striven to exalt themselves above the level
of humanity by extinguishing all earthly passion, and so drawing into
nearer communion with the Deity.
Or pass to Egypt, and behold the now desolate valley-land of the Nile
reinvested with its old splendour and fertility. Let a thousand
irrigating canals spread again over the surface, re-clothing the land
with verdure; while up from the sands spring miles of temples, pyramids,
and endless avenues of sphinxes, obelisks, and gigantic statues. And
Thebes with its “hundred gates,” its libraries, and stately palaces,—and
Memphis with its immense population, whose bones are still seen
whitening the desert sands whereon the city once bloomed amidst
verdure,—reappear with crowds of artisans and professional men, carrying
the division of labour almost as far as it is done in modern times;
while all around a rural population is tending herds or tilling the
thrice-fertile soil; and, wearily and worn, innumerable bands of
captives—Nubians from the south, Negroes from the desert, Arabs from
across the Red Sea, and Syrians and Assyrians from Euphrates to the foot
of Mount Taurus—are toiling in digging canals, in making bricks, or in
quarrying, transporting, or raising to their place, those huge blocks of
granite which fill with astonishment the engineers even of our own
times. Turn from all this pomp and bustle and busy hum of life, along
that silent mile-long avenue of double sphinxes; and, passing beneath
the stupendous ornamented portals of Karnac or Luxor, or some other
temple of the land, enter the vast halls and countless apartments
devoted to sacerdotal seclusion,—where the white-robed priests of the
Nile, bathing three times a day to maintain mental purity and calm,
engaged in the abstract sciences, or searched deep into the secrets of
nature for that magical power by which they fascinated and subjugated
the minds of the people, and which enabled them to contend on almost
equal terms with the divinely-commissioned champion of the Hebrews.
Or turn the eye northward, and see the Persian preparing to descend from
his mountains and conquer the world. Verdant valleys amidst sterile
hills and sandy plains are his home, blazed over by a sun to whose
bright orb he kneels in adoration as an emblem of the Deity. Hardy,
handsome, chivalrous, luxurious, despotic, and ambitious,—yet animated
by a spirit of justice, and by a religious belief so pure as at once to
sympathise with that of the Hebrews, and to win for the Persian monarch
the title of the “Servant of God;” they are the first in history to
exhibit a nation, few in numbers, but strong in arms and wisdom, lording
it over an immense tract of country, and over subjugated tribes—Syrians,
Assyrians, Asiatic Greeks, and Egyptians—of divers origin and customs
from themselves. The iron phalanx of Alexander at length caused this
empire of satrapies to crumble into the dust; but under a new dynasty it
revived again, so as to wage war successfully even with the
all-conquering legions of Rome.
Away, around the shores of the lovely Ægean—on the sunny slopes of Asia
Minor, among the sparkling vine-clad islets of the Cyclades, and on the
rocky, picturesque, bay-indented peninsula of Greece, the gay and
martial Hellenic race disported themselves. As a race, young,
imaginative, superstitious, and enamoured of the beautiful, they
ascribed every phenomenon in nature to the action of a god—peopled the
woods, the hills, the waters, with graceful imaginary beings
sympathising with and often visible to man, and filling even the highest
heaven with divinities who were gods but in power, and wholly men in
passion. Keenly alive to pleasure, and hearing little of the deeper
voices of the soul, their thoughts clung wholly to the beautiful world
around them; and, while acknowledging the soul’s immortality, they ever
looked upon Elysium, their world beyond the grave, as a shadowy land
where joy becomes so diluted as hardly to be worth the having. The
greatest poets the world ever saw, they embodied their conceptions,
alike in literature, in architecture, and the plastic arts, in forms of
such divine beauty, that after-ages have abandoned in despair even the
hope of rivalling them. The story of Greece is not easily told; it
excelled in so many departments of human effort—producing almost
simultaneously an Alexander, a Socrates, a Plato, a Demosthenes, an
Aristotle—not to speak of a Democritus, a Thales, an Anaxagoras, and
others, in whose daring but vaguely-framed systems of the universe are
to be found not a few brilliant anticipations of world-wide truth, which
modern science is now recovering, and placing on the firm and only
definite basis of experiment.
Add to the story of these nations that of the Roman—the great conquerors
and legislators,—the story of a city that came to throw its chains over
the world,—and thence pass over the dying ashes of Paganism into the new
world of Christianity, and to the congeries of kingdoms which arose
under its beneficent sway in mediæval Europe, at first small, and never
presenting those great contrasts so observable in the old empires of
Paganism, but each telling its lesson to those who study it, and some of
them already influencing the fortunes of the human race to an extent
never possible or dreamt of in prior times. The “meteor-flag” of England
is the great object which, in these latter days, arrests the eye of the
philosophic observer,—bridging over the seas, peopling continents and
islands with civilised man,—and carrying the science, the religion, and
the beneficent sway of Great Britain over an empire upon which the sun
never sets, and to climes “where Cæsar’s eagles never flew.”
Paradoxical as it may seem, the further we recede from the era of those
old nations, the better able are we becoming to write their history and
understand their civilisation. Not only are mankind becoming tolerant of
truth in whatever attire it present itself, and thus learning to
sympathise with, and so comprehend, those old forms of civilisation, but
the recent study of the languages of India and China have opened up to
us the literature and life of those old countries. The discovery of a
clue to the hieroglyphics of Egypt, to the rock-inscriptions of Persia,
and to the arrow-headed chronicles of Assyria, constitutes a series of
unexpected triumphs, which promises to rend the veil of oblivion from
the face of those long-perished empires. Lastly, the earth herself has
been giving us back their skeletons. Two old Roman cities, Herculaneum
and Pompeii, accidentally discovered, have been cleared of their
superincumbent mass of lava and ashes, and given back to the light
precisely as they stood on the day when the eruption of Vesuvius
overwhelmed them eighteen hundred years ago. Into those long-buried
streets we have descended, and seen the domestic civilisation of
imperial Rome mirrored in those hastily-abandoned boudoirs and
dining-rooms, baths, temples, and public buildings. In the wastes of
Persia, Chardin stumbled upon the ruins of imperial Persepolis, whose
very site had for ages dropt out of the world’s memory. The thousand
monuments of Egypt have been studied, their historic sculptures and
mural paintings magnificently copied, and a portrait-gallery published
of its ancient dynasties. Finally, Layard and Botta have carried the
thirst of discovery to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and have
exhumed from the mounds of long-lost Nineveh striking and instructive
vestiges of the first of the so-called “universal” empires.
The opportuneness of these revelations of the past cannot but strike one
as remarkable. Knowledge revealed too early is lost. Steam, the compass,
gunpowder, the principle of the electric telegraph, and a hundred other
discoveries made of old might be mentioned, which, in consequence of
mankind not being ready for them, wholly dropt out of mind again, or
languished on as mere toys or curiosities. And had those old cities been
unbared at some earlier period, would they not most lamentably have
shared the fate of the monuments which remained above ground—been
wantonly destroyed by a barbarous population, or been used as quarries,
from whence the degenerate successors of the elder race might indolently
draw their building materials? But the earth took them into her own safe
keeping, and covered them up until the world had grown older and wiser,
and knew how to prize such monuments of memorable but long-forgotten
times.
Of all the great empires which have enduringly impressed themselves upon
the world’s memory, no one has perished leaving so few visible marks of
its existence as that which first rose into greatness in the land of
Assyria. It was this memorable region which gave birth to the first of
the old “universal empires.” On the plains of Shinar, on the banks of
the Lower Euphrates, a community of civilised men was assembled more
than four thousand years ago. There, in course of time, arose Babylon,
with its impregnable walls, behind which the city might eat and drink
and be merry, though the mightiest of ancient hosts were encamped
outside. There were the fabled hanging-gardens, the wonder of the world,
erected by one of its monarchs to please his young Median bride, whose
heart yearned for the hills and groves of her native land. Towering
above all was the vast temple of Belus, unequalled for magnificence in
the ancient world,—crowned with its gigantic golden statue of the
sun-god, rising so high, and flashing so brightly in the upper air, that
to the crowds below it seemed invested with the splendours of the deity
whom it symbolised. But more than two thousand years have elapsed since
all this grandeur came to a sudden end; and so thoroughly has the city
mouldered into the dust, and so completely has it buried itself in its
own ruins, that during the recent excavations executed on its site,
scarcely a detached figure in stone, or a solitary tablet, says Mr
Layard, was dug out of the vast heaps of rubbish. “Babylon is fallen, is
fallen! and all the graven images of her gods He hath broken unto the
ground.”
To the north, near the head of the great Mesopotamian valley, on the
banks of the Tigris, stood the sister or rival city of Nineveh—Babylon
and it forming, as it were, the foci of the Assyrian realm, which spread
out like an ellipse around them. Nineveh, “that great city,” against
which Jonah of old uttered his prophetic warnings—from whose gates
Sennacherib, Sargon, and Holofernes successively set forth, with their
spearmen, and horses, and chariots against Damascus and Israel, and the
coasts of Tyre and Sidon,—and around whose walls the combined armies of
Persia and Babylonia encamped for three years in vain, fell at last by a
doom as sudden and overwhelming as that which overtook Babylon—perishing
so utterly, that when Xenophon and the Ten Thousand passed that way,
even its name was forgotten, and he notices its mounds of ruins simply
as having been those of “an ancient city,” which he calls Larissa.
As Xenophon left those ruins Layard found them. Riding, in company with
a friend as daring and enthusiastic as himself, down the right bank of
the Tigris, in April 1840, he rested for the night at a small Arab
village, around which are still the vestiges of an ancient town; and
here he got his first look of the buried city whose discovery was to
immortalise his name. “From the summit of an artificial eminence,” he
says, “I looked down upon a broad plain, separated from us by the river.
A line of lofty mounds bounded it on the east, and one of a pyramidal
form rose high above the rest. Beyond it could be faintly traced the
waters of the Zab. Its position rendered its identification easy. This
was the pyramid which Xenophon had described, and near which the Ten
Thousand had encamped; the ruins around it were those which the Greek
general saw twenty-two centuries before, and which were even then the
remains of an _ancient_ city.”
It must not be supposed, because Nineveh and Babylon are the only cities
made much mention of in Assyrian history, that none others of importance
existed in the country around. On the contrary, again and again, in the
course of his journeys, does Mr Layard speak of mounds of ruins, marking
the site of what must once have been “large cities.” In truth, the
valley-land of Mesopotamia, with its rich alluvial plains, intersected
by the Tigris and Euphrates and their numerous tributaries, presented a
vast surface, which at any moment the industry of man might convert into
a garden. In remotest times, if in imagination we can recur to the
period when first mankind began to settle on its plains, it must have
presented a spectacle very much like that which now meets the eye—wide
plains of fertile soil springing into verdure wherever it is touched by
water, but desert almost everywhere for a great portion of the year. The
latent fertility of the region was forthwith developed by the race who
there took up their abode. The waters of the rivers were led over the
flat plains in long canals, diffusing in all directions their irrigating
streams, and causing the teeming soil, under the rays of a glowing and
never-failing sun, to produce food in abundance for both man and beast.
“A system of navigable canals, that may excite the admiration of even
the modern engineer, connected together the Euphrates and Tigris. With a
skill showing no common knowledge of the art of surveying, and of the
principles of hydraulics, the Babylonians took advantage of the
different levels in the plains, and of the periodical rises in the
rivers, to complete the water-communication between all parts of the
province, and to fertilise, by artificial irrigation, an otherwise
barren and unproductive soil.”[146]
This system of irrigation, it is true, was not carried to perfection
until a late period in the history of the Assyrian empire; but it must,
at the same time, be recollected, that as far back as the light of
history penetrates, it is always civilised man that is discerned in the
valley of the Euphrates. The vague whisperings of tradition, even,
cannot speak of a time when savage tribes wandered over its plains. If
we investigate who were the settled inhabitants of the land when first
the light of history breaks upon it—the people among whom the old
Assyrian empire arose—we will come to the conclusion that the great mass
of the population belonged to that purely Syrian race whose settlements
have in all ages extended from the banks of the Euphrates to the shores
of the Levant. But mixed with this race, very much in the neighbourhood
of Babylon, and more faintly as we proceed northwards, were offshoots of
the Cushite race,—a people having its principal seats in southern
Arabia, along the coasts of the Indian and Red Seas, imperfectly
represented by the Himyarite Arabs of the present day, and forming a
connecting link between the old races of Syria and Egypt. Into the
population thus constituted descended the Chaldeans,—a tribe from the
highlands which border the Mesopotamian valley on the north-east, and
who, though Syrians in the main, probably approximated somewhat in
character to the Persian race. This tribe obtained the ascendant among
the population at Nineveh and in the upper portion of the Mesopotamian
valley,—imparting to that population, apparently, a sterner character
than prevailed in the lower part of the valley and around Babylon.
Frequent wars occurred between these half-rival half-sister cities; the
general result of which was, that the people of Nineveh held the
Babylonians in a more or less perfect state of dependence. In the course
of time, too, the Cushite element in the Babylonian population (and
which probably gave to it its turn for commerce and maritime enterprise)
became extinct; while the Chaldean element, which differed but little
from the general mass of the population, seems to have greatly
increased. It was from Ur of the Chaldees, in the vicinity of Nineveh,
that Abraham, in obedience to the Divine voice, went forth, journeying
south-westwards, through the desert lying between the Euphrates and
Syria, and, reaching Palestine, became the father of the Hebrew nation.
From his loins also proceeded the Idumeans, who proved their superiority
to the rest of the Arabian tribes by founding the kingdom of Edom, and
excavating the wondrous rock-city of Petra.
Such, then, appears to have been the old population of Assyria. In
Genesis we are informed that Ashur went forth out of the land of Shinar,
and founded new habitations in the north,—“Nineveh and the city
Reheboth, and Calah, and Resen, which is a great city;” but according to
the Chaldean historians, the builders of the cities of Assyria came down
from the mountains of Armenia. These statements, so far from being
inconsistent, tend to corroborate the conjecture which, from other
considerations, we had arrived at,—namely, that the Chaldeans were not
the first comers into the plains around Nineveh, but found there a
lowland population in an advanced state of society, and closely allied
in blood and language to themselves. Moses of Chorene expressly records
that such was the case; but the real strength of the supposition we rest
upon general grounds, which it is needless here to enter upon. This
Chaldean tribe, then, which ultimately became the predominant one in the
valley of the Upper Tigris, were not the actual founders of the Assyrian
cities; but under their ascendancy these cities were strengthened,
extended, and embellished so much, as to become as it were the creations
of their hands.
The architecture of a nation is ever dependent to a great extent upon
the building materials at its command. The alluvial plains of Assyria,
unbroken by a single eminence, were singularly destitute of stone of any
kind, especially in the lower portion of the valley; so that the
inhabitants had to betake themselves to bricks, which they could
manufacture in endless abundance by mixing a little straw with the
alluvial soil. In Babylonia, where not a slab of stone could be got
within hundreds of miles, these bricks were carefully made,—being
kiln-dried, and often coloured, and, while the colours were still moist,
glazed in the fire. Around Nineveh they were, for the most part, merely
dried for a day or two in the hot sun,—and with bricks of this
description the houses of Mesopotamia are built to this day. But
Nineveh, being nearer the mountains, had a great advantage over Babylon.
The plains around it, and the lowlands lying between the Tigris and the
hill-country, abound in a kind of coarse alabaster or gypsum, large
masses of which protrude in low ridges from the alluvial soil, or are
exposed in the gullies formed by winter torrents. Ornamental from its
colour and transparency, and offering few difficulties to the sculptor,
this alabaster was used by the people of Nineveh in their public
buildings. Cut into large slabs, it was used as panels to cover the
inner surface of the brick walls,—each slab bearing on its back an
inscription recording the name, title, and descent of the king
undertaking the work, and being kept in its place by cramps and plugs of
metal or wood. After being thus fixed against the wall, the face of the
slabs was covered with sculptures and inscriptions,—in some edifices, as
at Kouyunjik, each chamber being reserved for some particular historical
incident, and each palace, it would appear, only recording in its
sculptures the exploits of the king who built it. No pillars are to be
found in Assyrian architecture; and the difficulty experienced by the
builders in the construction of expansive roofs is shown by the great
narrowness of the rooms compared with their length; the most elaborately
ornamented hall at Nimroud, although above 160 feet in length, being
only 35 feet broad. Forty-five feet appears to have been the greatest
width spanned over by a roof; for the great central hall in the
north-west palace at Nimroud (110 feet by 90) may have been entirely
open to the sky,—and, as it did not contain sculptures, it probably was
so. The rooms ranged from 16 to 20 feet in height; the side-walls being
covered to twice the height of a man by the sculptured slabs, and their
upper portion being built of baked bricks richly coloured, or of
sun-dried bricks covered by a thin coat of plaster, on which various
ornaments were painted. Of the mode of roofing these palaces we know
nothing. Probably the roof was formed of beams resting solely on the
side-walls; but as this method would not have sufficed for the larger
rooms, from 35 to 45 feet in width, we may conjecture that the beams in
some instances were made to meet and rest against each other at a slight
angle in the centre of the ceiling, or (more improbably) that wooden
pillars or posts were employed which have since entirely mouldered away.
No traces of windows are to be found, even in the chambers next the
outer walls; so that, as in the temples of Egypt, there must have been
square openings or skylights in the ceilings, which may have been closed
during the winter-rains by canvass or some such material. The pavement
of the chambers was formed either of alabaster slabs, or of kiln-burnt
bricks, covered with inscriptions relating to the king;—and beneath this
pavement, drains led from almost every room, showing that water might
occasionally have entered the rooms from above, by such apertures in the
ceiling as have been conjectured.
The interior of these Assyrian palaces must have been as magnificent as
imposing. Mr Layard thus graphically describes the spectacle which, in
days of old, met the eye of those who entered the abode of the Assyrian
kings:—
“He was ushered in through the portal guarded by the colossal lions or
bulls of white alabaster. In the first hall he found himself
surrounded by the sculptured records of the empire. Battles, sieges,
triumphs, the exploits of the chase, the ceremonies of religion, were
portrayed on the walls—sculptured in alabaster, and painted in
gorgeous colours. Under each picture were engraved, in characters
filled up with bright copper, inscriptions describing the scenes
represented. Above the sculptures were painted other events—the king,
attended by his eunuchs and warriors, receiving his prisoners,
entering into alliances with other monarchs, or performing some sacred
duty. These representations were enclosed in coloured borders of
elaborate and elegant design. The emblematic tree, winged bulls, and
monstrous animals were conspicuous amongst the ornaments. At the upper
end of the hall was the colossal figure of the king in adoration
before the supreme deity, or receiving from his eunuch the holy cup.
He was attended by warriors bearing his arms, and by the priests or
presiding divinities. His robes, and those of his followers, were
adorned with groups of figures, animals, and flowers, all painted with
brilliant colours.
“The stranger trod upon alabaster slabs, each bearing an inscription,
recording the titles, genealogy, and achievements of the great king.
Several doorways, formed by gigantic winged lions or bulls, or by the
figures of guardian deities, led into other apartments which again
opened into more distant halls. In each were new sculptures. On the
walls of some were processions of colossal figures—armed men and
eunuchs following the king, warriors laden with spoil, leading
prisoners, or bearing presents and offerings to the gods. On the walls
of others were portrayed the winged priests, or presiding divinities,
standing before the sacred trees.
“The ceilings above him were divided into square compartments, painted
with flowers, or with the figures of animals. Some were inlaid with
ivory, each compartment being surrounded by elegant borders and
mouldings. The beams, as well as the sides of the chambers, may have
been gilded, or even plated with gold and silver; and the rarest
woods, in which the cedar was conspicuous, were used for the
wood-work. Square openings in the ceilings of the chambers admitted
the light of day. A pleasing shadow was thrown over the sculptured
walls, and gave a majestic expression to the human features of the
colossal forms which guarded the entrances. Through these apertures
was seen the bright blue of an eastern sky, enclosed in a frame on
which were painted, in vivid colours, the winged circle, in the midst
of elegant ornaments, and the graceful forms of ideal animals.
“These edifices, as it has been shown, were great national monuments,
upon the walls of which were represented in sculpture, or inscribed in
alphabetic characters, the chronicles of the empire. He who entered
them might thus read the history, and learn the glory and triumphs of
the nations. They served, at the same time, to bring continually to
the remembrance of those who assembled within them on festive
occasions, or for the celebration of religious ceremonies, the deeds
of their ancestors, and the power and majesty of their gods.”
This royal magnificence was well guarded. The external walls of the
Assyrian cities, as we learn from the united testimony of ancient
authors, were of extraordinary size and height. According to Diodorus
Siculus, the walls of Nineveh were one hundred feet high,—so broad that
three chariots might be driven abreast along their summit,—and fortified
with fifteen hundred towers, each of which was two hundred feet in
height. According to the same authority, the circumference of the city
was sixty miles,—a statement which exactly tallies with the dimensions
given in the Book of Jonah, where Nineveh is said to have been three
days’ journey round about. This is an immense circuit,—but it must be
recollected that the dimensions of an Eastern city do not bear the same
proportion to its population as those of an European city. The custom,
prevalent to some degree in Southern Asia, even in the earliest times,
of secluding the women in apartments removed from those of the men, as
well as the heat of the climate, renders a separate house for each
family almost indispensable, and is perfectly incompatible with that
economy of space, and close aggregation of dwellings, which we witness
in the cities of the West. Moreover, within the circuit of those old
cities there used to be a “paradise” or hunting-ground for the king, and
orchards, gardens, and an extensive tract of arable land; so that the
inhabitants, behind their impregnable walls, could bid defiance alike to
force and to famine. From the expression of Jonah, that there was much
cattle within the walls of Nineveh, it may be inferred that there was
also pasture for them. Many cities of the East—as, for instance,
Damascus and Ispahan—are still built in this manner; the amount of their
population being greatly disproportionate, according to our Western
notions, to the site which they occupy.
If we take the four great mounds of Nimroud, Kouyunjik, Khorsabad, and
Karamles, as the corners of an elongated quadrangle (eighteen miles by
twelve), it will be found that the form as well as the circumference of
the city correspond pretty accurately with the statements of ancient
writers. Each quarter of this vast city, says Mr Layard, may have had
its peculiar name; hence the palace of Evorita, where Saracus destroyed
himself—and the Mespila and Larissa of Xenophon, which names the Greek
general applies respectively to the mound-ruins at Kouyunjik and
Nimroud. It is certain that large fortified enclosures existed within
the outer walls, surrounding the principal buildings or palaces, and
capable of defence after the rest of the city was stormed. These four
great mounds, the scene of Mr Layard’s excavations, mark the site of the
principal public buildings of Nineveh,—apparently at once temples and
palaces,—built upon elevated platforms of masonry, like the temples of
the ancient Mexicans, and, from their great strength, always placed so
as to form part of the external defences of the city. But these were not
the only great buildings in Nineveh; for within the quadrangle described
by these ruins, many other large mounds are to be seen, and the face of
the country is strewed with the remains of pottery, bricks, and other
fragments. The space between the great public buildings was doubtless
occupied by private houses, standing in the midst of gardens, and built
at distances from each other; or forming streets which enclosed gardens
of considerable extent, and even arable land. The absence of the remains
of these houses, says Mr Layard, is easily accounted for. “They were
constructed almost entirely of sun-dried bricks, and, like the houses
now built in the country, soon disappeared altogether when once
abandoned, and allowed to fall into decay. The largest palaces would
probably have remained undiscovered, had not slabs of alabaster marked
the walls. There is, however, sufficient to indicate that buildings were
once spread over the space above described; for, besides the vast number
of small mounds everywhere visible, scarcely a husbandman drives his
plough over the soil without exposing the vestiges of former
habitations.”
From the numerous large mound-ruins visible on the Mesopotamian
plains, it is evident that the work of excavation is only commenced.
The long-sealed book of Assyrian history and antiquities has only
begun to be unrolled; and in the course of another generation the
labours of Layard will probably be as far exceeded as those of Belzoni
in Egypt have been by the recent investigations of Lepsius and
Champollion-le-Jeune. It is needless, then, at present to waste time
in the discussion of moot points in Assyrian history, which in a few
years fresh discoveries may at once set definitively at rest. As yet,
Assyrian chronology has been but little advanced by the recent
researches,—and this principally owing to the circumstance, already
mentioned, that the sculptures and inscriptions of each palace relate
only to the career of the particular king who erected or embellished
it. All we know is, that the palaces at Nimroud (if we except the
unfinished one) must have been built at least nine centuries B.C.; but
that the earliest of them may have been reared by the great Ninus
himself[147] (2000 B.C.),—a most unsatisfactory state of knowledge;
and that the palaces at the other angles of the city—namely,
Kouyunjik, Karamles, and Khorsabad—were erected, to all appearance,
between the ninth and sixth centuries B.C. We know, however, with all
certainty, that a great crisis and convulsion in the fortunes of the
State occurred between the erection of the earlier and later series of
palaces. This convulsion was probably occasioned by the successful
revolt of the Medes under Arbaces, and the capture of Nineveh, about
950 B.C., which brought to an end the ancient dynasty of Ninus and
Semiramis, after thirteen centuries of power, and established a new
family on the throne.
Ninus—whose character as a great hunter of the lion and panther tallies
with the scriptural accounts of Nimrod—is said, by the general consent
of many ancient writers, to have founded the Assyrian monarchy more than
two thousand years before Christ,—doing so in the midst of a people far
advanced in civilisation, whose works, says Moses of Chorene, the
new-comers endeavoured to destroy, and whose knowledge of the arts was
taken advantage of by the conquerors in the erection and embellishment
of their palaces. In corroboration of this it may be stated, that of all
the specimens of Assyrian art which have been discovered, the most
ancient are invariably the best,—a curious fact, agreeing with, but not
establishing, the hypothesis that the builders of the most ancient
edifices at Nineveh were assisted by a people of skill superior to their
own.
The boundaries of the Assyrian monarchy, like that of every other
long-established empire, fluctuated from age to age. At the epoch of its
greatest power, it appears to have maintained an ascendancy over Persia
and Media, and from thence westwards to the shores of the Levant; while
it is indisputable that its rule was for long dominant in Asia Minor,
where towns were built and colonies founded by the Assyrian
monarchs,—Troy itself, according to Plato, having been one of their
dependencies. The prowess of the Assyrian armies in later times made
itself felt even in Egypt; but in the wars between these two great
antagonists, there is reason to believe that the balance of success lay
chiefly with the Egyptians. It would appear that for a considerable
period, between the 14th and 9th centuries B.C., a close connection,
either by conquest or friendly intercourse, existed between these two
empires,—which connection produced considerable changes in the arts and
customs of Assyria, as may be witnessed in the introduction of the
sitting sphinxes of Nimroud, and the lotus-shaped ornaments of Khorsabad
and Kouyunjik. On the earliest monuments of Nineveh we read of
expeditions undertaken against Babylon, which city was at first
unquestionably independent of the Assyrian princes, but which ere long
became subject to them—wearing their chains, however, unwillingly, and
occasionally in name rather than in fact. When the Medes revolted under
Arbaces, the governor of Babylon took part with the rebels, and in
alliance with them succeeded in capturing Nineveh, and destroying its
public buildings—if not depopulating it. Under the new or later dynasty,
however—which counts in its brief roll the great names of Sargon and
Sennacherib—Nineveh rose in renewed splendour and power: the palaces of
Kouyunjik, Karamles, and Khorsabad were built, the last of which
excelled all its predecessors in magnificence; and the city attained
those vast dimensions described by Diodorus and the prophet Jonah. But
the days of this great city and ancient empire were fast drawing to a
close. Headed by Cyaxares and Nabopolassar, the combined armies of the
Persians and Babylonians again approached its walls; and after a
protracted siege of nearly three years, they at length (606 B.C.)
captured the city at a time when the river had overflowed its bed and
carried away a portion of the wall. The city was then utterly
destroyed—the torch was put to its noble palaces, and its inhabitants
were compulsorily distributed among the adjoining towns and villages.
Nineveh was no more. Twelve centuries afterwards (A.D. 627), the great
battle between Heraclius and Rhazates was fought within the space once
compassed by its walls. “The city, and even the ruins of the city,” says
Gibbon, “had long ago disappeared: the vacant space afforded a spacious
field for the operations of the two armies.”
The primitive religion of the Assyrians appears to have been a form of
Sabæanism. It appears to have consisted in the worship of the sun—not as
the Deity, but as an emblem of the Deity—as the greatest, most glorious,
and most beneficent of His works in the eye of man, and the mystery of
whose unbeholdable splendours not unaptly symbolised the presence of Him
“who dwelleth in light that is inaccessible and full of glory.” But the
peculiar part of the Chaldean faith or philosophy was the influence
which it ascribed to the planets over the life and fortunes of men. The
belief in astrology is one of the oldest, if not absolutely the very
oldest, which one meets with in the history of postdiluvian mankind. It
was not confined to any one nation, or any one era of the world. It has
lived from the earliest times, down through several thousand years, to
the middle ages of Europe, and still lingers even at the present day. To
take the last spots in the world where one is likely to find old-world
notions lingering—“Raphaels” and “Zadkiels” are to be found even in the
capitals of England and France, where astrological almanacs are at this
moment yearly published, containing predictions of the future—one of
which modern Magi boasts that he correctly predicted the death of the
“hero of Waterloo,” and both of whom, we believe, prophesied two years
ago that 1854 is to be the death-year of Louis Napoleon! But the East is
the native land of astrology; and there, to this day, it is believed in
as firmly as if it belonged to the domain of the positive sciences. It
is curious to know that one of the causes of the disastrous issue of the
last battle (August 5) between the Turks and Russians in Asia, was the
obstinate adhesion of the Turkish general to an astrological crotchet.
The Russians had detached a division of their army to Bayazid, where
they surprised and defeated a Turkish corps; but no sooner did General
Guyon learn of this movement, than he counselled the Turkish commander,
Zarif Pasha, immediately to advance and attack the main body of the
Russians while thus weakened. The Pasha, however, while assenting to the
plan, would not move at the time required, alleging that neither that
day nor the morrow would do for the attack, “because the stars were
unpropitious.” Eight-and-forty hours were thus lost, big with the
fortunes of the campaign; and the consequence was, that when the Turks
did at last advance, they found not only that the Russian detachment had
rejoined the main body, but that the Russian general had been fully
apprised by his spies of the meditated night-march of his enemies.
We have not space here to undertake an investigation of the old Chaldean
faith, nor to point out the principles in human nature by a rash
reasoning upon which astrology seems to have arisen. We would remark,
however, that the convulsion which intervened between the fall of the
first Assyrian dynasty and the rise of the second, occasioned, or was at
least accompanied by, a change in the State-religion of the country. In
the palaces at Khorsabad and Kouyunjik, built by the second dynasty, we
find no traces of the religious emblems so frequent in the sculptures of
the earliest palaces at Nimroud. The emblem of the great Divinity—the
winged figure within the circle—has never been found in the later-built
palaces; and from the frequent representations of the fire-altar in the
bas-reliefs from those ruins, and on cylinders, evidently of the same
period, there is reason to believe that a fire-worship, like that
introduced by Zoroaster among the Persians, had succeeded to the purer
forms of Sabæanism. Although eagle-headed figures, and other mythic
forms, exist in the earliest sculptures at Nineveh, in no case do they
appear to have been objects of worship. The king is only seen in
adoration before one symbol of the Deity—the figure of which we have
already spoken, with the wings and tail of a bird enclosed in a circle,
resembling the Ormuzd of the Persian monuments. He is generally standing
or kneeling beneath this circled figure with his hand raised in sign of
prayer or adoration. This symbol of the Deity is never represented above
any person of inferior rank, but appears to watch specially over the
king—who among the Assyrians, as among all the old nations, was regarded
as the type and representative of the nation. It is seen above him on
all occasions, in the sculptures, sympathising with and assisting him,
like a good Providence. If it presides over a triumph, its action
resembles that of the king; and when represented over the king in war,
it is seen, like a god of battles, shooting its arrows against the
enemies of the Assyrians. The most superficial examination of the
sculptures suffices to prove the sacred character of the king. Not only
is the symbol of the great Deity above him, as well as the sun, moon,
and planets; but the priests, or lesser divinities (whichever the winged
human figures so frequently found on the Assyrian monuments may be), are
represented as waiting upon or ministering to him. This is just a
development of the old patriarchal principle, by which a father used to
worship on behalf of his family. At this day the principle is carried
out to the fullest extent in China, where the “higher sacrifices” can
only be offered by the Emperor in person, who actually regards himself
as the father of the nation, and who, on occasion of national
calamities, fasts and makes public confession of his sins and
shortcomings, looking upon them as the reason why the Divine wrath is
poured out upon his people.
A marked difference is likewise observable in the style of ornamental
art under the earlier and later dynasties. What principally
distinguishes Assyrian from Egyptian sculpture is, that the former is
entirely free from the angular mode of treatment so conspicuous in the
latter. It is more florid, and altogether more advanced; but at the same
time it must be said, that in regard to accuracy we incline to place
greater estimation upon the portrait-sculpture of Egypt than upon that
of Assyria. In the later monuments of Nineveh we find direct, although
not very extensive, traces of Egyptian influence; but the principal
distinction between the earlier and later sculptures is, the greater
knowledge of design and composition displayed in the former. The
bas-relief representing the Lion-hunt, now in the British Museum, is a
good illustration of the earliest school of Assyrian art yet discovered.
It far exceeds the later sculptures in the vigour of treatment, the
elegance of the forms, and in what the French aptly term _mouvement_,—as
well as by the evident attempt at composition, the artistical
arrangement of the groups. The sculptors who worked at Khorsabad and
Kouyunjik perhaps possessed more skill in handling their tools, and
their work is frequently superior to that of the earlier artists in
delicacy of execution—as, for instance, in the details of the
features—and in boldness of relief; but they are decidedly inferior to
their ancestors in the higher branches of art—in the treatment of a
subject, and in beauty and variety of form.
The domestic furniture, arms, utensils, and personal ornaments of the
Assyrians show a very refined and cultivated taste. In their arms they
rivalled even the Greeks in elegance of design. Their drinking-cups and
vessels used on festive occasions were apparently of gold, like those of
Solomon, or of silver; and they were frequently wrought into the shape
of the head and neck of an animal—such as a lion or bull—and resembled
those afterwards in use among the Greeks, and found in the tombs of
Etruria. Their thrones, tables, and couches were made both of metal and
wood; and the tables and chairs were frequently shaped like our
camp-stools, and may have been made to close. On the earliest monuments,
the chair is represented richly cushioned, with the seat and legs
tastefully carved, but without a back,—in the later monuments the back
is added, but the chairs exhibit less elegance. Indeed, in domestic and
personal ornament, as in the higher branches of art, the most ancient
Assyrian monuments greatly exceed the later. “Many forms had been
preserved,” says Mr Layard, “as in the swords, bracelets, and armlets;
but they had evidently degenerated, and are more coarsely designed in
the sculptures. This is also evident in the embroideries of the robes,
and in the details of the chariots. We see the same love of elaborate
and profuse decoration, but not that elegance and variety so conspicuous
in the ornaments of the first period. The kneeling bull or wild-goat,
the graceful flower, and the groups of men and animals skilfully
combined, are succeeded by a profusion of rosettes, circles, and
squares, covering the whole surface of the dress, or the sides of the
chariots. Although there is a certain richness of appearance, yet the
classic forms, if the term may be used, of the earlier artists, are
wanting.”
The materials at our command are as yet too scanty to enable us to
arrive at definite conclusions as to the manners and private life of the
Assyrians; but we do not doubt that future discoveries will yet supply
the desideratum. Mr Layard says:—
“From casual notices in the Bible and in ancient history, we learn
that the Assyrians, as well as those who succeeded them in the empire
of Asia, were fond of public entertainments and festivities, and that
they displayed on such occasions the greatest luxury and magnificence.
The Assyrian king, called Nabuchodonosor in the book of Judith, on
returning from his victorious expedition against Arphaxad, feasted
with his whole army for one hundred and twenty days. The same is
related by the Greek authors of Sardanapalus, after his great victory
over the combined armies of the Medes. The Book of Esther describes
the splendour of the festivals given by the Babylonian king. The
princes and nobles of his vast dominions were feasted for one hundred
and eighty days; and for one week all the people of Susa assembled in
the gardens of his palace, and were served in vessels of gold. The
richest tapestries adorned the halls and tents, and the most costly
couches were prepared for the guests. Wine was served in abundance,
and women, including even the wives and concubines of the monarch,
were frequently present to add to the magnificence of the scene.
According to Quintus Curtius, not only did hired female performers
exhibit on these occasions, but the wives and daughters of the nobles,
forgetting their modesty, danced before the guests, divesting
themselves even of their garments. Wine was drunk immoderately. When
Babylon was taken by the Persians, the inhabitants were celebrating
one of their great festivals, and even the guards were intoxicated.
The Babylonian king, ignorant of the approaching fate of his capital,
and surrounded by one thousand of his princes and nobles, and by his
wives and concubines, drank out of the golden vessels that had been
carried away from the Jewish temple. On the walls of the palace at
Khorsabad was a bas-relief representing a public feast, probably in
celebration of a victory. Men were seen seated on high chairs with
drinking-cups in their hands; whilst attendants were bringing in
bowls, goblets, and various fruits and viands, for the banquet. At
Nimroud part of a similar bas-relief was discovered. Music was not
wanting on these occasions.”
The arts and civilisation of Nineveh represent those of Babylon also.
Babylon, though it was long of attaining to the political greatness of
her rival, was evidently an older city. It can hardly be doubted that it
arose from the first gathering of mankind upon the plains of Shinar.
From notices of it on Egyptian monuments of the time of Thothmes III.,
it is evident that it was a place of considerable note at least in the
fifteenth century before Christ. Although for long politically
overshadowed by her neighbour Nineveh, Babylon at an early period became
famous for the extent and importance of her commerce. No position could
then have been more favourable than hers for carrying on a trade with
all the regions of the known world. She stood upon a navigable stream
that brought to her quays the produce of the temperate highlands of
Armenia—running westward in one part of its course to within a hundred
miles of the Mediterranean, and emptying its waters into a gulf of the
Indian Ocean. Parallel to this great river, and scarcely inferior to it
in size, was the Tigris, flowing through the fertile plains of Assyria,
and carrying their produce to the Babylonian cities. The inhabitants
turned these natural advantages to the best account; and their industry
and enterprise, cooperating with that of civilised people in the
adjoining countries, greatly increased the means of locomotion.
Highroads and causeways across the Desert connected Babylonia with Syria
and Palestine. Fortified stations protected the merchant from the
wandering tribes of Arabia,—walled cities served as resting-places and
storehouses,—and wells at regular intervals gave an abundant supply of
water during the hottest season of the year. One of those highways was
carried through the centre of Mesopotamia, and, crossing the Euphrates
near the town of Anthemusia, led into Central Asia;—a second appears to
have left Babylon by the western quarter of the city, and entered
Idumea, after passing through the country of the Nabathæans;—while
others branched off to Tadmor, and to other cities built in the Desert
almost solely for purposes of trade. To the east of Babylon was the
celebrated military and commercial road described by Herodotus, leading
from Sardis to Susa in ninety days’ journey, and furnished at intervals
of about fifteen miles with stations and public hostelries, probably
resembling the modern caravanserais of Persia. A very considerable trade
was likewise carried on with India, through Media, Hyrcania, and the
centre of Asia,—by which route it was, probably, that the greater part
of the precious stones and gold were supplied to Babylon. A coasting
trade existed along the shores of the Persian Gulf eastwards. The
prophet Isaiah alludes to the ships of the Chaldeans; and we learn from
the Kouyunjik inscriptions that the inhabitants of the country at the
mouth of the Euphrates possessed vessels in which, when defeated by the
Assyrians, they took refuge on the sea. It is difficult to determine to
how far the Babylonians may have navigated the Indian Ocean; but of the
merchandise in which they traded, the pearls, cotton, spices, precious
stones, ivory, ebony, silks, and dyes, a large portion, if not the
whole, must have been obtained from the southern coasts of Arabia, and
from the Indian peninsula. Their exports consisted both of manufactures
and of the natural produce of the country. Corn was cultivated to a
great extent, and sent to distant provinces; and the Babylonian carpets,
silks, and woollen fabrics, woven or embroidered with figures of mythic
animals, and with exquisite designs, were not less famous for the beauty
of their texture and workmanship, than for the richness and variety of
their colours.
Babylon reached her zenith of power and magnificence immediately after
the final destruction of Nineveh. Under Nebuchadnezzar she succeeded to
the proud position so long held by her rival. The bounds of the city
were extended; buildings of extraordinary size and magnificence were
erected, and her victorious armies conquered Syria and Palestine, and
penetrated into Egypt. But her greatness as an independent State was
short-lived. The Medians and Persians, who had been the principal agents
in the overthrow of the Assyrian empire, now united under one king,
turned their warlike strength against their former ally Babylon; and
scarcely half a century had elapsed from the fall of Nineveh, when
“Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, was slain, and Darius the Median
took the kingdom.”
From that time Babylonia sank into a province of Persia—still retaining,
however, much of its former power and trade; and, as we learn from the
rock-inscriptions of Bisutun, as well as from ancient authors,
struggling more than once to regain its independence. When Alexander the
Great overthrew the Persian empire, Babylon opened its gates to him, and
he deemed the city worthy to become the capital of his mighty empire.
The early death of the conqueror, however, without leaving a successor,
prevented his splendid projects being carried into execution; and the
last blow to the prosperity of Babylon was given by Seleucus, when he
laid the foundations of his new capital (Seleucia) on the banks of the
Tigris (B.C. 322). Nevertheless, a considerable population seems to have
lingered in the fast-decaying city; for, five centuries afterwards, we
find the Parthian king Evemerus sending numerous families from Babylon
into Media, to be sold as slaves, and burning many great and beautiful
edifices which still remained standing. At the time of the Arab
invasion, in the beginning of the seventh century, the ancient cities of
Babylon were “a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness.” Amidst the
heaps that marked the site of Babylon herself, there rose the small town
of Hillah, which, with its falling gateway, mean bazaar, and a few
half-ruined mosques, still exists, as if in mockery of the power and
splendour which in long-departed ages had there its abode.
Moral corruption was the ruin of Babylon, as of all the great empires of
the old world. Her vast trade, which rendered Babylon the
gathering-place of men from all parts of the known world, which poured
wealth into her coffers, and furnished her with luxuries of all kinds,
had the effect of producing an effeminacy and general profligacy, which
mainly contributed to her fall. There is no necessary connection between
prosperity and corruption; nevertheless, in nations as in individuals,
it is generally found that a long lease of prosperity—especially if
conjoined with much wealth, which at once allows of indolence and
invites to self-indulgence—dwarfs the generous and lofty feelings of our
nature, and renders both men and nations selfish in feeling, and
absorbed in the material comforts and pleasures of life. In Babylon this
tendency was aggravated, at least in later times, by the corruptions of
its religion, promoted by a hierarchy which, in course of time, became
at once too rich and too powerful for its own purity, and too profligate
not to insure the corruption of the people. The description given by
Herodotus of the manners of the people, when under the dominion of the
Persian kings, is sufficient to explain the cause of Babylon’s speedy
fall and ultimate ruin; and his account tallies perfectly with the
denunciations of the city’s wickedness by the prophets of Israel. Her
inhabitants, as generally happens, along with their moral integrity lost
their warlike character. When the Persians broke into the city, they
were revelling in debauchery and lust; and when the Macedonian conqueror
appeared at their gates, they received with indifference the yoke of a
new master.
“It is not difficult,” says Mr Layard, “to account for the rapid decay
of the country around Babylon. As the inhabitants deserted the city,”
and a foreign yoke pressed heavily upon them, “the canals were
neglected; and when once those great sources of fertility were choked
up, the plains became a wilderness. Upon the waters conveyed by their
channels to the innermost parts of Mesopotamia, depended not only the
harvests, the gardens, and the palm-groves, but the very existence of
the numerous towns and villages far removed from the river-banks.” Built
of unbaked bricks, “they soon turned to mere heaps of earth and rubbish.
Vegetation ceased; and the plains, parched by the burning heat of the
sun, were ere long once more a vast arid waste.”
So flourished and so fell Nineveh and Babylon. For fourteen centuries
the Assyrian empire, of which they formed the pillars, was the leading
Power in Western Asia,—overlapping to the south with that of Egypt, with
which it was sometimes at peace, sometimes at war, at first a dependent
and latterly victorious. We think the character of these two old empires
may be symbolised by their different styles of architecture,—Egypt built
with granite, and Assyria with alabaster and painted brick. It was not
to geographical position that the difference was owing. The valley of
the Nile and that of the Euphrates are much alike. Both are alluvial in
their character, and possess but little stone; and with both nations,
accordingly, brick was the ordinary material employed in building. In
both countries quarries of granite and other stone existed in the
mountains which bordered the valley-land, with rivers upon which the
stone might be floated down on rafts. But the one nation used this
material, and the other did not. The Egyptians, indomitable in science,
and animated by grander views than their Asiatic rivals, sent several
hundred miles for intractable but everlasting granite, whereon to design
their sculptures and inscriptions, and with which to rear those vast and
countless edifices which seem destined to perpetuate the fame and
history of their founders to the end of time. The Assyrians, fonder of
luxury than of fame, more desirous of display than of enduring strength,
contented themselves with materials which they could get without
trouble, but ornamenting the brick with colours, or coating it with
slabs of soft alabaster, which they found protruding from the ground
beneath their feet. The architecture of Egypt was grand and strong—that
of Assyria was vast and showy. Egyptian sculpture was angular, and
strove to be correct,—that of Assyria was round and florid. Although we
know as yet but little of the arts and customs of life among the
Assyrians, we may confidently conjecture that they were left
comparatively unshackled by rule, and at the sway of individual impulse;
whereas in Egypt rule and system pervaded everything, alike in art and
in society.
Of all the empires of the first period of the world, the Assyrian is the
one whose history and civilisation most closely connect themselves with
the subsequent destinies of mankind. India and China were isolated
empires, each developing a civilisation for itself, independent of and
wholly uninfluencing the rest of the world. Egypt was less so; but it
also, secluded in position and unproselytising in spirit, stands apart
from the community of nations, and may be studied like an isolated
statue placed in a niche. With Assyria, however, the case is far
otherwise. Its influence, extending for centuries over Western and
Southern Asia—from the frontiers of Affghanistan to the Levant, from the
Persian Gulf to the shores of the Ægean Sea—was potent in modifying a
vast population, destined to give birth to many civilised States. From
its loins proceeded the empire of Persia,—which was, in fact, in all
respects only a modification of the empire which it supplanted; while
these two, by their great influence over all western Asia, including the
Greek settlements of Ionia, must have affected in no slight degree the
Hellenic mind—especially from the period when Alexander by his conquests
drew Greece bodily into Asia. As yet, as we have said, the book of
Assyrian history and civilisation is only beginning to be unrolled; but
there are already in the possession of the literati of Europe written
cylinders and inscriptions which, when deciphered, will cast important
light upon matters as yet in the dark. Doubtless many more will be found
even in the ruins already opened,—only one of which, let it be noted,
has been thoroughly searched. Above all, ruins upon ruins are to be seen
scattered over the plains of Mesopotamia, which Mr Layard himself
describes as the evident remains of ancient cities, and which offer
ample scope for the labours of more than one generation of
investigators. We shall get at the truth at last. Years may roll by, and
still see but little progress made in the search;—but there, underneath,
lie the records of the past for which we seek, and earth will keep them
safe until we are ready to dig for them in earnest.
THE OPENING OF THE GANGES CANAL.
_8th April 1854._
From distant-lying lands,
Lone in grey surges of the misty north,
The little band came forth,
Who meet their God to-day with thankful prayer:
The myriads clap their hands,
Sons of the soil now desolate and bare,
And their glad voices rise upon the morning air.
It comes, long-wished-for, comes,
The tamed and friendly flood,
While blatant arms and rattling drums
Sway to the peaceful conquest their unwonted mood.
And you, O ancient peaks,
Cold-glancing in the early sun!
This crowd, in every murmur, speaks
Your glory;—now is done
Your lonely age; your true life is begun:
Still through the night, from ledge to ledge
The avalanches fall,
Still rears its crag and breathless edge
Your præmemorial wall;
Yet may you swell our hymn to-day,
Your old reproach is taken away,—
Barren no more! Like her who bore
In her white age the lost hope of her prime,
Yet heard the Heavenly pledge with glad surprise,
Ye, having won your heritage from time,
Lift your hoar heads with laughter to the skies.
And years to come shall hear your praise,
Far other than the fame of demon-gods,
Holding their grim abodes
On Meru’s top through fabled sæcular days;
Years hence, some aged man may say—
Of those who stand to-day
By the glad baptism of your youngest born;—
Where, from his fruit-grove, far around
He eyes the green and affluent ground:—
“I stood among them on that shining morn,
I saw the ruler of the land
Let loose the waters with an easy hand;
The river, vainly idolised of yore,
Now first her servants blessed;
The white-topped mountains never bore
Us benefit before,
Till taught by those wise strangers of the West.
One shade alone hung o’er us,
To cloud the scene before us,
And temper with humility our joy—
One mild but earnest voice, though still,
Told us of mingled good and ill,
And the old moral of the world’s alloy!”
Ah!—may our names, like his,[148] be known,
When we are passed and grown
But Memories, as Greek and Moghul are,
By deeds like these alone,
True triumphs, that atone,
And vindicate the violence of war.
H.G.K.
THE USES OF BEAUTY.
Heart-throbs of Poesy;
Old storied walls;
Tint-beams of brilliancy
When daylight falls;
Floods of wild melody
Through palace-halls;
Twilight mists on the deep;
Keen stars above;
Woman’s sweet fellowship,
Holy home—Love;—
All that Earth preaches
By Beauty, is given
To train and to teach us,
And mould us for Heaven.
H.G.K.
SPANISH POLITICS AND CUBAN PERILS.
_Madrid, 14th September 1854._
Dear Ebony,—The political chronicle, since last I wrote to you, is far
from offering such stirring incidents as were recorded in my July and
August despatches. There has been no fighting, although we were once on
the brink of it, and things have gone pretty quietly, and, upon the
whole, satisfactorily. After the fray comes the feast; and just as my
last letter went off, a banquet was given at the Theatre-Royal, by the
press of Madrid, to the ministers and a large number of notable persons.
The press took an important part in the recent movements here, and has
not been unrewarded, several of its members having been appointed to
high posts under government. After the dinner, at which speeches and
patriotism were plentiful, the next incident of note was the return to
Madrid of the small division that first, under O’Donnell and Dulce,
raised the banner of revolt against the Sartorius tyranny, and fought
the brief but sanguinary fight of Vicálvaro. But the principal event of
the last thirty days, the only one which (with its consequences) is
worth dwelling upon, is the departure—I might almost say the escape—of
Queen Christina from Madrid and from Spain.
In former letters I have given you an idea of the detestation with which
Ferdinand’s widow, once so beloved, has long been regarded. To those who
remember the affection and enthusiasm testified for her during the early
years of her residence in this country, the contrast with the storm of
hatred and execration amidst which she has quitted it, is very striking.
Then she was the hope of Spain, the idol of the Liberal party; her
appearance abroad was the signal for cheers as vehement and heartfelt as
any that have since been raised for Espartero. Her name was the
soldier’s battle-cry, when combating, amidst the rugged hills of
northern and eastern Spain, the partisans of Charles V.; it was the
burthen of the songs with which he enlivened his brief intervals of
repose, and beguiled the weariness of the march. As I write, there
recurs to my memory the burthen of one of those cheerful ditties, in
which Spaniards are called upon joyfully to exclaim “_Viva la Reina,
Maria Cristina_, she who broke the chains that bound and oppressed
us”—and more to that effect. Little more than a month ago, as I walked
through the Puerta del Sol—the heart of Madrid, which is the centre of
Spain—blind men and ill-favoured women shouted at every corner the
titles and contents of scurrilous pamphlets that recounted the misdeeds
of “Mother Christina.” It may truly be said that, of the fourteen
millions that people Spain, not one person (save her own creatures)
could be found to raise his voice in her favour. The charges brought
against her are numerous, and but too well founded. She is accused of
gross and wilful neglect of her daughter’s education—neglect which has
been the main origin of the scandal Isabella has caused, and of the
humbled and perilous position in which she now finds herself; her crown
tottering on her head, and her only chance of not losing it consisting
in implicit obedience to her minister’s directions. She is accused of
having betrayed the liberties of Spain, which were intrusted to her
keeping; of having trampled on the laws she had sworn to maintain; of
having built up a colossal fortune at the expense of the nation; of
having, by her unscrupulous greed and shameful political intrigues, by
her own conduct, and by her patronage of, and complicity with, some of
the worst men in Spain, destroyed all public morality, and augmented to
an inconceivable extent administrative corruption. On all these charges,
an immense jury, composed of the whole Spanish nation, has unanimously
found her guilty. And, since her departure, the general hope and prayer
are that she may never again set foot in the country she has so deeply
injured. “May the accursed Italian,” said a newspaper the other day,
“never return hither to make a traffic of all that is most sacred and
holy upon earth.” But, before she had left, the feeling concerning her
was in one respect different. It was the opinion of many that it was
neither safe nor just to allow her to leave the country. It was
remembered how, during her three years’ exile in France, she had
intrigued and manœuvred, and lavished treasure, until, aided by the
divisions in the Liberal camp and by the incapacity of the Liberal
government, she rode into Madrid in the triumphal car of Reaction. Then,
it is true, she had a staunch and interested ally in the wily and
unscrupulous chief of the house of Orleans. Deprived of his powerful aid
and cooperation, she is manifestly much less to be dreaded. But a
portion of the Spanish nation, and especially of the inhabitants of the
capital, well acquainted with her great cunning and skill in intrigue,
and overrating, perhaps, the elements and resources she can command in a
foreign country for the purpose of again disturbing Spain’s
tranquillity, insisted that she should be caged and not expelled, and
moreover that she should be brought to account before the Cortes for the
peculations and robberies attributed to her by the voice of the entire
nation. You will remember the scenes that occurred at the palace soon
after Espartero’s arrival here, and the vain attempts then made to get
her off in safety, whilst armed and menacing crowds were vigilant to
prevent her passage, and could be induced to abandon their watch over
their sovereign’s palace, and their stations upon the roads from Madrid,
only by a promise from the government that the object of the popular
wrath should not be allowed clandestinely to depart. But it soon was
found that if there was a probability of her being dangerous abroad,
there was a certainty of her being so at home. Her daughter’s residence
again became a focus of intrigue. This got so well known, the
reactionary party, encouraged by having their old protectress to lean
upon, were so active, and symptoms were observed so dangerous to public
tranquillity, that the chiefs of the national guard sent a deputation to
the government, urging strongly the removal of Christina from the
palace. As the national guard of Madrid now consists of upwards of
twenty thousand men, and as they elect their own chiefs, who must
therefore be considered to represent the opinions and enjoy the
confidence of the majority, the prayer of such a deputation naturally
had weight; and at cabinet councils held on that and the following day,
the principal question discussed was—What is to be done with the
Queen-mother? The impossibility of preventing her intrigues, should she
remain in Spain, except by confinement too rigorous to be legal,
determined the council to expel her from the country; attaching her
property until the Cortes should have investigated her conduct, and
decided concerning the charges brought against her. This plan resolved
upon, it was immediately put into execution. The determination was come
to on the evening of the 27th August. On the 28th, at seven in the
morning, the ministers were at the palace, to witness the Queen-mother’s
departure. The adieus were brief. Christina betrayed no emotion at
parting from her daughter, who, on her part, dropped a few decorous
tears, but was not very greatly afflicted. There has never been much
affection between the two queens, although the elder of them, by her
astuteness and superior strength of character, has exercised great
influence over the younger. The Queen-mother then took leave of the
ministers, whom she must heartily detest; recommended her daughter to
the care and watchful guardianship of Espartero, and entered a large
travelling-vehicle, accompanied by her husband, who looked grievously
dejected, and attended by an ecclesiastic of high rank, and by several
persons of her household. Her children’s departure had preceded hers.
Some were in Portugal, others in France. Escorted by two squadrons of
cavalry, under the command of the well-known General Garrigó, she
reached, by short stages, and without molestation, the frontier of the
former country.
Few persons were present at Christina’s departure, although it was
stated in the French papers, whose blunders concerning Spanish affairs
are incessant and amusing, that the windows of the palace were filled
with ladies waving handkerchiefs, and that its roof was crowded with
national guards. The truth is, that hardly anybody in Madrid knew of the
Queen-mother’s going, until she had actually gone. As the news spread, a
certain excitement was manifested, and towards eleven o’clock a crowd of
men, many of them armed, thronged the small square in front of
Espartero’s residence, with menacing shouts of Down with the Ministry!
and loud demands for the return of Christina. An aide-de-camp presenting
himself at a window to address them, firearms were levelled at him, and
he was compelled to retire. The fermentation each moment increased.
Deputations from various public bodies waited upon the premier to
express their disapproval of the step taken. The general impression
abroad was, that a trick had been played on the people, that faith had
been broken with them, and that the government was pledged not to suffer
the departure of Christina until the Cortes had decided concerning her.
The verbal pledge given by Espartero to a deputation, at a time when it
was a great object to get rid of the bodies of armed men who beset the
palace, and infested the environs of Madrid, making it their business to
guard against the escape of the Queen-mother, was, that she should not
depart furtively, either by day or by night. Her departure, therefore,
at eight in the morning, when the gazette containing its announcement
had been but an hour published, was held to be a violation of this
promise, as far as regarded the people. On the other hand, the national
guard had insisted, through its chiefs, that Christina should not remain
at the palace; there was danger to the tranquillity of Madrid if she
continued there; her property in Spain, and her pension of thirty
thousand pounds a year, which was suspended, offered considerable
security for the financial improprieties of which she might be found to
have been guilty. To let her leave the country was manifestly the wisest
course, and it was adopted. It has been urged that it would have been
more straightforward of the government, and would have prevented even
the imputation of a breach of faith, to have summoned commissions of the
national guards, the corporation, and other bodies, and from them to
have obtained, beforehand, that approval of the measure which was almost
unanimously accorded to them a few hours after it had been taken. But in
cases of this kind there is a wide difference between before and after.
The same men who, when the thing was done, supported the cause of order
and the government, of whose good intentions they were sure, and of the
wisdom of whose conduct they presently became persuaded, might have
assumed a different attitude had they been consulted in advance.
Moreover, by acting in that way, by deferring on every occasion to the
popular voice, whether it spoke words of wisdom or words of folly, the
ministers could never hope to gain strength, which was what they most
needed. In short, it might have been a very difficult and dangerous
business to get Christina out of Madrid, had the intention been
published the day before; and doubtless the government preferred risking
the unfounded imputation of a deception, to incurring the responsibility
of fresh collisions. In my opinion, as an eyewitness of all that passed,
it would have been hazardous to have acted otherwise than the ministers
did. As it was, not a shot was fired, not a wound received; and three
days after the affair, everybody seemed convinced that the best had been
done.
I shall not dwell upon the incidents of the afternoon and night of the
28th August, of which you will have already seen accounts. For a short
time things looked menacing, and many expected a fight. The council of
ministers, assembled in the large building on the Puerta del Sol which
is at once the Spanish “Home Office” and the main guard-house, received
numerous delegates from the corporation, the provincial deputation, and
from other public bodies; expounded to them their views and reasons, and
received promises of support. Meanwhile the national guard—a portion of
it somewhat sulky and dissatisfied—took up arms and prepared to maintain
order. A considerable number of barricades had been thrown up. The
presence and exhortations of General San Miguel sufficed for some of
these to be removed by their makers. But in a small section of the town
they were maintained; and a few hundred malcontents busied themselves in
strengthening them, and declared their intention of defending them. Over
their uneven summits were to be seen the barrels of muskets and
fowling-pieces, and a few familiar faces which had often crossed my
sight during the revolution of July. It was not certain what the
barricaders wanted; in fact, there was a strange combination of
elements; but the chief demand they put forward was, the dismissal of
the ministry, whom they declared to have betrayed the people. As far as
I could observe, Espartero was excepted from this verdict; but only by
those of the insurgents who, however mistaken in the course they
pursued, acted in good faith, and in support of their own political
views. There were many others who were actuated by widely different
motives. The reactionary and absolutist party had its representatives at
the barricades; foreign influence was also at work; and it has been
supposed by some that Christina had supplied funds—not, perhaps, in
anticipation of the outbreak (although even that she may have foreseen),
but to be in readiness for any occasion of mischief that might present
itself. It was clearly for her interest, the revolution having gone so
far, to see it carried farther. If the ultra-democratic party, aided by
the rabble of the low districts of Madrid, could gain the ascendant, the
certain result was anarchy. Then would come reaction, and Christina and
her friends might hope to resume their places and recommence their
spoliations. Accordingly, there can be no doubt—indeed, it were easily
proved—that agents of the expelled party—the Palacos, as they are
called—stimulated and assisted in the disturbances of the 28th August.
Their efforts were of no avail against the steady attitude of the
national guards, who remained for eighteen hours under arms in the
streets, obedient to their officers, and turning a deaf ear to the
perfidious insinuations of agents who sought to set them against the
government, and to divide them amongst themselves. The insurgents,
seeing that their cause was hopeless, and having the promise, from
Espartero’s own lips, of a brisk cannonade at daybreak, abandoned their
barricades in the course of the night. Many of them left their arms
behind them; a considerable number were taken prisoners; more escaped by
concealing themselves in houses until such time as the national guards,
all danger being over, retired to their homes. On the 29th, Madrid was
as quiet as if nothing had occurred.
A foreigner, lately resident in this capital, and who, within little
more than a year, has acquired a rather unenviable celebrity, is here
generally believed to have had a hand in the outbreak of the 28th
ultimo. I refer to the Minister of the United States at Madrid. A
Frenchman by birth, but compelled to abandon his country previous to the
revolution of 1830, in consequence of certain political writings, M.
Pierre Soulé settled on the other side of the Atlantic, and became heart
and soul an American. A man of great energy, vigorous intellect, and
considerable astuteness, he attained to high practice at the bar, to a
seat in Congress, and to the leadership of the party which seeks,
without much regard to the means employed, to annex Cuba to the States.
With that unscrupulous party, his open profession of the most distorted
views on questions of international right made him highly popular. From
his seat in the Senate, early in 1852, he bitterly attacked the
government of Mr Fillmore for not taking up the cause of the adventurers
under Lopez; some of whom had been executed, and others sent to prison,
for their piratical attempt on the island of Cuba. In 1853, shortly
before his appointment as minister at Madrid, he made a long and
eloquent speech, in which he lauded Lopez and his companions as heroes,
indulged in stinging sarcasms on Spain and Spaniards, and, speaking of
Cuba, urged the government, in metaphorical phrase, not to delay too
long to pluck the fruit from the tree, lest it should rot upon the stem.
This is the man whom Mr Franklin Pierce thought proper to send as envoy
to Spain. You will remember that, on his arrival at New York to embark
for Europe, a meeting was held in that city, composed of members of the
Lone Star Society, of fugitives from Cuba, and of other partisans of
annexation, who proceeded to serenade him, bearing banners on which were
inscriptions coupling Mr Soulé’s name with the rescue of Cuba from the
Spanish yoke. A member of the procession made a high-flown speech, in
which he expressed a hope that, when the honourable envoy returned to
his own country with fresh claims upon the esteem of his
fellow-citizens, a new star would shine in the celestial vault of Young
America. M. Soulé replied to this address, referring to Cuba as a
suffering people; and declaring that, as an American minister, he did
not cease to be an American citizen; and that, as an American citizen,
he had a right to attend to the sobs of anguish of the oppressed. Taken
in connection with his harangues in the Senate, and with the address to
which it replied, his speech was certainly most significant, indiscreet,
and offensive to Spain. It caused great scandal, not only in Europe, but
amongst the right-thinking portion of the people of the United States.
Mr Pierce was loudly censured for the appointment, and American
newspapers declared that it was his duty, as soon as he knew what had
passed in New York, to send a steamer after Mr Soulé to bring him back,
since he had proved himself completely unfit to fill the office of
American minister in Spain. I believe it to be a fact that the United
States did not expect their envoy to be received as such at Madrid. But
they underrated the meanness and pusillanimity of the Spanish ministry
then in power. After some delay at Paris, employed, it was said, in
ascertaining what sort of reception awaited him in the Spanish capital,
Mr Soulé proceeded to his destination. He had been but a short time
there, when an unfortunate affair brought him into bad odour. At a ball
at the French ambassador’s, the Duke of Alba, referring to Mrs Soulé’s
dress, which struck him as peculiar, compared her to Mary of Burgundy.
Probably the comparison was not very apt; possibly the grandee who made
it was not particularly conversant with the costumes of the middle ages:
there certainly does not appear to have been any offensive intention of
comparing persons, but merely of criticising a costume. Mr Soulé’s son,
however, a very young man, overheard the remark, took it in bad part,
and provoked the Duke of Alba. The result was a bloodless duel, fought
with very long swords, lasting a very long time, and followed up by a
very long letter to the papers, which Mr Soulé, jun., had, for his own
sake, much better have left unwritten. Out of this affair grew a second
duel, more serious in its character and results, between Mr Soulé and
the French minister at Madrid. They fought with pistols, and the Marquis
de Turgot received an unfortunate wound in the leg, which, to this day,
compels him to use crutches. The whole details of these unpleasant
circumstances were at the time placed before the public by the English
and French press, and the general opinion certainly seemed to be that
the Soulés had unnecessarily commenced, and afterwards wilfully
aggravated a foolish quarrel, which, as new-comers to the country and
considering the diplomatic character of the senior, and the imputations
of hostility to Spain under which he laboured, they ought to have done
their utmost to avoid. Be this as it may, and without entering into the
political animosities that are said to have mingled in the affair, the
Spaniards naturally took the part of their countryman and of M.
Turgot—the case of the latter exciting particular sympathy, since he had
been dragged into and maimed in a quarrel with which he had not the
least concern. Thenceforward the society of Madrid avoided that of the
Soulé family.
These unpleasant incidents had scarcely ceased to arrest the public
attention, when the affair of the Black Warrior again brought Mr Soulé’s
name prominently before the world. This affair has been so much
discussed that its main facts must be generally and well known, and I
will use the utmost brevity in here recapitulating them, which I do for
the sake of adding a few comments, and of relating one or two
circumstances in the dispute to which they gave rise that I believe are
not widely known. On the 28th February last, the Black Warrior
steam-ship, a regular trader between Mobile and New York, arrived from
the former place in the port of Havanah. She was entered at the
custom-house as in ballast, and the manifest presented was conformable
with that declaration, ship’s provisions being the only cargo set down.
Her clearance was then applied for; but on the searcher from the
custom-house visiting the vessel, she was found to be cotton-laden;
whereupon her departure was stopped, and judicial proceedings were
commenced, the delay having expired that is allowed by law for the
rectification of the manifest. Article 162 of the Customs Regulations of
the Havanah states, that “after the twelve hours allowed by Article 15
for the rectification of, or addition to, the manifest, shall have
expired, all goods that may have been omitted in it shall be seized;
and, moreover, the captain shall be fined to the amount of their value,
provided always the amount of duty which would have to be paid on the
contents of the package or packages do not exceed four hundred dollars;
because if it exceed that sum, and if the goods belong, or are consigned
to, the owner, captain, or supercargo, the fine shall not be imposed,
but, instead of it, the vessel, together with its freights and
everything else available, shall be seized.” This is explicit enough;
and it is to be noted that a copy of the custom-house regulations,
printed in English, was handed to Captain Bullock, commanding the Black
Warrior, as soon as he entered the port. By order of the authorities the
cargo was landed, and found to consist of 957 bales of cotton. The
amount of seizure and of fines incurred was very large, and the Marquis
of Pezuela, captain-general of the Havanah, desired the superior board
of administration to consider the matter, with a view to its reduction.
That board fully confirmed the legality of the steps taken and fines
imposed, but left it at the discretion of the captain-general to reduce
the latter if he thought proper. He consulted the attorney-general of
the island, who recommended their reduction to ten thousand dollars,
exclusive of all expenses incurred in discharging the cargo; but general
Pezuela finally decided to reduce the penalty to six thousand dollars,
including all costs and charges. In the mean time the consignees had
made various applications to the captain-general, admitting their fault,
declaring the captain’s omission to have arisen from ignorance, pleading
ignorance on their own part also, begging that the vessel might be
allowed to depart upon payment of the transit duties, corresponding to a
ship laden as she was; and, finally, when the fine of six thousand
dollars was definitely fixed upon, entreating its further reduction.
This, however, the captain-general, who had officially announced his
decision, refused to grant; but he forwarded a petition from the
consignees to the Queen of Spain, in which it was set forth that there
could have been no fraudulent intention—cotton not being an article of
consumption in the island of Cuba—in which the heavy loss arising from
the detention, discharge, and reloading of the vessel was urged, and the
remission of the fine craved. This prayer was subsequently granted; but
before that was done the dispute between Spain and the United States had
assumed menacing proportions.
This statement of well-ascertained facts shows the Cuban authorities to
have acted strictly within the law throughout the whole business, and
with great clemency to the persons who had transgressed it. If it suited
American vessels, trading between Mobile and New York, to call at the
Havanah to take in coals, or for other objects, they were bound to
comply in every respect with the laws and regulations of the colony, and
could not expect to get off scot-free if they transgressed them. But
there is a circumstance to be taken into consideration which somewhat
modifies this view of matters in the case of the Black Warrior. It
appears that, owing to the remissness, indulgence, or—it has been
suggested, but I have not seen it proved—the corruptness of the Cuban
authorities, the Black Warrior had been in the habit of entering the
port with a cargo, exhibiting a manifest that stated her to be in
ballast, and being entered and cleared accordingly, and that she had
actually made more than thirty voyages in that manner without let or
impediment. It is scarcely possible that this should not have been known
to the Cuban custom-house, and if so, it must be admitted that the
course pursued on the occasion of the voyage made in February 1854 was,
although doubtless strictly legal, harsh and injudicious. The neglect to
enforce the law on more than thirty previous voyages might not suffice
to abrogate it; but it should have induced the Cuban authorities—though
it had been but from considerations of prudence—to re-enforce it less
suddenly. It is easy to understand that the new captain-general, and one
or two other newly-appointed and high functionaries, who had gone out
with him to the Havanah only a few weeks before the occurrence of the
difficulty, were fired with zeal for reform; and it is stated that,
during the first few months of their administration, the revenue of the
island increased. But they should have gone to work more coolly and
gradually. In consideration of the long impunity the irregularities of
the Black Warrior had enjoyed, it would surely have sufficed, on the
28th February, to have warned the captain and consignees that such could
be no longer permitted, and that, on her next voyage, the law would be
rigidly enforced, should occasion be given. Towards a country of equal
or inferior power, this would have been the fairest and most proper
course to pursue; but towards so potent and aggressive a neighbour as
the United States, it was most unwise to adopt any other. But although
numerous misrepresentations have been circulated on the subject, this
fault of judgment is the only one in the affair of the Black Warrior
that can fairly be imputed to General Pezuela and his subordinates.
Of course, the business was a godsend to President Pierce and the
annexation party in the United States. The former forthwith sent a
strong—I might almost say a violent—message to the House of
Representatives, declaring the seizure of the Black Warrior to present
“a clear case of wrong,” attributing habitual misconduct to the
authorities of Cuba, and stating that he had already given instructions
for the demand of an immediate indemnity; in the event of the refusal of
which, he declared, in menacing terms, that he would “vindicate the
honour of the American flag.” Now Mr Soulé appears again upon the scene.
The demands addressed by him to the Spanish government were an indemnity
of £60,000 sterling, the dismissal of all those Cuban authorities that
had been concerned in the proceedings against the Black Warrior (this
would of course include General Pezuela, although his name appears not
to have been mentioned in the note), and finally that, in future, the
governor of Cuba should have power to settle disputes with the United
States without reference to the home government—an arrangement directly
opposed to the colonial policy of Spain. As may be supposed, the Spanish
ministry demurred to such exorbitant and unreasonable demands. Calderon
de la Barca, the feeble and timid foreign minister of the Sartorius
cabinet, was no match for Mr Soulé. He even suffered himself to be
bullied by the American secretary of legation, who, on conveying to him
a communication, took out his watch and stated the exact time he would
allow him to answer it. And although Sartorius came to the aid of his
aged and incapable colleague, he quickly disgusted Mr Soulé by his
double-dealing, evasions, and procrastination. None of the
communications that have passed during the discussion of the Black
Warrior affair have as yet been published in Spain, or, that I am aware
of, in America. All the correspondence that passed in Cuba is before us,
so that we are enabled to form an opinion on the merits of the case; but
there our documentary information stops. What is positively known from
other sources is, that there seemed so little chance of the affair being
settled with Mr Soulé, that the Spanish government directed Señor Cueto
to try to arrange it at Washington, and sent after him, soon after his
departure, by Señor Galiano, notes and instructions to aid him in the
task. For a considerable time after that, scarcely anything was heard of
the matter; and there is strong reason to believe that Mr Soulé was
himself left without communications from his government for a length of
time that annoyed and perhaps surprised him. This naturally awakens a
doubt whether his proceedings have been altogether approved at
headquarters. His friends here maintain that they have. It is presumable
that they derive their information from himself.
On the 1st of August last, in compliance with the desire of the United
States Senate, President Pierce sent to it a message with respect to the
state of American relations with Spain since his former menacing message
of the 16th March. All that he said that directly referred to the Black
Warrior affair, was that Spain, instead of granting prompt reparation,
had justified the conduct of the Cuban authorities, and thereby assumed
the responsibility of their acts. The tone of the whole message was
threatening to Spain, and the probability of war at no distant period
was plainly indicated. It nevertheless excited little apprehension here,
where it was generally considered to be merely an unprincipled attempt,
on the part of Mr Pierce, to regain, by an appeal to the passions of the
people, the popularity he had lost, and at the same time to keep up
alarm in Cuba, and to wear out the energies of Spain, in hopes that at
last, disheartened and intimidated, a Spanish government would be found
willing to sell the island. It is doubtful, however, whether any Spanish
minister would dare to entertain proposals for its purchase. Mr Soulé
has declared himself, in his place in Congress, decidedly opposed to
that mode of acquiring Cuba, on the ground that it must, at no distant
date, fall into the lap of the Union without costing a dollar. This
declaration is nearly tantamount to saying that it is less expensive to
take a thing by force than to buy it with money, and conveys pretty much
the sentiment for the practical carrying out of which on a small scale,
men used to be hung, and are now transported. Mr Soulé is unquestionably
a man of talent—eloquent, wary, skilful in adapting himself to the
persons with whom he comes in contact—but he is deficient in good taste,
as he has more than once shown since he came to Madrid, and his
patriotism and philanthropy, with respect to the island of Cuba, smack
too strongly of piracy to obtain much respect in Europe, however
acceptable they may prove, and however loudly they may be applauded, in
a lodge of the “Lone Star,” or at a New Orleans public meeting. But
although “Cuba without cost” may be the device inscribed on his banner—a
black one, it is to be presumed—when he came to Spain as the
representative of his government, he was bound to obey his instructions,
and these, there can scarcely be a doubt, were to offer a large sum of
money for the much-coveted island. Knowing what we know of the Sartorius
ministry, we are justified in believing that they would have had no
objection to effect a sale which they assuredly would have made the
means of filling their own pockets. But however inclined they may have
felt, they dared not do it.
For some weeks the Black Warrior question had been comparatively little
spoken of in Madrid, and the general opinion seemed to be that it had
been amicably adjusted at Washington, or was in a fair way to be so,
when the O’Donnell insurrection and the July revolution concentrated the
public thought on home politics. Things had scarcely begun to settle
down, when, on the 21st August, the arrival of the President’s message
of the 1st once more drew attention to Cuba, and to the state of affairs
between Spain and America. Just a week later, on the 28th, occurred the
outbreak I have described in the early part of this letter. On that same
day, before the revolt was suppressed, it was said in Madrid that the
American minister was concerned in the insurrection. The next day, when
things were quiet, the part he was alleged to have played was matter of
common conversation, and then the newspapers took up the matter. The
_Diario Español_, usually one of the best written and best informed of
the Madrid journals, which supports the present government, and is
believed to be the special organ of General O’Donnell, published on the
30th August a very strong article on the subject. It had been stated the
day before with truth that Mr Soulé was about to leave Madrid for
France, and the supposition had been added that he did so in order to
avoid being in the Spanish capital when news should arrive of a
piratical invasion of Cuba by citizens of the United States. Taking this
for a text, the _Diario Español_ indignantly asked if Mr Soulé feared
for his personal safety, and mistrusted the honour of Spaniards. He
would have no cause for such apprehension, the paper continued, “even if
he had been wanting in the respect due to the nation, and had sought by
every means to favour projects tending to deprive Spain of her most
precious colony: even if it were certain that he had sought to profit by
the days of degradation of the Spanish government (under Sartorius), and
to take advantage of the insatiable voracity of high and low influences:
even if it were certain that he had endeavoured to profane the sanctity
of the revolution, and to sow discord amongst the people, seducing the
unwary, engaging in a vile intrigue, giving money and promising arms to
destroy the power of the honourable and patriotic men who now direct the
destinies of Spain: even if he had succeeded in gaining over a few
deluded persons who had failed to discern, through the cloud of his
honeyed and flattering words, the latent idea of keeping up agitation
and disorder in the Peninsula, and so of depriving Cuba of the succours
the mother-country might otherwise send thither: even though the people
knew that he had attempted to take advantage of a moment of
effervescence traitorously to excite its indignation, and to hurry it to
revolt.” This was pretty plain speaking. On the same day that the
article appeared, Mr Soulé addressed an angry letter to the _Diario
Español_, which did not publish it. The letter afterwards appeared in a
French frontier newspaper. The following is a translation of its
contents, as given in the _Bayonne Messager_ of the 9th August:—
“MADRID, _30th August_.
“_A Monsieur le Directeur du Diario Español._
“Sir,—The tone and character of the article concerning me published in
your sheet of this day, too plainly prove the influences that have
inspired it for me not to honour it by a word of reply.
“I leave Madrid because it pleases me to leave it, and because I have
no account to render to anybody, either of my proceedings or of the
motives that determine them.
“I will never absent myself from any place through fear of being
insulted or put in peril by those whom my presence may displease.
“I do not fear impertinence, nor even assassins.
“And especially, Sir, I do not fear the people.
“The people respects what deserves to be respected;—it brands only the
miserable men who flatter and deceive it.... It fights—but it does not
assassinate.
“As to the perfidious insinuations of which your article is full, they
are beneath my contempt.
“I leave to you the merit of the varnish with which you have covered
them, and, to those who dictated them, the infamy of their invention.
“I am, Sir, your Servant,
“PIERRE SOULÉ.”
The charges brought by the _Diario Español_, and to which the above
characteristic epistle was the reply, were endorsed to a greater or less
extent by public opinion in Madrid. On the 12th of August, Mr Soulé,
unable to attend the banquet given by the Press, had addressed to the
committee of management a letter, in which occurred the following
passage: “The heart of Young America, doubt it not, will palpitate with
joy and delight at the breath of the perfumed breeze that shall waft to
it across the ocean the acclamations of liberated Spain. May I be
permitted to say, that mine is intoxicated with felicity by the hope
that Europe, apathetic though it seem, will not suffer those germs of
regeneration, which the sublime sacrifice of some of her sons has just
so miraculously caused to sprout, to become debilitated, and to die.” It
is charitably supposed, by those who credit the American minister’s
participation in the events of the 28th August, that the intoxication
referred to in this flowery and figurative paragraph had not entirely
passed away at that date, and that the writer of the letter to the
dining committee thought it his duty, as the representative of Young
America, to contribute his aid to that germination of regeneration which
apathetic Spain showed herself tardy in promoting. At the same time,
there certainly are not wanting evil-disposed persons, who affirm that
Mr Soulé has so concentrated his vision on his adopted country, that he
can scarcely discern any other; that he looks with contempt upon the
herd of slaves who range about Europe, and that to him it would be
matter of indifference to see the Old World perish, so that the New
World prospered—and, with it, his ambition. It has further been said
that, neither prudent nor scrupulous in the means he employed, he
condescended assiduously to court that Dowager Queen whose whole life
has been a contradiction to the principles he professes, and to admit
the society of a yet more illegitimate influence at the Spanish court.
It has been declared, and believed by many, that Mr Soulé, knowing that
the government of Espartero and O’Donnell was not one that he could
either intimidate or buy, and beholding in its character an
insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of the great object of his
desires, resolved to work for its downfall by every means in his power,
and that, notwithstanding his fervent sympathy with the welfare and
liberties of Spain, he would have preferred either anarchy or despotism
to the triumph of a system which, whilst maintaining those liberties,
rendered more and more remote the prospect of realisation of that
cherished project, whose accomplishment would introduce a new star “into
the celestial vault of Young America,” and at the same time vastly add
to the importance and popularity in the States of the American minister
at Madrid. All these things have been said, and have found wide credence
in this capital and elsewhere.
Enough, however, on this branch of the subject. The sum of ten million
dollars, demanded by Mr Pierce to make head against the possible
contingency of a war with Spain, having been refused him by the American
Senate, the probabilities of such a war occurring are greatly
diminished, and the Spanish government entertains little apprehension on
that score. Upon the other hand, notwithstanding Mr Pierce’s declaration
in his Message of the 1st August that the whole of the means which the
constitution allows to the executive power should be employed to prevent
the violation of law, treaties, and international right, contemplated by
certain citizens of the United States, who, as the government was
officially and positively informed, were fitting out an expedition for
the invasion of Cuba—notwithstanding this assurance, I say, there appear
grounds for fearing that, owing perhaps to the weakness of the executive
arm in the States, the expedition in question will yet sail for the
coveted shores of the Pearl of the Antilles. Whether, if attempted, it
will meet the fate of that under Lopez, or whether it will succeed, not
only in landing, but in holding its ground until it can receive those
reinforcements which would probably flock to it from the Southern
States, as soon as it became known there that it had occupied, and was
maintaining, a position, is a matter of anxious uncertainty. The island
is strongly garrisoned, but American riflemen are formidable opponents.
The Spanish government feels confident of the result, and fully reckons
on the fidelity and valour of the two or three and twenty thousand good
troops now in Cuba. Where the Americans will be most deficient will
doubtless be in cavalry and artillery. The Spaniards have a thousand
dragoons, several batteries of field-artillery, and numerous large
Paixhans guns garnishing the forts and batteries of the island. And
although Spanish cavalry, judging from what we see here, is generally
but indifferently mounted, it is abundantly able to cope with irregular
infantry, and indeed would prove most formidable to the invaders, if
they ventured forth from the shelter of forests and hedges, or from the
broken ground favourable to sharp-shooters. As to the courage of the
men, when well led, there is no doubt of that. Good leading, which they
have rarely had, is all that Spaniards want to be as valiant troops as
any in Europe. Only the other day, at Vicálvaro, with General Garrigó
and other brave and determined officers at their head, regiments of
dragoons repeatedly galloped up to the very mouths of batteries, which
received them, at a few yards’ distance, with volleys of grape. Men who
would do this, would hardly flinch from charging irregular riflemen,
however accurate and deadly their fire. The Spanish artillery is
considered the best arm in the service; it is certainly the one with
which the most pains are taken, and which possesses the best-instructed
officers. The infantry now in Cuba is about twenty thousand strong, well
disciplined, in good condition, and accustomed to the climate. Were
these forces, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, concentrated in the
field against the American pirates, it is difficult to believe that the
latter could succeed in getting together, or at least in landing, a
force capable of resisting their attack. To speak positively on this
point, however, it would be necessary to be somewhat in the confidence
of the _filibusteros_, or at least to know more than is positively known
of their resources, plans, and places of rendezvous. But even supposing
that they muster more than we, in our imperfect information, think
probable, it is to be borne in mind that the very best irregular troops,
however formidable their valour and skill with their weapons may render
them in small numbers, are far less to be feared when they act in large
masses. Then the deficiency in discipline and drill tells heavily
against them. I am far from underrating the indomitable pluck of the
Americans, or their coolness or steadiness when in peril, and only
desire to see those valuable qualities displayed in a better cause than
the one to which we are assured they are shortly to be devoted. But in
an open plain, or in the attack of a fortress, and when opposed to
regular troops of average bravery, something more than pluck and
coolness is required. Upon the other hand, it must not be forgotten,
when we seek to strike the balance of chances, that the garrison of Cuba
could not be brought entire into the field. Certain forts, and towns,
and positions must be held, and although it is probable that many of
these would be left to the keeping of the numerous volunteers that would
take up arms the moment an invasion occurred, still portions of the
garrison must be detached from the main body. An intelligent Spaniard,
who has spent several years in Cuba, and but recently returned thence,
gave it me as his opinion that from ten to twelve thousand men could be
employed as the army of operation. He estimated the present garrison at
rather under twenty thousand men effective for the field, which is
somewhat less than the government estimate. The European Spaniards in
the island he believed to be about fifty thousand, a large proportion
Basques and Catalans, and who would readily enrol themselves as
volunteers in case of peril, would prove formidable antagonists, and
fight desperately for their homes and property. As to the native Cubans,
many of them would be likely to join the Americans, if these were
strong, and gained advantages at first starting; but if the invaders
were worsted, the Cubans would fly to arms and vaunt their fidelity to
Spain. The negroes, who have no wish to exchange Spanish for American
masters, and who are aware of the many disadvantages under which even a
free man of colour labours in the States, would all be ready to fight,
if arms were given to them. The negro mode of fighting, as described to
me by persons who are well acquainted with it, is peculiar and
dangerous. They fire a volley, receive the enemy’s fire, throw away
their muskets, and rush in with cutlass or poniard.
The long narrow shape of the island of Cuba, which bears a strong
resemblance to a lizard with the head looking eastward, is favourable to
its defenders, since it facilitates the cutting off of the invading
force. It will be a great advantage if General Concha’s arrival takes
place previously to any attack. He is the very man to command under such
circumstances. Quick of eye and ready of resource, he will inspire the
troops with confidence, and raise the courage of the Cubans. Amongst
these he has, what no captain-general of Cuba in our time has had, a
strong party—persons who are attached to him, like his mode of
administration, prefer him to any other captain-general, and will stand
by him to the utmost with all the influence and power they may possess.
This is a principal reason why he readily and gladly accepted the
destination towards which he is now steaming,—if indeed he has not
arrived there, since his departure from Corunna took place upwards of a
fortnight ago. The Spanish government—and indeed Spaniards generally, as
far as my means of observation extend—entertain a sanguine belief that,
with the troops at his command, and with the moral and physical support
of the majority of the dwellers on the island, Concha will so handle the
intruding annexionists as to make them heartily repent their unprovoked
and unjustifiable aggression.
There are other points to be taken into consideration when we discuss
the probable issue of the anticipated conflict. One of these, on which
such conflicting testimony has been given that it is scarcely possible
to form a decided opinion with respect to it, is the amount of support
the Americans would find in the island itself. The Spaniards, as I have
above intimated, think it would be unimportant. Ask a Yankee
annexionist, and he will tell you that the whole island, with the
exception of the European Spaniards resident in it, pines for release
from the intolerable yoke of Spain, longs to hoist the Stripes and
Stars, and to cling to the proud neck of the American eagle. I have been
told by Americans of the numbers of letters received from inhabitants of
Cuba, expressive of these sentiments, and imploring sympathy and
assistance. But it must be observed that a few malcontents, or American
settlers in the island, would suffice to circulate an immense number of
such complaints and prayers. One may imagine, for instance, the
consignees of the Black Warrior, after inditing their submissive and
penitent letters to the governor-general, and their petition to the
Queen of Spain for the remission of the fine, dipping their sharpest
iron pen into the ink-bottle, and relieving their afflicted souls by
throwing off screaming despatches to their friends in New York and New
Orleans, inveighing against the tyranny of Spanish rule, and longing for
the day when Cuba should join the Union. By those to whom such letters
were welcome, they would naturally be made the most of; they would be
handed about, talked of, and their contents verbally repeated, until it
would seem as if a hundred letters had arrived instead of one. The
Spaniards themselves admit that a part of the Creole population would be
glad to see the island detached from Spain. To these I suppose we may
safely add, as partisans of Cuba’s becoming a State of the Union, all
the Anglo-Americans resident in the island. Beyond this, I am in
possession of no trustworthy evidence; and when I say that only a small
portion of the Creoles or native whites are disaffected to the Spanish
government, I state it, as you will observe, on Spanish authority, but,
at the same time, on the authority of Spaniards long resident in the
island, particularly capable, by their position and intelligence, of
forming a correct judgment, and the sole drawback to the value of whose
opinion is the admissible supposition that it may be biassed by their
natural wishes on the subject.
Supposing that, in the autumn of 1854, an American expedition, starting
from Florida, or from one of the small islands in the Bahama channel,
made a descent upon Cuba, were entirely worsted, and cut off or
compelled to re-embark. How long a time would elapse before a third
expedition were got ready? Would not the interval probably be shorter
than the one between the Lopez expedition and the present date? The
dogged tenacity of a certain class of Americans, when bent upon
acquisition, is well known. And is it not probable that each expedition
would exceed the preceding one in strength, until one went forth strong
enough to triumph? The passage of the island from the feeble hands of
bankrupt decrepid Spain into the strong ones of the young and vigorous
Union, is a mere question of time, unless other nations interfere. Are
any prepared to do so? England and France are of course the only powers
to which Spain might look for aid to prevent her being robbed of her
last valuable colony. And would she not look to them in vain, at least
under present circumstances? I do not believe that the Spaniards reckon
on such assistance. The reflecting portion of the nation—those who think
upon the subject at all—seem convinced that the island must sooner or
later pass from them. Some would be disposed to sell it, whilst it still
has value, before the Americans feel so certain of getting it by other
means that they will no longer feel disposed to disburse. Others, on the
contrary, are for holding it to the last, burning the last cartridge
before giving in, and, as a last desperate resource, emancipating the
slaves. The most rational and profitable of the two courses would
doubtless be the sale. And yet, owing to the ignorance and national
conceit of a large number of Spaniards—who believe that the valour of
Spanish troops must always suffice to guard Cuba, and who have not
sufficient knowledge of the past and present history of the world to see
that in the course of nature they must lose it—it would be difficult for
any ministry to brave the storm of indignation that would here be raised
by the sale of the island. It could, of course, under the present
regime, be done only with the sanction of the Cortes; and perhaps the
wisest thing the Espartero ministry could do would be to bring forward
the subject when that body meets in November. To give advice to Spain
is, I am aware, a delicate thing for foreign governments to do, but the
men at present at the head of affairs here are not likely to mistake the
motive, or to take offence at a well-intended counsel. If England and
France be quite decided to take no steps towards the preservation of
Cuba to Spain, and if the government of this country be not already
perfectly aware of that decision, it would be but right to give it the
information, so that it might fairly and fully appreciate its position
and chances, and not delude itself with vain hopes, never to be
realised, of ultimate succour from powerful allies.
Assuredly no Spanish government was ever more in want than is the
present one of the pecuniary supplies which the sale of Cuba would place
at its disposal. The state of the finances of the country is lamentable,
and ministers are the more to be pitied, since their embarrassed
position is the consequence of no fault of theirs, but of the scandalous
misrule and malversation of several preceding governments, and
especially of that of Sartorius. The Spanish and English newspapers have
already supplied many details on this head. I will content myself with
throwing together a few of the principal and most striking facts. When
the present government assumed office, it found an empty treasury, and,
even worse than that, the resources on which it might have reckoned for
advances were already anticipated. There was no money anywhere. The
Sartorius-Domenech-Collantes ministry had made a clean sweep of
everything. The forced loan decreed on the 19th May, and which was to be
paid during the months of June and July, had not flowed in with that
gratifying rapidity announced by the organs of the _Polaco_ cabinet; but
nevertheless about four hundred and seventy thousand pounds sterling had
been collected, out of nearly two millions, which it was estimated that
it should yield. Of the £470,000, about £140, or thirteen thousand
reals, remained in the treasury. The confusion in the public accounts
rendered necessary the appointment of commissioners to investigate them,
and to report the real state of the finances. The labours of these
commissioners brought to light a whole system of iniquity and of
downright robbery. The most shameful jobs had been perpetrated; funds
set apart for particular purposes, and which could not legally be
otherwise employed, had been misappropriated; enormous amounts had been
expended in secret-service money, of which no account was to be found;
everything the government had to pay was in arrears, and all they had to
receive was in advance. The result of the examination was to exhibit a
balance against the treasury amounting to seven millions sterling, of
two and a half millions of which the payment was urgent. To meet this
heavy deficiency, equal to half a year’s revenue, the new ministry had
literally nothing but their good intentions and recognised
honesty—excellent things, but not always convertible into specie. The
consequences of the revolution added to their embarrassments. Nothing
was to be obtained from the provincial treasuries, which were found to
be nearly all empty, some of them having been drained to the last real
by the departed ministers; whilst in other cases there is reason to
conclude that the local juntas, formed during the revolution, had spent
the money. During the latter half of July, every place had its junta,
legislating as it thought fit, taking off taxes, admitting foreign goods
free of duty, sapping the foundations of the revenue. The effects of
this on the revenue for the month of July was a diminution of a quarter
of a million sterling, or fully one-fifth. Although, early in August,
the juntas were prohibited from passing laws and altering the
established system of the country, whilst since then many of them have
altogether dissolved themselves, fears are entertained that for some
months the revenue will continue below what it is in ordinary times. The
period of revolution was a jubilee for the smuggler. At some points of
the frontier he was suddenly converted into a fair trader by the
abolition, decreed by juntas, of all import duties. But, amidst the
confusion consequent on the revolution, he nowhere had any difficulty in
carrying on his commerce. From Gibraltar, from Portugal, from France,
foreign goods poured in, to the exhaustion of the smuggling depôts in
those three countries. Those large illicit importations must for some
time to come have a serious effect on the custom-house revenue. It is
predicted that the falling-off in the whole revenue for August will be
even greater than in that for July. This appears to me doubtful,
although nearly certain in the item of custom duties; and on the other
hand, we may hope the expenditure will be less under an honest and
economical government—whose economy, however, has not, in every
instance, been as rigorous as itself, I fully believe, earnestly
desired. The difficulties environing a government that is borne into
power in Spain on the billows of a revolution like that of 1854, are not
to be imagined by any who have not witnessed them. To form some faint
idea of them, one must be acquainted with the ramifications and extent
of the _empleomania_—mania for place—which is the great curse of Spain,
and which, when one beholds the extent to which it is carried, makes him
almost despair of the improvement of the nation. It were reasonable to
suppose that when Espartero and his colleagues took office, under as
difficult circumstances, certainly, as any set of men that ever accepted
it, even here, they would be allowed to give their whole time and
undivided attention to the necessities of the country, to the getting
rid of abuses, to the introduction of proper economics, to the adoption
of measures calculated to improve the wretched financial situation. Not
so: the idea of their supporters evidently was that their first duty was
the portioning out of places, not only to old friends, but to many new
ones—_libéraux du lendemain_. From the day they took office down to the
present date, ministers have been besieged, pestered, overwhelmed, by a
stream of applicants eager to live upon the budget. Espartero, from his
popularity and influence, was the chief victim of these cormorants. For
a very long time his anterooms were thronged from early morning till
late at night, by persons who could not go away, who _would_ see the
general, although perhaps the request they had to make had no possible
connection with his department, and should have been addressed to some
other minister, to the intendant of the palace, the captain-general of
the province, or the civil governor of Madrid. Sometimes, when there
were thirty or forty persons waiting at the door of his cabinet, all
deaf to the remonstrances of weary _aides-de-camp_, he would come out
himself, as if in despair at ever obtaining repose, despatch them all,
one after the other, as quickly as might be, and then retreat with his
secretary into his private room, giving orders that nobody should be
admitted, to try to get two or three hours’ uninterrupted work before
the usual hour for the sitting of the council arrived. And then the host
of letters—nearly all prayers and petitions, setting forth the services
and sufferings of the writers, and their strong claims to place or
patronage! The supplicants were of all kinds and classes; from the
colonel who thought his merits would not be over-rewarded by a
brigadier’s embroideries, from the aspirant to some fat berth of many
thousand reals a year, down to the suitor for a porter’s place or a
sergeant’s stripes, and even to individuals desirous of being appointed
_quitamanchas_, grease-spot extractors (fact) to the palace, and who
could think of no more fitting person to apply to than the
prime-minister. Ah this greedy mob pestered, and still pester, the
president of the council, and in a less degree the other ministers, with
their daily applications. The craving after place is disgusting to
behold, and extends, with a few honourable exceptions, through all
classes. As to patriotism in Spain, I have the utmost difficulty, after
witnessing what has followed upon this revolution, in crediting its
existence, except in the breasts of a small minority of the population.
Patriotism here appears to consist in turning out one party in order
that another may step into the enjoyment of the good things it
possessed. It is truly sickening to hear the selfish cuckoo-song of the
seekers after places, to hear them vaunt their past services, and tell
of their sufferings for the liberal cause during the eleven long years
that succeeded 1843—sufferings consisting, for the most part, when they
come to be inquired into, simply in exclusion from those loaves and
fishes for a share of which they now hungrily plead. With a certain and
too-numerous class of Spaniards, a man is a patriot and a martyr by the
mere fact of his drawing nothing from the treasury. There were many
persons who really had done great service to the triumphant cause; men
who had risked their lives, laboured hard, and been forward and most
useful in the hour of danger. These men, on account both of their merits
and of their abilities, had not to solicit, but were at once placed in
high and responsible situations. For each one appointed, how many
malcontents were made! Of these malcontents some must be conciliated;
others had claims which deserved attention, and which they had not
sufficient self-denial and love for their country altogether to
withdraw. Under these circumstances, how was it possible for the
government to economise as it should and might have done? The pressure
brought to bear upon it, the influences exerted, were more than it could
resist, and many a place was given that ought to have been suppressed in
the interest of Spain’s exhausted treasury. It gives small hope for the
future of a country when one sees even the best of her sons doing
nothing without hope of reward, nothing for the pure and disinterested
love of their native land. And to this rule, in Spain, I fear there are
but few exceptions.
A careful investigation and calm review of the present state of the
finances of Spain, leave upon the mind a strong doubt as to whether a
national bankruptcy can possibly be avoided. I have exposed the misery
of the treasury, as left by the ministry of Sartorius—seven millions
sterling deficiency, and not as many pence in the coffers of the State
for the pressing necessities of the new government. With some
difficulty, and by the aid of the signature of the San Fernando Bank,
the finance minister has obtained about fifty thousand pounds sterling,
secured on colonial revenues. Of course, a very short time will see the
last of that small sum; and what is then to be done, in presence of a
revenue which it is expected, with good show of reason, will, for some
time to come, be below an average? Economise, it may be said; but
economy is not to be effected, on an important scale, at a few days’
notice. It is probably in the army that reform and reduction, if made,
would most rapidly be felt. It is said to be the intention of the
minister of war greatly to reduce it; and no opportunity can be better
than the present, for when all the men who, in virtue of the boon of two
years’ remission of service lately granted to the whole army, have
completed their time, shall have received their discharge, the military
forces of Spain will probably be smaller than they ever have been since
the beginning of the Carlist war. The expense of the Spanish army is
about three millions sterling—an enormous burthen on the scanty revenue.
There are other burthens more difficult to diminish. The system pursued
in this country of turning out numbers of public officers and employés
when a new government comes in, to make room for its friends and
supporters, has loaded Spain with pensions, half-pay, and retired
allowances. These amount to a million and a half sterling. How is this
load to be lightened? But very gradually, it is evident;—by filling up
vacant places with pensioned men, whose pensions thereupon cease. To
abolish all those pensions not due to long service or ill-health would
be to condemn thousands of families to starvation, and to raise a storm
that no government could withstand. Such a sweeping measure would not be
just, nor is it practicable. A reform of the tariff is an obvious and
most effectual means of improving the financial position. Let the
government reduce the duties on foreign manufactured cottons to twenty
per cent _ad valorem_. The importations (chiefly contraband) of that
class of merchandise at present amounts, as I am informed, to about
three millions sterling. A twenty-per-cent duty would demolish the
smuggler, and yield the revenue six hundred thousand pounds a year.
Would it not then be possible for Spain to get a small loan on
reasonable terms, the coupons being accepted, as soon as due, in payment
of custom-house duties, and an arrangement, or the promise of an early
one, being at the same time made with respect to the amount of coupons
which Bravo Murillo laid upon the shelf? It is, however, unnecessary to
answer this question until we have reduced the duty. Here, again, great
difficulties present themselves, and jealous interests bar the way.
Catalonia and the smugglers would be in arms the very moment such a
measure was promulgated. Catalonia, which produces (I speak from
experience of its goods) wretched wares at exorbitant prices, has long
been the great impediment to Spain’s prosperity, or at least
improvement. That one province pretends to make the whole country buy
its inferior merchandise in preference to that of England and France;
and this pretension it enforces, to the great profit and contentment of
the contraband trader. Time and a strong government are needed to bring
about that reduction of duties on foreign manufactures which would prove
so great a benefit to Spain, and to its revenue. And at present, time is
wanting. Something must be done quickly. As things now stand, it is hard
to tell whence is to come the money for the next dividend on the home
and foreign debt. At this date but a small portion of the last dividend
due on the home debt has been paid. It has been suggested that much will
depend on the composition of the constituent Cortes. If the country
elects representatives who will support the present government, and so
give confidence in its duration and strength, it is thought that
capitalists will perhaps be found to come to its aid. But if the good
sense of Spanish electors prove unequal to the emergency—if they return
a Chamber composed of a mixture of demagogues and of partisans of
reaction, and not containing a good working majority in favour of the
policy of moderate progress, which is that of the Espartero-O’Donnell
cabinet—there is nothing but fresh trouble in store for Spain, and the
question of finance will then appear almost hopeless.
Whilst contemplating the gloomy, or at least uncertain, prospects of the
Spanish treasury, I am forcibly reminded of Cuba and of American
proposals for its purchase. I have not heard a statement of the exact
amount the States are disposed to give; but I have been assured, on no
mean authority, that it would suffice to pay off the whole of the debt,
home and foreign, and that a handsome surplus would still remain for
roads and railways. Besides these advantages, Cuba, once sold, Spain
might safely reduce her fleet and army, for she would then have no
reason to apprehend war with the United States, as she at present has
none to anticipate aggression or interference on the part of any
European power. Relieved of her heaviest burthens, and blessed with an
honest government (if indeed it be possible that such endure in a
country upon which the curse of misgovernment seems to rest), Spain
might soon and easily forget the loss of that cherished colony, whose
retention, under present circumstances, is more a question of pride than
of profit, and to whose loss without compensation, she must, I fear, by
the force of events, be prepared sooner or later to submit.
VEDETTE.
_Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh._
-----
Footnote 1:
_Of the Plurality of Worlds; an Essay. Also a Dialogue on the same
subject._ Second Edition. Parker and Son, 1854.
_More Worlds than One, the Creed of the Philosopher, and the Hope of
the Christian_, By Sir DAVID BREWSTER, K.H., D.C.L. Murray, 1854.
_The Planets: Are they Inhabited Worlds?_ Museum of Science and Art.
By DIONYSIUS LARDNER, D.C.L., Chapters i., ii., iii., iv. Walton and
Maberly, 1854.
Footnote 2:
_Works_, vol. xi. p. 198 (Bishop Heber’s edition). The following is
the entire sentence of which the above is the commencing section:
“Whatever we talk, things are as they are—not as we grant, dispute, or
hope; depending on neither our affirmative nor negative, but upon the
rate and value which God sets upon things.”
Footnote 3:
_Dialogue_, p. 37.
Footnote 4:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 59.
Footnote 5:
_Dialogue_, pp. 5, 6.
Footnote 6:
_Daily News._
Footnote 7:
_Essay_, p. 120.
Footnote 8:
_Ante_, p. 300, No. cccclxvii.
Footnote 9:
_Essay_, p. 202.
Footnote 10:
Ibid., pp. 134–136.
Footnote 11:
Ibid., p. 137.
Footnote 12:
One or two of these “Discourses,” all of which were delivered in the
Tron Church, Glasgow, at noon on the week day, were heard by the
writer of this paper, then a boy. He had to wait nearly four hours
before he could gain admission as one of a crowd, in which he was
nearly crushed to death. It was with no little effort that the great
preacher could find his way to his pulpit. As soon as his fervid
eloquence began to stream from it, the intense enthusiasm of the
auditory became almost irrestrainable; and in that enthusiasm the
writer, young as he was, fully participated. He has never since
witnessed anything equal to the scene.
Footnote 13:
_Essay_, pp. 193, 194.
Footnote 14:
In the “Dialogue,” Dr Whewell states that it was not till after the
publication of his “Essay” that he became acquainted with the fact of
the coincidence of his views, on the subject of Geology, with those of
Mr Hugh Miller, in his “First Impressions of England,” with reference
to astronomical objections to Revelation.
Footnote 15:
Ibid., chap. vii., § 1, p. 206.
Footnote 16:
Ibid., chap. vi., § 27, p. 190.
Footnote 17:
_Essay_, pp. 191, 192.
Footnote 18:
Ibid., p. 148.
Footnote 19:
Ibid., pp. 151, 152.
Footnote 20:
Ibid., p. 154.
Footnote 21:
Ibid., p. 166.
Footnote 22:
Ibid., p. 155.
Footnote 23:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 52.
Footnote 24:
_Essay_, p. 188.
Footnote 25:
_Essay_, pp. 198–199.
Footnote 26:
Ibid., p. 203.
Footnote 27:
_Ante_, p. 289.
Footnote 28:
_Essay_, p. 194.
Footnote 29:
_Essay_, p. 195.
Footnote 30:
Ibid., p. 196.
Footnote 31:
Even of monkeys, there have been found fossil remains.
Footnote 32:
_Essay_, p. 197.
Footnote 33:
_Essay_, p. 198.
Footnote 34:
Ibid., pp. 199, 200.
Footnote 35:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 237, (we quote from the first edition).
Footnote 36:
Ibid., p. 230.
Footnote 37:
Ibid., p. 240.
Footnote 38:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 202.
Footnote 39:
Ibid., p. 199.
Footnote 40:
In fact, in a note to page 247, Sir David thus slily alludes to those
“conjectures” of Dr Whewell in his _Bridgewater Treatise_, to which we
have referred (_ante_, pp. 290, 291):—“A very different opinion is
stated by Dr Whewell, in his _Bridgewater Treatise_;” adding, after
citing the passages, “the rest of the chapter, ‘_On the vastness of
the Universe_,’ is well worthy of the perusal of the reader, and forms
a striking contrast with the opinions of the Essayist.”—This is
perfectly fair.
Footnote 41:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 98.
Footnote 42:
Ibid., p. 108.
Footnote 43:
Ibid., p. 166.
Footnote 44:
_More Worlds than One_, pp. 180, 183.
Footnote 45:
Ibid., p. 185.
Footnote 46:
_Essay_, ch. vii. sec. 17, p. 221.
Footnote 47:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 248.
Footnote 48:
_Essay_, chap. x. sec. 10, pp. 308, 309; chap. xii. sec. 1, p. 359.
Footnote 49:
_More Worlds than One_, pp. 178, 179.
Footnote 50:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 18.
Footnote 51:
_Dialogue_, pp. 62–64.
Footnote 52:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 131.
Footnote 53:
Ibid.
Footnote 54:
Ibid., p. 138.
Footnote 55:
Ibid., p. 139.
Footnote 56:
Ibid., p. 140.
Footnote 57:
_More Worlds than One_, pp. 141–142.
Footnote 58:
Ibid., p. 151.
Footnote 59:
Ibid., p. 152.
Footnote 60:
Ibid., p. 153.
Footnote 61:
Ibid., pp. 44–47.
Footnote 62:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 47.
Footnote 63:
Azoic signifies those primary rocks which contain no traces of organic
life, no remains of plants or animals.
Footnote 64:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 52.
Footnote 65:
Ibid., p. 206.
Footnote 66:
_More Worlds than One_, pp. 206, 207.
Footnote 67:
A thirtieth planetoid was discovered by Mr Hind since the publication
of the second edition of the _Essay_.
Footnote 68:
LARDNER, _Museum of Science and Art_, vol. i. p. 156.
Footnote 69:
_Dial._, p. 60.
Footnote 70:
Ibid., p. 28.
Footnote 71:
_Museum_, &c., vol. i. p. 64.
Footnote 72:
P. 271. Her distance from us is 240,000 miles; and our Essayist, by
the way, tells us (chap. x. §7) that “a railroad-carriage, at its
ordinary rate of travelling, would reach her in _a month_.” We should
not like to travel by the Lunar Express, but should prefer the
parliamentary train, and hope, starting from the Hanwell station, to
get to the terminus in a couple of years or so. Good Bishop Wilkins
intended to be taken up by birds of flight trained for the purpose.
When the Duchess of Newcastle asked him where he intended to bait by
the way, he answered, “Your Grace is the last person to ask me the
question, having built so many _castles in the air_!”
Footnote 73:
_Essay_, p. 272.
Footnote 74:
Pp. 80, 81.
Footnote 75:
_Museum_, &c., vol. iii. p. 48.
Footnote 76:
P. 108.
Footnote 77:
P. 24.
Footnote 78:
_Museum_, &c., vol. iii. p. 109.
Footnote 79:
P. 112.
Footnote 80:
Ibid., vol. i. p. 63.
Footnote 81:
_More Worlds than One_, pp. 97, 101.
Footnote 82:
Pp. 99, 100.
Footnote 83:
_Essay_, p. 278.
Footnote 84:
_Essay_, p. 281, 289.
Footnote 85:
Brewster, p. 60.
Footnote 86:
To descend, for a moment, to details. Sir David Brewster will not
allow himself to be driven to elect between the icy or watery
constituency of Jupiter. He declares direct experiment to have proved
that it is neither; that if Jupiter were a sphere of water, the light
reflected from his surface, when in his quadratures, must contain, as
it does _not_, a large portion of polarised light; and if his crust
consist of mountains, precipices, and rocks of ice, some of whose
faces must occasionally reflect the incident light at nearly the
polarising angle, the polarisation of their light would be distinctly
indicated. The Essayist, in his _Dialogue_, “doubts whether the remark
is applicable; for Jupiter’s watery or icy mass must be clothed in a
thick stratum of air, and aqueous vapour, and clouds. But even were
the planet free from clouds, the parts of the planet’s surface from
which polarised light would be reflected, would be only as points
compared with the whole surface; and the common light reflected from
the whole surface would quite overwhelm and obliterate the polarised
light.”—_Dial._ p. 64. We cite this as a sample of the ingenuity of
both disputants, in a point of scientific contact. Whether Sir David’s
conjectural polarised light be or be not thus obliterated, in our view
the item in dispute is quite lost in the general question, and the
great principles on which its solution depends. If driven to elect
between ice and water, asks Sir David playfully, “may we not, upon
good grounds, prefer the probable _ice_ to the possible water, and
accommodate the inhabitants of Jupiter with very comfortable quarters,
in huts of snow and houses of crystal, warmed by subterranean heat,
and lighted with the hydrogen of its waters, and its cinders not
wholly deprived of their bitumen?”—Pp. 236, 237. The answer of his
opponent would be obvious.
Footnote 87:
Brewster, p. 61.
Footnote 88:
Ibid., p. 62.
Footnote 89:
Ibid., pp. 65, 66.
Footnote 90:
Ibid., pp. 68, 69.
Footnote 91:
_Dial._, p. 6.
Footnote 92:
Ibid., p. 23.
Footnote 93:
_Dial._, p. 76.
Footnote 94:
_Museum_, &c., vol. i. p. 35.
Footnote 95:
_Dial._, p. 23.
Footnote 96:
Lord Byron—Hebrew Melodies. “The philosopher will scan,” says Sir
David, at the close of his eloquent Treatise, “with a new sense, the
lofty spheres in which he is to study.”—P. 259.
Footnote 97:
Pp. 164, 165.
Footnote 98:
Isaiah, xlv. 9.
Footnote 99:
Isaiah, lv. 8, 9.
Footnote 100:
_Essay_, p. 244.
Footnote 101:
Pp. vii.–viii.
Footnote 102:
_Essay_, pp. 243, 244.
Footnote 103:
See them specified, p. 251.
Footnote 104:
_Cosmos_, iii. 373.
Footnote 105:
Ch. viii., _passim_.
Footnote 106:
_Dial._, pp. 20–23.
Footnote 107:
_More Worlds than One_, Ch. vi., _passim_.
Footnote 108:
_More Worlds than One_, Ch. viii., _passim_.
Footnote 109:
Ibid., p. 164.
Footnote 110:
Ibid., p. 119.
Footnote 111:
_Essay_, p. 257.
Footnote 112:
_Lect. on Astron._, 2d edit. (1849.)
Footnote 113:
Pp. ix. x.
Footnote 114:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 176.
Footnote 115:
_Essay_, p. 211.
Footnote 116:
_Essay_, pp. 235–236.
Footnote 117:
_Dial._, p. 18.
Footnote 118:
_Essay_, p. 214.
Footnote 119:
Ibid., p. 216.
Footnote 120:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 215.
Footnote 121:
_Essay_, p. 298.
Footnote 122:
_More Worlds than One_, p. 315, and note.
Footnote 123:
Ibid., p. 315.
Footnote 124:
Romans, i. 22.
Footnote 125:
Matthew, vii. 26.
Footnote 126:
_Dialogue_, p. 74.
Footnote 127:
Isaiah, lxiv. 4; 1 Cor., ii. 9.
Footnote 128:
John, xiv. 2, 23.
Footnote 129:
_Dialogue_, p. 42.
Footnote 130:
_Wisdom of God in the Worlds of Creation_, vol. iii. p. 265.
Footnote 131:
_Monthly Magazine_, A.D. 1798—art. “Walpoliana.”
Footnote 132:
Matthew, vii. 24.
Footnote 133:
This must evidently mean Loufti Pasha, who was grand vizier from A.D.
1539 to 1541.
Footnote 134:
This passage may be admitted as a proof that the tribute of children
was not regularly exacted from the population of the capital. The
difficulty Mohammed the Second found in repeopling Constantinople
explains the exemption.
Footnote 135:
_Glasgow Records_, ii. 341.
Footnote 136:
Ibid., p. 343.
Footnote 137:
Ibid., p. 422.
Footnote 138:
“Gladios, pugiones sicas machæras rhomphæas acinaces fustes, præsertim
si præferrati vel plumbati sint, veruta missilia tela sclopos tormenta
bombardas balistas ac arma ulla bellica nemo discipulus
gestato.”—_Fasti Aberdonienses_, 242. The Glasgow list is less
formidable: “Nemo gladium pugionem tormenta bellica aut aliud quodvis
armorum et telorum genus gestet; sed apud præfectum omnia
deponat.”—_Instituta_, 49.
Footnote 139:
_Instituta Univ. Glasg._, p. 519, 520.
Footnote 140:
_Fasti Univ. Glasg._, p. 548.
Footnote 141:
_Hist. Univ. Paris_, iv. 266.
Footnote 142:
_Fasti_, p. 400.
Footnote 143:
Ibid., p. 400.
Footnote 144:
There was an attempt to _enforce_ returns upon religious and
educational statistics, but, in the words of the Report, “It was,
however, considered doubtful whether, upon a rigid construction, the
Census Act rendered it compulsory upon parties to afford information
upon these particulars; and the inquiry was, therefore, pursued as a
purely voluntary investigation.”—_Report_, No. 1.
Footnote 145:
“The weight of the schedules, blank enumeration-books, and other forms
despatched from the Central Office, exceeded fifty-two
tons.”—_Report_, No. 1.
Footnote 146:
LAYARD. Alexander the Great, after he had transferred his seat of
empire to the East, so fully appreciated the importance of those great
works that he ordered them to be cleansed and repaired, and
superintended the work in person, steering his boat with his own hand
through the channels. Similar operations undertaken now would again
restore to Mesopotamia its old fertility, and fit Babylon, not only
for regaining her place as the emporium of the Eastern world, but for
becoming the great entrepot of commerce between the West and East,
which will ere long, in consequence of the introduction of railways,
again flow into its old overland route by Palmyra, through the
deserts, from the Levant to the head of the Persian Gulf.
Footnote 147:
Ctesias and other writers speak of the Bactrian and Indian expedition
of Ninus and Semiramis; and in connection with this it is important to
notice, that upon the obelisk discovered at Nimroud—which belongs to
the period of the earliest palace, having been erected by the son of
the founder of that building—are represented the Bactrian camel, the
elephant, and the rhinoceros—(all animals from India and Central
Asia)—brought as tribute by a conquered people to the Assyrian king.
Footnote 148:
The Hon. James Thomason, late Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West
Provinces, who lingered too long in India, chiefly in the hope to have
been present on the occasion above commemorated.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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1^{st}).
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