Chapter 13

There can be no doubt that the Bench and the Bar, that Medicine and Surgery, owe to the emancipation of the Professions many of their noblest members. Great names occur to every one which belong to this and that Polytechnic, and are written on the walls in letters of gold as an encouragement to succeeding generations. One would not go back to the old state of things. At the same time there were losses and there are regrets. So great, for instance, was the competition in Medicine that the sixpenny General Practitioner established himself everywhere, even in the most fashionable quarters; so numerous were solicitors that the old system of a recognised tariff was swept away and gave place to open competition as in trade. That the two branches of the law should be fused into one was inevitable; that the splendid incomes formerly derived from successful practice should disappear was also a matter of course. And there were many who regretted not only the loss of the old professional rules and the old incomes, but also the old professional _esprit de corps_--the old jealousy for the honour and dignity of the profession: the old brotherhood. All this was gone. Every man's hand was against his neighbour; advocates sent in contracts for the job; the physicians undertook a case for so much; the surgeon operated for a contract price; the usages of trade were all transferred to the Professions.

As for the Services, the Navy remained an aristocratic body; boys were received too young for the Polytechnic lads to have a chance; also, the pay was too small to tempt them, and the work was too scientific. In the Army a few appeared from time to time, but it cannot be said that as officers the working-classes made a good figure. They were not accustomed to command; they were wanting in the manners of the camp as well as those of the court; they were neither polished enough nor rough enough; the influence of the Poly might produce good soldier obedient, high-principled, and brave; but it could not produce good officers, who must be, to begin with, lads born in the atmosphere of authority, the sons of gentlemen or the sons of officers. Yet even here there were exceptions. Every one, for instance, will remember the case of the general--once a Poly boy--who successfully defended Herat against an overwhelming host of Russians in the year 1935.

It was not enough to throw open the Professions. Some there were in which, whether they were thrown open or not, a new-comer without family or capital or influence could never get any work. Thus it would seem that Engineering was a profession very favourable to such new-comers. It proved the contrary. All engineers in practice had pupils--sons, cousins, nephews--to whom they gave their appointments. To the new-comer nothing was given. What good, then, had been effected by this revolution? Nothing but the crowding into the learned Professions of penniless clever lads? Nothing but the destruction of the old dignity and self-respect of Law and Medicine? Nothing but the degradation of a Profession to the competition of trade?

Much more than this had been achieved. The Democratic movement which had marked the nineteenth century received its final impulse from this great change. Everyone knows that the House of Lords, long before the end of that century, had ceased to represent the old aristocracy. The old names were, for the most part, extinct. A Cecil, a Stanley, a Howard, a Neville, a Bruce, might yet be found, but by far the greater part of the Peers were of yesterday. Nor could the House be kept up at all but for new creations. They were made from rich trade or from the Law, the latter conferring respect and dignity upon the House. But lawyers could no longer be made Peers. They were rough in manners, and they had no longer great incomes. Moreover, the nation demanded that its honours should be equally bestowed upon all those who rendered service to the State, and all were poor. Now a House of poor Lords is absurd. Equally absurd is a House of Lords all brewers. Hence the fall of the House of Lords was certain. In the year 1924 it was finally abolished.

In the next chapter I propose to relate what followed this rush into the Professions. We have seen how the grant of the higher education to working lads caused the Conquest of the Professions and brought about the change I have indicated. We have seen how this revolution was bound to sweep away in its course the last relics of the old aristocratic constitution of the country. It remains to be told how learning, when it became the common possession of all clever lads, ceased to be a possession by which money could be made, except by the very foremost. Then the boys went back to their trades. If the reign of the gentleman is over, the learning and the power and culture that has belonged to the gentleman now belongs to the craftsman. This, at least, must be admitted to be pure gain. For one man who read and studied and thought one hundred years ago, there are now a thousand. Editions of good books are now issued by a hundred thousand at a time. The Professions are still the avenues to honours. Still, as before, the men whom the people respect are the followers of science, the great Advocate the great Preacher, the great Engineer, the great Surgeon, the great Dramatist, the great Novelist, the great Poet. That the national honours no longer take the form of the Peerage will not, I think, at this hour, be admitted to be a subject for regret by even the stanchest Conservative.

[1893.]

I.--THE LAND OF ROMANCE

At the back of the setting sun; beyond the glories of the evening; on the other side of the broad, mysterious ocean, lay for nine generations of Englishmen the Land of Romance. It began--for the English youth--to be the Land of Romance from the very day when John Cabot discovered it for the Bristol merchants it continued to be their Land of Romance while every sailor-captain discovered new rivers, new gulfs, and new islands, and went in search of new north-west passages, while the rovers, freebooters, privateers and buccaneers, put out in their crazy, ill-found craft, to rob and slay the Spaniard; while the mystery of the unknown still lay upon it; long after the mystery had mostly gone out of it, save for the mystery of the Aztec; it remained the Land of Romance when New England was fully settled and Virginia already an old colony; it was the English Land of Romance while King George's redcoats fought side by side with the colonials, to drive the French out of the continent for ever.

We have had India, as well. Surely, in the splendid story of the long struggle with France for the Empire of the East, in the achievements of our soldiers, in the names of Clive, Lawrence, Havelock; in the setting of the piece, so to speak, in its people, its wisdom, its faith, its cities, its triumphs, its costumes, its gold and silver and precious stones and costly stuffs--there is material wherewith to create a romance of its own, sufficient to fire the blood and stir the pulse and light the eye. Or, we have had Australia, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope; coral isles, strongholds, fortresses, islands here, and great slices and cantles of continent there. We have had all these possessions, but round none of these places has there grown up the romance which clung to the shores of America, from the mouth of the Orinoco round the Spanish Main, and from Florida to Labrador. This romance formerly belonged to the whole of our people. In their imaginations--in their dreams--they turned to America. There came a time when this romance was destroyed violently and suddenly, and, apparently, for ever. In another shape it has grown up again, for some of us; it is taking fresh root in some hearts, and putting forth new branches with new blossoms, to bear new fruit. America may become, once more, the Land of Romance to the Englishman. I say with intent, the Englishman. For, if you consider, it was the Englishman, not the Scot or the Irishman, who discovered America by means of John Cabot and his Bristol merchants--not to speak of Leif, the son of Eric, or of Madoc, the Welshman. It was the Englishman, not the Scot or the Irishman, who fought the Spaniard; who sent planters to Barbadoes; who settled colonists and convicts in Virginia; from England, not from Ireland or Scotland, went forth the Pilgrims and the Puritans. While the Scottish gentlemen were still taking service in foreign courts--as, for example, the Admirable Crichton with the Duke of Mantua--the young Englishman was sailing with Cavendish or Drake; he was fighting and meeting death under desperadoes, such as Oxenham; he was even, later on, serving with L'Olonnois, Kidd, or Henry Morgan. All the history of North America before the War of Independence is English history. Scotland and Ireland hardly came into it until the eighteenth century; till then their only share in American history was the deportation of rebels to the plantations. The country was discovered by England, colonized by England; it was always regarded by England as specially her own child; the sole attempt made by Scotland at colonization was a failure; and to this day it is England that the descendants of the older American families regard as the cradle of their name and race.

As for the men who created this romance, they belong to a time when the world had renewed her youth, put the old things behind, and begun afresh, with new lands to conquer, a new faith to hold, new learning, new ideas, and new literature. Those who sit down to consider the Elizabethan age presently fall to lamenting that they were born three hundred years too late to share those glories. Their hearts, especially if they are young, beat the faster only to think of Drake. They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre de Dios--Brothers, what a Gest was that!--and to Cartagena, where Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the _Golden Hind_, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, _Our Lady of the Conception_, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his own ship. Drake--the 'Dragon'--is the typical English hero; he is Galahad in the Court of the Lady Gloriana; he is one of the long series of noble knights and valiant soldiers, their lives enriched and aglow with splendid achievements, who illumine the page of English history, from King Alfred to Charles Gordon.

The first and greatest of the Elizabethan knights is Drake; but there were others of nearly equal note. What of Raleigh, who actually founded the United States by sending the first colonists to Virginia--the country where the grapes grew wild? What of Martin Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert? What of Cavendish? What of Captain Amidas? What of Davis and half a score more? The exploits and victories and discoveries--in many cases, the disasters and death--of these sea-dogs filled the country from end to end with pride, and every young, generous heart with envy. They, too, would sail Westward Ho! to fight the Spaniard--three score of Englishmen against thousand Dons--and sail home again, heavy laden with the silver ingots of Peru, taken at Palengue or Nombre de Dios. Kingsley has written a book about these adventurers; a very good book it is; but his pictures are marred with the touch of the ecclesiastic--we need not suppose that the young men sat always Bible in hand, talked like seminarists, or thought like curates. The rovers who sailed with Drake and Raleigh had their religion, like their rations, served out to them. Sailors always do. Drake, the captain, might and did, consult the Bible for encouragement and hope. Even he, however, reserved the right of using profane oaths; that right survived the older form of faith. In a word, the Elizabethan sailor--although a Protestant--was, in all respects, like his predecessor, save that on this new battle-field he was filled with a larger confidence and an audacity almost incredible to read of--almost impossible to think upon.

This was the first phase of the romance which grew up along the shores of America. So far it belongs to the Spanish Main and to the Isthmus of Panama. The romance remained when the Elizabethans passed away--they were followed by the buccaneers, privateers, marooners and pirates--a degenerate company, but not without their picturesque side. Pierre le Grand, François l'Olonnois, Henry Morgan, are captains only one degree more piratical than Drake and Raleigh. Edward Teach, Kidd, Avery, Bartholomew Roberts were pirates only because they plundered ships English and French as well as Spanish; that they were roaring, reckless, deboshed villains as well, detracted little from the renown with which their names and exploits were surrounded, and that they were mostly hanged in the end was an accident common to such a life, the men under Drake were also sometimes hanged, though they were mostly killed by sword, bullet, or fever. The romance remained. The lad who would have enlisted under Drake found no difficulty in joining Morgan, and, if the occasion offered, he was ready to join the bold Captain Kidd with alacrity.

The seventeenth century furnished another kind of romance. It was the century of settlement. In the year 1606, after Sir Walter Raleigh had led the way, the Virginia Company sent out the _Susan Constant_ with two smaller ships, containing a handful of colonists. They settled on the James River. Among them was John Smith, an adventurer and free-lance quite of the Elizabethan strain. In him John Oxenham lived again. We all know the story of Captain John Smith. He began his career by killing Turks; he continued it by exploring the creeks and rivers of Virginia, with endless adventures. Sometimes he was a prisoner of the Indians. Once, if his own account is true, he was rescued from imminent death by the intervention of Pocahontas, called Princess--or Lady Rebecca. He explored Chesapeake Bay, and he gave the name of New England to the country north of Cape Cod. Such histories, of which this is only one, kept alive in England the adventurous spirit and the romance of the West. The dream of _finding_ gold had vanished: what belonged to the present were the things done and suffered in His Majesty's plantations with all that they suggested. It is most certain that in every age there are thousands who continually yearn for the 'way of war' and the life of battle. Mostly, they fail in their ambitions because in these times the nations fear war. In the seventeenth century there was always good fighting to be got somewhere in Europe; if everything else failed there were the American Colonies and the Indians--plenty of fighting always among the Indians.

Besides the romance of war there was the romance of religious freedom. Everybody in America knows the story of the _Mayflower_ and her Pilgrims in 1620, and the coming of the Puritans in 1630 under John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Company. I suppose, also, that all Americans know of the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, and of Lord Baltimore's Catholic, but tolerant, colony of Maryland. They know as well the very odd story of Carolina and its 'Lords Proprietors' and the aristocratic form of government attempted there; of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Temperance Colony of Georgia. One may recall as well the influx of Germans by thousands in the early part of the eighteenth century, and the first immigration of Irish Presbyterians, the flower of the Irish nation, driven abroad by the stupidity and fanaticism of their own Government, which wanted to make them conform to the Irish Episcopal Church. In the whole history of Irish misgovernment there is nothing more stupid than this persecution of Irish Presbyterians. But, indeed, we may not blame our forefathers for this stupidity. Persecution of this kind belonged to the times. It seems to us inconceivably stupid that men should be exiled because they would not acknowledge the authority of a bishop, but, out of Maryland, there was nowhere any real religious toleration; the dream of every sect was to trample down and to destroy all other sects. Our people in Ireland were no worse than the people of Salem and Boston. Religious toleration was not yet understood. Therefore, it was only playing the game according to the laws of the game when the United Kingdom threw away tens of thousands--the strongest, the most able, the most industrious, the most loyal--of her Irish subjects, because they would not change one sect for another; and retained the Roman Catholics, hereditary rebels, who were numerically too strong to be turned out.

All these things are perfectly well known to the American reader. But is it also well known to the American reader--has he ever asked himself--how these things affected and impressed the mind of England?

In this way. The Land of Romance was no longer the fable land where a dozen Protestant soldiers, headed by the invincible Dragon, could drive out a whole garrison of Catholic Spaniards and sack a town. It had ceased to be another Ophir and a richer Golconda; but it was the Land of Religious Freedom. The Church of England and Ireland, by law established, had no power across the ocean. America, to the Nonconformist of the seventeenth century, was a haven and a refuge ever open in case of need. The history of Nonconformity shows the vital necessity of such a refuge. The very existence of free America gave to the English Nonconformist strength and courage. Such a persecution as that of the Irish Presbyterians became impossible when it had been once demonstrated that, should the worst happen, the persecuted religionists would escape by voluntary exile.

That the spirit of persecution long survived is proved by the lingering among us down to our own days of the religious disabilities. Within the memory of living men, no one outside the Church of England could be educated at a public school; could take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge; could hold a scholarship or a fellowship at any college; could become a professor at either university; could sit in the House of Commons; could be appointed to any municipal office; could hold a commission in the army or navy. These restrictions practically--though with some exceptions--reduced Nonconformity in England to the lower middle class, the small traders. Their ministers, who had formerly been scholars and theologians, fell into ignorance; their creeds became narrower; they had no social influence; but for the example of their brethren across the ocean they would have melted away and been lost like the Non-Jurors who expired fifty years ago in the last surviving member; or, like a hundred sects which have arisen, made a show of flourishing for a while, and then perished. They were sustained, first, by the memory of a _victorious_ past; next, by the tradition of religious liberty; and, thirdly, by the report of a country--a flourishing country--where there were no religious disabilities, no social inferiority on account of faith and creed. Not reports only: there was a continual passing to and fro between Bristol and Boston during three-fourths of the eighteenth century. The colonies were visited by traders, soldiers and sailors. John Dunton in the year 1710 thought nothing of a voyage to Boston with a consignment of books for sale. Ned Ward, another bookseller, made the same journey with the same object. There exists a whole library of Quaker biographies showing how these restless apostles travelled backwards and forwards, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, and journeying up and down the country, to preach their gospel. And the life of John Wesley also proves that the Colonies were regarded as easily accessible. I have seen a correspondence between a family in London and their cousins in Philadelphia, in the reign of Queen Anne, which brings out very clearly the fact that they thought nothing of the voyage, and fearlessly crossed the ocean on business or pleasure. The connection between the Colonies and England was much closer than we are apt to imagine. The Colonies were much better known by us than we are given to believe; they were regarded by the ecclesiastical mind as the home of schismatic rebellion; but by the layman as the land where thought was free.

That was one side--perhaps the most important side. But the halo of adventure still lay glowing in the western land. No colony but had its history of massacre, treachery, and war to the knife with the Red Indian. Long before the time of Fenimore Cooper the English lad could read stories of dreadful tortures, of heroic daring, of patience and endurance, of revenges fierce, of daily and hourly peril. The blood of the Dragon ran yet in English veins. America was still to the heirs and successors of that Great Heart the Land of Romance and the Land of Gallant Fights.

And such stories! That of Captain John Smith laying his head upon the block that it might be smashed by the Indians' clubs, and of his rescue by the Indian girl, afterwards the 'Princess Rebecca'; the massacre of three hundred and fifty men, women and children of the infant colony of Virginia, a hundred stories of massacre. Or, that story of the mother's revenge, told, I believe, by Thoreau. Her name was Hannah Dunstan. Her house was attacked by Indians; her husband and her elder children fled for their lives; she, with an infant of a fortnight, and her nurse, were left behind. The Indians dashed out the brains of the baby and forced the two women to march with them through the forest to their camp. Here they found an English boy, also a prisoner. Hannah Dunstan made the boy find out from one of the Indians the quickest way to strike with the tomahawk so as to kill and to secure the scalp. The Indian told the boy. Now there were in the camp two men, three women, and seven children. In the dead of night Hannah got up, awakened her nurse and the boy, secured the tomahawks, and in the way the unsuspecting Indian had taught the boy, she tomahawked every one--man, woman and child--except a boy who fled into the woods--and took their scalps. Then she scuttled all the canoes but one, and taking the scalps with her as proof of her revenge, she put the nurse and the boy into the canoe and paddled down the river. She escaped all roving bands and won her way home again to find her husband and sons safe and well, and to show the scalps--the blood payment for her murdered child. Such were the stories told and retold in every colonial township, round every fire; such were the stories brought home by the sailors and the merchants; they were published in books of travel. Think you that our English blood had grown so sluggish that it could not be fired by such tales? Think you that the romance of the Colonies was one whit less enthralling than the romance of the Spanish Main?