Chapter 17

The creature of an hour, whose chief care it is to live and indulge his self-love, who cannot see without light, nor distinctly above a few inches from the eye, is wholly incompetent to determine those questions which have so long agitated philosophy; as, Whether the phenomena of the creation could be made to exist without action and re-action, and without space?--Whether, consequently, there are #THREE# Eternals, or #ONE# Eternal?--Whether the #SUPREME INTELLIGENCE, MATTER# void of form, and #SPACE# containing it, were all eternal--or whether the supreme intelligence alone was eternal, and matter and space created?--Whether the supreme intelligence has only been exerted proximately or remotely on inorganic matter; space being the necessary medium of creation, and organization being the result?--Whether the globe of the earth, in form, is eternal, or, according to Herschel, the effect of "a clustering power" in the matter of space, beginning and ending, according to the general analogy of organized beings?--Whether the earth was a comet, the ellipticality of whose orbit has been reduced; and, if so, what was the origin of the comet?--How the secondary mountains were liquefied--whether by fire or by water--and what were the then relations of the earth to the sun?--How and when that liquefaction ceased; and how, and when, and in what order of time, the several organizations arose upon them?--How those organizations, at least those now existing, received the powers of secondary causes for continuing their kind?--How every species now lives, and grows, and maintains an eternal succession of personal identities?--How these things were before we were, and how they now are on every side of us--are topics which have made so much learning ridiculous, that, if I were to discuss them, in the best forms prescribed by the schools, I might but imitate in folly the crawling myriads, who luxuriate for an hour on a ripening peach; and who, like ourselves, may be led by their vanity to discuss questions in regard to the eternity, and other attributes, of the prodigious globe, which they have inherited from their remote ancestry, and of which the early history is lost in the obscure traditions of their countless generations!

Without presuming, however, to argue on premises which finite creatures cannot justly estimate, we may safely infer, in regard to the world in which we are placed, that all things which #DO EXIST#, owe their existence to their #COMPATIBILITY# with other existences; to the necessary #FITNESS# of all existing things; and to the #HARMONY# which is essential to the existence of any thing in the form and mode in which it does exist: for, without reciprocal #COMPATIBILITY#, without individual #FITNESS#, and without universal #HARMONY#, nothing could #CONTINUE TO EXIST# which #DOES EXIST#; and, therefore, what does exist, is for the time #NECESSARILY COMPATIBLE# with other existences, #FIT# or #NOT INCOMPATIBLE#, and in #HARMONY# with the whole of #CO-EXISTENT BEING#. Every organized #EXISTENCE# affords, therefore, indubitable evidence of #FINAL CAUSES# or #PURPOSES#, competent to produce and sustain it; of certain relations of #FITNESS# to other beings; of #COMPATIBILITY# with other existences; and of #HARMONY# in regard to the whole. And every case of #DESTRUCTION# affords evidence, that certain #FINAL CAUSES# have become unequal to their usual office; that the being is #UNFIT# to exist simultaneously with some other beings; that its existence is #INCOMPATIBLE# with certain circumstances, or that it is contrary to the general #HARMONY# of co-existent being. May not the fifty thousand species of beings now discoverable, be all the species whose existences have continued to be fit, compatible, and harmonious? May not the known extinction of many species be received as evidence, therefore, of the gradual decay of the powers which sustain organized being on our planet? May not the extinction of one species render the existence of others more unfit, by diminishing the number of final causes? And, may not the successive breaking or wearing out of these links of final causes ultimately lead to the end of all organized being, or to what is commonly called, #THE END OF OUR WORLD#?

As I approached a sequestered mansion-house, and some other buildings, which together bear the name of #Brick-stables#, I crossed a corner of the meadow towards an angle formed by a rude inlet of the Thames, which was running smoothly towards the sea at the pace of four miles an hour. The tide unites here with the ordinary current, and, running a few miles above this place, exhibits twice a day the finely-reduced edge of that physical balance-wheel or oscillating fluid-pendulum which creates the earth's centrifugal power, varies the centre of its forces, and holds in equilibrium that delicately adjusted pressure of the medium of space, which pressure, without such balance, would, by its _clustering power_, drive together the isolated masses of suns and planets.--In viewing the beautiful process of Nature, presented by a majestic river, we cease to wonder that priestcraft has often succeeded in teaching nations to consider rivers as of divine origin, and as living emblems of Omnipotence. Ignorance, whose constant error it is to look only to the last term of every series of causes, and which charges Impiety on all who venture to ascend one term higher, and Atheism on all who dare to explore several terms (though every series implies a first term), would easily be persuaded by a crafty priesthood to consider a beneficent river as a tangible branch of the Godhead. But we now know that the waters which flow down a river, are but a portion of the rains and snows which, having fallen near its source, are returning to the ocean, there to rise again and re-perform the same circle of vapours, clouds, rains, and rivers. What a process of fertilization, and how still more luxuriant would have been this vicinity, if man had not levelled the trees and carried away the crops of vegetation! What a place of shelter would thus have been afforded to tribes of amphibiae, whose accumulated remains often surprise geologists, though necessarily consequent on the fall of crops of vegetation on each other, near undisturbed banks of rivers. Happily, in Britain, our coal-pits, or mineralized forests, have supplied the place of our living woods; or man, regardless of the fitness of all the parts to the perfection of every natural result, might here, as in other long-peopled countries, ignorantly have thwarted the course of Nature by cutting down the timber, which, acting on the electricity of the clouds, affects their density, and causes them to fall in fertilizing showers. Such has been the fate of all the countries famous in antiquity. Persia, Syria, Arabia, parts of Turkey, and the Barbary coast, have been rendered arid deserts by this inadvertency. The clouds from the Western Ocean would long since have passed over England without disturbance from the conducting powers of leaves of trees, or blades of grass, if our coal-works had not saved our natural conductors; while this Thames, the agent of so much abundance and so much wealth, might, in that case, have become a shallow brook, like the once equally famed Jordan, Granicus, or Ilyssus.

The dingy atmosphere of London smoke, which I had measured so accurately on Putney Heath, presented itself again over the woods of Chiswick Grove, reminding me of the cares of the busy world, and producing a painful contrast to the tranquillity of nature, to the silently gliding Thames, and to the unimpassioned simplicity of the vegetable creation. #Man#, I reflected, brings upon himself a thousand calamities as consequences of his artifices and pride, and then, overlooking his own follies, gravely investigates the origin of what he calls #EVIL#:--#He# compromises every natural pleasure, to acquire fame among transient beings, who forget him nightly in sleep, and eternally in death; and seeks to render his name celebrated among posterity, though it has no identity with his person, and though posterity and himself can have no contemporaneous feeling--#HE# deprives himself, and all around him, of every passing enjoyment, to accumulate wealth, that he may purchase other men's labour, in the vain hope of adding their happiness to his own--#HE# omits to make effective laws to protect the poor against the oppressions of the rich, and then wears out his existence under the fear of becoming poor, and being the victim of his own neglect and injustice--#HE# arms himself with murderous weapons, and on the lightest instigations practises murder as a science, follows this science as a regular profession, and honours its chiefs above benefactors and philosophers, in proportion to the quantity of blood they have shed, or the mischiefs they have perpetrated--#HE# disguises the most worthless of the people in showy liveries, teaches them the use of destructive weapons, and then excites them to murder men whom they never saw, by the fear of being killed if they will not kill, or of being shot for cowardice--#HE# revels in luxury and gluttony, and then complains of the diseases which result from repletion--#HE# tries in all things to counteract, or improve, the provisions of nature, and then afflicts himself at his disappointments--#HE# multiplies the chances against his own health and life, by his numerous artifices, and then wonders at the frequency of their fatal results--#HE# shuts his eyes against the volume of truth, presented by nature, and, vainly considering that all was made for him, founds on this false assumption various doubts in regard to the justice of eternal causation--#HE# interdicts the enjoyments of all other creatures, and, regarding the world as his property, in mere wantonness destroys myriads on whom have been lavished beauties and perfections--#HE# is the selfish and merciless tyrant of all animated nature, no considerations of pity or sympathy restraining, or even qualifying, his antipathies, his caprices, or his gluttonies; while, more unhappy than his victims, he is constantly arraigning that system in which he is the chief cause of more misery than all other causes joined together--#HE# forgets, that to live and let live, is a maxim of universal justice, extending not only to all man's relations with his fellow-men, but to inferior creatures, to whom his moral obligations are the greater, because their lives and happiness are often within his power--#HE# is the patient of the unalterable progress of universal causation, yet makes a difficulty of submitting to the impartial distribution of the provisions which sustain all other beings--#HE# afflicts himself that he cannot live for ever, though he sees all organized being decay around him, and though his forefathers have successively died to make room for him--#HE# repines at the thought of losing that life, the use of which he so often perverts; and, though he began to exist but yesterday, thinks the world was made for him, and that he ought to continue to enjoy it for ever--#HE# sees no benevolence in the scheme of Nature which provides eternal youth to partake of the pleasures of existence; and which, destroying those pleasures by satiety of enjoyment, produces the blunted feelings of disease and old age--#HE# mars all his perceptions of well-being by anticipating the cessation of his vital functions, though, before that event, he necessarily ceases to be conscious or to suffer--#HE# seeks indulgences unprovided for by the course of Nature, and then anxiously employs himself in endeavouring to cheat others of the labour requisite to procure them--#HE# desires to govern others, but, regardless of their dependence on his benevolence, is commonly gratified in displaying the power entrusted to him, by a tyrannical abuse of it--#HE# professes to love wisdom, yet in all his establishments for promoting it he sets up false standards of truth; and persecutes, even with religious intolerance, all attempts to swerve from them--#HE# makes laws, which, in the hands of mercenary lawyers, serve as snares to unwary poverty, but as shields to crafty wealth--#HE# renders justice unattainable by its costliness; and personal rights uncertain by the intricacy and fickleness of legal decisions--#HE# possesses means of diffusing knowledge, in the sublime art of Printing; but, by suffering wealth and power to corrupt its agents, he has allowed it to become subservient to the gratification of personal malignity and political turpitude--#HE# acknowledges the importance of educating youth, yet teaches them any thing rather than their social duties in the political state in which they live--#HE# adopts the customs of barbarous ages as precedents of practice, and founds on them codes for the government of enlightened nations--in a word, #HE# makes false and imperfect estimates of his own being, of his duties to his fellow-beings, and of his relations to all being; and then passes his days in questioning the providence of Nature, in ascribing Evil to supernatural causes, and in feverish expectations of results contrary to the necessary harmony of the world!

I was thus employed in drawing a species of Indictment against the errors, follies, selfishness, and vices of my fellow-men, while I passed along a pleasant foot-path, which conducted me from Brick-stables to the carriage-road from Mortlake to Kew. On arriving at the stile, I saw a colony of the people called #Gipsies#, and, gratified at falling in with them, I seated myself upon it, and, hailing the eldest of the men in terms of civility, he approached me courteously; and I promised myself, from the interview, a fund of information relative to the economy of those people.

Policy so singular, manners so different, and passions so varied, have for so many ages characterized the race of Gipsies, that the incident of meeting with one of their little camps agreeably roused me from that reverie on Matter and its modifications, into which I had fallen. What can be more strongly marked than the gipsy physiognomy? Their lively jet-black eyes--their small features--their tawny skins--their small bones--and their shrill voices, bespeak them to be a distinct tribe of the human race, as different from the English nation as the Chinese, the North-American Indians, or the woolly-headed Africans. They seem, in truth, as different in their bodies, and in their instincts, from the inhabitants of England and other countries in which they live, as the spaniel from the greyhound, or as the cart-horse from the Arabian. Our instincts, propensities, or fit and necessary habits, seem to lead us, like the ant, to lay up stores; theirs, like the grasshopper, to depend on the daily bounties of nature;--we, with the habits of the beaver, build fixed habitations; and they, like the deer, range from pasture to pasture;--we, with an instinct all our own, cultivate arts; they content themselves with picking up our superfluities;--we make laws and arrange governments; they know no laws but those of personal convenience, and no government beyond that of muscular force growing out of the habits of seniority;--and we cherish passions of ambition and domination, consequent on our other arrangements, to which they are utter strangers. Thus, we indulge our propensities, and they indulge theirs. Which are the happiest beings, might be made a question--but I am led to decide in favour of the arts and comforts of civilized life. These people appear to possess the natural feebleness and delicacy of man, without the power of shielding themselves from the accidents of nature. Their darling object appears to be, to enjoy practical personal liberty. They possess less, and they enjoy fewer, luxuries than others; but they escape slavery in all the Protean shapes by which it ensnares the rest of mankind. They do not act as menial servants, and obey the caprice of a master; nor do they work as labourers for a tythe of the advantages of their industry. They do not, as tenants of land, pay half the produce in rentals; nor do they, as anxious traders, pay half their profits to usurers or capitalists. They are not liable to the conscriptions of a militia-ballot; nor to be dragged from their families by the frightful tyranny of the impress. And, in fine, they are not compelled to contribute a large portion of their earnings in taxes to support folly or prodigality; nor are they condemned to pay, through their successive generations, the interest of money lent for the hire of destroyers of men, who were, like themselves, guilty only of resolving to be free. Yet, if they are exempt from the torture of civilized man, of having the comforts he enjoys torn from him by the sophistry of law, or the tyranny of governments; they suffer from hour to hour the torments of want, and the apprehension of not meeting with renewed supplies. If they are gayer than civilized man, it is because their wants are fewer, and therefore fewer of them are unsatisfied; and probably the gaiety which they assume before strangers may result from their constitution, which, under the same circumstances, may render them gayer than others, just as a Frenchman is gayer than an Englishman, or an Englishman than a North-American Indian. In a word, in looking upon this race, and upon the other recorded varieties of our species, from the woolly-headed African to the long-haired Asiatic, from the blue-eyed and white-haired Goth to the black-eyed and black-haired North American, and from the gigantic Patagonian to the dwarfish Laplander; we are led to believe, that the human species must radically have been as various as any other species of animated beings; and it seems as unphilosophical as impious, to limit the powers of creation to pairs of one kind, and to ascribe their actual varieties to the operations of chance.

As I proceeded from the stile towards their tents, the apparent chief of the gang advanced with a firm step, holding a large knife in one hand, and some eatables in the other; and he made many flourishes with his knife, seemingly in the hope of intimidating me, if I proved an enemy. I civilly begged his pardon for intruding upon their camp, and assured him that mine was a mere visit of curiosity; that I was not a justice of the peace, and had no desire to disturb them. He then told me I was very welcome, and I advanced to their chief tent. "But," said I to this man, "you have not the gipsy colour and features?" "O, no," he replied, "I am no gipsy--the people call us all _gipsies_--but I am by trade a tinker--I live in ---- Court, Shoreditch, in the winter; and during the summer I travel the country, and get my livelihood by my trade." Looking at others of the group, who were sitting at the entrance of two tents, I traced two sets of features among them, one plainly English, and the other evidently Gipsy; and, mentioning this circumstance, he replied, "O yes--though I am not a gipsy, my wife is, and so is her old mother there--they are true gipsies, every inch of 'em. This man, my wife's brother, is a gipsy--we are useful to one another in this way of life--and the old woman there is as knowing a gipsy as any in the country, and can tell your fortune, sir, if you like to hear it."--His character of the elder gipsy, who resembled Munden's witch in Macbeth, produced considerable mirth in the whole party; and the old woman, who was engaged in smoking her pipe, took it from her mouth, and said: "I ayn't told so many gentlefolks their fortunes to no purpose, and I'll tell your's, sir, if you'll give me something to fill my pipe." I smiled, and told her I thanked her; but, as I was not _in love_, I felt no anxiety to hear my fortune.--"Aye, sir," said she, "many's the lover I've made happy, and many's the couple that I've brought together."--Recollecting Farquhar's incident in the Recruiting Officer, I remarked:--"You tell the ladies what their lovers hire you to tell them, I suppose--and the gentlemen what the ladies request you to tell them?"--"Why, yes," said she, "something like it;" and laughing--"aye, sir, I see you're in the secret!"--"And then you touch golden fees, I suppose?"--"Yes," interrupted the first man, "I've known her get five or six guineas on a wedding-day, part from the lady, and part from the gentleman; and she never wants a shilling, and a meal's victuals, when she passes many houses that I could name."--"True," exclaimed the old beldame, "that's all true; and I've made many fine folks happy in my time, and so did my mother before me--she was known far and near!" I had no occasion to remark on the silly dupes on whom they practised these impositions, for the whole party expressed their sentiments by bursts of laughter while the old woman was speaking: but I could not help exclaiming, that I thought she ought to make the fools pay well who gave credit to her prophecies.--"Aye," said she, "I see you don't believe in our art--but we tell all by _the hand_!"--I felt of course that _the hand_ was as good a key to determine the order of _probable_ events as planets, cards, or tea-sediments; and therefore, concluding that gipsies, like astrologers and other prophets, are imposed on by the doctrine of chances, I dropped the conversation; but felt it my duty to give the old woman a shilling to buy some tobacco for her pipe.

I now surveyed the entire party, and in three tents found there were three men, two women, besides the old woman, four girls, and two boys. One of the tents was placed at a little distance from the others, and in that resided a young married couple.--"And pray," said I, "where and how do you marry?"--"Why," said the first man, "we marry like other folks--they were married at Shoreditch Church--I was married to my old woman here at Hammersmith Church--and my brother-in-law here was married at Acton Church."--"Then," said I, "you call yourselves Christians?"--At this question they all laughed; and the first man said, that, "If it depends on our going to church, we can't say much about it; but, as we do nobody any harm, and work for our living, some in one way, and some in another, we suppose we are as good Christians as many other folks."

While this conversation passed, I heard them speaking to each other in a language somewhat resembling Irish, but it had tones more shrill; and the first man, notwithstanding his English physiognomy, as well as the others, spoke with a foreign accent, not unlike that of half-anglicized Hindoos. I mentioned this peculiarity; but he assured me that neither he nor any of the party had been out of England. I now inquired about their own language, when one of them said it was _Maltese_; but the other said it was their _cant_ language. I asked their names for various objects which I pointed out; but, after half a dozen words, the first man inquired, if I had "ever heard of one Sir Joseph Banks--for," said he, "that gentleman once paid me a guinea for telling him twenty words in our language." Perceiving, therefore, that he rated this species of information very high, and aware that the subject has been treated at large by many authors, I forbore to press him further.