Part 16

Few courts-martial ever excited a stronger interest in the French military world than those held upon Lieutenant Victor de Berg and the _maréchal de logis_ Francis Oakley. The case was one almost unparalleled in the annals of military offences. A duel between an officer and a sergeant was a thing previously unheard-of; and the mystery in which its causes were enveloped, aggravated the universal curiosity and excitement. The offenders resolutely refused to throw light upon the subject; it had been vainly endeavoured to ascertain their seconds; the surgeon who attended on the ground had been sought for equally in vain; after placing the first dressings he had disappeared, and another had been summoned to the sufferer’s bedside. The wound proved of little importance, and, with the assistance of crutches, De Berg was soon able to get out. Upon their trials, he and Oakley persisted in the same system of defence. When off duty, they said, they had met, in society, and had had a dispute on a subject unconnected with the service; the result had been an agreement to settle their difference with pistols. Oakley refused to state from whom the challenge proceeded; but Lieutenant de Berg proclaimed himself the aggressor, and, aware that the sentence would weigh far more heavily on Oakley than on himself, generously assumed a large share of blame. As to the cause of quarrel, names of the seconds, and all other particulars, both culprits maintained a determined silence, which no endeavours of friends or judges could induce them to break. Colonel de Bellechasse and various other officers visited Oakley in his prison, and did their utmost to penetrate the mystery. Their high opinion both of him and De Berg, convinced them there was something very extraordinary and unusual at the bottom of the business, and that its disclosure would tell favourably for the prisoners. But nothing could be got out of the obstinate duellists, who called no witnesses, except to character. Of these, a host attended, for both Oakley and De Berg; and nothing could be stronger than the laudatory testimonials given them by their superiors and comrades. These, doubtless, had weighed with the court, for its sentence was considered very lenient. Oakley was condemned to five years’ imprisonment, for attempting the life of his officer; De Berg was reprimanded for his forgetfulness of discipline, in provoking or consenting to a personal encounter with a subordinate, was removed from his regiment, and placed in non-activity, which, under the circumstances, was equivalent to dismissal from the service, less the disgrace.

I remained in Paris till the sentence of the court was known. Although by no means desirous to be brought forward in the business, I was willing to waive my repugnance if, by so doing I could benefit Oakley. With some difficulty I obtained access to him, begged him to prescribe a course for my adoption, and frankly to tell me if my evidence could be of service. He assured me it could not; there, was no question of the fairness of the duel, and the sole crime was in the breach of military discipline. This crime, my testimony could in no way palliate. He requested me to see M. de Berg, and to tell him that, to avoid the possibility of the cause of the duel becoming known, he should refuse to answer questions, plead guilty to the charge, and state, as sole extenuation, that the quarrel occurred off duty, and had no connexion with military matters. This commission I duly executed. Another which he intrusted to me I found greater difficulty in performing. It was to procure information concerning Bertha de Bellechasse. After some unsuccessful attempts, I at last ascertained that she had been for some days confined to her bed by indisposition. This was sad news for Oakley, and I was loath to convey them to him, but I had promised him the exact truth. Fortunately I was able, to tell him at the same time that the young lady’s illness was not of a dangerous character, although the species of nervous languor which had suddenly and unaccountably seized her, caused great alarm to her parents, and especially to the colonel, who idolised his only child. Oakley was sadly depressed on learning the effect upon Bertha of his imprisonment and dangerous position, and made me promise to keep him informed of the variations in her state of health. This I did; but the bulletins were not of a very satisfactory nature, and in Oakley’s pale and haggard countenance upon the day of trial, attributed by the spectators to uneasiness about his own fate, I read the painful and wearing anxiety the illness of his mistress occasioned him.

The sentence was no sooner published, than every effort was made to procure Oakley’s pardon, or, failing that, a commutation of his punishment. Colonel de Bellechasse used all the interest he could command; Monsieur de Berg set his friends to work; and I, on my part, did every thing in my power to obtain mercy for the unfortunate young man. All our endeavours were fruitless. The minister of war refused to listen to the applications by which he was besieged. In a military view, the crime was flagrant, subversive of discipline, and especially dangerous as a precedent in an army where promotion from the ranks continually placed between men, originally from the same class of society and long comrades and equals, the purely conventional barrier of the epaulet. The court-martial, taking into consideration the peculiar character of the offence, had avoided the infliction of an ignominious punishment. Oakley was not sentenced to the _boulet_, or to be herded with common malefactors; his doom was to simple imprisonment. And that doom the authorities refused to mitigate.

Some days had elapsed since Oakley’s condemnation. Returning weary and dispirited from a final attempt to interest an influential personage in his behalf, I was startled by a smart tap upon the shoulder, and looking round, beheld the shrewd, good-humoured countenance of Mr Anthony Scrivington, a worthy man and excellent lawyer, who had long had entire charge of my temporal affairs. Upon this occasion, however, I felt small gratification at sight of him, for I had a lawsuit pending, on account of which I well knew I ought to have been in England a month previously, and should have been, but for this affair of Oakley’s, which had interested and occupied me to the exclusion of my personal concerns. My solicitor’s unexpected appearance made me apprehend serious detriment from my neglect. He read my alarm upon my countenance.

“Ah!” said he, “conscience pricks you, I see. You know I have been expecting you these six weeks. No harm done, however; we shall win the day, not a doubt of it.”

“Then you are not come about my business?”

“Not the least, although I shall take you back with me, now I have found you. A very different affair brings me over. By the bye, you may perhaps help me. You know all Paris. I am come to look for an Englishman.”

“You need not look long,” said I, glancing at a party of unmistakeable Britons, who stood talking broad Cockney on the Boulevard.

“Aye, but not _any_ Englishman. I want one in particular, the heir to a pretty estate of eight or ten thousand a-year. He was last heard of in Paris, three years ago, and since then all trace of him is lost. ’Tis an odd affair enough. No one could have expected his coming to the estate. A couple of years since, there were two young healthy men in his way. Both have died off,—and he is the owner of Oakley Manor.”

“Of what?” I exclaimed, in a tone of voice that made Scrivington stagger back, and for a moment drew the eyes of the whole street upon us. “What did you say?”

“Oakley Manor,” stammered the alarmed attorney, settling his well-brushed hat, which had almost fallen from his head with the start he had given. “Old Valentine Oakley died the other day, and his nephew Francis comes into the estate. But what on earth is the matter with you?”

For sole reply I grasped his arm, and dragged him into my house, close to which we had arrived. There, five minutes cleared up every thing, and convinced Scrivington and myself that the man he sought now languished, a condemned criminal, in a French military prison.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon what all will conjecture; superfluous to detail the active steps that were at once taken in Oakley’s behalf, with very different success, now that the unknown sergeant had suddenly assumed the character of an English gentleman of honourable name and ample fortune. Persons of great influence and diplomatic weight, who before had refused to espouse the cause of an obscure adventurer in a foreign service, suffered themselves to be prevailed upon, and interceded efficaciously for the master of Oakley Manor. It was even said that a letter was written on the subject by an English general of high distinction to an old opponent in arms. Be that as it may, all difficulties were at length overcome, and Oakley received his free pardon and discharge from the French service. And that equal measure of clemency might be shown, De Berg, upon the same day, was allowed to resume his place in his regiment.

I would tell how the news of her lover’s pardon proved more potent than all the efforts of the faculty to bring back joy to Bertha’s heart and the roses to her check; how Colonel Count de Bellechasse, on being informed of the attachment between his daughter and Oakley, and of the real cause of the duel, at first stormed and was furious, but gradually allowed himself to be mollified, and finally gave his consent to their union; how De Berg exchanged into a regiment serving in Africa, and has since gained laurels and high rank in the pursuit of the intangible Abd-el-Kader. But I have no time to expatiate upon any of these interesting matters, for I leave town to-morrow morning for Oakley Manor, to pay my annual visit to MY ENGLISH ACQUAINTANCE.

OUR WEST INDIAN COLONIES.

It is full time that the nation should be roused to an acute sense of the perilous position in which it has been placed, by a hitherto unparalleled union of quackery, conceit, and imbecility. The system of legislation which we have been pursuing for many years, under the guidance of rival statesmen, each attempting to outdo the other in subserviency to popular prejudice, is a manifest and admitted departure, on almost every point, from the principles of that older system through which we attained the culminating point of our greatness. We do not complain of such changes as are inevitable from altered circumstances, and in some degree from the altered spirit of the times—but we protest against social changes, forced on, as if in mere wantonness, against warning and against experience, either for the sake of exhibiting the dexterity of the operator, or for the poorer and meaner object of attaining the temporary possession of power. We look in vain, both in the past and present Cabinet, for that firm purpose, prescience, and honesty which were considered, in old times, the leading characteristics of the British statesman. We can see, in the drama of late events, nothing but the miserable spectacle of party degenerating into coterie, and coterie prostituting itself to agitation and corrupt influence, for the sake of the retention of office. It may be that such is the inevitable result of the triumph of the so-called liberal principles; and, indeed, the example of America would go far to prove that such principles cannot coexist along with a high state of political morality and honour; but that, at all events, is no excuse for the conduct of the men who, reared under better training, have led us insensibly to the path down which we are now proceeding with such recklessness and with such precipitation.

The commercial crisis of the last year may well furnish the electors of these kingdoms with some topics for their anxious and solemn consideration. That momentous and uncalled-for change in the currency, effected by the Acts of 1844, is already brought under the active notice of the legislature; and though the process may be tedious—for the whole subject-matter, it seems, is to pass through the weary alembic of a committee—we are not without hopes that the common sense of the nation will be vindicated in this important particular. Recent events, too, have somewhat shaken the faith of many in the efficacy of that celebrated panacea called Free-trade, without the promise of a foreign reciprocity. A few more quarterly accounts, with their inevitable deficits, and an augmentation of the income-tax, will serve still further to demonstrate the true nature of the blessings which we are destined to enjoy under the system hatched by Cobden, and adopted by Russell and by Peel. Even now the credit of the great free-trade apostle, formerly so extensive, is somewhat impaired by the novel views he has promulgated for contracting the expenditure of the State. The true means, as we are now told, for insuring the success of the experiment of Free-trade, are the disbandment of our standing army, and the abolition of our war navy; and pitiful stuff to this effect has actually been enunciated by the man to whom Sir Robert Peel avowed himself indebted for the most important lesson in political economy which he had learned throughout the course of a long—would we could add a consistent—career of statesmanship! Well, indeed, might some or the old friends and supporters of Mr Cobden recoil in astonishment from this display of weak and miserable fatuity! Well might they stand aghast, and even doubt the evidence of their senses, at hearing such doleful folly from the lips of their quondam oracle! If this is all the wisdom which the Manchester manufacturer has gathered in the course of his recent travels—if these are the deductions he has made, the fruits he has collected from Barcelona banquets and Leghorn demonstrations, we give him joy of his augmented knowledge of the world, his increased political sagacity, and his extended experience of the motives and actions of mankind!

Mr Cobden, we shrewdly suspect, has served his turn, and must now submit quietly and gradually to lapse into the obscurity out of which he was borne by the force of circumstances. He can afford to do it; and the nation, we believe, will not think the less of him for retiring under the cover of his former victory. On his part the contest was strenuously, and we believe honestly, conducted. The principles he advocated became triumphant, not through the will of the nation, or the conviction of the majority of its representatives, but through a singular combination of craft, weakness, and ambition. How those principles, when reduced to practice, and in full operation, may work, is the problem which all of us are trying in our different spheres to solve. Hitherto the results of the experiment have been a palpable national loss, with extensive individual suffering, and a diminution of employment to the labouring classes; and though other causes may for the present be adduced as tending to these calamitous circumstances, time, the great expositor of human affairs, must soon decide in favour of the one party or of the other.

We have thought it our duty of late to speak out so strongly and so fully on the subject of the internal commercial state of Great Britain, that we need not, on the present occasion, resume the argument, although that is far from exhausted. Indeed, our intention in the present article is to entreat the attention of the people of this country, and of Parliament, to a case which will brook no delay,—which is of imminent and paramount interest to us all; and which, if not now considered as justice and humanity demand,—if not speedily adjusted, without the interposition of those formalities and delays which are the last refuge of a tottering ministry,—must not only entail the ruin of our oldest, our fairest, and our most productive colonies, but sacrifice British capital already invested, on the faith of public honesty, to an enormous extent, and finally leave a blot upon our national honour. It is after the most careful review of the whole circumstances and evidences of the case,—after the perusal of almost every document of authority which could throw light upon the subject,—after personal communication with parties whose means of knowledge are unequalled, and whose high character places them beyond the suspicion of any thing like self-interest or dissimulation,—that we deliberately state our opinion, _that not only are our West Indian and sugar growing American colonies at this moment in imminent danger of being abandoned; but, through the course of reckless legislation pursued by her Majesty’s present Ministers_, THE SLAVE TRADE, _in all its horrors, has received direct and prodigious encouragement_.

We do hope and trust, that, notwithstanding all the political slang and misrepresentation with which, of late years, hired and uneducated adventurers have inundated the country, it is not necessary to point out to the thoughtful and well-disposed portion of our countrymen the extreme importance of maintaining the relations which have hitherto subsisted between Great Britain and her colonies. These relations have been notoriously the envy of every maritime state of Europe; they have proved invaluable to us in times of difficulty and danger; and in peace they have contributed greatly to our wealth, our commerce, and our aggrandisement. In the words of a colonial writer, whose pamphlet is now lying before us,—

“Great Britain had for ages acted on the grand principle of creating a world for herself out of the countries of each hemisphere, to which her ships might carry the treasures of her factories and mines, and from which, in return, they might bring the products of each clime, not as from a foreign state, but an integral part of the empire. Her colonies fostered her marine establishment, which again united the most distant of her territories with the parent country in one mighty whole; (free trade substitutes foreign nations for colonies, with what result the world will see;) affording all the advantages which could be derived from trading with other nations in different parts of the world, without any of the draw-backs necessarily attending commercial intercourse, liable to interruption from war, or the capricious policy of people having different manners and customs from our own. She regulated this trade as she thought proper, her colonies going hand-in-hand with her, and, excepting in one unhappy instance, that of the Americans, where she unjustly attempted to take their money to pay her expenses, concord and prosperity marked the career of the nation and its dependencies. In an evil hour her manufacturers, elated with their good fortune, began to dream of making cloth for the whole globe. Political economists, instigated by them, advanced the specious and deceitful doctrines of free trade. The very phrase has a catching sound to men who are not disposed to study the interests of one country as opposed to those of another, and the belief in the infallibility of tenets so strenuously recommended gaining ground, until it became too strong for the government of the country, the humiliating spectacle was presented to the nation of a minister, who during a long public career, had been the most zealous opponent of the new doctrines, proposing to carry them into effect.”[8]

Footnote 8:

_Thoughts on British Guiana._ By a Planter. 2d Edition. Demerara, 1847.

We now arrived at the point,—or rather we had reached it in 1846,—when free trade interests, and those of colonial establishments, came into direct and unquestionable collision. The Whig party, taking their stand upon the maxim of “buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market,” thought fit to extend to the article of sugar the same immunity which Sir Robert Peel had previously bestowed upon corn. The Sugar Act, which received the royal assent upon the 18th August 1846, was, at all events, a bold and a decided measure. It utterly repudiated the principle laid down in former Sugar Acts, the last of which, contained in the Statute Book, (24th April 1845,) broadly recognised the distinction between sugars which were the produce of free and of slave labour. This distinction is now utterly and entirely done away with. There is, indeed, attached to the act, a schedule which, until the year 1851, provides for a reduced sliding scale of differential duties in favour of the British colonist. Thus, in the article of sugar, muscovado or clayed, there is a difference of duty, for the present year, in favour of the colonies, of six shillings per cwt., which is to decrease at the rate of one shilling and sixpence per annum, until the equalisation is effected. This difference, however, is, as we shall undertake to show, at the present moment merely nominal; and, even were it otherwise, utterly insufficient and unjust. But, at present, let us attend to the principle of the later act, which, as we apprehend, embodies two positions.

1st, That the sugar-growing colonies of Great Britain stand in need of no protection whatever; and, 2dly, That it is wrong to put any prohibitory duty in the way of the free use and consumption of slave-grown sugar in this country.

The first position is, of course, a matter of statistics, which we shall argue exclusively upon that ground. There are, indeed, certain topics connected with it, bearing less or more upon questions of public faith and general expediency, which we cannot entirely throw aside; but we shall attempt, if possible, to avoid all declamation, and to give a plain and distinct statement of the facts, as they have reached us through various channels. The second position involves questions of a more serious nature. We have, hitherto, believed that if any Briton were deliberately asked the question, what principle or what act of universal philanthropy and benevolence he was most proud of as displaying the Christian character of his country, he would, without hesitation, refer to the struggles and sacrifices which have been made for the abolition of slavery throughout the world, and more especially to the stringent and costly measures adopted by Great Britain for putting down the infamous and most inhuman traffic in human flesh and blood. We say that, hitherto, such has been our belief, and most devoutly do we wish that we had no cause whatever to alter it. But we cannot look at the complexion of the late measures, and at their notorious results, without being convinced that the race for power, and the thirst after mammon, which are daily becoming more and more undisguised in the political movements and revolutionary legislation of this country, are weaning us from our finer and our humaner instincts, destroying our once generous sympathies, and rendering us wilfully blind to our duties to God and man, whenever a temporary interest appears thrown into the opposite scale. Of these two positions let us now address ourselves to the first, not because it is in any degree the more important, but because, very unfairly, it has been made the excuse and the palliation for the other. The two positions, indeed, are so interwoven, as to be in some respects entirely inseparable.