c. 43, cannot be justly regarded in the light of an infraction of the

general principle of the Scotch law. Its direct object is not the limitation of the right of hunting, but the maintenance of the public revenue; and it will be readily admitted by all reasonable men that, on the one hand, there cannot be a less objectionable source of taxation than the privilege in question, and, on the other, that the duty is not excessive, when we find above 60,000 persons in Great Britain voluntarily subjecting themselves to it every year.

The two other principal enactments regarding the pursuit of game in Scotland, commonly known as the Night and the Day Trespass Acts, 9 Geo. IV. c. 69, and 2 and 3 Will. IV. c. 68, cannot here be criticised in detail. Their provisions contain one or two anomalies which we shall have occasion to notice below, in suggesting some practicable amendments on the present law. But as to their general spirit, we venture to affirm that they are most legitimate developments of the general principle above stated. In every class of injuries to the rights of others, there are some species of the offence which, from their frequency, or from their being difficult to detect, must necessarily be prevented by more stringent prohibitions than those attached to the genus in general; and in the same way that orchards for example, timber, salmon fisheries, and many other subjects are protected by special penalties, so has it been found requisite to amplify the common law of trespass, in its application to that particular manner of trespass which is confessedly the most frequent and annoying. If the penalties are unnecessarily stringent, let them by all means be modified; but their severity, in comparison with the punishment of ordinary trespass, is not inconsistent with justice, or the principles of wise legislation.

We have adverted, in this hasty sketch, only to the prominent features and growth of the law of Scotland; but a more detailed comparison with that of England and other countries of Europe, especially when recent statutes and decisions are taken into view, will fully justify the opinion of Hutcheson and other well qualified judges, that it is "the most liberal and enlightened of all laws as to game." It recognises, of course, no such thing as _property_ in game more than in any other animals of a wild nature. The proprietor of a manor has no right to the pheasant he has fed until he shall have actually brought it to bag, or at least disabled it from escaping; and the right which he then first acquires is quite independent of his ownership of the land.

To many the distinction thus created, by considering all game as wild animals, appears too theoretical; and no doubt it is a question for zoologists rather than for lawyers to decide, whether there really be in animals any such permanent and invariable character as to justify such a universal distinction. There is the strongest presumption that all our domesticated animals were at one time _feræ_; and it is rather a difficult task to show reason for considering some classes as "_indomitabiles_," when we see the reindeer, of a tribe naturally the most shy of man, living in the hut of his Lapland master--and when we recollect that among birds, the duck, turkey, and peacock, with us the most civilised and familiar of poultry, are elsewhere most indubitable _feræ_ at this very moment. It has been argued that the commoner kinds of game, under the system of rearing and feeding now so general, are scarcely more shy or migratory in their habits than those animals which the law contrasts with them as _mansuefactæ_, and therefore regards as property: that even when straying in the fields, we may as reasonably impute to them the _animus revertendi_--the instinct of returning to their haunts and coverts, as to pigeons and bees which the law for this reason retains under its protection, though abroad from their cots or hives; that the common objection as to the difficulty of identifying game, is one which applies as strongly to many other subjects recognised as vested in an owner; and finally, that, being now in reality valuable articles of commerce, these classes of animals should cease to be viewed as incapable of becoming property. It is difficult to gainsay the premises on which this proposal is built: and if we look to analogy, it cannot be doubted that the invariable tendency of civilisation is towards the restriction of the category of _res nullius_, and by art and culture to subject all products of the earth to the use, and consequently to the possession of man. But, apart from this speculative view of the subject--it seems to us that, while common opinion is unprepared for so fundamental a change in the law of Scotland, the alteration proposed would not in practice improve the position of any of those classes who are affected by the operation of the present game laws, nor materially obviate any of the bad effects usually ascribed to them.

But it is time now to turn to those alleged evils, and to form some judgment as to whether they are in reality so weighty and numerous, that nothing short of the total abolition of the game laws can effectually check them. The abrogation of a law is no doubt an easy way of overcoming the difficulty of amending it--in the same way that the expedient of wearing no breeches will unquestionably save you the cost of patching them; and as a device for diminishing game-law offences, the total repeal of all game laws is perhaps as simple and efficacious a recipe as could well be conceived. But let us first inquire into the existence of the disease, before we resort to so summary a remedy.

There are three distinct parties who are said to be injured by the operation of these laws--_The community_ at large suffer chiefly by being deprived, it is alleged, of a very large proportion of the produce of the soil, which, if not consumed by game, would go to increase the stock of human food--_The poacher_ has to bear the double injustice of a law which first makes the temptation, and then punishes the transgression--_The farmer_ finds, in the protection given to game, a source of constant annoyance, loss, and disappointment. We shall take these complainants in their order.

The public, (we are told by the enlightened commercial gentleman who represents the metropolis of Scotland,) the public have _a right_ to see that none of the means for maintaining human life are wasted--a great popular principle popularly and broadly stated. It is possible, however, that Mr Cowan may not have contemplated all the admirable results of his principle. He may, perchance, not have seen that it sweeps away, not only every hare and pheasant, but every animal whatever that cannot be eaten or turned to profit in the ledger. His carriage horses eat as much as would maintain six poor paper-makers and their families; the keep of his children's pony would board and educate four orphans at the Ragged Schools. But we are not yet done with him; for he cannot stick his fork into that tempting fowl before him until he can satisfy us, the public, that the grain it has consumed would not have been more profitably applied in fattening sheep or cattle. And what, pray, is that array of plate on the _buffet_ behind him but so much capital held back from the creation of employment and food for that starving population, which he assures us (though every one but himself knows it is nonsense) is increasing at the rate of 1000 per diem! Political economy of this quality may do very well for the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce; but we really hope, for the credit of the city he represents, that he will not expose himself on any other stage, nor consider it a necessary part of his duties as a legislator, to prescribe the precise manner in which corn shall or shall not be used.

The supposed amount of destruction by game of cereal and other produce, has afforded a fine field for the more erudite of the game law opponents. Mr Gayford's celebrated calculation, that three hares eat as much as a full-grown sheep, is generally assumed as the infallible basis of their estimates, and the most astounding results are evolved from it.[8] Mr Charles Stevenson thinks the destruction cannot be less than two bushels per acre over the whole kingdom, representing a total of _two hundred thousand quarters_. "_If it be the case_," says Mr Chiene Shepherd, with a modest hesitation--"if it be the case, that throughout this empire the farmers, in general, suffer more loss from game than they pay in the form of poor's tax (_and I suppose it cannot be doubted that they do so_--that in most parts they suffer _more than double_ the amount of their poor-rates,) then it follows, of course, that there is more destruction from game than would make up the sum collected from poor-rates from the whole lands of the empire."[9] Double the amount of poor-rates paid by land may be taken roughly at some £9,000,000. But there are others who think even this too low an estimate, and throw into the scale (a million out or in is of no importance) the county rate, highway rate, and all the other direct burdens on land put together! Let us carry on the line of calculation a step further: if game animals _alone_ consume all this, and if we allow a fair proportion of voracity to the minor, but more numerous _feræ_--rats, mice, rooks, wood-pigeons, &c.--it is clear as daylight that it is a mere delusion to think that a single quarter of wheat can, by any possibility, escape the universal devastation. There is no lunatic so incurable as your rampant arithmetician; and the only delusion that could stand a comparison with the above would be the attempt to reason such men out of their absurdities.

But the actual waste of grain is not, it seems, the only way in which the public suffers. The annual cost to the community of prosecutions under the game acts is an enormous and annually increasing burden. This is proved, of course, by the same system of statistics run mad as that of which we have just given some specimens. The game convictions in the county of Bedford, it is discovered, were, in the year 1843, 36 per cent of the total _male_ summary convictions; and the lovers of the marvellous, who listen to such statements, are quietly left to infer, not only that this is usually the case in Bedfordshire, but that a similar state of things prevails throughout England and Scotland also. They are sagacious enough, however, never to refer to general results. They carefully avoid any mention of the fact, (which, however, any one may learn for himself, by referring to Mr Phillipps' tables,) that the average of the game convictions during the five years these tables include, was, for _all England_, not 36, but a fraction over 6 per cent of the whole. Now, let us see how the case stands in Scotland. We have observed that our northern orators always draw their illustrations from the south of the Tweed; and we have, therefore, looked with some curiosity into the records of our Scotch county courts, as affording some test of the real extent of the grievance in this part of the empire. Unfortunately these records are not preserved in a tabular form by all the counties; but we have been favoured with returns from five of the most important on the east coast, which we selected as being those in which the preservation of game is notoriously carried to the greatest extent. An abstract of these returns will be found below,[10] and will suffice to show how false, in regard to Scotland, is the assertion that game prosecutions are alarmingly numerous; while every one knows that the expense is borne, not by the public, but by the private party, except in very rare and aggravated cases. From these it appears that the whole number of game cases tried, or reported to the authorities, in these five counties, during the years 1846 and 1847, was one hundred and forty-four, being about 2.5 per cent of the whole. Fifeshire (which was selected to be shown up before Mr Bright's committee as an abyss of game-law abuses) had, in 1848, out of eight hundred and thirty offences, only _three_ under the game acts. As to the alleged progressive _increase_ of such cases, the subjoined table of the numbers for the five years preceding 1848[11] proves that, whether it be true or not as respects isolated districts of England, that the number of game-law trials is every year becoming a heavier burden on the public, it certainly is not true in four of the largest and most _game-keeping_ counties of Scotland.

We have now to make a remark or two on the plea set up on behalf of the poacher against the present game laws. What is it that makes a man become a poacher? "Temptation," says Mr Bright, "and temptation only. How can you expect that the poor but honest labourer, who, on his way home from his daily toil, sees hares and pheasants swarming round his path, should abstain from eking out his scanty meal with one of those wild animals, which, though on your land, are no more yours than his? The idea would never have occurred to him if he had not seen the pheasants; and if there had been no game laws, he would have remained an upright and useful member of society." Such, we believe, is the beau-ideal of the poacher, as we find it in abolitionist speeches, and in popular afterpieces at the theatre. He is, of course, always poor, but virtuous,--

"A friendless man, at whose dejected eye Th'unfeeling proud one looks, and passes by."

We shall not quarrel, however, with the fidelity of this fancy sketch; but we may be allowed to doubt whether any large proportion of those who incur penalties for game trespass have been led into temptation by the mere abundance of game in large preserves. Men of plain sense will think it just as fair to ascribe the frequency of larceny to the abundance of bandanas which old gentlemen _will_ keep dangling from their pockets while pursuing their studies at print-shop windows. The evidence taken by the committee seems rather to show that the poacher's trade thrives best where there is what is called "a fair sprinkling" of ill-watched game, than where he has to encounter a staff of vigilant and well-trained keepers. But what though the case were otherwise? Suppose the existence of the temptation to be admitted, is it to be seriously argued that the province of legislation is not to prohibit offence, but to remove all temptation from the offenders? not to protect men in the enjoyment of their rights, but to abridge or annihilate those rights, that they may not be invaded by others? This, we affirm, is the principle when reduced to simple terms; and startling enough it is to those who have been accustomed to think that the proper tendency of laws and civilisation is in precisely the opposite direction. What although a breach of these laws may sometimes be the commencement of a course of crime, are there no other temptations which open the road to the hulks or the penitentiary? If the magistrates of our towns, who so vehemently denounce the danger of the game laws, are sincere in their search after the sources of crime, and in their efforts to repress them, we can help their inquiries--we can show them at their own doors, and swarming in every street, temptations to debauchery, which have made a hundred crimes for every one that can be traced to game laws,--and yet we cannot perceive that the zeal of our civic reformers has been very strenuously directed to discourage or to diminish the numbers of these dens of dissipation. We can refer them to the reports of our gaol chaplains for proof that three out of every four prisoners are ignorant of the simplest rudiments of education; and yet a praiseworthy attempt lately made in our metropolis to promote instruction by means of apprentice schools, was not favoured with the countenance of our chief magistrate, because he happened to be engaged in the more philanthropic duty of presiding at a meeting for condemning the game laws!

If we are called upon to assign a reason for the frequency of poaching, we should attribute it neither to the mere superabundance of game by itself, nor yet to the pressure of poverty, but very much to the same sort of temptation that encourages the common thief to filch a watch or a handkerchief--namely, the facility of disposing of his spoil. Well-stocked covers may present opportunities to the poacher for turning his craft to account, but it is plain the practice would be comparatively rare if he did not know that at the bar of the next alehouse he can barter his sackful of booty either for beer or ready coin, and no questions asked. Every village of 1000 or 1500 inhabitants offers a market for his wares, and any surplus in the hands of the country dealer can be transferred in eighteen hours to the London poulterer's window. There cannot be a doubt that the consumption of game has increased enormously since the beginning of this century. It was formerly unknown at the tables of men of moderate means, except when haply it came as an occasional remembrance from some country relation, or grateful M.P. Now-a-days the spouse of any third-rate attorney or thriving tradesman would consider her housekeeping disgraced for ever, if she failed to present the expected pheasant or brace of moorfowl "when the goodman feasts his friends." And even if we descend to the artisans and operatives of our large towns, it will be found that hares and rabbits form a wholesome and by no means unusual variation of their daily fare. We have the evidence of one of the great Leadenhall game dealers, that in the month of November hares are sent up to London in such quantities, that they are often enabled to sell them at 9d., and even at 6d. each. The average weight of a hare may be taken at about 8 lb.; and if we deduct one-half for the skin, &c., there will remain 4 lb. of nutritious food, which, even at 2s., is cheaper than beef or mutton; while the occasional change cannot but be both agreeable and beneficial to those who have so limited a choice of food within reach of their means. Some idea may be formed of the vast quantity of game brought into London, from the statements of Mr Brooke, who buys £10,000 worth of game during the course of the winter; and there are ten other great salesmen in Leadenhall market alone. If we make allowance for the supplies sent directly to the smaller poulterers, for the consumption in the other great towns throughout the kingdom, and for the probably still larger quantity that never comes into market at all, it is impossible to deny that game has now become an important part of the food of the people, and that, as an article of commerce, it deserves the attention of the legislature. Any attempt to check the production and sale of a commodity for which there is so general a demand, must prove both useless and mischievous. It is in vain to proscribe it as an expensive luxury, and insist on the substitution of less costly fare. It may be true, for anything we know, that the grain or provender consumed by the 164,000 head of game, which Mr Brooke disposed of in six months, might have produced a greater weight of bullocks or Leicester wedders, (though this is extremely unlikely, for the simple reason that grain, grass, and green crops form only a _part_ of the food of any of the game species); but, whether true or not, it is useless to prevent the rearing of game by any sort of sumptuary enactment, direct or indirect. The proper course of legislation is very plain. While compensation should be made exigible for all damage from excess of game, and new statutory provision made for this purpose, if the present law is insufficient--fair encouragement should at the same time be given for the production, in a legitimate way, of what is required for the use of the public. Facilities should be afforded to the honest dealer for conducting his trade without risk or disguise, and the useless remnant of the qualification law in Scotland should be abolished. Measures of this nature, by turning the constant demand for game into proper channels, will prove the most effectual discouragement to the occupation of the poacher, and to the reckless and irregular habits of life which it generally induces.

A very opposite result, we are persuaded, would follow from the adoption of Mr Bright's quack recipe for putting an end to the practice of poaching. By what indirect influence is the abolition of the game laws expected to produce this effect? If, indeed, along with the game laws, you sweep away also the law of common trespass--if you proclaim, in the nineteenth century, a return to the habits of the golden age, when, as Tibullus tells us--

"Nullus erat _custos_, nulla exclusura volentes Janua";

and if you authorise the populace at large to traverse every park and enclosure, at all hours and seasons, and in any numbers and any manner they please, then we can understand that a few months probably of rustic riot and license may settle the question by the extermination of the whole game species. But we have not yet met any game-law reformer so rabid as to propose putting an end to the penalties on ordinary trespass; on the contrary, we find most of them, (Sir Harry Verney and Mr Pusey among the number,)[12] anticipating the necessity of arming the law with much stronger powers for preventing common trespasses. And even without such additional powers, will not the trespass law as it stands be employed by proprietors to prevent interference with their sports? Is it supposed that the abolition of the game statutes will at once prevent the owners of great manors from rearing pheasants in their own covers? It may indeed drive them to do so at a greater expense, and to enlist additional watchers; but it is not likely that keen game preservers will not avail themselves of such defences as the common law may still leave them. Game then, we contend, may be thinned by this plan, but it will not be exterminated. The consequence will be that its price will be enhanced; but as the demand will still continue, the trade of the poachers will remain as thriving as ever. He may have to work harder and to trudge farther before he can fill his wallet; but this will be compensated by the additional price; and if the present quantity of game is diminished by one-half, the consequence will be that his agents will be able to pay him five shillings a-head for his pheasants instead of five shillings a-brace. In short, we should anticipate, as the effects of abolishing the present statutes, that, while many of the less wealthy owners of land would be deterred by the expense from protecting game, and while the amusement (such as it is) would become greatly more exclusive than it is now, such a measure would not only fail to remove any of the inducements which tempt the idle peasant to take to the predatory life of a poacher, but would, in the outset at least, induce many to try it who never thought of it before.

We must now pass on to the considerations we have to offer on the situation of the tenant-farmer as to game; and the first question that suggests itself as to his case is this,--Whether the injury suffered by tenants be really so serious and extensive as is represented?

"There is no denying," says Mr Shepherd, in his _Essay_, (p. 12,) "the notoriety of the fact that, _in a great majority of instances_, this excessive power of infringement on the property of the tenant through these laws has been abused. It has been almost _universally abused_." Is this true as regards either England or Scotland? or is it merely one of those vague and reckless affirmations which a man writing for a purpose, and not for truth, is so apt to hazard, in disregard or defiance of the facts before him? One thing we do find to be notorious--that the committee's evidence of game abuses in Scotland was limited _to one solitary case_, that of the estate of Wemyss. And although we may very readily conceive that, with more time and exertion, the agents of the league might have ferreted out other instances, we may, nevertheless, be allowed to express our astonishment that, on the slender foundation of this single case, Mr Bright should have ventured to ask his committee to find the general fact proved, that the prosperity of agriculture "_in many parts of Scotland_ as well as England, is greatly impaired by the preservation of game." We learn at least to estimate the value of the honourable gentleman's judgment, and the amount of proof which an abolitionist regards as demonstration. But the truth is, that the case of Scotland was not examined at all; and the _rejected_ report of Mr Bright and his associates bears on its face the most satisfactory evidence of their utter ignorance that the law on this side the Tweed is a perfectly different system from that of England.

Will any believe that if our Scotch farmers, "in a great majority of instances," found their property sacrificed, they would not have universally joined in demanding the interference of the legislature? But what is the fact? An examination of the reports on petitions during the last two sessions shows that there certainly have been petitions against the game laws, but that for every one emanating from an agricultural body there have been ten from town-councils. We have better evidence, however, than mere inference, for the general distrust with which the farmers have regarded this agitation; for we find the Leaguers themselves, one and all of them, lamenting that their disinterested exertions on behalf of the tenantry have been viewed by that body with the most callous and ungrateful indifference. It is impossible to read without a smile Mr Bright's Address to the Tenant-farmers (prefixed to Mr Welford's Summary of the Evidence); and to mark the patient earnestness with which he entreats them to believe that they are groaning under manifold oppressions--and insists on "rousing them to a sense of what is due to themselves." But your tiller of the soil is ever hard to move. It is surprising that the obstinate fellow cannot be made to comprehend that he is the victim of a malady he has never felt--that he will persist in believing that if game were all he had to complain of, he might snap his fingers at Doctor Bright and his whole fraternity. The essayist of the Association can find no better reason to assign for what he calls "the wondrous and apparently patient silence of the tenantry under so exasperating an evil,"--than, forsooth, that they are too servile to speak out their true opinions. Such an explanation, at the expense of the body whom he pretends to represent, can only insure for him the merited scorn of all who have opportunities of knowing the general character of the spirited, educated, and upright men whom he ventures thus to calumniate. The most obvious way of accounting for their wondrous silence under oppression is also the true one--namely, that, as a general fact, the oppression is unknown. When an intelligent farmer looks round among his neighbours, and finds that for every acre damaged by game there are thousands untouched by it,--when he knows that there are not only whole parishes, but almost whole counties, in which he could not detect in the crops the slightest indication of game,--and further, that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in which a tenant really suffers injury, he is sure of prompt and ample compensation--it is not surprising that he looks upon the Association with suspicion, and refuses to support, by his name or his money, their system of stupendous exaggeration. If anyone wishes to convince himself of the actual truth, we venture to suggest to him a simple test. Damage from game, to be appreciable at all, cannot well be less than a shilling an acre. Now, let any farmer survey in his mind the district with which he is best acquainted, and estimate on how much of it the tenants would give this additional rent, on condition of the game laws being abolished. An average-sized farm, in our best cultivated counties, may be taken at two hundred acres--how many of his brother farmers can he reckon up, who would consent to pay £10 a-year additional on these terms? A similar test, it may be mentioned, was offered to one of Mr Bright's witnesses, (Evidence, i. 4938,) who had set down his annual damages from game at from £180 to £200, and who, after successively declining to give £200, £100, and £75 a-year additional rent for leave to extirpate the game, thought, at last, he _might_ give £50 a-year for that bargain.

But the question immediately before us is this: what remedy does the existing law of Scotland give a tenant in cases of real hardship from the preservation of game? In regard to this question, it is impossible to overlook the broad distinction between the cases of those who have expressly undertaken the burden of the game, and those whose leases contain no such covenant. The quasi-right of property in game recognised by the English law is, by Lord Althorpe's statute of 1832, vested in the _occupier_ of land, when there is no express stipulation to the contrary. The reverse is virtually the case in Scotland--the landlord retains his right to kill game, unless he shall have agreed to surrender it to his tenant. In most cases, however, the landlord's right does not rest merely on the common law, but is expressly reserved to him in the lease. Now, when a tenant has deliberately become a party to such an express stipulation, and when the quantity of game (whether it be small or great) does not exceed, during the currency of the lease, what it was at his entry, on what conceivable plea of reason or justice can he ask the interference either of a court of law or of the legislature? To say, with Mr Bright and his coadjutors, that he seldom attends much to such minor articles in a lease--that he does not understand their effect--that in the competition for land he is glad to secure a farm on any conditions--all this is the most childish trifling, and unworthy of a moment's serious notice. There is not a single sentence in any lease that may not be set aside on the very same grounds; and if agreements of this nature are to be cancelled on pretences so frivolous, there is an end to all faith and meaning in contracts between man and man.

But the tenant's case assumes a very different aspect when, by artificial means expressly contrived for the purpose, the game has been increased _subsequent_ to his entry. Then, it is obvious, the burden is no longer the same which the tenant undertook. It is a state of things which he could not anticipate from the terms of his contract; and if the authority of the courts of law were unable to reach such a case, and to protect the tenant from what is in fact an infringement, on the part of the landlord, of their mutual agreement, it is difficult to imagine stronger grounds for insisting that the defect should be supplied by positive enactment. No such interference, however, is requisite. Our law courts not only possess the power of enforcing compensation for such injuries, but in the recent decision, in the case of Wemyss and Others v. Wilson, the supreme court has asserted and exercised that power in the most distinct and unqualified manner. "There is no instance," says Mr Chiene Shepherd, writing before the date of the above-mentioned judgment, "in which our head court in Scotland--the Court of Session--has ever given a decision entitling a tenant to damages from a landlord for destruction of his crops by game." Now, supposing the fact as here stated, to be strictly correct, what inference, we ask, can common candour draw from it? Are we to conclude that the law of Scotland, or the bench that administers it, are so corrupt as to countenance such an insult to justice? No such express decision had then been given, simply because no such claim had ever been tried; and surely this very fact is in itself the strongest possible presumption against the alleged universal abuse of the power of preserving game--a presumption that a hardship which, up to 1847, had never been made the ground of a formal appeal to the law tribunals, cannot be either very frequent or very severe. The statement, however, is not strictly correct; for, though no actual decree had been given on the special amount of damages before 1847, a very distinct, though incidental, opinion as to the liability of landlords in such cases was given in a case which occurred fifteen years ago--Drysdale v. Jameson. The principle of the law could not be more lucidly stated than in the words of the learned judge (Fullerton) on that occasion.

"A tenant, in taking a farm, must be considered as taking it under the burden of supporting the game, and may be presumed to have satisfied himself of the extent of that burden, as he is understood to do of any other unfavourable circumstance impairing the productiveness of the farm. But, on the other hand, it would seem contrary to principle that the landlord, who is bound to warrant the beneficial possession to the tenant, should be allowed, by his own act, to aggravate the burden in any great degree. A tenant, in order to support such a claim, must prove not only a certain visible damage arising from game, but a certain visible increase of the game, and _a consequent alteration of the circumstances contemplated in the contract, imputable to the landlord_. The true ground of damage seems to be, not that the game is abundant, but that its abundance has been materially increased since the date of the lease."[13]

Surely so clear an opinion, coming from such a quarter, was a pretty plain indication of the protection which the law would extend to a tenant in these circumstances; and, accordingly, it has been completely confirmed on every point by the more recent and comprehensive decision on Captain Wemyss' case. Any new steps on the part of a landlord for stimulating the natural supply of game, whether by feeding them, breeding them artificially, or by a systematic destruction of the vermin which naturally prey on them, will be held as indicating an intention on his part to depart from the terms of the contract, and as therefore opening a valid claim for any damage the tenant may experience in consequence of the change. And it is not only such direct and active measures for augmenting the stipulated burden that will be thus interpreted against the landlord; but even his doing so negatively--that is, his failing to exercise the power he retains in his own hands, and to keep down the burden to the same amount at which the tenant found it on his entry, will be held as equivalent to his positive act.

If, then, there ever was any ground for alleging that the state of the law was indefinite, the objection is now removed. No one can pretend to doubt that a tenant of land in Scotland has as ample a protection against injury from game as the law can give him. To prevent the injury beforehand is beyond the power of any law. All that it can do is to afford him as prompt and effectual means of redress as it furnishes against any other species of injury. In short, when its principle is weighed fairly, and when we take into consideration the relief from the fiscal qualification which Mr Mackenzie's act of last session conferred on the farmers, we shall be able to estimate how far it is true that, "both in parliament and out of parliament, the interests and industry of tenants are systematically sacrificed to the maintenance of the odious privileges of more favoured classes."

We have followed out and exposed, perhaps at greater length than was necessary, the stock sophisms and more flagrant exaggerations by which the total abolition of game laws is usually supported. Some points are yet untouched; but we prefer employing the rest of our paper in briefly stating a few suggestions for the removal of some of those difficulties and anomalies in the Scotch law, which we set out with acknowledging. In judging of any such alterations, it is necessary never to lose sight of the leading principle on which the whole Scotch system is founded--namely, the original and common right to seize and appropriate the animals of chase, qualified and determined by the previous right of the landowner to the exclusive use of the soil.

1st. Keeping this in view, our first change would be the abolition of the land-qualification introduced by the Act 1621; and this for the double reason that it was originally an unwarrantable departure from the general principle just mentioned, and that it is inexpedient to cumber the system with a law which is practically in desuetude.

2d. The effect of this alteration would be to remove also the useless and improper restriction on the sale of game. There can be no good reason for throwing difficulties in the way of the game-dealer's trade. As a check to poaching, we have abundant proof that the present restriction is inoperative; or, if it has any effect, it is directly the reverse of that intended, by throwing the trade very much into the hands of a low class of retailers. Instead of requiring a qualification or permission, which is constantly evaded, we would substitute a game-dealer's license, as in England.

3d. The fifth section of the Day Trespass Act empowers the person having the right to kill game on any lands, or any person authorised by him, to seize game in the possession of a trespasser. This provision has sometimes given occasion to dangerous conflicts between the parties, and is, moreover, quite at variance with the principle of the law above noted.

4th. The next particular we shall mention is of more importance. The evidence of Mr Bright's committee has, we think, fully disproved the charge against the county magistracy of England, of partiality and excessive severity in game cases. Exceptions no doubt were brought forward, but their paucity shows the contrary to be the rule. In Scotland there is still less ground for such an accusation. With us, such an occurrence as a justice adjudicating in his own case is unknown; and we find even the most violent of the abolition lecturers admitting that proceedings before the sessions under the game statutes are conducted with equity and leniency. But this is not enough. The parties who have to administer the law should be above all suspicion of bias or interest, even of the most indirect kind; and we should greatly prefer that game prosecutions were removed altogether, into the court of the judge-ordinary. Such an alteration, were a sure, would be regarded generally by the benches of county magistrates as a most desirable relief from one of the most invidious and embarrassing duties they have to execute. But, as the law stands, they have no option--for offences under the Day Trespass Act are cognisable by them only. If, then, there be any valid reason against transferring the trial of all game offences to the sheriff court, (and at present we can see none) it is at all events most advisable that his jurisdiction should be extended to day as well as to night trespasses.

5th. Any revisal of the law should embrace provisions against the accumulation of penalties; for although these are very rarely insisted on in Scotland, the power of enforcing them affords a pretext for declamations against the severity of the game law, which its opponents know well how to employ.

Besides these modifications of the statutes, it seems most desirable that in all leases the disposal of game should be regulated by special clauses, which should include a reference to arbitration in case of dispute.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] "The game agitators are individuals who suffer _a little_, and see their brethren suffering more, and who have _their feelings annoyed_; and those who are not hurt at all by game, but will strike at any public wrong."--_Speech of Mr Munro, one of the Council of the Association._

[3] _Lecture on the Game Laws_, by R. Wilson, &c., March 22, 1848.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Address in Mr Welford's _Influences of the Game Laws_.

[7] The statute of 1600, prohibiting hunting and hawking to those who had not "the revenues requisit in sik pastimes," is plainly one of a sumptuary tenor, and not properly a game law.

[8] It is right to mention, that there is some discrepancy in the estimates of Mr Bright's authorities on this point, of whom Mr Gayford is comparatively moderate; for we have others who, (upon, no doubt, equally sound data,) think two hares is the proper equivalent; and Mr Back of Norfolk is convinced that _one_ hare is _worse_ than a sheep; in other words, that one hare will eat up a statute acre. On the other hand, Mr Berkeley weighed the _full_ stomachs of a large hare, and an average Southdown sheep, and found them as one to fifty-five. So that, if the accounts of Mr Gayford and his _confrères_ are right, we have arrived at a law in physiological science equally new and surprising--that the digestive powers of animals increase in a compound inverse ratio to the capacity of the digestive organs!

[9] _Scotsman_, February 12, 1848.

[10]

| | || || | | | 1846. || 1847. || | | | || || Per cent. | | | Total | Game || Total | Game ||(both years.)| |Counties. | cases. | cases.|| cases. | cases. || | | +--------+-------++--------+--------++-------------+ |Aberdeen, | 683 | 2 || 800 | 5 || 0.4 | |Berwick, | 317 | 10 || 342 | 16 || 3.9 | |Edinburgh, | 336 | 12 || 475 | 14 || 3.2 | |Haddington,| 456 | 33 || 572 | 33 || 6.4 | |Fife, | 862 | 13 || 819 | 6 || 1.1 | | +--------+-------++--------+--------++-------------+ | Total, | 2654 | 70 || 3008 | 74 || 2.5 |

Compare these facts with the preposterous statements which the latest orator of the league, Mr M. Crichton, has been repeating to listening zanies at Greenock, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, that "the commitments arising from game laws amount to ONE-FOURTH of the whole crime of the country."

[11] Return of game-law offences during the years 1843-7

| | | | | | | |Counties. | 1843. | 1844. | 1845. | 1846. | 1847. | | +-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ |Berwick, | 14 | 8 | 14 | 10 | 16 | |Edinburgh, | 41 | 48 | 21 | 12 | 14 | |Haddington, | 35 | 55 | 23 | 33 | 33 | |Fife, | 30 | 25 | 19 | 13 | 6 | | +-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ | Total, | 120 | 136 | 77 | 68 | 69 |

[12] Evidence, Part i. 1414; ii. 7647, 7651.

[13] Shaw, ii. 147.

DOMINIQUE.

A SKETCH FROM LIFE.

TWO STUDENTS.

At the lower extremity of that ancient street long recognised as the head and centre of the _Pays Latin_ or scholastic quarter of Paris, and which, for six centuries, has borne the name of the _Rue de la Harpe_, within a few doors of the bridge of _St Michel_, and in a room upon the fifth floor, two young men were seated, on a spring morning of the year 182-. Even had the modest apartment been situated elsewhere than in the focus of the students' district, its appearance would have prevented the possibility of mistake as to the character of its inmates. Scanty furniture, considerably battered, caricatures of student life, partially veiling the dirty damp-stained paper that blistered upon the walls, which were also adorned by a pair of foils, a cracked guitar, and a set of castanets; a row of pegs supporting pipes, empty bottles in one corner, ponderous octavos thickly coated with dust in another, told a tale confirmed by the exterior of the occupants of the apartment. One of these, a young man of two-and-twenty, was evidently at home, for his feet were thrust into slippers, once embroidered, a Greek cap covered his head, and a tattered dressing-gown of pristine magnificence enveloped his slender and active figure. His features were regular and intelligent, and he had the dark fiery eyes, clustering black hair, and precociously abundant beard of a native of southern France. His companion, a young Norman, had nothing particularly noticeable in his countenance, save a broad open brow and a character of much shrewdness and perspicacity--qualities possessed in a high degree by a majority of his fellow provincials. His dress was one of those nondescript eccentric coats and conical broad-leafed hats at all times particularly affected by French _studiosi_.

The two young men were seated at either extremity of the low sill of a tall French window, thrown wide open to admit the pleasant spring sunshine, into which they puffed, from capacious pipes, wreaths of thin blue smoke. Their conversation turned upon a crime--or rather a series of crimes--which occasioned, at that particular moment, much excitement in Paris, and which will still be remembered by those persons upon the tablets of whose memory the lapse of a quarter of a century does not act as a spunge. About three years previously, a young man named Gilbert Gaudry, of respectable family, liberal education, and good reputation, had been tried and convicted for the murder of an uncle, by whose death he largely inherited. The accused man was in debt, and his embarrassed circumstances prevented his marrying a woman to whom he was passionately attached; his uncle had recently refused him pecuniary assistance, upon which occasion Gaudry was heard to express himself harshly and angrily. Many other circumstances concurred to throw upon him the odium of the crime; and, altogether, the evidence, although entirely circumstantial, was so strong against him, that, in spite of his powerful appeal and solemn denial, the judge condemned him to death. The sentence had been commuted to the galleys for life. Three years passed, and the real murderer was discovered--a discharged servant of the murdered man, who, at the trial, had given important evidence against Gaudry. The guillotine did its work on the right offender, and Gaudry's sentence was reversed. But three years of slavery and opprobrium, of shame, horror, and gnawing sense of injustice, had wrought terribly upon the misjudged man, inspiring him with a blind and burning thirst of revenge. Almost his first act, on finding himself at liberty, was to stab, in broad daylight, and in the open street, the judge who had condemned him. This time there could be no question of his guilt, and he would inevitably have been condemned to death; but, before his trial, he found means of hanging himself in his cell. This last tragical and shocking incident had occurred but two days previously, and now furnished the embryo jurists with a theme for animated discussion. Without vindicating the wretched murderer and suicide, the young Norman was disposed to find an extenuating circumstance in the unjust punishment he had endured. But his friend scouted such leniency, and, taking up high ground, maintained that no criminal was baser than he who, the victim of judicial error, revenged himself upon the magistrate who had decided according to the best of his judgment and conscience, but who, sharing the liability to err of every human judge, was misled by deceitful appearances or perjured witnesses.

"Argue it as you will," cried Dominique Lafon; "be plausible and eloquent, bring batteries of sophisms to the attack, you cannot breach my solid position. Excuse and extenuation are alike in vain. I repeat and maintain, that to make a magistrate personally responsible for his judgments, be they just or unjust, so long as he has kept within the line of his duty, and acted according to his conscience, is revenge of the basest and most criminal description."

"Bear in mind," replied Henry la Chapelle, "that I attempt not to justify the unhappy Gaudry. All I assert is, that injustice excites in the breast of every man, even of the gentlest, hatred against him by whom the injustice is done. And its frequent repetition, or the long continuance of the suffering it occasions, will ultimately provoke, in nine cases out of ten, an outbreak of revengeful fury. The heart becomes embittered, the judgment blinded, the mild and beautiful injunctions of Scripture are forgotten or disregarded, in the gust of passion and vindictive rage. To offer the left cheek when the right has been buffeted, is, of all divine precepts, the most difficult to follow. A man ruined, tortured, or disgraced by injustice, looks to the sentence, not to the intention, of his judge; taxes him with precipitation, prejudice, or over-severity, and views revenge as a right rather than a crime. Doubtless there are exceptions--men whose Christian endurance would abide by them even unto death; but, believe me, they are few, very few. The virtues of Job are rare; and rancour, the vile weed, chokes, in our corrupt age, the meek flower, resignation."

"A man to whom injustice is really done," said Dominique, "may console himself with the consciousness of his innocence, which an act of rancorous revenge would induce many to doubt. The suffering victim finds sympathy; the fierce avenger excites horror and reprobation."

"Mere words, my dear fellow," replied la Chapelle. "Fine phrases, and nothing else. You are a theorist, pleading against human nature. What logic is this? Undeserved punishment is far more difficult to endure than merited castigation; and an act of revenge should rather plead in favour of the innocence of him who commits it. In a criminal, the consciousness that he merited his punishment would leave less room for hatred than for shame; it would excite vexation at his ill luck, rather than enduring anger against his judge. There would be exceptions and variations, of course, according to the moral idiosyncracy of the individual. It is impossible to establish a mathematical scale for the workings of human passions. I repeat that I do not justify such revenge, but I still maintain that to seek it is natural to man, and that many men, even with less aggravation than was given to Gaudry, might not have sufficient resolution and virtue to resist the impulse."

"You have but a paltry opinion of your fellow-creatures," said Dominique. "I am glad to think better of them. And I hold him a weak slave to the corruption of our nature, who has not strength to repress the impulse to a deed his conscience cannot justify."

"Admirable in principle," said la Chapelle, smiling, "but difficult in practice. You yourself, my dear Dominique, who now take so lofty a tone, and who feel, I am quite sure, exactly as you speak--you yourself, if I am not greatly mistaken in your character, would be the last man to sit down quietly under injustice. Your natural ardour and impetuosity would soon upset your moral code."

"Never!" vehemently exclaimed Dominique. "La Chapelle, never will I suffer my passions thus to subdue my reason! What gratification of revenge can ever compensate the loss of that greatest of blessings, a pure and tranquil conscience? What peace of mind could I hope for, after permitting such discord between my principles and my actions? La Chapelle, you wrong me by the thought."

"Well, well," replied his friend, "I may be wrong, and at any rate I reason in the abstract rather than personally to you. I heartily wish you never may suffer wrong, or be tempted to revenge. But remember, my friend, safety is not in over-confidence. The severest assaults are for the strongest towers."

A knock at the room-door interrupted the conversation. It was the porter of the lodging-house, bringing a letter that had just arrived for Dominique. On recognising the handwriting of the address, and the postmark of Montauban, the young man uttered a cry of pleasure. It was from home, from his mother. He hastily tore it open. But as he read, the smile of joy and gratified affection faded from his features, and was replaced by an expression of astonishment, indignation, grief. Scarcely finishing the letter, he crumpled it in his hand with a passionate gesture, and stripping off his dressing-gown began hastily to dress. With friendly solicitude la Chapelle observed his varying countenance.

"No bad news, I hope?" he inquired.

For sole reply, Dominique threw him the letter.

MOTHER AND SON.

Dominique Lafon was the son of a man noted for his democratic principles, who, after holding high provincial office under the Republic and the Consulate, resigned his functions in displeasure, when Napoleon grasped an emperor's sceptre, and retired to his native town of Montauban, where he since had lived upon a modest patrimony. Under Napoleon, Pascal Lafon had been unmolested; but when the Bourbons returned, his name, prominent during the last years of the eighteenth century, rendered him the object of a certain _surveillance_ on the part of the police of the Restoration. On the occasion of more than one republican conspiracy, real or imaginary, spies had been set upon him, and endeavours made to prove him implicated. Once he had even been conducted before a tribunal, and had undergone a short examination. Nothing, however, had been elicited that in any way compromised him; and in a few hours he was again at liberty, before his family knew of his brief arrest. In reality, Lafon, although still an ardent republican, was entirely guiltless of plotting against the monarchy, which he deemed too firmly consolidated to be as yet shaken. France, he felt, had need of repose before again entering the revolutionary arena. His firm faith still was, that a time would come when she would dismiss her kings for ever, and when pure democracy would govern the land. But before that time arrived, his eyes, he believed, would be closed in death. He was no conspirator, but he did not shun the society of those who were; and, moreover, he was not sufficiently guarded in the expression of his republican opinions and Utopian theories. Hence it came that, like the Whig in Claverhouse's memoranda, he had a triple red cross against his name in the note-book of the Bourbon police, who, at the time now referred to, had been put upon the alert by the recent assassination of the Duke of Berri. Although the circumstances of that crime, and the evidence upon Louvel's trial, combined to stamp the atrocious deed as the unaided act of a fanatic, without accomplices or ulterior designs, the event had provoked much rigid investigation of the schemes of political malcontents throughout France; and in several districts and towns, magistrates and heads of police had been replaced, as lax and lukewarm, by men of sterner character. Amongst other changes, the Judge of Instruction at Montauban had had a successor given him. The new magistrate was preceded by a reputation of great vigilance and severity--a reputation he lost no time in justifying. By the aid of a couple of keen Parisian police agents of the _Procureur du Roi_, whom he stimulated to increased activity, he soon got upon the scent of a republican conspiracy, of which Montauban was said to be a principal focus. Various reports were abroad as to the manner in which Monsieur Noell, the new judge, had obtained his information. Some said, the plotters had been betrayed by the mistress of one of them, in a fit of jealous fury at a fancied infidelity of her lover; others declared, that hope of reward had quickened the invention of a police spy, who, despairing of discovering a conspiracy, had applied himself to fabricate one. Be that as it might, a number of arrests took place, and, amongst others, that of Dominique's father. The intelligence of this event was conveyed to the young student in a few despairing lines from his mother, whose health, already very precarious, had suddenly given way under the shock of her husband's imprisonment. She wrote from a sick-bed, imploring her son to lose no time in returning to Montauban.

Gloomy were the forebodings of Dominique as the mail rattled him over the weary leagues of road between Paris and Montauban. Yet, when he reached home, he half hoped to be greeted by his father's friendly voice, for, himself convinced of his innocence, he could not believe the authorities would be long in recognising it. He was disappointed. The sorrowful mien of the domestic who opened the door told a tale of misfortune.

"Oh, Monsieur Dominique!" said the man, an old servant, who had known the student from his cradle, "the house is not wont to be so sad when you return."

"My mother! where is my mother?" cried Dominique. The next instant he was at her bedside, clasping her poor thin fingers, and gazing in agony on her emaciated features. A few days of intense alarm and anxiety, acting on an exquisitely susceptible organisation, had done the work of months of malady. A slow fever was in her veins, undermining her existence. Dominique shuddered at sight of her sunken temples, and of the deep dark furrows below her eyes. It seemed as if the angel of death had already put his stamp upon that beloved countenance. But he concealed his mental anguish, and spoke cheeringly to the invalid. She told him the particulars of his father's arrest. She had already written to some friends, sent for others, and had done all in her power to ascertain exactly the offences of which Lafon was accused; but the persons who had made the inquiries had been put off with generalities, and none had obtained access to the prisoner, who was in solitary confinement.

Dominique Lafon was tenderly attached to both his parents. Upon him, their only child, their entire affection was concentrated and lavished. They had made him their companion even from his earliest years, had tended him with unwearying solicitude through his delicate infancy, had devoted themselves to his education when he grew older, and had consented with difficulty and regret to part from him, when his arrival at man's estate rendered it desirable he should visit the capital for the conclusion of his studies. Dominique repaid their care with devoted love. His father's consistency and strength of character inspired him with respect; he listened to his precepts with veneration and gratitude; but he idolised his mother, whose feminine graces and tender care were intertwined with the sweetest reminiscences of childhood's happy days. He now strove to repay some portion of his debt of filial love by the most unwearying attendance at the invalid's pillow. His arrival brought a gleam of joy and hope to the sick woman's brow, but the ray was transient, and quickly faded. The vital flame had sunk too low to revive again permanently. She grew weaker and weaker, and felt that her hour approached. But her spirit, so soon to appear before her Maker, yet clung to an earthly love. Whilst striving to fix her thoughts on things heavenly, they still dwelt upon him by whose side she had made life's checkered pilgrimage. She wrung her hands in agony at the thought that she must leave the world without bidding him a last farewell. She asked but a moment to embrace him who, for five-and-twenty years, had been her guardian and protector, her tenderest friend and companion. Dominique could not endure the spectacle of her grief. He left the house to use every endeavour to obtain for her the indulgence she so ardently desired.

The first person to whom he applied was the Judge of Instruction, Monsieur Noell. Provided with a medical certificate of his mother's dying state, he obtained admission to that magistrate's cabinet. He found a tall thin man, with harsh strongly marked features, and a forbidding expression of countenance. The glazed stare of his cold gray eyes, and the cruel lines about his mouth, chilled Dominique's hopes, and almost made him despair of success. The youth preferred his request, however, with passionate earnestness, imploring that his father might be allowed to leave his prison for a single hour, under good guard, to visit the bedside of his expiring wife, in presence of such witnesses as the authorities would think proper to name. The reply to this prayer was a formal and decided negative. Until the prisoner Lafon had undergone a second examination, no one could be admitted to see him under any pretext whatever. That examination was not to take place for at least a week. Dominique was very sure, from what the physicians had told him, that his mother could not survive for a third of that time.

The frigid manner and unsympathising tone of the magistrate, and the uncourteous brevity of his refusal, grated so unpleasantly upon the irritated feelings of the student, that he had difficulty in restraining a momentary anger. In less imminent circumstances, his pride would have prevented his persisting in a petition thus unkindly rejected, but the thought of his dying mother brought patience and humility to his aid. Warmly, but respectfully, he reiterated his suit. The magistrate was a widower, but he had children, to whom report said he was devotedly attached. Harsh and rigid in his official duties, in his domestic circle he was said to be the tenderest of fathers. Dominique had heard this, and availed of it in pleading his suit.

"You have children, sir!" he said; "you can picture to yourself the grief you would feel were your deathbed unblessed by their presence. How doubly painful must be the parting agony, when the ear is unsoothed by the voice of those best beloved, when no cherished hand is there to prop the sinking head, and close the eyes for ever on this world and its sufferings! Refuse not my father the consolation of a last interview with his dying wife! Have compassion on my poor mother's agony! Suffer her to breathe her last between the two beings who share all her affection! So may your own deathbed be soothed by the presence of those you most dearly love!"

Doubtless Monsieur Noell's ear was well used to such pleadings, and his heart was hardened by a long course of judicial severity. His glance lost nothing of its habitual cold indifference, as he replied to Dominique's passionate entreaties with a decided negative.

"I must repeat my former answer," he said; "I neither can nor will grant the indulgence you require. And now I will detain you no longer, as you may perhaps make use of your time to greater advantage in other quarters."

He rose from his chair, and remained standing till Dominique left the room. The tone of his last words had wellnigh crushed hope in the young man's bosom. But as long as a possibility remained, the student pursued it. He betook himself to the _Procureur du Roi_, whose office constituted him public prosecutor in cases of this kind. That functionary declared himself incompetent, until the prisoner should have undergone another examination. Until then, the only appeal from the judge was to the minister of justice. Dominique instantly drew up and forwarded a petition; but before it reached Paris, his mother breathed her last. She met her death, preceded and attended by acute sufferings, with the resignation of a martyr. But even after the last sacrament of her religion had been administered, and when she earnestly strove to fix her mind on eternity, to the exclusion of things temporal, the thought of her husband, so long and tenderly beloved, and absent at this supreme hour, intruded itself upon her pious meditations, brought tears to her eyes, and drew heartrending sobs from her bosom; her last sigh was for him, her latest breath uttered his name. This fervent desire, so cruelly thwarted, those tears of deferred hope and final profound disappointment, were inexpressibly painful to contemplate. Upon Dominique, whose love for his mother was so deep and holy, they made a violent impression. Bitter were his feelings as he sat beside her couch when the spirit had fled, and gazed upon her clay-cold features, whereon there yet lingered a grieved and suffering expression. And later, when the earth had received her into its bosom, that pallid and sorrowful countenance was ever before his eyes. In his dreams he heard his mother's well-known voice, mournfully pronouncing the name of her beloved husband, and praying, as she had done in the last hours of her life, that she might again behold him before she departed. Nor were these visions dissipated by daylight. They recurred to his excited imagination, and kindled emotions of fierce hatred towards the man who had had it in his power to smooth his mother's passage from life to death, and who had wantonly refused the alleviation. Nay more; convinced of his father's innocence, Dominique considered the judge who had thrown him into prison as in some sort his mother's murderer. He had accelerated her decease, and thrown gall into the cup it is the lot of every mortal to drain. The physicians had declared anxiety of mind to be the immediate cause of her death. Dominique brooded over this declaration, and over the misfortunes that had so suddenly overtaken him, until he came to consider M. Noell as much an assassin as if he had struck a dagger into his mother's heart. "What matter," he thought, "whether the wound be dealt to body or to soul, so long as it slays?" He had nothing to distract his thoughts from dwelling upon and magnifying the wrongs that had deprived him of both parents, one by death, the other by an imprisonment whose termination he could not foresee. At times his melancholy was broken by bursts of fury against him he deemed the cause of his misfortunes.

"Could I but see him die!" he would exclaim, "the cold-blooded heartless tyrant--die alone, childless, accursed, without a friendly hand to wipe the death-sweat from his face! Then, methinks, I could again be happy, when his innocent victim was thus revenged. Alas, my mother!--my poor, meek, long-suffering mother,--must your death go unrequited? For what offence was your life taken as atonement? By what vile distortion of justice did this base inquisitor visit upon your innocent head a transgression that never was committed?"

Meanwhile the captivity of the elder Lafon was prolonged. A second examination relaxed nothing of his jailor's severity, and his son's applications to see him were all rejected. Dominique wrote to his father, but he received no answer; and he afterwards learned that his letter had not been delivered when sent, but had been detained by Noell, who, finding nothing criminatory in its contents, had subjected it, with characteristic suspicion, to chemical processes, in hopes to detect writing with sympathetic ink, and had finally made it accessory to an attempt to extort a confession from the prisoner. This information, obtained from an understrapper of the prison by means of a large bribe, raised Dominique's exasperation to the highest pitch.

"Gracious Heaven!" he exclaimed, "are such things to be endured in silence and submission? Has human justice iron scourges for nominal offences,--honours and rewards for real crimes? On a false accusation my father pines in a dungeon, whilst my mother's murderer walks scatheless and exalted amongst his fellows; but if the laws of man are impotent to avenge her death, who shall blame her son for remembering her dying agony, and requiting it on those who aggravated her sufferings?"

And he walked forth, pondering vengeance. Unconsciously his steps took the direction of the prison. Long he stood, with folded arms and lowering brow, gazing at the small grated aperture that gave light and air to his father's cell, and hoping to see his beloved parent look out and recognise him. He gazed in vain: twilight came, night followed, no one appeared at the window. Dominique knew not that it was high above the prisoner's reach. He returned home, fancying his father ill, nourishing a thousand bitter thoughts, and heaping up fresh hatred against the author of so much misery. That night Michel, the old servant, came twice to his room door, to see what ailed him, since, instead of retiring to rest, he unceasingly paced the apartment. Dominique dismissed the faithful fellow to his bed, and resumed his melancholy walk. But in the morning he was so pale and haggard that Michel slipped out to ask the family physician to call in _by accident_. When he returned, Dominique had left the house. In great alarm--for his young master's gloomy despondency at once suggested fear of suicide--Michel tracked his steps. His fears proved unfounded. With some trouble he ascertained that Dominique had quitted the town on the top of a passing diligence, with a valise for sole baggage, and without informing any one of the object of his journey.

THE DOUBLE DUEL.

Antony Noell, the judge, had three children, and report lied not when it said that he was tenderly attached to them. A harsh and unfeeling man in his official capacity, and in the ordinary affairs of life, all the softer part of his nature seemed to have resolved itself into paternal affection. His two sons were students at the university of Toulouse; his youngest child, a blooming maiden of twelve, still brightened his home and made his heart joyful, although she soon was to leave him to finish her education in a convent. The two students were gay handsome lads, but somewhat dissipated; fonder of the bottle and the billiard-room than of grave lectures and dry studies. They were in small favour with their pedagogues, but in high repute with their fellow collegians; whilst peaceable citizens and demure young ladies regarded them with mingled aversion, interest, and curiosity, on account of certain mad pranks, by which, during their first half-year's residence, they had gained a certain notoriety in the quiet city of Toulouse.

It happened one night, as the brothers came both flushed with play and wine from their accustomed coffeehouse on the Place du Capitole, that Vincent, the elder of the two, stumbled over the feet of a man who sat upon one of the benches placed outside the establishment. The passage through the benches and tables was narrow; and the stranger, having thrust his legs nearly across it, had little reason to complain of the trifling offence offered him. Nevertheless he jumped to his feet and fiercely taxed young Noell with an intentional insult. Noell, full of good humour and indifferent wine, and taking his interlocutor for a fellow student, made a jesting reply, and seizing one of the stranger's arms, whilst his brother Martial grasped the other, dragged him into the lamp-light to see who he was. But the face they beheld was unknown to them; and scarcely had they obtained a glimpse at it when its owner shook them off, applying to them at the same time a most injurious epithet. The students would have struck him, but he made a pace backwards, and, seizing a heavy chair which he whirled over his head as though it had been a feather, he swore he would dash out the brains of the first who laid a finger on him.

"I do not fight like a water-carrier," he said, "with fists and feet; but if you are as ready with your swords as you are with your insolence, you shall not long await satisfaction."

And offering a card, which was at once accepted, he received two in return. The disputants then separated; and as soon as the Noells turned out of the square, they paused beneath a lamp to examine the card they had received. Inscribed upon it was the name of Dominique Lafon.

It was too late, when this quarrel occurred, for further steps to be taken that night; but early on the following morning Dominique's second, a young lawyer whom he had known during his studies at Paris, had an interview with the friends appointed by the Noells to act on their behalf. The latter anticipated a duel with swords, and were surprised to find that Dominique, entitled, as the insulted party, to fix the weapon, selected the more dangerous and less usual one of pistols. They could not object, however, and the meeting was fixed for the next day; the arrangement being that both brothers should come upon the ground, and that, if Dominique was unhurt in the first encounter, the second duel should immediately succeed it.

In a secluded field, to the right of the pleasant road from Toulouse to Albi, and at no great distance from the tumulus on whose summit a stone pillar commemorates Soult's gallant resistance to Wellington's conquering forces, the combatants met at the appointed hour, and saluted each other with cold courtesy. Dominique was pale, but his hand and eye were steady, and his pulse beat calmly. The two Noells were cheerful and indifferent, and bore themselves like men to whom encounters of this kind were no novelty. The elder brother took the first turn. The seconds asked once more if the affair could not be peaceably arranged; but, receiving no answer, they made the final arrangements. Two peeled willow rods were laid upon the ground, six yards apart. At ten yards from either of these the duellists were placed, making the entire distance between them six and twenty yards; and it was at their option, when the seconds gave the word, either to advance to the barrier before firing, or to fire at once, or from any intervening point.

The word was given, and the antagonists stepped out. Vincent Noell took but two paces, halted and fired. He had missed. Dominique continued steadily to advance. When he had taken five paces, the seconds looked at each other, and then at him, as if expecting him to stop. He took no notice, and moved on. It was a minute of breathless suspense. In the dead silence, his firm tread upon the grass was distinctly audible. He paused only when his foot touched the willow wand. Then he slowly raised his arm, and fired.

The whirling smoke prevented him for an instant from discerning the effect of his shot, but the hasty advance of the seconds and of two surgeons who had accompanied them to the field, left him little doubt that it had told. It had indeed done so, and with fatal effect. The unhappy Vincent was bathed in his blood. The surgeons hastened to apply a first dressing, but their countenances gave little hope of a favourable result.

Pale and horror-stricken, not with personal fear, but with grief at his brother's fate, Martial Noell whispered his second, who proposed postponing the second duel till another day. Dominique, who, whilst all his companions had been busy with the wounded man, had remained leaning against a tree, his discharged pistol in his hand, collected and unsympathising, stepped forward on hearing this proposition.

"Another day?" said he with a cruel sneer. "Before another day arrives, I shall doubtless be in prison for this morning's work. But no matter; if the gentleman is less ready to fight than he was to insult me, let him leave the field."

The scornful tone and insinuation brought a flush of shame and anger to the brow of the younger Noell. He detested himself for the momentary weakness he had shown, and a fierce flame of revenge kindled in his heart.

"Murderer!" he exclaimed, "my brother's blood calls aloud for vengeance. May Providence make me its instrument!"

Dominique replied not. Under the same conditions as before, the two young men took their stations. But the chances were not equal. Dominique retained all his coolness; his opponent's whole frame quivered with passionate emotion. This time, neither was in haste to fire. Advancing slowly, their eyes fixed on each other, they reached at the same moment the limits of their walk. Then their pistols were gradually raised, and, as if by word of command, simultaneously discharged. This time both balls took effect. The one that struck Dominique went through his arm, without breaking the bone, and lodged in his back, inflicting a severe but not a dangerous wound. But Martial Noell was shot through the head.

The news of this bloody business soon got wind, and the very same day it was the talk of all Toulouse. Martial Noell had died upon the spot; his brother expired within forty-eight hours. The seconds got out of the way, till they should see how the thing was likely to go. Dominique's wound prevented his following their example, if he were so disposed; and when it no longer impeded his movements, he was already in the hands of justice. Frantic with grief on learning the fate of his beloved sons, Anthony Noell hurried to Toulouse, and vigorously pushed a prosecution. He hoped for a very severe sentence, and was bitterly disappointed when Dominique escaped, in consideration of his wounds and of his having been the insulted party, with the lenient doom of five years' imprisonment.

FIVE YEARS LATER.

Five years of absence from home may glide rapidly enough away, when passed in pursuit of pleasure or profit; dragged out between prison walls, they appear an eternity, a chasm between the captive and the world. So thought Dominique as he re-entered Montauban, at the expiration of his sentence. During the whole time, not a word of intelligence had reached him from his home, no friendly voice had greeted his ear, no line of familiar handwriting had gladdened his tearless eyes. Arrived in his native town, his first inquiry was for his father. Pascal Lafon was dead. The fate of his wife and son had preyed upon his health; the prison air had poisoned the springs of life in the strong, free-hearted man. The physician declared drugs useless in his case, for that the atmosphere of liberty alone could save him; and he recommended, if unconditional release were impossible, that the prisoner should be guarded in his own house. The recommendation was forwarded to Paris, but the same post took a letter from Anthony Noell, and a few days brought the physician's dismissal and an order for the close confinement of Lafon. Examinations followed each other in rapid succession, but they served only to torment the prisoner, without procuring his release; and after some months he died, his innocence unrecognised. The cause of his death, and the circumstances attending it, were loudly proclaimed by the indignant physician; and Dominique, on his return to Montauban, had no difficulty in obtaining all the details, aggravated probably by the unpopularity of the judge. He heard them with unchanging countenance; none could detect a sign of emotion on that cheek of marble paleness, or in that cold and steadfast eye. He then made inquiries concerning Anthony Noell. That magistrate, he learned, had been promoted, two years previously, and now resided in his native town of Marseilles. At that moment, however, he happened to be at an hotel in Montauban. He had never recovered the loss of his sons, which had aged him twenty years in appearance, and had greatly augmented the harshness and sour severity of his character. He seemed to find his sole consolation in the society of his daughter, now a beautiful girl of seventeen, and in intense application to his professional duties. A tour of inspection, connected with his judicial functions, had now brought him to Montauban. During his compulsory absences from home, which were of annual occurrence and of some duration, his daughter remained in the care of an old female relation, her habitual companion, whose chief faults were her absurd vanity, and her too great indulgence of the caprices of her darling niece.

Dominique showed singular anxiety to learn every particular concerning Anthony Noell's household, informing himself of the minutest details, and especially of the character of his daughter, who was represented to him as warmhearted and naturally amiable, but frivolous and spoiled by over-indulgence. On the death of his sons, Noell renounced his project of sending her from home, and the consequence was, that her education had been greatly neglected. Madame Verlé, the old aunt already mentioned, was a well-meaning, but very weak widow, who, childless herself, had no experience in bringing up young women. In her own youth she had been a great coquette, and frivolity was still a conspicuous feature in her character. As M. Noell, since his sons' death, had shown a sort of aversion for society, the house was dull enough, and Madame Verlé's chief resource was the circulating library, whence she obtained a constant supply of novels. Far from prohibiting to her niece the perusal of this trash, she made her the companion of her unwholesome studies. The false ideas and highflown romance with which these books teemed, might have made little impression on a character fortified by sound principles and a good education, but they sank deep into the ardent and uncultivated imagination of Florinda Noell, to whose father, engrossed by his sorrows and by his professional labours, it never once occurred to check the current of corruption thus permitted to flow into his daughter's artless mind. He saw her gay, happy, and amused, and he inquired no further; well pleased to find her support so cheerfully the want of society to which his morose regrets and gloomy eccentricity condemned her.

One of Dominique's first cares, on his return to Montauban, was to visit his parents' grave. Although his father died in prison, and his memory had never been cleared from the slur of accusation, his friends had obtained permission, with some difficulty, to inter his corpse beside that of his wife. The day was fading into twilight when Dominique entered the cemetery, and it took him some time to find the grave he sought. The sexton would have saved him the trouble, but the idea seemed a profanation; in silence and in solitude he approached the tomb of his affections and happiness. Long he sat upon the mound, plunged in reverie, but with dry eyes, for the source of tears appeared exhausted in his heart. Night came; the white tombstones looked ghastly pale in the moonlight, and cast long black shadows upon the turf. Dominique arose, plucked a wild-flower from his mother's grave, and left the place. He had taken but three steps when he became aware he was not alone in the churchyard. A tall figure rose suddenly from an adjacent grave. Although separated but by one lofty tombstone, the two mourners had been too absorbed and silent in their grief to notice each other's presence. Now they gazed at one another. The moon, for a moment obscured, emerged from behind a cloud, and shone upon their features. The recognition was mutual and instantaneous. Both started back. Between the graves of their respective victims, Anthony Noell and Dominique Lafon confronted each other.

A dusky fire gleamed in the eyes of Dominique, and his features, worn and emaciated from captivity, were distorted with the grimace of intense hatred. His heart throbbed as though it would have burst from his bosom.

"May your dying hour be desolate!" he shrieked. "May your end be in misery and despair!"

The magistrate gazed at his inveterate foe with a fixed stare of horror, as though a phantom had suddenly risen before him. Then, slowly raising his hand, till it pointed to the grave of his sons, his eye still fixed, as if by fascination, upon that of Dominique, a single word, uttered in a hollow tone, burst from his quivering lips.

"Murderer!" he exclaimed.

Dominique laughed. It was a hideous sound, a laugh of unquenchable hatred and savage exultation. He approached Noell till their faces were but a few inches apart, and spoke in a voice of suppressed fierceness.

"My father and my mother," he said, "expired in grief, and shame, and misery. By your causeless hate and relentless persecution, I was made an orphan. The debt is but half paid. You have still a child. You still find happiness on earth. But you yet shall lose all--all! Yet shall you know despair and utter solitude, and your death shall be desolate, even as my father's was. Remember! _We shall meet again._"

And passing swiftly before the magistrate, with a gesture of solemn menace, Dominique left the cemetery. Noell sank, pale and trembling, upon his children's grave. His enemy had found him, and security had fled. Dominique's last words, "We shall meet again!" rang in his ears, as if uttered by the threatening voice of hostile and irresistible destiny. Slowly, and in great uneasiness, he returned into the town, which he left early the next day for Marseilles. To his terrified fancy, his daughter was safe only when he watched over her. So great was his alarm, that he would have resigned his lucrative and honourable office sooner than have remained longer absent from the tender flower whom the ruthless spoiler threatened to trample and destroy.

THE HORSE-RIDERS.

Months passed away, and spring returned. On a bright morning of May--in parched Provence the pleasantest season of the year--a motley cavalcade approached Marseilles by the Nice road. It consisted of two large waggons, a score of horses, and about the same number of men and women. The horses were chiefly white, cream-coloured, or piebald, and some of them bore saddles of peculiar make and fantastical colours, velvet-covered and decorated with gilding. One was caparisoned with a tiger-skin, and from his headstall floated streamers of divers-coloured horsehair. The women wore riding-habits, some of gaudy tints, bodices of purple or crimson velvet, with long flaunting robes of green or blue. They were sunburned, boldfaced damsels, with marked features and of dissipated aspect, and they sat firmly on their saddles, jesting as they rode along. Their male companions were of corresponding appearance; lithe vigorous fellows, from fifteen to forty, attired in various hussar and jockey costumes, with beards and mustaches fantastically trimmed, limbs well developed, and long curling hair. Various nations went to the composition of the band. French, Germans, Italians, and Gipsies made up the equestrian troop of Luigi Bartolo, which, after passing the winter in southern Italy, had wandered north on the approach of spring, and now was on its way to give a series of representations at Marseilles.

A little behind his comrades, upon a fine gray horse, rode a young Florentine named Vicenzo, the most skilful rider of the troop. Although but five-and-twenty years old, he had gone through many vicissitudes and occupations. Of respectable family, he had studied at Pisa, had been expelled for misconduct, had then enlisted in an Austrian regiment, whence his friends had procured his discharge, but only to cast him off for his dissolute habits. Alternately a professional gambler, a stage player, and a smuggler on the Italian frontier, he had now followed, for upwards of a year, the vagabond life of a horse-rider. Of handsome person and much natural intelligence, he covered his profligacy and taste for low associations with a certain varnish of good breeding. This had procured him in the troop the nickname of the _Marchese_, and had made him a great favourite with the female portion of the strollers, amongst whom more than one fierce quarrel had arisen for the good graces of the fascinating Vicenzo.

The Florentine was accompanied by a stranger, who had fallen in with the troop at Nice, and had won their hearts by his liberality. He had given them a magnificent supper at their _albergo_, had made them presents of wine and trinkets--all apparently out of pure generosity and love of their society. He it was who had chiefly determined them to visit Marseilles, instead of proceeding north, as they had originally intended, by Avignon to Lyons. He marched with the troop, on horseback, wrapped in a long loose coat, and with a broad hat slouched over his brow, and bestowed his companionship chiefly on Vicenzo, to whom he appeared to have taken a great affection. The strollers thought him a strange eccentric fellow, half cracked, to say the least; but they cared little whether he were sane or mad, so long as his society proved profitable, his purse well filled, and ever in his hand.

The wanderers were within three miles of Marseilles when they came to one of the _bastides_, or country-houses, so thickly scattered around that city. It was of unusual elegance, almost concealed amongst a thick plantation of trees, and having a terrace, in the Italian style, overlooking the road. Upon this terrace, in the cool shade of an arbour, two ladies were seated, enjoying the sweet breath of the lovely spring morning. Books and embroidery were on a table before them, which they left on the appearance of the horse-riders, and, leaning upon the stone parapet, looked down on the unusual spectacle. The elder of the two had nothing remarkable, except the gaudy ribbons that contrasted with her antiquated physiognomy. The younger, in full flush of youth, and seen amongst the bright blossoms of the plants that grew in pots upon the parapet, might have passed for the goddess of spring in her most sportive mood. Her hair hung in rich clusters over her alabaster neck; her blue eyes danced in humid lustre; her coral lips, a little parted, disclosed a range of sparkling pearls. The sole fault to be found with her beauty was its character, which was sensual rather than intellectual. One beheld the beautiful and frivolous child of clay, but the ray of the spirit that elevates and purifies was wanting. It was the beauty of a Bacchante rather than of a Vestal--Aurora disporting herself on the flower banks, and awaiting, in frolic mood, the advent of Cupid.

The motley cavalcade moved on, the men assuming their smartish seat in the saddle as they passed under the inspection of the _bella biondina_. When Vicenzo approached the park wall, his companion leaned towards him and spoke something in his ear. At the same moment, as if stung by a gadfly, the spirited gray upon which the Florentine was mounted, sprang with all four feet from the ground, and commenced a series of leaps and curvets that would have unseated a less expert rider. They only served to display to the greatest advantage Vicenzo's excellent horsemanship and slender graceful figure. Disdaining the gaudy equipments of his comrades, the young man was tastefully attired in a dark closely-fitting jacket. Hessian boots and pantaloons exhibited the Antinöus-like proportions of his comely limbs. He rode like a centaur, he and his steed seemingly forming but one body. As he reached, gracefully caracoling, the terrace on whose summit the ladies were stationed, he looked up with a winning smile, and removing his cap, bowed to his horse's mane. The old lady bridled and smiled; the young one blushed as the Florentine's ardent gaze met hers, and in her confusion she let fall a branch of roses she held in her hand. With magical suddenness Vicenzo's fiery horse stood still, as if carved of marble. With one bound the rider was on foot, and had snatched up the flowers; then placing a hand upon the shoulder of his steed, who at once started in a canter, he lightly, and without apparent effort, vaulted into the saddle. With another bow and smile he rode off with his companion.

"'Twas well done, Vicenzo," said the latter.

"What an elegant cavalier!" exclaimed Florinda Noell pensively, following with her eyes the accomplished equestrian.

"And so distinguished in his appearance!" chimed in her silly aunt. "And how he looked up at us! One might fancy him a nobleman in disguise, bent on adventures, or seeking intelligence of a lost lady-love."

Florinda smiled, but the stale platitude, borrowed from the absurd romances that crammed Madame Verlé's brain, abode in her memory. Whilst the handsome horse-rider remained in sight, she continued upon the parapet and gazed after him. On his part, Vicenzo several times looked back, and more than once he pressed to his lips the fragrant flowers of which accident had made him the possessor.

A small theatre, which happened then to be unoccupied, was hired by the equestrians for their performances, the announcement of which was soon placarded from one end to the other of Marseilles. At the first representation, Florinda and her aunt were amongst the audience. They had no one to cheek their inclinations, for Mr Noell, after passing many months with his daughter without molestation from Dominique, who had disappeared from Montauban the day after their meeting in the churchyard, had forgotten his apprehensions, and had departed on his annual tour of professional duty. At the circus, the honours of the night were for Vicenzo. His graceful figure, handsome face, skilful performance, and distinguished air, were the theme of universal admiration. Florinda could not detach her gaze from him as he flew round the circle, standing with easy negligence upon his horse's back; and she could scarcely restrain a cry of horror and alarm at the boldness of some of his feats. Vicenzo had early detected her presence in the theatre; and the expression of his eyes, when he passed before her box, made her conscious that he had done so.

Several days elapsed, during which Florinda and her aunt had more than once again visited the theatre. Vicenzo had become a subject of constant conversation between the superannuated coquette and her niece, the old lady indulging the most extravagant conjectures as to who he could be, for she had made up her mind he was now in an assumed character. Florinda spoke of him less, but thought of him more. Nor were her visits to the theatre her only opportunities of seeing him. Vicenzo, soon after his arrival at Marseilles, had excited his comrades' wonder and envy by appearing in the elegant costume of a private gentleman, and by taking frequent rides out of the town, at first accompanied by Fontaine, the stranger before mentioned, but afterwards more frequently alone. These rides were taken early in the morning, or by moonlight, on evenings when there was no performance. The horse-riders laughed at the airs the _Marchese_ gave himself, attributed his extravagance to the generosity of Fontaine, and twitted him with some secret intrigue, which he, however, did not admit, and they took little pains to penetrate. Had they followed his horse's hoof-track, they would have found that it led, sometimes by one road, sometimes by another, to the _bastide_ of Anthony Noell the magistrate. And after a few days they would have seen Vicenzo, his bridle over his arm, conversing earnestly, at a small postern-gate of the garden, with the charming _biondina_, whose bright countenance had greeted, like a good augury, their first approach to Marseilles.

At last a night came when this stolen conversation lasted longer than usual. Vicenzo was pressing, Florinda irresolute. Fontaine had accompanied his friend, and held his horse in an adjacent lane, whilst the lovers (for such they now were to be considered) sauntered in a shrubbery walk within the park.

"But why this secrecy?" said the young girl, leaning tenderly upon the arm of the handsome stroller. "Why not at once inform your friends you accede to their wishes, in renouncing your present derogatory pursuit? Why not present yourself to my father under your real name and title? He loves his daughter too tenderly to refuse his consent to a union on which her happiness depends."

"Dearest Florinda!" replied Vicenzo, "how could my ardent love abide the delays this course would entail? How can you so cruelly urge me thus to postpone my happiness? See you not how many obstacles to our union the step you advise would raise up? Your father, unwilling to part with his only daughter, (and such a daughter!) would assuredly object to our immediate marriage--would make your youth, my roving disposition, fifty other circumstances, pretexts for putting it off. And did we succeed in overruling these, there still would be a thousand tedious formalities to encounter, correspondence between your father and my family, who are proud as Lucifer of their ancient name and title, and would be wearisomely punctilious. By my plan, we would avoid all long-winded negotiations. Before daylight we are across the frontier; and before that excellent Madame Verlé has adjusted her smart cap, and buttered her first roll, my adored Florinda is Marchioness of Monteleane. A letter to papa explains all; then away to Florence, and in a month back to Marseilles, where you shall duly present me to my respected father-in-law, and I, as in humility bound, will drop upon my knees and crave pardon for running off with his treasure. Papa gives his benediction, and curtain drops, leaving all parties happy."

How often, with the feeble and irresolute, does a sorry jest pass for a good argument! As Vicenzo rattled on, his victim looked up in his face, and smiled at his soft and insidious words. Fascinated by silvery tones and gaudy scales, the woman, as of old, gave ear to the serpent.

"'Tis done," said the stroller, with a heartless smile, as he rode off with Fontaine, half an hour later--"done. A post-chaise at midnight. She brings her jewels--all the fortune she will ever bring me, I suppose. No chance of drawing anything from the old gentleman?"

"Not much," replied Fontaine drily.

"Well, I must have another thousand from you, besides expenses. And little enough too. Fifty yellow-boys for abandoning my place in the troop. I was never in better cue for the ring. They are going to Paris, and I should have joined Franconi."

"Oh!" said Fontaine, with a slight sneer, "a man of your abilities will never lack employment. But we have no time to lose, if you are to be back at midnight."

The two men spurred their horses, and galloped back to Marseilles.

A few minutes before twelve o'clock, a light posting-carriage was drawn up, by the road-side, about a hundred yards beyond Anthony Noell's garden. Vicenzo tapped thrice with his knuckles at the postern door, which opened gently, and a trembling female form emerged from the gloom of the shrubbery into the broad moonlight without. Through the veil covering her head and face, a tear might be seen glistening upon her cheek. She faltered, hesitated; her good genius whispered her to pause. But an evil spirit was at hand, luring her to destruction. Taking in one hand a casket, the real object of his base desires, and with the other arm encircling her waist, the seducer, murmuring soft flatteries in her ear, hurried Florinda down the slope leading to the road. Confused and fascinated, the poor weak girl had no power to resist. She reached the carriage, cast one look back at her father's house, whose white walls shone amidst the dark masses of foliage; the Florentine lifted her in, spoke a word to the postilion, and the vehicle dashed away in the direction of the Italian frontier.

So long as the carriage was in sight, Fontaine, who had accompanied Vicenzo, sat motionless upon his saddle, watching its career as it sped, like a large black insect, along the moonlit road. Then, when distance hid it from his view, he turned his horse's head and rode rapidly into Marseilles.

FOES AND FRIENDS.

Upon the second day after Florinda's elopement with her worthless suitor, the large coffee-room of the Hotel de France, at Montauban, was deserted, save by two guests. One of these was a man of about fifty-five, but older in appearance, whose thin gray hair and stooping figure, as well as the deep, anxious wrinkles and mournful expression of his countenance, told a tale of cares and troubles, borne with a rebellious rather than with a resigned spirit. The other occupant of the apartment, who sat at its opposite extremity, and was concealed, except upon near approach, by a sort of high projecting counter, was much younger, for his age could hardly exceed thirty years. A certain sober reserved expression, (hardly amounting to austerity,) frequently observable in Roman Catholic priests, and which sat becomingly enough upon his open intelligent countenance, betrayed his profession as surely as some slight clerical peculiarities of costume.

Suddenly a waiter entered the room, and approaching the old man with an air of great respect, informed him that a gentleman, seemingly just come off a journey, desired particularly to speak with him. The person addressed raised his eyes, whose melancholy expression corresponded with the furrows of his cheek, from the Paris newspaper he was reading, and, in a voice at once harsh and feeble, desired the stranger should be shown in. The order was obeyed; and a person entered, wrapped in a cloak, whose collar was turned up, concealing great part of his face. His countenance was further obscured by the vizard of a travelling-cap, from beneath which his long hair hung in disorder. Splashed and unshaven, he had all the appearance of having travelled far and fast. The gentleman whom he had asked to see rose from his seat on his approach, and looked at him keenly, even uneasily, but evidently without recognition. The waiter left the room. The stranger advanced to within three paces of him he sought, and stood still and silent, his features still masked by his cloak collar.

"Your business with me, sir?" said the old man quickly. "Whom have I the honour to address?"

"I am an old acquaintance, Mr Anthony Noell," said the traveller, in a sharp ironical tone, as he turned down his collar and displayed a pale countenance, distorted by a malignant smile. "An old debtor come to discharge the balance due. My errand to-day is to tell you that you are childless. Your daughter Florinda, your last remaining darling, has fled to Italy with a nameless vagabond and stroller."

At the very first word uttered by that voice, Noell had started and shuddered, as at the sudden pang of exquisite torture. Then his glassy eyes were horribly distended, his mouth opened, his whole face was convulsed, and with a yell like that of some savage denizen of the forest suddenly despoiled of its young, he sprang upon his enemy and seized him by the throat.

"Murderer!" he cried. "Help! help!"

The waiters rushed into the room, and with difficulty freed the stranger from the vice-like grasp of the old man, to whose feeble hands frenzy gave strength. When at last they were separated, Noell uttered one shriek of impotent fury and despair, and fell back senseless in the servants' arms. The stranger, who himself seemed weak and ailing, and who had sunk upon a chair, looked curiously into his antagonist's face.

"He is mad," said he, with horrible composure and complacency; "quite mad. Take him to his bed."

The waiters lifted up the insensible body, and carried it away. The stranger leaned his elbows upon a table, and, covering his face with his hands, remained for some minutes absorbed in thought. A slight noise made him look up. The priest stood opposite to him, and uttered his name.

"Dominique Lafon," he said, calmly but severely, "what is this thing you have done? But you need not tell me. I know much, and can conjecture the rest. Wretched man, know you not the word of God, to whom is all vengeance, and who repayeth in his own good time?"

Dominique seemed surprised at hearing his name pronounced by a stranger. He looked hard at the priest. And presently a name connected with days of happiness and innocence broke from the lips of the vindictive and pitiless man.

"Henry la Chapelle!"

It was indeed his former fellow-student, whom circumstances and disposition had induced to abandon the study of the law and enter the church. They had not met since Dominique departed from Paris to receive the last sigh of his dying mother.

Who shall trace the secret springs whence flow the fountains of the heart? For seven years Dominique Lafon had not wept. His captivity and many sufferings, his father's death, all had been borne with a bitter heart, but with dry eyes. But now, at sight of the comrade of his youth, some hidden chord, long entombed, suddenly vibrated. A sob burst from his bosom, and was succeeded by a gush of tears.

Henry la Chapelle looked sadly and kindly at his boyhood's friend.

"He who trusteth in himself," he said in low and gentle tones, "let him take heed, lest his feet fall into the snares they despise. Alas! Dominique, that you so soon forgot our last conversation! Alas! that you have laid this sin to your soul! But those tears give me hope: they are the early dew of penitence. Come, my friend, and seek comfort where alone it may be found. Verily there is joy in heaven over one repentant sinner, more than over many just men."

And the good priest drew his friend's arm through his, and led him from the room.

Dominique's exclamation was prophetic. When Anthony Noell rose from the bed of sickness to which grief consigned him, his intellects were gone. He never recovered them, but passed the rest of his life in helpless idiocy at his country-house, near Marseilles. There he was sedulously and tenderly watched by the unhappy Florinda, who, after a few miserable months passed with her reprobate seducer, was released from farther ill-usage by the death of Vicenzo, stabbed in Italy in a gambling brawl.

Not long after 1830, there died in a Sardinian convent, noted for its ascetic observances and for the piety of its inmates, a French monk, who went by the name of brother Ambrose. His death was considered to be accelerated by the strictness with which he followed the rigid rules of the order, from some of which his failing health would have justified deviation, and by the frequency and severity of his self-imposed penances. His body, feeble when first he entered the convent, was no match for his courageous spirit. In accordance with his dying request, his beads and breviary were sent to a vicar named la Chapelle, then resident at Lyons. When that excellent priest opened the book, he found the following words inscribed upon a blank page:--

"Blessed be the Lord, for in Him have I peace and hope!"

And Henry la Chapelle kneeled down, and breathed a prayer for the soul of his departed friend, Dominique Lafon.

PESTALOZZIANA.

"Etiam illud adjungo, sæpius ad laudem atque virtutem _naturam sine doctrinâ_, quam sine naturâ valuisse doctrinam."--CICERO, _pro. Arch._, 7.

"Que vous ai-je donc fait, O mes jeunes années! Pour m'avoir fui si vite, me croyant satisfait?"

VICTOR HUGO, _Odes_.

For the abnormal, and, we must think, somewhat faulty education of our later boyhood--a few random recollections of which we here purpose to lay before the reader--our obligations, _quantuloecunquoe sint_, are certainly due to prejudices which, though they have now become antiquated and obsolete, were in full force some thirty years ago, against the existing mode of education in England. Not that the public--_quâ_ public--were ever very far misled by the noisy declamations of the Whigs on this their favourite theme: people for the most part paid very little attention to the inuendoes of the peripatetic schoolmaster, so carefully primed and sent "abroad" to disabuse them; while not a few smiled to recognise under that imposing misnomer a small self-opinionated _clique_--free traders in everything else, but absolute monopolists here--who sought by its aid to palm off on society the _jocosa imago_ of their own crotchets, as though in sympathetic response to a sentiment wholly proceeding from itself. When much inflammatory "stuff" had been discharged against the walls of our venerable institutions, not only without setting Isis or Cam on fire, but plainly with some discomfitures to the belligerents engaged, from the opposite party, who returned the salute, John Bull began to open his eyes a little, and, as he opened them, to doubt whether, after all, the promises and _programmes_ he had been reading of a spic-and-span new order of everything, particularly of education, might not turn out a _flam_; and the authors of them, who certainly showed off to most advantage on _Edinburgh Review_ days, prove anything but the best qualified persons to make good their own vaticinations, or to bring in the new golden age they had announced. Still, the crusade against English public seminaries, though abortive in its principal design--that of exciting a _general_ defection from these institutions--was not quite barren of results. It was so far successful, at least, as completely to unsettle for a time the minds of not a few over-anxious parents, who, taught to regard with suspicion the credentials of every schoolmaster "at home," were beginning to make diligent inquiries for his successor among their neighbours "abroad." To all who were in this frame of mind, the first _couleur de rose_ announcements of Pestalozzi's establishment at Yverdun were news indeed! offering as they did--or at least seeming to offer--the complete solution of a problem which could scarcely have been entertained without much painful solicitude and anxiety. "Here, then," for so ran the accounts of several trustworthy eyewitnesses, educational amateurs, who had devoted a _whole morning_ to a most prying and probing dissection of the system within the walls of the chateau itself, and putting down all the results of their carefully conducted autopsy, "here was a school composed of boys gathered from all parts of the habitable globe, where each, by simply carrying over a little of his mother tongue, might, in a short time, become a youthful Mezzofante, and take his choice of many in return; a school which, wisely eschewing the routine service of books, suffered neither dictionary, gradus, grammar, nor spelling-book to be even seen on the premises; a school for morals, where, in educating the head, the right training of the heart was never for a moment neglected; a school for the progress of the mind, where much discernment, blending itself with kindness, fostered the first dawnings of the intellect, and carefully protected the feeble powers of memory from being overtaxed--where delighted Alma, in the progress of her development, might securely enjoy many privileges and immunities wholly denied to her at home--where even philosophy, stooping to conquer, had become _sportive_ the better to _persuade_; where the poet's vow was actually realised--the bodily health being as diligently looked after as that of the mind or the affections; lastly, where they found no fighting nor bullying, as at home, but agriculture and gymnastics instituted in their stead." To such encomiums on the school were added, and with more justice and truth, a commendation on old Pestalozzi himself, the real liberality of whose sentiments, and the overflowings of whose paternal love, could not, it was argued, and did not, fail to prove beneficial to all within the sphere of their influence. The weight of such supposed advantages turned the scale for not a few just entering into the pupillary state, and settled their future destination. Our own training, hitherto auspiciously enough carried on under the birchen discipline of Westminster, was _suddenly_ stopt; the last silver prize-penny had crossed our palm; the last quarterly half-crown tax for birch had been paid into the treasury of the school; we were called on to say an abrupt good-by to our friends, and to take a formal leave of Dr P----. That ceremony was not a pleasing one; and had the choice of a visit to Polyphemus in his cave, or to Dr P---- in his study, been offered to us, the first would certainly have had the preference; but as the case admitted neither evasion nor compromise, necessity gave us courage to bolt into the august presence of the formidable head-master, after lessons; and finding presently that we had somehow managed to emerge again safe from the dreaded interview, we invited several class-fellows to celebrate so remarkable a day at a tuck-shop in the vicinity of Dean's Yard. There, in unrestricted indulgence, did the party get through, there was no telling how many "lady's-fingers," tarts, and cheese-cakes, and drank--there was no counting the corks of empty ginger-beer bottles. When these delicacies had lost their relish--~kai hex heron hento~--the time was come for making a distribution of our personal effects. First went our bag of "taws" and "alleys," _pro bono publico_, in a general scramble, and then a Jew's-harp for whoever could twang it; and out or one pocket came a cricket-ball for A, and out of another a peg-top for B; and then there was a hockey-stick for M, and a red leathern satchel, with book-strap, for N, and three books a-piece to two class-chums, who ended with a toss-up for Virgil. And now, being fairly cleaned out, after reiterated good-bys and shakes of the hand given and taken at the shop door, we parted, (many of us never to meet again,) they to enjoy the remainder of a half-holiday in the hockey-court, while we walked home through the park, stopping in the midst of its ruminating cows, ourself to ruminate a little upon the future, and to wonder, unheard, what sort of a place Switzerland might be, and what sort of a man Pestalozzi!

These adieus to old Westminster took place on a Saturday; and the following Monday found us already _en route_ with our excellent father for the new settlement at Yverdun. The school to which we were then travelling, and the venerable man who presided over it, have both been long since defunct--_de mortuis nil nisi bonum_; and gratitude itself forbids that we should speak either of one or of the other with harshness or disrespect; of a place where we certainly spent some very happy, if not the happiest, days of life; of him who--rightly named the _father_ of the establishment--ever treated us, and all with whom he had to do, with a uniform gentleness and impartiality. To tell ill-natured tales out of school--of such a school, and after so long a period too--would indeed argue ill for _any one's_ charity, and accordingly _we_ do not intend to try it. But though the feeling of the _alumnus_ may not permit us to think unfavourably of the _Pensionat_ Pestalozzi, we shall not, on that account, suppress the mention of some occasional hardships and inconveniences experienced there, much less allow a word of reproach to escape our pen. The reader, with no such sympathies to restrain his curiosity, will no doubt expect, if not a detailed account, some outline or general ground-plan of the system, which, alas! we cannot give him; our endeavour to comprehend it as a digested _whole_--proceeding on certain data, aiming at certain ends, and pursuing them by certain means--has been entirely unsuccessful; and therefore, if pressed for more than we can tell, our answer must be, in the words of Cicero, _Deprecor ne me tanquam philosophum putet scholam sibi istam, explicaturum_.[14] But though unable to make out--if, indeed, there were any spirit of unity to be made out--in Pestalozzi's scheme, there were certain manifest imperfections in the composition of his plan of education--improprieties to which the longest familiarity could scarcely reconcile, nor the warmest partiality blind even the most determined partisan. In the first place--to state them at once, and have done with the unpleasing office of finding fault--it always struck us as a capital error, in a school where books were not allowed, to suffer almost the whole teaching of the classes to devolve upon some leading member of each; for what, in fact, could self-taught lads be expected to teach, unless it were to make a ring or a row--to fish, to whistle, or to skate? Of course, any graver kind of information, conveyed by an infant prodigy to his gaping pupils, must have lacked the necessary precision to make it available to them: first, because he would very seldom be sufficiently possessed of it himself; and secondly, because a boy's imperfect vocabulary and inexperience render him at all times a decidedly bad interpreter even of what he may really know. In place of proving real lights, these little Jack-o'-Lanterns of ours tended rather to perplex the path of the inquiring, and to impede their progress; and when an appeal was made to the master, as was sometimes done, the master--brought up in the same vague, bookless manner, and knowing nothing more _accurately_, though he might know _more_ than his puzzle-pated pupils--was very seldom able to give them a lift out of the quagmire, where they accordingly would stick, and flounder away till the end of the lesson. It was amusing to see how a boy, so soon as he got but a glimpse of a subject before the class, and could give but the ghost of a reason for what he was eager to prelect upon, became incontinent of the bright discovery, till all his companions had had the full benefit of it, with much that was irrelevant besides. The mischiefs which, it would occur to any one's mind, were likely to result in after life from such desultory habits of application in boyhood, actually did result to many of us a few years later at college. It was at once painful and difficult to indoctrinate indocile minds like ours into the accurate and severe habits of university discipline. On entering the lists for honours with other young aspirants, educated in the usual way at home, we were as a herd of unbroken colts pitted against well-trained racers: neither had yet run for the prize--in that single particular the cases were the same; but when degree and race day came, on whose side lay the odds? On theirs who had been left to try an untutored strength in scampering over a wild common, at will, for years, or with those who, by daily exercise in the _manège_ of a public school, had been trained to bear harness, and were, besides, well acquainted with the ground? _Another_ unquestionable error in the system was the absence of emulation, which, from some strange misconception and worse application of a text in St Paul, was proscribed as an unchristian principle; in lieu of which, we were to be brought--though we never _were_ brought, but that was the object aimed at--to love learning for its own sake, and to prove ourselves anxious of excelling without a motive, or to be _good for nothing_, as Hood has somewhere phrased it.

"Nunquam præponens se aliis, ITA facillime Sine invidia invenias laudem,"

says Terence, and it will be so where envy and conceit have supplanted emulation: yet are the feelings perfectly distinct; and we think it behoves all those who contend that every striving for the mastery is prohibited by the gospel, to show how _communism_ in inferiority, or _socialism_ in dulness, are likely to improve morals or mend society. Take from a schoolboy the motive of rewards and punishments, and you deprive him of that incentive by which your own conduct through life is regulated, and that by which God has thought fit, in the moral government of his rational creatures, to promote the practice of good works, and to discourage and dissuade from evil. Nor did that which sounds thus ominously in theory succeed in its application better than it sounded. In fact, nothing more unfortunate could have been devised for all parties, but especially for such as were by nature of a studious turn or of quicker parts than the rest; who, finding the ordinary stimulus to exertion thus removed, and none other to replace it, no longer cared to do well, (why should they, when they knew that their feeblest efforts would transcend their slow-paced comrades' best?) but, gradually abandoning themselves to the _vis inertiæ_ of sloth, incompetence, and bad example, did no more than they could help; repressing the spirit of rivalry and emulation, which had no issue in the school, to show it in some of those feats of agility or address, which the rigorous enactment of gymnastic exercises imposed on all alike, and in the performance of which we certainly _did_ pride ourselves, and eagerly sought to eclipse each other in exhibiting any natural or acquired superiority we might possess. The absence of all elementary books of instruction throughout the school, presented another barrier in the way of improvement still more formidable than even the _bétise_ of boy pedagogues, the want of sufficient stimulus to exertion, or the absurd respect paid sometimes to natural incapacity, and sometimes even to idleness. Those who had no rules to learn had of course none to apply when they wanted them; no masters could have adequately supplied this deficiency, and those of the chateau were certainly not the men to remedy the evil. As might therefore have been anticipated, the young Pestalozzian's ideas, whether innate or acquired, and on every subject, became sadly vague and confused, and his grammar of a piece with his knowledge. We would have been conspicuous, even amongst other boys, for what _seemed_ almost a studied impropriety of language; but it _was_, in fact, nothing more than the unavoidable result of natural indolence and inattention, uncoerced by proper discipline. The old man's slouching gait and ungraceful attire afforded but too apt an illustration of the intellectual _nonchalance_ of his pupils. As to the modern languages, of which so much has been said by those who knew so little of the matter, they were in parlance, to be sure--but how spoken? Alas! besides an open violation of all the concords, and a general disregard of syntax, they failed where one would have thought them least likely to fail, in correctness of idiom and accent. The French--this was the language of the school--abounded in conventional phrases, woven into its texture from various foreign sources, German, English, or Italian, and in scores of barbarous words--not to be found in the _Dictionnaire de l'Academie_, certainly, but quite current in the many-tongued vernacular of the chateau. Our pronunciation remained unequivocally John Bullish to the end--not one of us ever caught or thought of catching the right intonation; and, whether the fault originated merely in want of ear, or that we could not make the right use of our noses, it is quite certain that all of us had either no accent or a wrong one. The German was as bad as the French: it was a Swiss, not a German, abounding in _patois_ phrases and provincialisms--in short, a most hybrid affair, to say nothing of its being as much over-guttural as the last was sub-nasal. With regard to Spanish and Italian, as the English did not consort with either of these nations, all they ever acquired of their languages were such oaths and _mauvais mots_ as parrots pick up from sailors aboard ship, which they repeated with all the innocence of parrots. Thus, then, the opportunities offered for the acquisition of modern languages were plainly defective; and when it is further considered that the dead languages remained untaught--nay, were literally unknown, except to a small section of the school, for whom a kind Providence had sent a valued friend and preceptor in Dr M----, (whose neat Greek characters were stared at as cabalistical by the other masters of the _Pensionat_,)--and finally, that our very English became at last defiled and corrupted, by the introduction of a variety of foreign idioms, it will be seen that for any advantage likely to accrue from the polyglot character of the institution, the Tower of Babel would, in fact, have furnished every whit as good a school for languages as did our turreted chateau. And now, if candour has compelled this notice of some, it must be admitted, serious blemishes in the system of old Pestalozzi, where is the academy without them?

"Whoever hopes a faultless school to see, Hopes what ne'er was, nor is, nor is to be."

Meanwhile the Swiss Pension was not without solid advantages, and might justly lay claim to some regard, if not as a school for learning, at least as a _moral_ school; its inmates for the most part spoke truth, respected property, eschewed mischief, were neither puppies, nor bullies, nor talebearers. There were, of course, exceptions to all this, but then they were _exceptions_; nor was the number at any time sufficient to invalidate the general rule, or to corrupt the better principle. Perhaps a ten hours' daily attendance in class, coarse spare diet, hardy and somewhat severe training, may be considered by the reader as offering some explanation of our general propriety of behaviour. It may be so; but we are by no means willing to admit, that the really high moral tone of the school depended either upon gymnastic exercises or short commons, nor yet arose from the want of facilities for getting into scrapes, for here, as elsewhere, where there is the will, there is ever a way. We believe it to have originated from another source--in a word, from the encouragement held out to the study of natural history, and the eagerness with which that study was taken up and pursued by the school in consequence. Though Pestalozzi might not succeed in making his disciples scholars, he certainly succeeded in making many among them _naturalists_; and of the two--let us ask it without offence--whether is he the happier lad (to say nothing of the future man) who can fabricate faultless pentameters and immaculate iambics to order; or he who, already absorbed in scanning the wonders of creation, seeks with unflagging diligence and zeal to know more and more of the visible works of the great _Poet of Nature_? "Sæpius sane ad laudem atque virtutem naturam sine doctrinâ, quam sine naturâ valuisse doctrinam;" which words being Cicero's, deny them, sir, if you please.

The Pension, during the period of our sojourn at Yverdun, contained about a hundred and eighty élèves, natives of every European and of some Oriental states, whose primitive mode of distribution into classes, according to age and acquirements, during school hours, was completely changed in playtime, when the boys, finding it easier to speak their own tongue than to acquire a new one, divided themselves into separate groups according to their respective nations. The English would occasionally admit a German or a Prussian to their coterie; but that was a favour seldom conferred upon any other foreigner: for the Spaniards, who were certainly the least well-conducted of the whole community, did not deserve it: among them were to be found the litigious, the mischief-makers, the quarrellers, and--for, as has been hinted, we were not all honest--the exceptional thieves. The Italians we could never make out, nor they us: we had no sympathy with Pole or Greek; the Swiss we positively did not like, and the French just as positively did not like us; so how could it be otherwise? The ushers, for the most part trained up in the school, were an obliging set of men, with little refinement, less pretension, and wholly without learning. A distich from Crabbe describes them perfectly--

"Men who, 'mid noise and dirt, and play and prate, Could calmly mend the pen, and wash the slate."

Punishments were rare; indeed, flogging was absolutely prohibited; and the setting an imposition would have been equally against the _genius loci_, had lesson-books existed out of which to hear it afterwards. A short imprisonment in an unfurnished room--a not very formidable black-hole--with the loss of a _goutte_, now and then, and at very long intervals, formed the mild summary of the penal "code Pestalozzi."

It was Saturday, and a half holiday, when we arrived at Yverdun, and oh the confusion of tongues which there prevailed! All Bedlam and Parnassus let loose to rave together, could not have come up to that diapason of discords with which the high corridors were ringing, as, passing through the throng, we were conducted to the venerable head of the establishment in his private apartments beyond. In this gallery of mixed portraits might be seen long-haired, highborn, and high-cheek-boned Germans; a scantling of French _gamins_ much better dressed; some dark-eyed Italians; Greeks in most foreign attire; here and there a fair ingenuous Russian face; several swart sinister-looking Spaniards, models only for their own Carravagio; some dirty specimens of the universal Pole; one or two unmistakeable English, ready to shake hands with a compatriot; and Swiss from every canton of the Helvetic confederacy. To this promiscuous multitude we were shortly introduced, the kind old man himself taking us by the hand, and acting as master of the ceremonies. When the whole school had crowded round to stare at the new importation, "Here," said he, "are four English boys come from their distant home, to be naturalised in this establishment, and made members of our family. Boys, receive them kindly, and remember they are henceforth your brothers." A shout from the crowd proclaiming its ready assent and cordial participation in the adoption, nothing remained but to shake hands _à l'Anglaise_, and to fraternise without loss of time. The next day being Sunday, our skulls were craniologically studied by Herr Schmidt, the head usher; and whatever various bumps or depressions phrenology might have discovered thereon were all duly registered in a large book. After this examination was concluded, a week's furlough was allowed, in order that Herr Schmidt might have an opportunity afforded him of seeing how far our real character squared with phrenological observation and measurement, entering this also into the same ledger as a note. What a contrast were we unavoidably drawing all this time between Yverdun and Westminster, and how enjoyable was the change to us! The reader will please to imagine as well as he can, the sensations of a lately pent up chrysalis, on first finding himself a butterfly, or the not less agreeable surprise of some newly metamorphosed tadpole, when, leaving his associates in the mud and green slime, he floats at liberty on the surface of the pool, endowed with lungs and a voice,--if he would at all enter into the exultation of our feelings on changing the penitential air of Millbank for the fresh mountain breezes of the Pays de Vaud. It seemed as if we had--nay, we had actually entered upon a new existence, so thoroughly had all the elements of the old been altered and improved. If we looked back, and compared past and present experiences, there, at the wrong end of the mental telescope, stood that small dingy house, in that little mis-yclept Great Smith Street, with its tiny cocoon of a bedroom, whilom our close and airless prison; here, at the other end, and in immediate contact with the eye, a noble chateau, full of roomy rooms, enough and to spare. Another retrospective peep, and _there_ was Tothill Fields, and its seedy cricket ground; and _here_, again, a level equally perfect, but carpeted with fine turf, and extending to the margin of a broad living lake, instead of terminating in a nauseous duck-pond; while the cold clammy cloisters adjoining Dean's Yard were not less favourably replaced by a large open airy play-ground, intersected by two clear trout-streams--and a sky as unlike that above Bird-Cage Walk as the interposed atmosphere was different; whilst, in place of the startling, discordant _Keleusmata_ of bargees, joined to the creaking, stunning noise of commerce in a great city, few out-of-door sounds to meet our ear, and these few, with the exception of our own, all quiet, pastoral, and soothing, such as, later in life, make

"Silence in the heart For thought to do her part,"

and which are not without their charm even to him "who whistles as he goes for _want_ of thought." No wonder, then, if Yverdun seemed Paradisaical in its landscapes. Nor was this all. If the views outside were charming, our domestic and social relations within doors were not less pleasing. At first, the unwelcome vision of the _late_ head-master would sometimes haunt us, clad in his flowing black D.D. robes--"tristis severitas in vultu, atque in verbis fides," looking as if he intended to flog, and his words never belying his looks. That terrible Olympian arm, raised and ready to strike, was again shadowed forth to view; while we could almost fancy ourselves once more at that judicial table, one of twenty boys who were to draw lots for a "hander." How soothingly, then, came the pleasing consciousness, breaking our reverie, that a very different person was _now_ our head-master--a most indulgent old man whom we should meet ere long, with hands uplifted, indeed, but only for the purpose of clutching us tight while he inflicted a salute on both cheeks, and pronounced his affectionate _guten morgen, liebes kind_, as he hastened on to bestow the like fatherly greeting upon every pupil in turn.

THE DORMITORY.

The sleeping apartments at the chateau occupied three of the four sides of its inner quadrangle, and consisted of as many long rooms, each with a double row of windows; whereof one looked into the aforesaid quadrangle, while the opposite rows commanded, severally, views of the garden, the open country, and the Grande Place of the town. They were accommodated with sixty uncurtained stump bedsteads, fifty-nine of which afforded _gîte_ to a like number of boys; and one, in no respect superior to the rest, was destined to receive the athletic form of Herr Gottlieb, son-in-law to Vater Pestalozzi, to whose particular charge we were consigned during the hours of the night. These bedrooms, being as lofty as they were long, broad, and over-furnished with windows, were always ventilated; but the in-draught of air, which was sufficient to keep them cool during the hottest day in summer, rendered them cold, and sometimes _very_ cold, in the winter. In that season, accordingly, especially when the _bise_ blew, and hail and sleet were pattering against the casements, the compulsory rising to class by candlelight was an ungenial and unwelcome process; for which, however, there being no remedy, the next best thing was to take it as coolly, we were going to say--_that of course_--but, as patiently as might be. The disagreeable anticipation of the _réveil_ was frequently enough to scare away sleep from our eyes a full hour before the command to jump out of bed was actually issued. On such occasions we would lie awake, and, as the time approached, begin to draw in our own breath, furtively listening, not without trepidation, to the loud nose of a distant comrade, lest its fitful stertor should startle another pair of nostrils, on whose repose that of the whole dormitory depended. Let Æolus and his crew make what tumult they liked inside or outside the castle--_they_ disturbed nobody's dreams--_they_ never murdered sleep. Let them pipe and whistle through every keyhole and crevice of the vast _enceinte_ of the building--sigh and moan as they would in their various imprisonments of attic or corridor; howl wildly round the great tower, or even threaten a forcible entry at the windows, nobody's ears were scared into unwelcome consciousness by sounds so familiar to them all. It was the expectation of a blast louder even than theirs that would keep our eyes open--a blast about to issue from the bed of Herr Gottlieb, and thundering enough, when it issued, to startle the very god of winds himself! Often, as the dreaded six A.M. drew nigh, when the third quarter past five had, ten minutes since, come with a sough and a rattle against the casements, and still Gottlieb slept on, we would take courage, and begin to dream with our eyes open, that his slumbers might be prolonged a little; his face, turned upwards, looked so calm, the eyes so resolutely closed--every feature so perfectly at rest. It could not be more than five minutes to six--might not he who had slept _so long_, for once _over_sleep himself? NEVER! However placid those slumbers might be, they invariably forsook our "unwearied one" just as the clock was on the point of striking six. To judge by the rapid twitchings--they almost seemed galvanic--first of the muscles round the mouth, then of the nose and eyes, it appeared as though some ill-omened dream, at that very nick of time, was sent periodically, on purpose to awaken him; and, if so, it certainly never returned ~apraktos~. Gottlieb would instantly set to rubbing his eyes, and as the hour struck, spring up wide awake in his shirt sleeves--thus destroying every lingering, and, as it always turned out, ill-founded hope of a longer snooze. Presently we beheld him jump into his small-clothes, and, when sufficiently attired to be seen, unlimber his tongue, and pour forth a rattling broadside--_Auf, kinder! schwind!_--with such precision of delivery, too, that few sleepers could turn a deaf ear to it. But, lest any one should still lurk under his warm coverlet out of earshot, at the further end of the room, another and a shriller summons to the same effect once more shakes the walls and windows of the dormitory. Then every boy knew right well that the last moment for repose was past, and that he must at once turn out shivering from his bed, and dress as fast as possible; and it was really surprising to witness how rapidly all could huddle on their clothes under certain conditions of the atmosphere!

In less than five minutes the whole school was dressed, and Gottlieb, in his sounding shoes, having urged the dilatory with another admonitory _schwind, schwind!_ has departed, key and candle in hand, to arouse the remaining sleepers, by ringing the "Great Tom" of the chateau. So cold and cheerless was this matutinal summons, that occasional attempts were made to evade it by simulated headach, or, without being quite so specific, on the plea of general indisposition, though it was well known beforehand what the result would be. Herr Gottlieb, in such a case, would presently appear at the bedside of the delinquent patient, with very little compassion in his countenance, and, in a business tone, proceed to inquire from him, Why not up?--and on receiving for reply, in a melancholy voice, that the would-be invalid was _sehr krank_, would instantly pass the word for the doctor to be summoned. That doctor--we knew him well, and every truant knew--was a quondam French army surgeon--a sworn disciple of the Broussais school, whose heroic remedies at the chateau resolved themselves into one of two--_i. e._, a starve or a vomit, alternately administered, according as the idiosyncracy of the patient, or as this or that symptom turned the scale, now in favour of storming the stomach, now of starving it into capitulation. Just as the welcome hot mess of bread and milk was about to be served to the rest, this dapper little Sangrado would make his appearance, feel the pulse, inspect the tongue, ask a few questions, and finding, generally, indications of what he would term _une légère gastrite_, recommend _diète absolue_; then prescribing a mawkish _tisane_, composed of any garden herbs at hand, and pocketing lancets and stethoscope, would leave the patient to recover _sans calomel_--a mode of treatment to which, he would tell us, we should certainly have been subjected in our own country. Meanwhile, the superiority of _his_ plan of treatment was unquestionable. On the very next morning, when he called to visit his _cher petit malade_, an empty bed said quite plainly, "Very well, I thank you, sir, and in class." But these feignings were comparatively of rare occurrence; in general, all rose, dressed, and descended together, just as the alarum-bell had ceased to sound; and in less than two minutes more all were assembled in their respective class-rooms. The rats and mice, which had had the run of these during the night, would be still in occupation when we entered; and such was the audacity of these vermin that none cared _alone_ to be the first to plant a candle on his desk. But, by entering _en masse_, we easily routed the _Rodentia_, whose forces were driven to seek shelter behind the wainscot, where they would scuffle, and gnaw, and scratch, before they finally withdrew, and left us with blue fingers and chattering teeth to study to make the best of it. Uncomfortable enough was the effort for the first ten minutes of the session; but by degrees the hopes of a possible warming of hands upon the surface of the Dutch stoves after class, if they should have been lighted in time, and at any rate the certainty of a hot breakfast, were entertained, and brought their consolation; besides which, the being up in time to welcome in the dawn of the dullest day, while health and liberty are ours, is a pleasure in itself. There was no exception to it here; for when the darkness, becoming every moment less and less dark, had at length given way, and melted into a gray gloaming, we would rejoice, even before it appeared, at the approach of a new day. That approach was soon further heralded by the fitful notes of small day-birds chirping under the leaves, and anon by their sudden dashings against the windows, in the direction of the lights not yet extinguished in the class-rooms. Presently the pigs were heard rejoicing and contending over their fresh wash; then the old horse and the shaggy little donkey in the stable adjoining the styes, knowing by this stir that their feed was coming, snorted and brayed at the pleasant prospect. The cocks had by this time roused their sleepy sultanas, who came creeping from under the barn-door to meet their lords on the dunghill. Our peacock, to satisfy himself that he had not taken cold during the night, would scream to the utmost pitch of a most discordant voice; then the prescient goats would bleat from the cabins, and plaintively remind us that, till their door is unpadlocked, they can get no prog; then the punctual magpie, and his friend the jay, having hopped all down the corridor, would be heard screaming for broken victuals at the school-room door, till our dismissal bell, finding so many other tongues loosened, at length wags its own, and then for the next hour and a half all are free to follow their own devices. Breakfast shortly follows; but, alas! another cold ceremony must be undergone first. A preliminary visit to pump court, and a thorough ablution of face and hands, is indispensable to those who would become successful candidates for that long-anticipated meal. This bleaching process, at an icy temperature, was never agreeable; but when the pipes happened to be frozen--a contingency by no means unfrequent--and the snow in the yard must be substituted for the water which was not in the pump, it proved a difficult and sometimes a painful business; especially as there was always some uncertainty afterwards, whether the chilblained paws would pass muster before the inspector-general commissioned to examine them--who, utterly reckless as to how the boys might "be off for soap," and incredulous of what they would fain attribute to the adust complexion of their skin, would require to have that assertion tested by a further experiment at the "pump head."

THE REFECTORY.

"Forbear to scoff at woes you cannot feel, Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal."--CRABBE.

The dietary tables at the chateau, conspicuous alike for the paucity and simplicity of the articles registered therein, are easily recalled to mind. The fare they exhibited was certainly _coarse_--though, by a euphemism, it might have been termed merely _plain_--and spare withal. The breakfast would consist of milk and water--the first aqueous enough without dilution, being the produce of certain ill-favoured, and, as we afterwards tasted their flesh, we may add ill-flavoured kine, whose impoverished lacteals could furnish out of their sorry fodder no better supplies. It was London sky-blue, in short, but not of the Alderney dairy, which was made to serve our turn at Yverdun. This milk, at seven in summer, and at half-past seven in winter, was transferred boiling, and as yet unadulterated, into earthenware mixers, which had been previously half-filled with hot water from a neighbouring kettle. In this half-and-half state it was baled out for the assembled school into a series of pewter platters, ranged along the sides of three bare deal boards, some thirty feet long by two wide, and mounted on tressels, which served us for tables. The ministering damsels were two great German Fraus, rejoicing severally in the pleasing names of Gretchen and Bessie. When Frau Gretchen, standing behind each boy, had dropt her allowance of milk over his right shoulder--during which process there was generally a mighty clatter for full measure and fair play--the other Frau was slicing off her slices of bread from a brown loaf a yard long, which she carried under her arm, and slashed clean through with wonderful precision and address. It was now for all those who had saved pocket-money for _menus-plaisirs_ to produce their _cornets_ of cinnamon or sugar, sprinkle a little into the milk, and then fall to sipping and munching with increased zest and satisfaction. So dry and chaffy was our _pain de ménage_ that none ventured to soak it entire, or at once, but would cut it into _frustrums_, and retain liquid enough to wash down the boluses separately. In a few minutes every plate was completely cleaned out and polished; and the cats, that generally entered the room as we left it, seldom found a drop with which they might moisten their tongues, or remove from cheeks and whiskers the red stains of murdered mice on which they had been breaking their fast in the great tower. So much for the earliest meal of the day, which was to carry us through five hours, if not of laborious mental study, at least of the incarceration of our bodies in class, which was equally irksome to them as if our minds had been hard at work. These five hours terminated, slates were once more insalivated and put by clean, and the hungry garrison began to look forward to the pleasures of the noon-day repast. The same bell that had been calling so often to class would now give premonitory notice of dinner, but in a greatly changed tone. In place of the shrill snappish key in which it had all the morning jerked out each short unwelcome summons from lesson to lesson, as if fearful of ringing one note beyond the prescribed minute, it now would take time, vibrate far and wide in its cage, give full scope to its tongue, and appear, from the loud increasing swell of its prolonged _oyez_, to announce the message of good cheer like a herald conscious and proud of his commission. Ding-dong!--come along! Dinner's dishing!--ding-dong! _Da capo_ and _encore_! Then, starting up from every school-room form throughout the chateau, the noisy boys rushed pell-mell, opened all the doors, and, like emergent bees in quest of honey, began coursing up and down right busily between the _salle-à-manger_ and the kitchen--snuffing the various aromas as they escaped from the latter into the passage, and inferring from the amount of exhaled fragrance the actual progress of the preparations for eating. Occasionally some "sly Tom" would peep into the kitchen, while the Fraus were too busy to notice him, and watch the great cauldron that had been milked dry of its stores in the morning, now discharging its aqueous contents of a much-attenuated _bouillon_--the surface covered with lumps of swimming bread, thickened throughout with a hydrate of potatoes, and coloured with coarse insipid carrots, which certainly gave it a savoury appearance. It was not good broth--far from it, for it was both _sub_-greasy and _super_-salted; but then it was hot, it was thick, and there was an abundant supply. It used to gush, as we have said, from the great stop-cock of the cauldron, steaming and sputtering, into eight enormous tureens. The shreds of beef, together with whatever other solids remained behind after the fluid had been drawn off, were next fished up from the abyss with long ladles, and plumped into the decanted liquor. The young _gastronome_ who might have beheld these proceedings would wait till the lid was taken off the _sauerkraut_; and then, the odour becoming overpoweringly appetising, he would run, as by irresistible instinct, into the dining-room, where most of the boys were already assembled, each with a ration of brown bread in his hand, and ready for the Fraus, who were speedily about to enter. The dinner was noisy and _ungenteel_ in the extreme--how could it be otherwise? _ventre affamé n'a point d'oreilles._ Hardly was the German grace concluded, and the covers removed, when that bone of contention, the marrow bone, was caught up by some big boy near the top of the table, and became the signal for a general row. All in his neighbourhood would call out second, third, fourth, fifth, &c., for said bone; and thus it would travel from plate to plate, yielding its contents freely to the two or three first applicants, but wholly inadequate--unless it could have resolved itself altogether into marrow--to meet all the demands made upon its stores. Then arose angry words of contention, which waxed hot as the marrow waxed cold, every candidate being equally vociferous in maintaining the priority of his particular claim. Earnest appeals in German, French, Spanish, English, &c., were bandied from one to the other in consequence, as to who had really said _après toi_ first! At last the "dry bone" was found undeserving of further contention; and, ceasing to drop any more fatness upon any boy's bread, the competition for it was dropt too. When now we had half-filled our stomachs with a soup which few physicians would have withheld from their fever patients on the score of its strength, we threw in a sufficiency of bread and _sauerkraut_ to absorb it; and, after the post-prandial German grace had been pronounced, the boys left the table, generally with a saved crust in their pockets, to repair to the garden and filch--if it was filching--an alliaceous dessert from the beds, which they washed in the clear stream, and added, without fear of indigestion, to the meal just concluded within the chateau. Most of us throve upon this Spartan diet; but some delicate boys, unendowed with the ostrich power of assimilation usual at that period--for boys, like ostriches, can digest almost anything--became deranged in their chylopoietics, and continued to feel its ill effects in mesenteric and other chronic ailments for years afterwards. An hour was given for stomachs to do their work, before we reassembled to ours in the class-room. At half-past four precisely, a _gouté_, was served out, which consisted of a whacking slice of bread, and either a repetition of the morning's milk and water, or _café au lait_, (without sugar "_bien entendu_,") or twenty-five walnuts, or a couple of ounces of strong-tasted _gruyère_, or a plateful of _schnitz_ (cuttings of dried apples, pears, and plums). We might choose any one of these several dainties we liked, but not more. Some dangerous characters--not to be imitated--would occasionally, while young Frau Schmidt stood doling out the supplies from her cupboard among the assembled throng, make the disingenuous attempt to obtain cheese with one hand and _schnitz_ with the other. But the artifice, we are happy to say, seldom succeeded; for that vigilant lady, quick-eyed and active, and who, of all things, hated to be imposed upon, would turn round upon the false claimant, and bid him hold up both his hands at once--which he, ambidexter as he was, durst not do, and thus he was exposed to the laughter and jeers of the rest. At nine, the bell sounded a feeble call to a _soi-disant_ supper; but few of us cared for a basin of _tisane_ under the name of lentil soup--or a pappy potato, salted in the boiling--and soon after we all repaired to our bedrooms--made a noise for a short time, then undressed, and were speedily asleep under our _duvets_, and as sound, if not as musical, as tops.

Our common fare, as the reader has now seen, was sorry enough; but we had our Carnival and gala days as well as our Lent. Vater Pestalozzi's birthday, in summer, and the first day of the new year, were the most conspicuous. On each of these occasions we enjoyed a whole week's holiday; and as these were also the periods for slaughtering the pigs, we fed (twice a-year for a whole week!) upon black puddings and pork _à discretion_, qualified with a sauce of beetroot and vinegar, and washed down with a fluid really like small-beer.

CLASSES.

The school-rooms, which lay immediately under the dormitories on the ground-floor, consisted of a number of detached chambers, each of which issued upon a corridor. They were airy--there was plenty of air at Yverdun--and lofty as became so venerable a building; but they were unswept, unscrubbed, peeled of their paint, and, owing to the little light that could find its way through two very small windows punched out of the fortress walls, presented, save at mid-day, or as the declining sun illumined momentarily the dark recess, as comfortless a set of interiors as you could well see. It required, indeed, all the elasticity of youth to bear many hours' daily incarceration in such black-holes, without participating in the pervading gloom. Such dismal domiciles were only fit resorts for the myoptic bat, who would occasionally visit them from the old tower; for the twilight horde of cockroaches, which swarmed along the floor, or the eight-eyed spiders who colonised the ceiling. The tender sight, too, of a patient just recovering from ophthalmia would here have required no factitious or deeper shade--but merits like these only rendered them as ungenial as possible to the physiology and feelings of their youthful occupants. If these apartments looked gloomy in their dilapidations and want of sun, the sombre effect was much heightened by the absence of the ordinary tables and chairs, and whatever else is necessary to give a room a habitable appearance. Had an appraiser been commissioned to make out a complete list of the furniture and the fixtures together, a mere glance had sufficed for the inventory. In vain would his practised eye have wandered in quest of themes for golden sentences, printed in such uncial characters that all who run may read; in vain for the high-hung well-backed chart, or for any pleasing pictorial souvenirs of Æsop or the Ark--neither these nor the long "coloured Stream of Time," nor formal but useful views in perspective, adorned our sorry walls. No old mahogany case clicked in a corner, beating time for the class, and the hour up-striking loud that it should not be defrauded of its dues. No glazed globe, gliding round on easy axis, spun under its brassy equator to the antipodes on its sides being touched. No bright zodiac was there to exhibit its cabalistic figures in pleasing arabesques. In place of these and other well-known objects, here stood a line of dirty, much-inked desks, with an equally dirty row of attendant forms subjacent alongside. There was a scantling--it seldom exceeded a leash--of rickety rush-bottom chairs distributed at long intervals along the walls; a coal-black slate, pegged high on its wooden horse; a keyless cupboard, containing the various implements of learning, a dirty duster, a pewter plate with cretaceous deposits, a slop-basin and a ragged sponge;--and then, unless he had included the cobwebs of the ceiling, (not usually reckoned up in the furniture of a room,) no other movables remained. One conspicuous fixture, however, there was, a gigantic Dutch stove. This lumbering parallelogram, faggot-fed from the corridor behind, projected several feet into the room, and shone bright in the glaze of earthenware emblazonments. Around it we would sometimes congregate in the intervals of class: in winter to toast our hands and hind quarters, as we pressed against the heated tiles, with more or less vigour according to the fervency of the central fire; and in summer either to tell stories, or to con over the pictorial History of the Bible, which adorned its frontispiece and sides. We cannot say that every square exactly squared with even our schoolboy notions of propriety in its mode of teaching religious subjects; there was a Dutch quaintness in the illustrations, which would sometimes force a smile from its simplicity, at others shock, from its apparent want of decorum and reverence. Preeminent of course among the gems from Genesis, Adam and Eve, safe in innocency and "_naked_ truth," here walked unscathed amidst a menagerie of wild beasts--_there_, dressed in the costume of their fall, they quitted Eden, and left it in possession of tigers, bears, and crocodiles. Hard by on a smaller tile, that brawny "knave of clubs," Cain, battered down his brother at the altar; then followed a long picture-gallery of the acts of the patriarchs, and another equally long of the acts of the apostles. But, queer as many of these misconceptions might seem, they were nothing to the strange attempts made at dramatising the _parables_ of the New Testament--_e. g._ a stout man, staggering under the weight of an enormous beam which grows out of one eye, employs his fingers, assisted by the other, to pick out a black speck from the cornea of his neighbour. Here, an unclean spirit, as black as any sweep, issues from the mouth of his victim, with wings and a tail! Here again, the good Samaritan, turbaned like a Turk, is bent over the waylaid traveller, and pours wine and oil into his wounds from the mouths of two Florence flasks; there, the grain of mustard-seed, become a tree, sheltering already a large aviary in its boughs; the woman, dancing a hornpipe with the Dutch broom, has swept her house, and lo! the piece of silver that was lost in her hand; a servant, who is digging a hole in order to hide his lord's talent under a tree, is overlooked by a magpie and two crows, who are attentive witnesses of the deposit:--and many others too numerous to mention. So much for the empty school-room, but what's a hive without bees, or a school-room without boys? The reader who has peeped into it untenanted, shall now, if he pleases, be introduced, _dum fervet opus_ full and alive. Should he not be able to trace out very clearly the system at work, he will at least be no worse off than the bee-fancier, who hears indeed the buzzing, and sees a flux and reflux current of his winged confectioners entering in and passing out, but cannot investigate the detail of their labours any farther. In the Yverdun, as in the hymenopterus apiary, we swarmed, we buzzed, dispersed, reassembled at the sound of the bell, flocked in and flocked out, all the day long; exhibited much restlessness and activity, evincing that something was going on, but _what_, it would have been hard to determine. Here the comparison must drop. Bees buzz to some purpose; they know what they are about; they help one another; they work orderly and to one end,--

"How skilfully they build the cell, How neat they spread the wax, And labour hard to store it well With the sweet food," &c. &c.

In none of these particulars did we resemble the "busy bee." This being admitted, our object in offering a few words upon the course of study pursued at the chateau is not with any idea of enlightening the reader as to anything really acquired during the long ten hours' session of each day; but rather to show how ten hours' imprisonment may be inflicted upon the body for the supposed advantage of the mind, and yet be consumed in "profitless labour, and diligence which maketh not rich;" to prove, by an exhibition of their opposites, that method and discipline are indispensable in tuition, and (if he will accept our "pathemata" for his "mathemata" and guides in the bringing up of his sons) to convince him that education, like scripture, admits not of private interpretation. Those who refuse to adopt the Catholic views of the age, and the general sense of the society in which they live, must blame themselves if they find the experiment of foreign schools a failure, and that they have sent their children "farther to fare worse."

And now to proceed to the geography class, which was the first after breakfast, and began at half-past eight. As the summons-bell sounded, the boys came rushing and tumbling in, and ere a minute had elapsed were swarming over, and settling upon, the high reading-desks: the master, already at his work, was chalking out the business of the hour; and as this took some little time to accomplish, the youngsters, not to sit unemployed, would be assiduously engaged in impressing sundry animal forms--among which the donkey was a favourite--cut out in cloth, and well powdered, upon one another's backs. When Herr G---- had finished his chalkings, and was gone to the corner of the room for his show-perch, a skeleton map of Europe might be seen, by those who chose to look that way, covering the slate: this, however, was what the majority of the assembly never dreamt of, or only dreamt they were doing. The class generally--though ready when called upon to give the efficient support of their tongues--kept their eyes to gape elsewhere, and, like Solomon's fool, had them where they had no business to be. The map, too often repeated to attract from its novelty, had no claim to respect on other grounds. It was one of a class accurately designated by that careful geographer, old Homer, as "~maps ou Kata Kosmon~." Coarse and clumsy, however, as it necessarily would be, it might still have proved of service had the boys been the draughtsmen. As it was, the following mechanically Herr G----'s wand to join in the general chorus of the last census of a city, the perpendicular altitude of a mountain, or the length and breadth of a lake, could obviously convey no useful instruction to any one. But, useful or otherwise, such was our _regime_,--to set one of from fifty to sixty lads, day after day, week after week, repeating facts and figures notorious to every little reader of penny guides to science, till all had the last statistical returns at their tongue's tip; and knew, when all was done, as much of what geography really meant as on the day of their first matriculation. Small wonder, then, if some should later have foresworn this study, and been revolted at the bare sight of a map! All our recollections of _map_, unlike those of _personal_ travel, are sufficiently distasteful. Often have we yawned wearily over them at Yverdun, when our eyes were demanded to follow the titubations of Herr G----'s magic wand, which, in its uncertain route, would skip from Europe to Africa and back again--_qui modo Thebas modo me ponit Athenis_; and our dislike to them since has increased amazingly. Does the reader care to be told the reason of this? Let him--in order to obtain the pragmatic sanction of some stiff-necked examiner--have to "get up" all the anastomosing routes of St Paul's several journeyings; have to follow those rebellious Israelites in all their wanderings through the desert; to draw the line round them when in Palestine; going from Dan to Beersheba, and "meting out the valley of Succoth;" or, finally, have to cover a large sheet of foolscap with a progressive survey of the spread of Christianity during the three first centuries--and he will easily enter into our feelings. To return to the class-room: The geographical lesson, though of daily infliction, was accurately circumscribed in its duration. Old Time kept a sharp look-out over his blooming daughters, and never suffered one hour to tread upon the heels or trench upon the province of a sister hour. Sixty minutes to all, and not an extra minute to any, was the old gentleman's impartial rule; and he took care to see it was strictly adhered to. As the clock struck ten, geography was shoved aside by the muse of mathematics. A sea of dirty water had washed out in a twinkling all traces of the continent of Europe, and the palimpsest slate presented a clean face for whatever figures might next be traced upon it.

The hour for Euclidising was arrived, and anon the black parallelogram was intersected with numerous triangles of the Isosceles and Scalene pattern; but, notwithstanding this promising _début_, we did not make much quicker progress here than in the previous lesson. How should we, who had not only the difficulties inseparable from the subject to cope with, but a much more formidable difficulty--viz. the obstruction which we opposed to each other's advance, by the plan, so unwisely adopted, of making all the class do the same thing, that they might keep pace together. It is a polite piece of folly enough for a whole party to be kept waiting dinner by a lounging guest, who chooses to ride in the park when he ought to be at his toilet; but we were the victims of a much greater absurdity, who lost what might have proved an hour of profitable work, out of tenderness to some incorrigibly idle or Boeotian boy, who could not get over the Pons Asinorum, (every proposition was a _pons_ to some _asinus_ or other,) and so made those who were over stand still, or come back to help him across. Neither was this, though a very considerable drawback, our only hindrance--the guides were not always safe. Sometimes he who acted in that capacity would shout "Eureka" too soon; and having undertaken to lead the van, lead it astray till just about, as he supposed, to come down upon the proof itself, and to come down with a Q. E. D.: the master would stop him short, and bid him--as Coleridge told the ingenious author of _Guesses at Truth_--"to guess again." But suppose the "guess" fortunate, or that a boy had even succeeded, by his own industry or reflection, in mastering a proposition, did it follow that he would be a clear expositor of what he knew? It was far otherwise. Our young Archimedes--unacquainted with the terms of the science, and being also (as we have hinted) lamentably defective in his knowledge of the power of words--would mix up such a "farrago" of irrelevancies and repetitions with the proof, as, in fact, to render it to the majority no proof at all. Euclid should be taught in his own words,--just enough and none to spare: the employment of less must engender obscurity; and of more, a want of neatness and perspicacity. The best geometrician amongst us would have cut but a bad figure by the side of a lad of very average ability brought up to know Euclid by book.

Another twitch of the bell announced that the hour for playing at triangles had expired. In five minutes the slate was covered with bars of minims and crotchets, and the music lesson begun. This, in the general tone of its delivery, bore a striking resemblance to the geographical one of two hours before; the only difference being that "ut, re, me" had succeeded to names of certain cities, and "fa, so, la" to the number of their inhabitants. It would be as vain an attempt to describe all the noise we made as to show its rationale or motive. It was loud enough to have cowed a lion, stopped a donkey in mid-bray--to have excited the envy of the vocal Lablache, or to have sent any _prima donna_ into hysterics. When this third hour had been bellowed away, and the bell had rung unheard the advent of a fourth--_presto_--in came Mons. D----, to relieve the meek man who had acted as coryphæus to the music class; and after a little tugging, had soon produced from his pocket that without which you never catch a Frenchman--a _thème_. The theme being announced, we proceeded (not quite _tant bien que mal_) to scribble it down at his dictation, and to amend its orthography afterwards from a corrected copy on the slate. Once more the indefatigable bell obtruded its tinkle, to proclaim that Herr Roth was coming with a Fable of Gellert, or a chapter from Vater Pestalozzi's serious novel, _Gumal und Lina_, to read, and expound, and catechise upon. This last lesson before dinner was always accompanied by frequent yawns and other unrepressed symptoms of fatigue; and at its conclusion we all rose with a shout, and rushed into the corridors.

On resuming work in the afternoon, there was even less attention and method observed than before. The classes were then broken up, and private lessons were given in accomplishments, or in some of the useful arts. Drawing dogs and cows, with a master to look after the trees and the hedges; whistling and spitting through a flute; playing on the patience of a violin; turning at a lathe; or fencing with a powerful _maître d'armes_;--such were the general occupations. It was then, however, that we English withdrew to our Greek and Latin; and, under a kind master, Dr M----, acquired (with the exception of a love for natural history, and a very unambitious turn of mind) all that really could deserve the name of education.

We have now described the sedentary life at the chateau. In the next paper the reader shall be carried to the gymnasium; the drill ground behind the lake; to our small menageries of kids, guinea pigs, and rabbits; be present at our annual ball and skating bouts in winter, and at our bathings, fishings, frog-spearings, and rambles over the Jura in summer.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] CICERO, _De Fin._, ii. 1.

THE CROWNING OF THE COLUMN, AND CRUSHING OF THE PEDESTAL.

It was said in the debate on the Navigation Laws, in the best speech made on the Liberal side, by one of the ablest of the Liberal party, that the repeal of the Navigation Laws was the _crowning of the column of free trade_. There is no doubt it was so; but it was something more. It was not only the carrying out of a principle, but the overthrow of a system; it was not merely the crowning of the column, but the _crushing of the pedestal_.

And what was the system which was thus completely overthrown, for the time at least, by this great triumph of Liberal doctrines? It was the system under which England had become free, and great, and powerful; under which, in her alone of all modern states, liberty had been found to coexist with law, and progress with order; under which wealth had increased without producing divisions, and power grown up without inducing corruption; the system which had withstood the shocks of two centuries, and created an empire unsurpassed since the beginning of the world in extent and magnificence. It was a system which had been followed out with persevering energy by the greatest men, and the most commanding intellects, which modern Europe had ever produced; which was begun by the republican patriotism of Cromwell, and consummated by the conservative wisdom of Pitt; which had been embraced alike by Somers and Bolingbroke, by Walpole and Chatham, by Fox and Castlereagh; which, during two centuries, had produced an unbroken growth of national strength, a ceaseless extension of national power, and at length reared up a dominion which embraced the earth in its grasp, and exceeded anything ever achieved by the legions of Cæsar, or the phalanx of Alexander. No vicissitudes of time, no shock of adverse fortune, had been able permanently to arrest its progress. It had risen superior alike to the ambition of Louis XIV. and the genius of Napoleon; the rude severance of the North American colonies had thrown only a passing shade over its fortunes; the power of Hindostan had been subdued by its force, the sceptre of the ocean won by its prowess. It had planted its colonies in every quarter of the globe, and at once peopled with its descendants a new hemisphere, and, for the first time since the creation, rolled back to the old the tide of civilisation. Perish when it may, the _old English system_ has achieved mighty things; it has indelibly affixed its impress on the tablets of history. The children of its creation, the Anglo-Saxon race, will fill alike the solitudes of the Far West, and the isles of the East; they will be found equally on the shores of the Missouri, and on the savannahs of Australia; and the period can already be anticipated, even by the least imaginative, when their descendants will people half the globe.

It was not only the column of free trade which has been crowned in this memorable year. Another column, more firm in its structure, more lasting in its duration, more conspicuous amidst the wonders of creation, has, in the same season, been crowned by British hands. While the sacrilegious efforts of those whom it had sheltered were tearing down the temple of protection in the West, the last stone was put to the august structure which it had reared in the East. The victory of Goojerat on the Indus was contemporary with the repeal of the Navigation Laws on the Thames. The completion of the conquest of India occurred exactly at the moment when the system which had created that empire was repudiated. Protection placed the sceptre of India in our hands, when free trade was surrendering the trident of the ocean in the heart of our power. With truth did Lord Gough say, in his noble proclamation to the army of the Punjaub, on the termination of hostilities, that "what Alexander had attempted they had done." Supported by the energy of England, guided by the principles of protection, restrained by the dictates of justice, backed by the navy which the Navigation Laws had created, the British arms had achieved the most wonderful triumph recorded in the annals of mankind. They had subjugated a hundred and forty millions of men in the Continent of Hindostan, at the distance of ten thousand miles from the parent state; they had made themselves felt alike, and at the same moment, at Nankin, the ancient capital of the Celestial Empire, and at Cabool, the cradle of Mahommedan power. Conquering all who resisted, blessing all who submitted, securing the allegiance of the subjects by the justice and experienced advantages of their government, they had realised the boasted maxim of Roman administration--

"Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos,"

and steadily advanced through a hundred years of effort and glory, not unmixed with disaster, from the banks of the Hoogley to the shores of the Indus--from the black hole of Calcutta to the throne of Aurengzebe.

"Nulla magna civitas," said Hannibal, "diu quiescere potest--si foris hostem non habet, _domi invenit_: ut praevalida corpora ab externis causis tuta videntur, suis ipsis viribus conficiuntur."[15] When the Carthaginian hero made this mournful reflection on the infatuated spirit which had seized his own countrymen, and threatened to destroy their once powerful dominion, he little thought what a marvellous confirmation of it a future empire of far greater extent and celebrity was to afford. That the system of free trade--that is, the universal preference of foreigners, for the sake of the smallest reduction of price, to your own subjects--must, if persisted in, lead to the dismemberment and overthrow of the British empire, cannot admit of a moment's doubt, and will be amply proved to every unbiassed reader in the sequel of this paper. Yet the moment chosen for carrying this principle into effect was precisely that, when the good effects of the opposite system had been most decisively demonstrated, and an empire unprecedented in magnitude and magnificence had reached its acme under its shadow. It would be impossible to explain so strange an anomaly, if we did not recollect how wayward and irreconcilable are the changes of the human mind: that action and reaction is the law not less of the moral than of the material world; that nations become tired of hearing a policy called wise, not less than an individual called the just; and that if a magnanimous and truly national course of government has been pursued by one party long in possession of power, this is quite sufficient to make its opponents embrace the opposite set of tenets, and exert all their influence to carry them into effect when they succeed to the direction of affairs, without the slightest regard to the ruin they may bring on the national fortunes.

The secret of the long duration and unexampled success of the British national policy is to be found in the protection which it afforded to _all_ the national interests. But for this, it must long since have been overthrown, and with it the empire which was growing up under its shadow. No institutions or frames of government can long exist which are not held together by that firmest of bonds, _experienced benefits_. What made the Roman power steadily advance during seven centuries, and endure in all a thousand years? The protection which the arms of the legions afforded to the industry of mankind, the international wars which they prevented, the general peace they secured, the magnanimous policy which admitted the conquered states to the privileges of Roman citizens, and caused the Imperial government to be felt through the wide circuit of its power, only by the vast market it opened to the industry of its multifarious subjects, and the munificence with which local undertakings were everywhere aided by the Imperial treasury. Free trade in grain at length ruined it: the harvests of Libya and Egypt came to supersede those of Greece and Italy,--and thence its fall. To the same cause which occasioned the rise of Rome, is to be ascribed the similar unbroken progress of the Russian territorial dominion, and that of the British colonial empire in modern times. What, on the other hand, caused the conquests of Timour and Charlemagne, Alexander the Great and Napoleon, to be so speedily obliterated, and their vast empires to fall to pieces the moment the powerful hand which had created them was laid in the dust? The _want of protection_ to general interests, the absence of the strong bond of experienced benefits; the oppressive nature of the conquering government; the sacrifice of the general interests to the selfish ambition or rapacious passions of a section of the community, whether civil or military, which had got possession of power. It is the selfishness of the ruling power which invariably terminates its existence: men will bear anything but an interference with their patrimonial interests. The burning of 50,000 Protestants by the Duke of Alva was quietly borne by the Flemish provinces: but the imposition of a small _direct_ tax at once caused a flame to burst forth, which carried the independence of the United Provinces. Attend sedulously to the interests of men, give ear to their complaints, anticipate their wishes, and you may calculate with tolerable certainty on acquiring in the long run the mastery of their passions. Thwart their interests, disregard their complaints, make game of their sufferings, and you may already read the handwriting on the wall which announces your doom.

That the old policy of England, foreign, colonial, and domestic, was thoroughly protective, and attended, on the whole, with a due care of the interests of its subjects in every part of the world, may be inferred with absolute certainty from the constant growth, unexampled success, and long existence of her empire. But the matter is not left to inference: decisive proof of it is to be found in the enactments of our statute-book, the treaties we concluded, or the wars we waged with foreign powers. Protection to native industry, at home or in the colonies, security to vested interests, a sacred regard to the rights and interests of our subjects, in whatever part of the world, were the principles invariably acted upon. Long and bloody wars were undertaken to secure their predominance, when threatened by foreign powers. This protective system of necessity implied some restrictions upon the industry, or restraints upon the liberty of action in the colonial dependencies, as well as the mother country--but what then? They were not complained of on either side, because they were accompanied with corresponding and greater benefits, as the consideration paid by the mother country, and received by her distant offspring. Reciprocity in those days was not entirely one-sided; there was a _quid pro quo_ on both sides. The American colonies were subjected to the Navigation Laws, and, in consequence, paid somewhat higher for their freights than if they had been permitted to export and import their produce in the cheaper vessels of foreign powers; but this burden was never complained of, because it was felt to be the price paid for the immense advantages of the monopoly of the English market, and the protection of the English navy. The colonies of France and Spain desired nothing so much, during the late war, as to be conquered by the armies of England, because it at once opened the closed markets for their produce, and restored the lost protection of a powerful navy. The English felt that their colonial empire was in some respects a burden, and entailed heavy expenses both in peace and war; but they were not complained of, because the manufacturing industry of England found a vast and increasing market for its produce in the growth of its offspring in every part of the world, and its commercial navy grew with unexampled rapidity from the exclusive enjoyment of their trade.

Such was the amount of protection afforded in our statute-book to commercial industry, that we might imagine, if there was nothing else in it, that the empire had been governed exclusively by a manufacturing aristocracy. Such was the care with which the interests of the colonies were attended to, that it seemed as if they must have had representatives who possessed a majority in the legislature. To one who looked to the welfare of land, and the protection of its produce, the chapel of St Stephens seemed to have been entirely composed of the representatives of squires. The shipping interest was sedulously fostered, as appeared in the unexampled growth and vast amount of our mercantile tonnage. The interests of labour, the welfare of the poor, were not overlooked, as was demonstrated in the most decisive way by the numerous enactments for the relief of the indigent and unfortunate, and the immense burden which the legislature voluntarily imposed on itself and the nation for the relief of the destitute. Thus _all_ interests were attended to; and that worst of tyrannies, the tyranny of one class over another class, was effectually prevented. It is in this sedulous attention to _all_ the interests of the empire that its long duration and unparalleled extension is to be ascribed. Had any one class or interest been predominant, and commenced the system of pursuing its separate objects and advantages, to the subversion or injury of the other classes in the state, such a storm of discontent must have arisen as would speedily have proved fatal to the unanimity, and with it to the growth and prosperity of the empire.

Two causes mainly contributed to produce this system of catholic protection by the British government to native industry; and to their united operation, the greatness of England is chiefly to be ascribed. The first of these was the peculiar constitution which time had worked out for the House of Commons, and the manner in which all the interests of the state had come silently, and without being observed, to be indirectly but most effectually represented in parliament. That body, anterior to the Reform Bill, possessed one invaluable quality--its franchise was multiform and various. In many burghs the landed interest in their neighbourhood was predominant; in most counties it returned members in the interests of agriculture. In other towns, mercantile or commercial wealth acquired by purchase an introduction, or won it from the influence of some great family. Colonial opulence found a ready inlet in the close boroughs: Old Sarum or Gatton nominally represented a house or a green mound--really, the one might furnish a seat to a representative of Hindostan, the other of the splendid West Indian settlements. The members who thus got in by purchase had one invaluable quality, like the officers who get their commissions in the army in the same way--they were independent. They were not liable to be overruled or coerced by a numerous, ignorant, and conceited constituency. Hence they looked only to the interests of the class to which they belonged, amidst which their fortunes had been made, and with the prosperity of which their individual success was entirely wound up. With what energy these various interests were attended to, with what perseverance the system of protecting them was followed up, is sufficiently evident from the simultaneous growth and unbroken prosperity of all the great branches of industry during the long period of a hundred and fifty years. Talent, alike on the Whig and the Tory side, found a ready entrance by means of the nomination burghs. It is well known that all the great men of the House of Commons, since the Revolution, obtained entrance to parliament in the first instance through these narrow inlets. Rank looked anxiously for talent, because it added to its influence. Genius did not disdain the entrance, because it was not obstructed by numbers, or galled by conceit. No human wisdom could have devised such a system; it rose gradually, and without being observed, from the influence of a vast body of great and prosperous interests, feeling the necessity of obtaining a voice in the legislature, and enjoying the means of doing so by the variety of election privileges which time had established in the House of Commons. The reality of this representation of interests is matter of history. The landed interest, the West India interest, the commercial interest, the shipping interest, the East Indian interest, could all command their respective phalanxes in parliament, who would not permit any violation of the rights, or infringement on the welfare, of their constituents to take place. The combined effect of the whole was the great and glorious British empire, teeming with energy, overflowing with patriotism, spreading out into every quarter of the globe, and yet held together in all its parts by the firm bond of experienced benefits and protected industry.

The second cause was, that no speculative or theoretical opinions had then been broached, or become popular, which proclaimed that the real interest of any one class was to be found in the spoliation or depression of any other class. No gigantic system of _beggar my neighbour_ had then come to be considered as a shorthand mode of gaining wealth. The nation had not then embraced the doctrine, that to buy cheap and sell dear constituted the sum total of political science. On the contrary, protection to industry in all its branches was considered as the great principle of policy, the undisputed dictate of wisdom, the obvious rule of justice. It was acknowledged alike by speculative writers and practical statesmen. The interests of the producers were the main object of legislative fostering and philosophic thought--and for this plain reason, that they constitute the great body of society, and their interests chiefly were thought of. Realised wealth was then, in comparison to what it now is, in a state of infancy; the class of traders and shopkeepers, who grow up with the expenditure of accumulated opulence, was limited in numbers and inconsiderable in influence. It would have been as impossible _then_ to get up a party in the House of Commons, or a cry in the country, in favour of the consumers or against the producers, as it would be now to do the same among the corn producers in the basin of the Mississippi, or among the cotton growers of New Orleans.

It is in the profound wisdom of Hannibal's saying--that great states, impregnable to the shock of external violence, are consumed and wasted away by their own internal strength--that the real cause of the subsequent and extraordinary change, first in the opinions of men, and then in the measures of government, is to be found. Such was the wealth produced by the energy of the Anglo-Saxon race, sheltered and invigorated by the protection-policy of government in every quarter of the globe, that in the end it gave birth to a new class, which rapidly grew in numbers and influence, and was at length able to bid defiance to all the other interests in the state put together. This was the _moneyed interest_--the class of men whose fortunes were made, whose position was secure, and who saw, in a general cheapening of the price of commodities and reduction of prices, the means of making their wealth go much farther than it otherwise would. This class had its origin from the long-continued prosperity and accumulated savings of the whole producing classes in the state; like a huge lake, it was fed by all the streams and rills which descended into it from the high grounds by which it was surrounded; and the rise of its waters indicated, as a register thermometer, the amount of additions which it was receiving from the swelling of the feeders by which it was formed. But when men once get out of the class of producers, and into that of moneyed consumers, they rapidly perceive an _immediate_ benefit to themselves in the reduction of the price of articles of consumption, because it adds proportionally to the value of their money. If prices can be forced down fifty per cent by legislative measures, every thousand pounds in effect becomes fifteen hundred. It thus not unfrequently and naturally happened, that the son who enjoyed the fortune made by protection came to join the ranks of the free traders, because it promised a great addition to the value of his inheritance. The transition from Sir Robert Peel the father, and staunch supporter of protection, who _made the fortune_, to Sir Robert Peel the son, who _inherited it_, and introduced free-trade principles, was natural and easy. Each acted in conformity with the interests of his respective position in society. It is impossible to suppose in such men a selfish or sordid regard to their own interests, and we solemnly disclaim the intention of imputing such. But every one knows how the ablest and most elevated minds are insensibly moulded by the influence of the atmosphere with which they are surrounded; and, at all events, they were a type of the corresponding change going on in successive generations of others of a less elevated class of minds, in whom the influence of interested motives was direct and immediate.

Adam Smith's work, now styled the _principia_ of economical science by the free-traders, first gave token of the important and decisive change then going forward in society. It was an ominous and characteristic title: _The Nature and Cause of the_ WEALTH _of Nations_. It was not said of their wisdom, virtue, or happiness. The direction of such a mind as Adam Smith's to the exclusive consideration of the riches of nations, indicated the advent of a period when the fruits of industry in this vast empire, sheltered by protection, had become so great that they had formed a powerful class in society, which was beginning to look to its separate interests, and saw them in the beating down the price of articles--that is, diminishing the remuneration of other men's industry. It showed that the _Plutocracy_ was becoming powerful. The constant arguments that able work contained, in favour of competition and against monopoly,--its impassioned pleadings in favour of freedom of commerce, and the removal of all restrictions on importation, were so many indications that a new era was opening in society; that the interests of _realised wealth_ were beginning to come into collision with those of _creating industry_, and that the time was not far distant when a fierce legislative contest might be anticipated between them. It is well known that Adam Smith advocated the Navigation Laws, upon the ground that national independence was of more importance than national wealth. But there can be no doubt that this was a deviation from his principles, and that, if they were established in other particulars, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to succeed in maintaining an exception in favour of the shipping interests, because that was retaining a burden on the colonies, when the corresponding benefit had been voted away.

Although, however, the doctrines of Adam Smith, from their novelty, simplicity, and alliance with democratic liberty, spread rapidly in the rising generation--ever ready to repudiate the doctrines and throw off the restraints of their fathers--yet, so strongly were the producing interests intrenched in the legislature, that a very long period would probably have elapsed before they came to be practically applied in the measures of government, had it not been that, at the very period when, from the triumph of protection-principles during the war, and the vast wealth they had realised in the state, the moneyed interest had become most powerful, a great revolution in the state gave that interest the command of the House of Commons. By the Reform Bill _two-thirds of the seats_ in that house were given to boroughs, and _two-thirds of the voters_ in boroughs, in the new constituency, were shopkeepers or those in their interest. Thus a decisive majority in the house, which, from having the command of the public purse, practically became possessed of supreme power, was vested in those who made their living by buying and selling--with whom cheap prices was all in all. The producing classes were virtually, and to all practical purposes, cast out of the scale. The landed interest, on all questions vital to its welfare, would evidently soon be in a minority. Schedules A and B at one blow disfranchised the whole colonial empire of Great Britain, because it closed the avenue by which colonial wealth had hitherto found an entrance to the House of Commons. Seats could no longer be bought: the virtual representation of unrepresented places was at an end. The greatest fortunes made in the colonies could now get into the house only through some populous place; and the majority of voters in most populous places were in favour of the consumers and against the producers, because the consumers bought _their goods_, and they bought those of the producers. Thus no colonial member could get in but by forswearing his principles and abandoning the interests of his order. The shipping interest was more strongly intrenched, because many shipping towns had direct representatives in parliament, and it accordingly was the last to be overthrown. But when the colonies were disfranchised, and protection was withdrawn from their industry to cheapen prices at home, it became next to impossible to keep up the shipping interest--not only because the injustice of doing so, and so enhancing freights, when protection to colonial produce was withdrawn, was evident, but because it was well understood, by certain unequivocal symptoms, that such a course of policy would at once lead to colonial revolt, and the dismemberment of the empire.

The authors of the Reform Bill were well aware that under it two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons were for boroughs: but they clung to the idea that a large proportion of these seats would fall under the influence of the landed proprietors in their vicinity, and thus be brought round to the support of the agricultural interest. It was on that belief that Earl Grey said in private, amidst all his public democratic declamations, that the Reform Bill was "the most _aristocratic_ measure which had ever passed the House of Commons." But in this anticipation, which was doubtless formed in good faith by many of the ablest supporters of that revolution, they showed themselves entirely ignorant of the effect of the great monetary change of 1819, which at that very period was undermining the influence of the owners of landed estates as much as it was augmenting the power of the holders of bonds over their properties. As that bill changed the prices of agricultural produce, at least to the extent of forty _per cent_, it of course crippled the means and weakened the influence of the landowners as much as it added to the powers of the moneyed interest which held securities over their estates. This soon became a matter of paramount importance. After a few severe struggles, the landowners in most places saw that they were over-matched, and that their burdened estates and declining rent-rolls were not equal to an encounter with the ready money of the capitalists, which that very change had so much enhanced in value and augmented in power. One by one the rural boroughs slipped out of the hands of the landed, and fell under the influence of the moneyed interest. At the same time one great colonial interest, that of the West Indies, was so entirely prostrated by the ruinous measure of the emancipation of the negroes, that its influence in parliament was practically rendered extinct. Thus two of the great producing interests in the state--those of corn and sugar--were materially weakened or nullified, at the very time when the power of their opponents, the moneyed aristocracy, was most augmented.

Experience, however, proved, on one important and decisive occasion, that even after the Reform Bill had become the law of the land, it was still possible, by a coalition of _all_ the producing interests, to defeat the utmost efforts of the moneyed party, even when aided by the whole influence of government. On occasion of the memorable Whig budget of 1841, such a coalition took place, and the efforts of the free-traders were overthrown. A change of ministry was the consequence; but it soon appeared that nothing was gained by an alteration of rulers, when the elements in which political power resided, under the new constitution, remained unchanged.

Sir Robert Peel, and the leaders of the party which now succeeded to power, appear to have been guided by those views in the free-trade measures which they subsequently introduced. They regarded, and with justice, the Reform Bill as, in the language of the _Times_, "a great fact"--the settlement of the constitution upon a new basis--on foundations _non tangenda non movenda_, if we would shun the peril of repeated shocks to our institutions, and ultimately of a bloody revolution. Looking on the matter in this light, the next object was to scan the composition of the House of Commons, and see in what party and interest in the state a preponderance of power was now vested. They were not slow in discerning the fatal truth, that the Reform Bill had given a decided majority to the representatives of boroughs, and that a clear majority in these boroughs was, from the embarrassments which monetary change had produced on the landed proprietors, and the preponderance of votes which that bill had given to shopkeepers, vested in the moneyed or consuming interest. Such a state of things might be regretted, but still it existed; and it was the business of practical statesmen to deal with things as they were, not to indulge in vain regrets on what they once were or might have been. It seemed impossible to carry on the government on any other footing than that of concession to the wishes and attention to the interests of the moneyed and mercantile classes, in whose hands supreme power, under the new constitution, was now practically vested. Whether any such views, supposing them well founded, could justify a statesman and a party, who had received office on a solemn appeal to the country, under the most solemn engagement to support the principles of protection, to repudiate those principles, and introduce the measures they were pledged to oppose, is a question on which, it is not difficult to see, but one opinion will be formed by future times.

Still, even when free-trade measures were resolved on by Sir R. Peel's government, it was a very doubtful matter, in the first instance, how to secure their entire success. The great coalition of the chief producing interests, which had proved fatal to the Whig administration by the election of 1841, might again be reorganised, and overthrow any government which attempted to renew the same projects. Ministers had been placed in office on the principles of protection--they were the watches, planted to descry the first approaches of the enemy, and repel his attacks. But the old Roman maxim, "_Divide et impera_," was then put in practice with fatal effect on the producing interests, and, in the end, on the general fortunes of the empire. The assault was in the first instance directed against the agricultural interest: the cry of "Cheap bread," ever all-powerful with the multitude, was raised to drown that of "Protection to native industry." The whole weight of government, which at once abandoned all its principles, was directed to support the free-trade assault, and beat down the protectionist opposition. The whole population in the towns--that is, the inhabitants of the places which, under the Reform Bill, returned two-thirds of the House of Commons--was roused almost to madness by the prospect of a great reduction in the price of provisions. The master-manufacturers almost unanimously supported the same views, in the hope that the wages of labour and the cost of production would be in a similar way reduced, and that thus the foreign market for their produce would be extended. The West India interest, the colonial interest, the shipping interest, stood aloof, or gave only a lukewarm support to the protectionists, conceiving that it was merely an agricultural question, and that the time was far distant when there was any chance of their interests being brought into jeopardy. "_Cetera quis nescit?_" The corn-laws were repealed, agricultural protection was swept away, and England, where wheat cannot be raised at a profit when prices are below 50s., or, at the lowest, 45s. a quarter, was exposed to the direct competition of states possessing the means of raising it to an indefinite extent, where it can be produced and imported at a profit for in all 32s.

What subsequent events have abundantly verified, was at the time foreseen and foretold by the protectionists,--that when agricultural protection at home was withdrawn, it could not be maintained in the colonies, and that cheap prices must be rendered universal, as they had been established in the great article of human subsistence. This necessity was soon experienced. The West Indies were the first to be assailed. Undeterred by the evident ruin which a free competition with the slave-growing states could not fail to bring on British planters forced to work with free labourers--undismayed by the frightful injustice of first establishing slavery by law in the English colonies, and giving the utmost encouragement to negro importation, then forcibly emancipating the slaves on a compensation not on an average a fourth part of their value, and then sweeping away all fiscal protection, and exposing the English planters, who could not with their free labourers raise sugar below £10 a ton, to competition with slave states who could raise it for £4 a ton--that great work of fiscal iniquity and free-trade spoliation was perpetrated. The English landed interest resisted the unjust measure; but it could hardly be expected that they were to be very enthusiastic in the cause. They had not forgotten their desertion in the hour of need by the West India planters, and the deferred punishment, as they conceived, dealt out to them in return, was not altogether displeasing. The shipping interest did little or nothing when either contest was going on; nay, they in general, and with fatal effect, supported free-trade principles thus far: they were delighted that the tempest had not as yet reached their doors, and flattered themselves none would be insane enough to attack the wooden walls of Old England, and hand us over, bereft of our ocean bulwarks, to the malice and jealousy of our enemies. They little knew the extent and infatuation of political fanaticism. They were only reserved, like Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, for the melancholy privilege of being last devoured. Each session of Parliament, since free trade was introduced, has been marked by the sacrifice of a fresh interest. The year 1846 witnessed the repeal of the corn laws; the year 1847 the equalisation, by a rapidly sliding scale, of the duties on English free-grown and foreign slave-raised sugar; and 1849 was immortalised by the destruction of the Navigation Laws. The British shipowner, who pays £10 for wages on ships, is exposed to the direct competition of the foreign shipowner, who navigates his vessel for £6. "Perish the colonies," said Robespierre, "rather than one principle be abandoned." Fanaticism is the same in all ages and countries. The triumph of free trade is complete. A ruinous and suicidal principle has been carried out, in defiance alike of bitter experience and national safety. Each interest in the state has, since the great conservative party was broken up by Sir R. Peel's free-trade measures, looked on with indifference when its neighbour was destroyed; and to them may be applied with truth what the ancient annalist said of the enemies of Rome, "_Dum singuli pugnant, universi vincuntur._"[16]

We say advisedly, each interest has looked on with indifference when its neighbour was _destroyed_. That this strong phrase is not misapplied to the effect of these measures in the West Indies, is too well known to require any illustration. Ruin, widespread and universal, has, we know by sad experience, overtaken, and is rapidly destroying these once splendid colonies. While we write these lines, a decisive proof[17] has been judicially afforded of the frightful depreciation of property which has there taken place, from the acts of successive administrations acting on liberal principles, and yielding to popular outcries: the fall has amounted to _ninety-three per cent_. Beyond all doubt, since the new system began to be applied to the West Indies, property to the amount of _a hundred and twenty millions_ has perished under its strokes. The French Convention never did anything more complete. Free-trade fanaticism may well glory in its triumphs; it is doubtful if they have any parallel in the annals of mankind.

We do not propose to resume the debate on the Navigation Laws, of which the public have heard so much in this session of parliament. We are aware that their doom is sealed; and we accept the extinction of shipping protection as _un fait accompli_, from which we must set out in all future discussions on the national prospects and fortunes. But, in order to show how enormously perilous is the change thus made, and what strength of argument and arrays of facts free-trade fanaticism has had the merit of triumphing over, we cannot resist the temptation of transcribing into our pages the admirable letter of Mr Young, the able and unflinching advocate of the shipping interest, to the Marquis of Lansdowne, after the late interesting debate on the subject in the House of Lords. We do so not merely from sincere respect for that gentleman's patriotic spirit and services, but because we do not know any document which, in so short a space, contains so interesting a statement of that leading fact on which the whole question hinges--viz. the progressive and rapid decline of British, and growth of foreign tonnage, with those countries with whom we have concluded reciprocity treaties: affording thus a foretaste of what we may expect now that we have established a reciprocity treaty, by the repeal of the Navigation Laws, with the whole world:

"My Lord,--In the debate last night on the Navigation Laws, your Lordship said,--

'The noble and learned Lord opposite has spoken contemptuously of statistics. Let me remind that noble and learned Lord that if any statement founded on statistics remains unshaken, it is the statement that under reciprocity treaties now existing, by which this country enjoys no protection, she, nevertheless, monopolises the greater part of the commerce of the north of Europe.'

As an impartial statist, as well as a statesman, your Lordship will perhaps permit me to invite your attention to the following abstract from Parliamentary returns, respectfully trusting that, if the facts it discloses should be found irreconcilable with the opinions you have expressed, a sense of justice will induce your Lordship to correct the error:--

The reciprocity treaty with the United States was concluded in 1815.

The British inward entries from that country were--

Tons. In 1816 45,140 In 1824, reciprocity having been eight years in operation 44,994 -------- British tonnage having in } that period decreased } 146

The inward entries of American tonnage were--

Tons. In 1816 91,914 In 1824 153,475 -------- American tonnage having in } that period increased } 61,561

During that period no reciprocity existed with the Baltic Powers; and

Tons. In 1815 the British entries from Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were 78,533 In 1824 129,895 -------- British tonnage having increased 51,362

In 1815 those Baltic entries were 319,181 In 1824 350,624 -------- Baltic tonnage having increased 31,443

Thus, from the peace in 1815 to 1824, when the "Reciprocity of Duties Act" passed, in the trade of the only country in the world with which great Britain was in reciprocity, her tonnage declined 146 tons, and that of the foreign nation advanced 61,561 tons; while in the trade with the Baltic powers, with which no reciprocity existed, British tonnage advanced on its competitors in the proportion of 51,362 to 31,443 tons.

From 1824 the reciprocity principle was applied to the Baltic powers; and--

Tons. In 1824, the British entries being 129,895 In 1846 they had declined to 88,894 -------- Having diminished during } the period } 41,001

While the Baltic tonnage, which in 1824 was 350,624 Had advanced in 1846 to 571,161 -------- Showing an increase of no } less than } 220,537

And during this same period, the proportion of tonnage of the United States continued, under the operation of the same principle, steadily to advance, the British entries thence being--

Tons. In 1846 205,123 And the American 435,399 -------- Showing an excess of American } over British of } 230,276

I have (I hope not unfairly) introduced into this statement American tonnage, because it shows that while, in the period antecedent to general reciprocity, the adoption of the principle in the trade with that nation produced an actual decline of British navigation, while in the trade with the Baltic powers, which was free from that scourge, British navigation outstripped its competitor, it exhibits in a remarkable manner the reverse result, from the moment the principle was applied to the Baltic trade; while, above all, it completely negatives the statement of the greater part of the commerce of the north of Europe being monopolised by British ships, showing that in that commerce, in 1846, of an aggregate of 660,055 tons, British shipping had only 88,894 tons, while no less than 571,161 tons were monopolised by Baltic ships!"

It is evident, from this summary, that the decline of British and growth of foreign shipping will be so rapid, under the system of Free Trade in Shipping, that the time is not far distant when the foreign tonnage employed in conducting our trade will be superior in amount to the British. In all probability, in six or seven years that desirable consummation will be effected; and we shall enjoy the satisfaction of having purchased freights a farthing a pound cheaper, by the surrender of our national safety. It need hardly be said that, from the moment that the foreign tonnage employed in conducting our trade exceeds the British, our independence as a nation is gone; because we have reared up, in favour of states who may any day become our enemies, a nursery of seamen superior to that which we possess ourselves. And every year, which increases the one and diminishes the other, brings us nearer the period when our ability to contend on our own element with other powers is to be at end, and England is to undergo the fate of Athens after the catastrophe of Aigos Potamos--that of being blockaded in our own harbours by the fleets of our enemies, and obliged to surrender at discretion on any terms they might think fit to impose.

But in truth, the operations of the free-traders will, to all appearance, terminate our independence, and compel us to sink into the ignoble neutrality which characterised the policy of Venice for the last two centuries of its independent existence, before the foreign seamen we have hatched in our bosom have time to be arrayed in a Leipsic of the deep against us. So rapid, _so fearfully rapid_, has been the increase in the importation of foreign grain since the repeal of the corn laws took place, and so large a portion of our national sustenance has already come to be derived from foreign countries, that it is evident, on the first rupture with the countries furnishing them, we should at once be starved into submission. The free-traders always told us, that a considerable importation of foreign grain would only take place when prices rose high; that it was a resource against seasons of scarcity only; and that, when prices in England were low, it would cease or become trifling. Attend to the facts. Free trade in grain has been in operation just three years. We pass over the great importation of the year 1847, when, under the influence of the panic, and high prices arising from the Irish famine, no less than 12,000,000 quarters of grain were imported in fifteen months, at a cost of £31,000,000, nearly the whole of which was paid in specie. Beyond all doubt, it was the great drain thus made to act upon our metallic resources--at the very time when the free-traders had, with consummate wisdom, established a _sliding paper circulation_, under which the bank-notes were to be _withdrawn_ from the public in proportion as the sovereigns were exported--which was the main cause of the dreadful commercial catastrophe which ensued, and from the effects of which, after two years of unexampled suffering, the nation has scarcely yet begun to recover. But what we wish to draw the public attention to is this. The greatest importation of foreign grain ever known, into the British islands, before the corn laws were repealed, was in the year 1839, when, in consequence of three bad harvests in succession, 4,000,000 quarters in round numbers were imported. The average importation had been steadily diminishing before that time, since the commencement of the century: in the five years ending with 1835, it was only 381,000 quarters. But since the duties have become nominal, since the 1st February in this year, the importation has become so prodigious that it is going on at the rate of FIFTEEN MILLIONS of quarters a-year, or a full fourth of the national consumption, which is somewhat under sixty millions. This is in the face of prices fallen to 44s. 9d. for the quarter of wheat, and 18s. the quarter of oats! We recommend the Table below, taken from the columns of that able free-trade journal, the _Times_--showing the amount of importation for the month ending April 5, 1849, when wheat was at 45s. a-quarter--to the consideration of those well-informed persons who expect that low prices will check, and at last stop importation. It shows decisively that even a very great reduction of prices has not that tendency in the slightest degree. The importation of grain and flour is going on steadily, under the present low prices, at the rate of about 15,000,000 quarters a-year.[18]

The reasons of this continued and increasing importation, notwithstanding the lowness of prices, is evident, and was fully explained by the protectionists before the repeal of the corn laws took place, though the free-traders, with their usual disregard of facts when subversive of a favourite theory, obstinately refused to credit it. It is this. The price of wheat and other kinds of grain, in the grain-growing countries, especially Poland and America, is entirely regulated by its price in the British islands. They can raise grain in such quantities, and at such low rates, that everything depends on the price which it will fetch in the great market for that species of produce--the British empire. In Poland, the best wheat can be raised for 16s. a-quarter, and landed at any harbour in England at 25s. The Americans, out of the 250,000,000 quarters of bread stuffs which they raise annually, and which, if not exported, is in great part not worth above 10s. a-quarter, can afford, with a handsome profit to the exporting merchant, to send grain to England, however small its price may be in the British islands. However low it may be, it is much higher than with them--and therefore it is _always_ worth their while to export it to the British market. If the price here is 40s., it will there be 28s. or 30s.; if 30s. here, it will not be more than 15s. or 20s. there. Thus the profit to be made by importation retains its proportion, whatever prices are in this country, and the motives to it are the same whatever the price is. It is as great when wheat is low as when it is high, except to the fortunate shippers, before the rise in the British islands was known on the banks of the Vistula or the shores of the Mississippi. Now that the duty on wheat is reduced to 1s. a-quarter, we may look for an annual importation of from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 quarters--that is, from a fourth to a third of the annual subsistence, constantly, alike in seasons of plenty and of scarcity.

That the importation is steadily going on, appears by the following returns for the port of London alone, down to May, taken from the _Morning Post_ of May 7:--

Entered for home consumption during the month ending--

Wheat. Flour. qrs. cwt. February 5, 442,389 478,815 March 5, 405,685 355,462 April 5, 559,602 356,308 May 5, 383,395 243,154 --------- --------- Making a total } 1,791,071 1,433,739 in four months, }

--equal, if we take 3-1/2 cwt. of flour to the qr. of wheat, to 2,200,700 qrs. of the latter. The importations of the first four months of the year are, therefore, nearly as great as they were during the whole of the preceding twelve months, the quantities duty paid in 1848 being, of wheat, 2,477,366 qrs., and of flour, 1,731,974 cwt.

The reason why young states, especially if they possess land eminently fitted for agricultural production, such as Poland and America, can thus permanently undersell older and longer established empires in the production of food, is simple, permanent, and of universal application, but nevertheless it is not generally understood or appreciated. It is commonly said that the cause is to be found in the superior weight of debts, public and private, in the old state. There can be no doubt that this cause has a considerable influence in producing the effect, but it is by no means the only or the principal one. The main cause is to be found in the superior _riches_ of the old state, when compared with the young one, which makes money of less value, because it is more plentiful. The wants and necessities of an extended commerce, the accumulated savings of centuries of industry, at once require an extended circulation, and produce the wealth necessary to purchase it. The precious metals, and wealth of every sort, flow into the rich old state from the poor young one, for the same reason that corn, and wine, and oil, follow the same direction in obedience to the same impulse. That it is the superior riches, and not the debts or taxes, of England which render prices so high, comparatively speaking, in these islands, is decisively proved by the immense difference between the value of money, and the cost of living at the same time, in different parts of the same empire, subject to the same public and private burdens,--in London, for example, compared with Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Lerwick. Every one knows that £1500 a-year will not go farther in the English metropolis than £1000 in the Scotch, or £750 in the ancient city of Aberdeen, or £500 in the capital of the Orkney islands. Whence this great difference in the same country, and at the same time? Simply, because money is over plentiful in London, less so in Edinburgh, and much less so in Aberdeen or Lerwick. The same cause explains the different cost of agricultural production in England, Poland, the Ukraine, and America. It is the comparative poverty, the _scarcity of money_, in the latter countries which is the cause of the difference. Machinery, and the division of labour, almost omnipotent in reducing the cost of the production of manufactured articles, are comparatively impotent in affecting the cost of articles of rude or agricultural produce. England, under a real system of free trade, would undersell all the world in its manufactures, but be undersold by all the world in its agricultural productions. If the national debt was swept away, and the whole taxes of Great Britain removed, the cost of agricultural production would not be materially different from what it now is. We shall be able to raise grain as cheap as the serfs of Poland, or the peasants of the Ukraine, when we become as poor as they are, but _not till then_. Under the free-trade system, however, the period may arrive sooner than is generally suspected, and the importation of foreign grain be checked by the universal pauperism and grinding misery of the country.

Assuming it, then, as certain that, under the free-trade system, the importation of grain is to be constantly from a third to a fourth of the annual consumption, the two points to be considered are, How is the national _independence to be maintained_, or _incessant commercial crises averted_, under the new system? These are questions on which it will become every inhabitant of the British islands to ponder; for on them, not only the independence of his country, but the private fortune of himself and his children, is entirely dependent. If so large a portion as a third or a fourth of the annual subsistence is imported almost entirely from three countries, Russia, Prussia, and America, how are we to withstand the hostility of these states? Prussia, in the long run, is under the influence of Russia, and follows its system of policy. The nations on whom we depend for so large a part of our food are thus practically reduced to two, viz., Russia and America--what is to hinder them from coalescing to effect our ruin, as they practically did in 1800 and 1811, against the independence of England? Not a shot would require to be fired, not a loan contracted. The simple threat of closing their harbours would at once drive us to submission. Importing a third of our food from these two states, to what famine-price would the closing of their harbours speedily raise its cost! The failure of £15,000,000 worth of potatoes in 1847--scarce a _twentieth_ part of the annual agricultural produce of these islands, which is about £300,000,000,--raised the price of wheat, in 1848, from 60s. to 110s.--what would the sudden stoppage of a _third_ do? Why, it would raise wheat to 150s. or 200s. a-quarter--in other words, to famine-prices--and inevitably induce general rebellion, and compel national submission. After the lapse of fifteen centuries, we should again realise, after similar Eastern triumphs, the mournful picture of the famine in Rome, in the lines of the poet Claudian,[19] from the stoppage of the wonted supplies of grain from the two granaries of the empire, Egypt and Libya, by the effect of the Gildonic war. But the knowledge of so terrible a catastrophe impending over the nation would probably prevent the collision. England would capitulate while yet it had some food left, on the first summons from its imperious grain-producing masters.

But supposing such a decisive catastrophe were not to arise, at least for a considerable period, how are _commercial crises_ to be prevented from continually recurring under the new policy? How is the commercial interest to be preserved from ruin--from the operation of the system which itself has established? This is a point of paramount interest, as it directly affects every fortune in the kingdom, the commercial in the first instance, but also the realised and landed in the last; but, nevertheless, it seems impossible to rouse the nation to a sense of its overwhelming importance and terrible consequences. Experience has now decisively proved that the corn-growing states, upon whom we most depend for our subsistence, will not take our manufactures to any extent, though they will gladly take our sovereigns or bullion to any imaginable amount. The reason is, they are poor states, who are neither rich enough to buy, nor civilised enough to have acquired a taste for our manufactured articles, but who have an insatiable thirst for our metallic riches, the last farthing of which they will drain away, in exchange for their rude produce. The dreadful monetary crises of 1839 and 1848, it is well known, were owing to the drain upon our metallic resources, produced by the great grain importations of those years, in the latter of which above £30,000,000 of gold, probably a half of the metallic circulation, was at once sent headlong out of the country. Now, if an importation of grain to a similar amount is to become _permanent_, and an export of the precious metals to a corresponding degree to go on year after year, how, in the name of wonder, is a perpetual repetition of similar disasters to be prevented?

We could conceive, indeed, a system of paper currency which might in a great degree, if not altogether, prevent these terrible disasters. If the nation possessed a circulation of bank-notes capable of being _extended_ in proportion as the metallic circulation was withdrawn by the exchanges of the commerce in grain, as was the law during the war, the industry of the country might be vivified and sustained during the absence of the precious metals, and their want be very little, if at all, experienced. But it is well known that not only is there no provision made by law, or the policy of government, for an _extension_ of the paper circulation when the metallic currency is withdrawn, but the very reverse is done. There is a provision, and a most stringent and effectual one, made for the _contraction_ of the currency at the very moment when its expansion is most required, and when the national industry is threatened with starvation in consequence of the vast and ceaseless abstraction of the precious metals which free trade in grain necessarily establishes. When free trade is sending gold headlong out of the country, to buy food, Sir Robert Peel's law sends the bank-notes, public and private, back into the banker's coffers, and leaves the industry of the country without _either_ of its necessary supports! Beyond all question, it is the double operation of free trade in sending the sovereigns in enormous quantities out of the country, and of the monetary laws, in contracting the circulation of paper in a similar degree, and at the same time, which has done all the mischief, and produced that widespread ruin which has now overtaken nearly all the interests--but most of all the _commercial_ interests--in the state. That ruin is easily explained, when it is recollected what government has done by legislative enactment, on free-trade principles, during the last five years.

1. They first, by the Acts of 1844 and 1845, restricted the paper circulation of the whole empire, including Ireland, to £32,000,000 in round numbers. For every note issued, either by the Bank of England or private banks, above that sum, they required these establishments to have sovereigns in their coffers.

2. Having thus restricted the currency, by which the industry of the country was to be paid and supplied, to an amount barely sufficient for its _ordinary_ wants, they next proceeded to encourage to the greatest degree railway speculation, and pass bills through parliament requiring an _extraordinary_ expenditure, in the next four years, of £333,000,000 sterling.

3. Having thus contracted the currency of the nation, and doubled its work, they next proceeded to introduce, in 1846 and the two following years, the free-trade system, under the operation of which our specie was sent out of the country in enormous quantities, in exchange for food, and by the operation of the law the paper proportionally contracted.[20]

4. When this extraordinary system of augmenting the work of the people, at the time the currency which was to sustain it was withdrawn, had produced its natural and unavoidable effects, and landed the nation, in October 1847, in such a state of embarrassment as rendered a suspension of the law unavoidable, and induced a commercial crisis of unexampled severity and duration, the authors of the monetary measures still clung to them as the sheet-anchor of the state, and still upheld them, although it is as certain as any proposition in Euclid, that, combined with a free trade in grain, they _must_ produce a constant succession of similar catastrophes, until the nation, like a patient exhausted by repeated shocks of apoplexy, perishes under their effects.

It may be doubted whether the annals of the world can produce another example of insane and suicidal policy on so great a scale as has been exhibited by the government of England of late years, in its West India measures, and the _simultaneous_ establishment of free trade and fettered currency, and a railway mania, in the heart of the empire.

The effect of these measures upon the internal state of the empire has been beyond all measure dreadful, and has far exceeded the worst predictions of the protectionists upon their inevitable effect. Proofs on this subject crowd in on every side, and all entirely corroborative of the prophecies of the protectionists, and subversive of all the prognostics of the free-traders. It was confidently asserted by them that their system would immensely increase our foreign trade, because it would enrich the foreign agriculturists from whom we purchased grain, and who would take our manufactures in exchange; and what has been the result, after free-trade principles have been in full operation for three years? Why, they have stood thus:--

Exports, Imports, Declared Value. Market Value. British and Irish produce.

1845, £84,054,272 £60,111,081 1846, 89,281,433 57,786,875 1847, 117,047,229 58,971,166 1848, 92,660,699 53,099,011[21]

Thus, while there has been an enormous increase going on during the last three years in our imports, there has been nothing but a diminution at the same time taking place in our exports. The foreigners who sent us, in such prodigious quantities, their rude produce, would not take our manufactures in return. They would only take our gold. Hence our metallic treasures were hourly disappearing in exchange for the provisions which showered in upon us; and this was the precise time which the free-traders took to establish the monetary system which compelled the contraction of the paper circulation _in direct proportion to that very disappearance_. It is no wonder that our commercial interests were thrown into unparalleled embarrassments from such an absurd and monstrous system of legislation.

Observe, if the arguments and expectations of the free-traders had been well founded, the immense importation of provisions which took place in 1847 and 1848, in consequence of the failure of the potato crop in Ireland and the west of Scotland, should immediately have produced a vast rise in our exports. Was this the case? Quite the reverse; it was attended with a decline in them. The value of corn, meal, and flour imported in the following years stood thus:--

1845, £3,594,299 1846, 8,870,202 1847, 29,694,112 1848, 12,457,857[22]

Now, in the year 1847, though we imported nearly thirty millions' worth of grain, our exports were £1,200,000 _less_ than in 1845, when we only received three millions and a half of subsistence from foreign states. Can there be a more decisive proof that the greatest possible addition to our importation of grain is not likely to be attended with any increase to our export of manufactures?

But if the great importation of grain which free-trade induces into the British empire is not attended with any increase of our exports, in the name of heaven, what good does it do? Feed the people cheap. But what do they gain by that, if their wages, and the profits of their employers, fall in the same or a greater proportion? That effect has already taken place, and to a most distressing extent. Wages of skilled operatives, such as colliers, iron-moulders, cotton-spinners, calico-printers, and the like, are now not more than _half_ of what they were when the corn-laws were in operation. They are now receiving 2s. 6d. a-day where, before the change, they received 5s. Wheat has been forced down from 56s. to 44s.: that is somewhat above a fifth, but wages have fallen a half. The last state of those men is worse than the first. The unjust change for which they clamoured has proved ruinous to themselves.

The way in which this disastrous effect has taken place is this: In the first place, the _balance_ of trade has turned so ruinously against us, from the effect of the free-trade measures, that the credit of the commercial classes has, under the operation of our monetary laws, been most seriously confused. It appears, from the accurate and laborious researches of Mr Newdegate, that the balance of trade against Great Britain, during the last three years of free trade, has been no less than £54,000,000 sterling.[23] Now, woful experience has taught the English people that the turning of the balance of trade is a most formidable thing against a commercial nation, and that the practical experience of mankind, which has always regarded it as one of the greatest of calamities, is more to be regarded than the theory of Adam Smith, that it was a matter of no sort of consequence. When coupled with a sliding currency scale, which contracts the circulation of bank-notes in proportion as the specie is withdrawn, it is one of the most terrible calamities which can befall a commercial and manufacturing state. It is under this evil that the nation is now labouring: and it will continue to do so, till folly of conduct and error of opinion have been expiated or eradicated by suffering.

In the next place, the purchase of so very large a portion as a fourth of the annual subsistence--not from our own cultivators, who consume at an average five or six pounds a-head of our manufactures, but from foreign growers, who consume little or nothing--has had a most serious effect upon the home trade. The introduction of 12,000,000 or 13,000,000 quarters of grain a-year into our markets, from countries whose importation of our manufactures is almost equal to nothing, is a most dreadfully depressing circumstance to our manufacturers. It is destroying one set of customers, and that the very best we have--the home growers--without rearing up another to supply their place. It is exchanging the purchases by substantial yeomen, our own countrymen and neighbours, of our fabrics, for the abstraction by aliens and enemies of our money. It is the same thing as converting a customer into a pauper, dependent on our support. It was distinctly foretold by the protectionists, during the whole time the debate on the repeal of the corn laws was going forward, that this effect would take place: that the peasants of the Ukraine and the Vistula did not consume a hundredth part as much, per head, as those of East Lothian or Essex; and that to substitute the one for the other was to be penny wise and pound foolish. These predictions, however, were wholly disregarded; the thing was done; and now it is found that the result has been _much worse_ than was anticipated--for not only has it gratuitously and unnecessarily crippled the means of a large part of the home consumers of our manufactures, but it has universally shaken and contracted credit, especially in the commercial districts, by the drain it has induced upon the precious metals. These evils, from the earliest times, have been felt by mercantile nations; but they were the result, in previous cases, of adverse circumstances or necessity. It was reserved for this age to introduce them voluntarily, and regard them as the last result of political wisdom.

In the third place, the reduction of prices, and diminution in the remuneration of industry, which has taken place from the introduction of free trade, and the general admission of foreign produce and manufactures, raised in countries where production is cheap, because money is scarce and taxes light, to compete with one where production is dear, because money is plentiful and taxes heavy, cannot of course fail to be attended--and that from the very outset--with the most disastrous effects upon the general interests of the empire, and especially such of them as are engaged in trade and manufactures. Suppose that, anterior to the monetary and free-trade changes intended to force down prices, the annual value of the industry of the country stood thus, which we believe to be very near the truth:--

Lands and minerals, £300,000,000 Manufactures and commerce of all sorts, 200,000,000 ------------ Deduct taxes and local burdens, £80,000,000 Interest of mortgages, 50,000,000 ----------- 130,000,000 ------------ Clear to national industry, £370,000,000

But if prices are forced down a half, which, at the very least, may be anticipated, and in fact has already taken place, from the _combined_ effect of free trade and a restricted currency, estimating each at a fourth only, the account will stand thus,--

Land and minerals, £150,000,000 Manufactures, 100,000,000 ------------ Total, £250,000,000

Deduct taxes and rates, £80,000,000 Interest of mortgages, 50,000,000 ----------- 130,000,000 ------------ Clear to national industry, £120,000,000

Thus, by the operation of these changes, in money and commerce, which lower prices _a half_, the whole national income is reduced from £370,000,000 to £120,000,000, or _less than a third_. Such is the inevitable effect of a great reduction of prices, in a community of which the major and more important part is still engaged in the work of production; and such the illustration of the truth of the Marquis of Granby's observation, that, under such a reduction, the whole producing classes must lose more than they can by possibility gain, because their loss is upon their _whole_ income, their gain only upon that portion of their means--seldom more than a half--which is spent on the purchase of articles, the cost of which is affected by the fall of prices.

The most decisive proof of the universality and general sense of this reduction of income and general distress, is to be found in the efforts which Mr Cobden and the free-trade party are now making to effect a great reduction in the public expenditure. During the discussion on corn-law repeal, they told us that the change they advocated could make no sort of difference on the income of the producing and agricultural classes, and that it would produce an addition to the income of the trading classes of £100,000,000 a-year. Of course, the national and public resources were to be greatly benefited by the change; and it was under this belief adopted. Now, however, that the change has taken place, and its result has been found to be a universal embarrassment to all classes and interests, but especially to the commercial, they turn round and tell us that this effect is inevitable from the change of prices--that the halcyon days of high rents and profits are at an end, and that all that remains is for all classes to accommodate themselves the best way they can to the inevitable change. They propose to begin with Queen Victoria and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, from whom they propose to cut off £11,000,000 a-year of income. But they consider this perfectly safe, because, as the aspect of things, both abroad and in our colonial empire, is so singularly pacific, and peace and goodwill are so soon to prevail among men, they think it will be soon possible to disband our troops, sell our ships of war, and trust the stilling the passions and settling the disputes of nations and races to the great principles of justice and equity, which invariably regulate the proceedings of all popular and democratic communities. We say nothing of the probability of such a millennium soon arriving, or of the prognostics of its approach, which passing and recent events in India, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sicily, and Ireland, have afforded, or are affording. We refer to them only as giving the most decisive proof that the free-traders have now themselves become sensible that their measures have produced a general impoverishment of all classes, from the head of the state downwards, and that a great reduction of expenditure is unavoidable, if a general public and private bankruptcy would be averted.

In truth, the proofs of this general impoverishment are now so numerous and decisive, that they have brought conviction home to the minds of the most obdurate, and, with the exception of the free-trade leaders or agitators--whose fanaticism is, of course, fixed and incurable--have produced a general distrust of the new principles. A few facts will place them in the most striking light. The greatest number of emigrants who had previously sailed from the British shores was in 1839, when they reached 129,000. But in the year 1847, the sacred year of free trade and a fettered currency, they rose at once to 258,270. In 1848 they were 248,000. The number this year is understood to be still greater, and composed almost entirely, not of paupers--who, of course, cannot get away--but of the better sort of mechanics, tradesmen, and small farmers, who, under the new system, find their means of subsistence dried up. The poor-rate in England has now risen to £7,000,000 annually--as much in nominal amount as it was in 1834, when the new poor-law was introduced by the Whig government, and, if the change in the value of money is taken into account, half as much more. A _seventh_ of the British empire are now supported in the two islands by the parish rates, and yet the demands on private charity are hourly increasing. Crime is universally and rapidly on the increase: in Ireland, where the commitments never before exceeded 21,000, they rose in 1848 to 39,000. In England, in the same year, they were 30,000; in Scotland, 4908; all a great increase over previous years. It is not surprising crime was so prolific in a country where, in the preceding year, at least 250,000 persons _died of famine_, in spite of the noble grant of £10,000,000 from the British treasury for their support. We extract from the _Standard of Freedom_ the following summary of some of the social results which have followed the adoption of liberal principles:--

"STATE OF ENGLAND.--One man in every ten, according to Sir J. Graham, a short time ago was in receipt of parish relief in this country; but now, it appears, from a return up to June last, it is not 10 per cent, but 11 per cent of the population who receive parochial relief; for the persons so relieved amount to 1,700,000 out of 15,000,000. £7,000,000 was raised annually for the relief of the poor in England, and £500,000 in Scotland; and, taking the amount collected for and raised in Ireland at £1,860,957, it makes a total of £9,460,957, as the sum levied annually in the British empire for the relief of the poor, or three times the cost of the civil government, independently of the cost of the army and navy. Besides the regular standing force, there is the casual poor, a kind of disposable force, moving about and exhausting every parish they go through. In 1815, there were 1,791 vagrants in one part of the metropolis, and, in 1828, in the same district in London, they had increased to 16,086. In 1832, the number was 35,600, which had increased, in 1847, to 41,743. Moreover, there is a certain district south of the Thames, in which, for the six months ending September 1846, the number was 18,533, and which had increased, during the same six months in 1847, to 44,937. And, in the county of York, in one of the first unions in the West Riding, in 1836, one vagrant was relieved, and, in 1847, 1,161. This affords a pretty strong, dark, and gloomy picture of the state of destitution prevailing in this country."--_Standard of Freedom._

General as the distress is which, under the combined operations of free trade and a fettered currency, has been brought upon the country, there is one circumstance of peculiar importance which has not hitherto, from the efforts of the free-traders to conceal it, met with the attention it deserves. This is the far greater amount of ruin and misery they have brought upon the commercial classes, who supported, than the agriculturists, who opposed them. The landed interest is only beginning to experience, in the present low prices, the depressing effects of free trade. The Irish famine has hitherto concealed or postponed them. London is suffering, but not so much as the provincial towns, from its being the great place where the realised wealth of the country is spent. But the whole commercial classes in the manufacturing towns have felt them for nearly two years in the utmost intensity. It is well known that, during that short period, _one-half_ of the wealth realised, and in course of realisation, in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow, has perished. There is no man practically acquainted with these cities who will dispute that fact. The poor-rates of Glasgow, which, five years ago, did not exceed £30,000 a-year for the parliamentary city, have now reached £200,000; viz.

Glasgow parish, £90,000 Barony, 70,000 Gorbals, 40,000 -------- £200,000

The sales by shopkeepers in these towns have not, during three years, been a third of their average amount. All the witnesses examined before the Lords' committee on the public distress, describe this panic of autumn 1847 as infinitely exceeding in duration and severity anything previously experienced; and the state of matters, and the intensity of the shock given to public credit, may be judged of by the following entries as to the state of the Bank of England in June 1845 and October 1847, when the law was suspended:--

JUNE 1845.

| | ISSUE DEPARTMENT. | BANKING DEPARTMENT. | | Date. | Notes | Gold and | Notes in | Gold and | | | Issued. | Silver | Reserve. | Silver | | | | Bullion. | | Coin. | +--------+ | | | | | June 7 | £29,732,000 | £15,732,000 | £9,382,000 | £779,000 | | -- 14 | 29,917,000 | 15,917,000 | 9,854,000 | 696,000 | | -- 21 | 30,051,000 | 16,051,000 | 9,837,000 | 587,000 | | -- 28 | 30,047,000 | 16,047,000 | 9,717,000 | 554,000 |

OCTOBER 1847.

| | ISSUE DEPARTMENT. | BANKING DEPARTMENT. | | | | | | | | Date. | Notes | Gold and | Notes in | Gold and | | | Issued. | Silver | Reserve. | Silver | | | | Bullion. | | Coin. | +--------+ | | | | | Oct. 2 | £22,121,000 | £8,121,000 | £3,409,000 | £443,000 | | -- 9 | 21,961,000 | 7,961,000 | 3,321,000 | 447,000 | | -- 16 | 21,989,000 | 7,989,000 | 2,630,000 | 441,000 | | -- 23 | 21,865,000 | 7,865,000 | 1,547,000 | 447,000 | | -- 30 | 22,009,000 | 8,009,000 | 1,176,000 | 429,000 |

_Commercial Crisis_, 2d edition, 132-133.

Thus, such was the severity of the panic, and the contraction of the currency, consequent on the monetary laws and the operation of free trade in grain, that the nation was all but rendered bankrupt, and half its traders unquestionably were so, when there were still eight millions of sovereigns in the issue department of the bank which could not be touched, while the reserve of notes in the banking department had sunk from nearly £10,000,000, in 1845, to £1,100,000!

So portentous a state of things, fraught as it necessarily was with utter ruin to a great part of the best interests in the empire, was certainly not contemplated by the commercial classes, when they embarked in the crusade of free trade against the productive interests. It might have been long of coming on, and certainly would never have set in with half the severity which actually occurred, had it not been that, not content with the project of forcing down prices by means of the unrestricted admission of foreign produce, they at the same time sought to augment their own fortunes by restricting the currency. It was the _double project_, beyond all question, which proved their ruin. They began and flattered themselves they would play out successfully the game of "_beggar my neighbour_," but by pushing their measures too far, it turned into one of "_beggar ourselves_." It was the double strain of free trade and a fettered currency which brought such embarrassment on the commercial classes, as it was the double strain of the Spanish and Russian wars which proved the destruction of Napoleon. It would appear to be a general law of nature, that great measures of injustice cannot be carried into execution, either by communities or single men, without vindicating the justice of the Divine administration, by bringing down upon themselves the very ruin which they have designed for others.

The free-traders say that there is no general reaction against their principles, and that the formation of a government on protectionist principles is at present impossible. We shall not inquire, and have not the means of knowing, whether or not this statement is well founded. We are willing to accept the statement as true, and we perceive a great social revolution, accompanied with infinite present suffering, but most important ultimate results, growing from their obstinate adherence to their principles in defiance of the lessons of experience. _The free-traders are with their own hands destroying the commercial classes, which had acquired an undue preponderance in the state._ They must work out their own punishment before they abjure their principles. Every day a free-trading merchant or shopkeeper is swept into the _Gazette_, and his family cast down to the humblest ranks in society. They go down like the Fifth Monarchy men when expelled from the House of Commons by the bayonets of Cromwell, or the Girondists when led to the scaffold by the Jacobins, chanting hymns in honour of their principles when perishing from their effects:--

"They are true to the last of their blood and their breath, And, like reapers, descend to the harvest of death."

But this constancy of individuals when suffering under the measures they themselves have introduced, however curious and respectable as a specimen of the unvarying effect of fanaticism, whether religious or social, on the human mind, cannot permanently arrest the march of events; it cannot stop the effect of their own measures, any more than the courage of the Highlanders in 1745 could prevent the final extinction of the Jacobite cause. Let them adhere to free trade and a fettered currency as they like, the advocates of the new measures are daily and hourly losing their influence. Money constitutes the sinews of war not less in social than in national contests. No cause can be long victorious which is linked to that worst of allies, INSOLVENCY. In two years the mercantile classes have destroyed one-half of their own wealth; in two years more, one-half of what remains will be gone. Crippled, discredited, ruined, beat down by foreign competition, exhausted by the failure of domestic supplies, the once powerful mercantile body of England will be prostrate in the dust. All other classes, of course, will be suffering from their fall, but none in the same degree as themselves. It is not improbable that the land may regain its appropriate influence in the state, by the ruin which their own insane measures have brought upon its oppressors. No one will regret the lamentable consequences of such a change, already far advanced in its progress, more than ourselves, who, have uniformly foretold its advent, and strenuously resisted the commercial and monetary changes which, amidst shouts of triumph from the whole Liberal party, were silently but certainly inducing these results.

Confounded at such a series of events, so widely different from what they anticipated and had predicted from their measures, the free-traders have no resource but to lay them all on two external causes, for which they are not, as they conceive, responsible: these causes are, the French and German revolutions, and the potato famine in Ireland.

That the revolutions on the continent of Europe have materially affected the market for the produce of British industry, in the countries where they have occurred, is indeed certain; but are the Liberals entitled to shake themselves free from the consequences of these convulsions? Have we not, for the last thirty years, been labouring incessantly to encourage and extend revolution in all the adjoining states? Did we not insidiously and basely support the revolutions in South America, and call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old? Was not the result of that monstrous and iniquitous interference in support of the rebels in an allied state, to induce the dreadful monetary catastrophe of December 1825, the severest, till that of 1847, ever experienced in modern Europe? Did we not, not merely instantly recognise the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, but lend our powerful aid and countenance to extend the laudable example to the adjoining states? Did we not join with France to prevent the King of the Netherlands from regaining the command of Flanders in 1832, and blockade the Scheldt while Marshal Gerard bombarded Antwerp? Did we not conclude the Quadruple Alliance to effect the revolutionising of Spain and Portugal, and bathe both countries for four years with blood, to establish revolutionary queens on both the thrones in the Peninsula? Have we not intercepted the armament of the King of Naples against Sicily, by Admiral Parker's fleet, and aided the insurgents in that island with arms from the Tower? Did we not interfere to arrest the victorious columns of Radetsky at Turin, but never move a step to check Charles Albert on the Mincio? Did we not side with revolutionary Prussia against the Danes, and aid in launching Pio Nono into that frantic career which has spread such ruin through the Italian peninsula? Have we not all but lost the confidence of our old ally, Austria, from our notorious intrigues to encourage the furious divisions which have torn that noble empire? Nay, have we not been so enamoured of revolution, that we could not avoid showing a partiality for it in our own dominions--rewarding and encouraging O'Connell, and allowing monster meetings, till by the neglect of Irish industry we landed them in famine, and by the fanning of Irish passions brought them up to rebellion;--and establishing a constitution in Canada which gave a decided majority in parliament to an alien and rebel race, and, as a necessary consequence, giving the colonial administration to the very party whom, ten years ago, the loyalists put down with true British spirit at the point of the bayonet? All this we have done, and have long been doing, with impunity; and now that the consequences of such multifarious sins have fallen upon us, in the suffering which revolution has at last brought upon the British empire, the Liberals turn round and seek to avoid the responsibility of the disasters produced by their internal policy, by throwing it on the external events which they themselves have induced.

Then as to the Irish famine of 1846, it is rather too much, after the lapse of _three_ years, to go on ascribing the general distress of the empire to a partial failure of a particular crop, which, after all, did not exceed the loss of a twentieth part of the annual agricultural produce of the British Islands. But if the free-traders' principles had been well founded, this failure in Ireland should have been the greatest possible blessing to their party in the state, because it _immediately_ effected that transference of the purchase of a part of the national food from home to foreign cultivators, which is the very thing they hold out as such an advantage, and likely in an especial manner to enlarge the foreign market for our manufactures. It induced the importation of £30,000,000 worth of foreign grain in three months: that, on the principles of the free-traders, should have put all our manufacturers in activity, and placed the nation in the third heaven. Disguise it as you will, the Irish potato-rot was but an anticipation, somewhat more sudden than they expected, of the _free-trade rot_, which was held out as a certain panacea for all the national evils. And now, when free trade and a restricted currency have not proved quite so great a blessing as they anticipated, the free-traders turn round and lay it all on the substitution of foreign importation for domestic production in Ireland, when that very substitution is the thing they have, by abolishing the corn laws, laboured to effect over the whole empire.

Then as to the state of Ireland, which has at length reached the present unparalleled crisis of difficulty and suffering, the conduct of the Liberals has been, if possible, still more inconsistent and self-condemnatory. For half a century past, they have been incessantly declaiming on the mild, inoffensive, and industrious character of the Irish race; upon their inherent loyalty to the throne; and upon the enormous iniquity of British rule, which had brought the whole misfortunes under which they were labouring on that virtuous people. Nothing but equal privileges, Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, burgh reform, and influence at Dublin Castle, we were told, were required to set everything right, and render Ireland as peaceable and prosperous as any part of the British dominions. The conduct of James I. and Cromwell, in planting Saxon and Protestant colonies in Ulster, was in an essential manner held up to detestation, as one of the chief causes of the social and religious divisions which had over since distracted the country. Well, the Liberals have given all these things to the Irish. For twenty years, the island has been governed entirely on these principles. They have got Catholic emancipation, a reduction of the Protestant church, national education, corporate reform, parliamentary reform, monster meetings, ceaseless agitation, and, in fact, all the objects for which, in common with the Liberal party in Great Britain, they have so long contended. And what has been the result? Is it that pauperism has disappeared, industry flourished, divisions died away, prosperity become general? So far from it, divisions never have been so bitter, dissension never so general, misery so grinding, suffering so universal, since the British standards, under Henry II., seven centuries ago, first approached their shores. A rebellion has broken out; anarchy and agitation, by turning the people aside from industry, have terminated in famine; and even the stream of English charity seems dried up, from the immensity of the suffering to be relieved, and the ingratitude with which it has heretofore been received. And what do the Liberals now do? Why, they put it all down to the score of the incurable indolence and heedlessness of the Celtic race, which nothing can eradicate, and cordially support Sir R. Peel's proposal to plant English colonies in Connaught, _exactly similar to Cromwell's in Ulster_, so long the object of Liberal hatred and declamation! They tell us now that the native Irish are irreclaimable helots, hewers of wood and drawers of water, and incapable of improvement till directed by Saxon heads and supported by the produce of Saxon hands. They forget that it is these very helots whom they represented as such immaculate and valuable subjects, the victims of Saxon injustice and Ulster misrule. They forget that English capitalists and farmers would long since have migrated to Ireland, and induced corn cultivation in its western and southern provinces, were it not that Liberal agitation kept the people in a state of menacing violence, and Liberal legislation took away all prospect of remunerating prices for their grain produce. And thus much for the Crowning of the Column of Free Trade, and Crushing of the Pedestal of the Nation.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] "No great state can long remain quiet; if it has not an enemy abroad, it finds one at home, as powerful bodies resist all external attacks, but are destroyed by their internal strength."--LIVY.

[16] "While each separately fights, all are conquered."--TACITUS.

[17]

Column Headings-- A - Slavery Value. B - After Abolition. C - After Abolition of Apprenticeship. D - Since passing Sugar Bill of 1846.

A | B | C | D | Name of the | | | | Estate. ---------+---------+---------+---------+ £ | £ | £ | £ | 120,000 | 60,000 | 45,000 | 5,000 | Windsor Forest. 65,000 | 32,000 | 26,000 | 5,000 | La Grange. 55,000 | 27,500 | 23,000 | 3,500 | Belle Plaine. 80,000 | 30,000 | 20,000 | 6,000 | Rabacca. 70,000 | 25,000 | 17,000 | 3,000 | Sir W. South. 45,000 | 20,000 | 15,000 | 5,000 | Richmond Hill. ---------+---------+---------+---------+ 435,000 | 194,500 | 146,000 | 27,500 |

Slavery value, £435,000 Estimated present value, 27,500 -------- Depreciation, £407,500 Or equal to 93-1/2 per cent on original value.

--IN RE CRUIKSHANKS, IN CHANCERY, _Times_, June 6th, 1849.

[18]

| QUANTITIES imported into the United Kingdom in the | | month ending April 5, 1849:-- | | | | | | The | | | | | produce | | | | | of, and | | | Species of | Imported | imported | | | Corn, Grain, | from foreign | from, | Total. | | Meal, and | countries. | British | | | Flour. | | possessions| | | | | out of | | | | | Europe. | | +-----------------+----------------+------------+-----------------+ | | Qrs. Bush.| Qrs. Bls. | Qrs. Bush. | | Wheat | 535,015 2 | | 535,015 2 | | Barley | 150,177 5 | | 150,177 5 | | Oats | 146,149 6 | 1 6 | 146,151 4 | | Rye | 20,768 4 | | 20,768 4 | | Peas | 12,313 6 | | 12,313 6 | | Beans | 60,294 5 | | 60,294 5 | | | | | | | Maize or } | 184,772 4 | | 184,772 4 | | Indian corn } | | | | | Buck-wheat | 12 3 | | 12 3 | | Bere or bigg | 800 0 | | 800 0 | | +----------------+------------+-----------------+ | Total of corn } | 1,110,304 3 | 1 6 | 1,110,306 1 | | and grain } | | | | | +----------------+------------+-----------------+ | | | | | | | Cwt. qrs. lb.| Cwt. q. lb.| Cwt. qrs. lb.| | Wheat meal } | 307,617 0 7 | 753 3 11 | 308,370 3 18 | | or flour } | | | | | Barley meal | | | | | Oat meal | 24 2 0 | | 24 2 0 | | Rye meal | 1,571 1 9 | | 1,571 1 9 | | Pea meal | 10 0 0 | | 10 0 0 | | Indian meal | 10,707 1 10 | | 10,707 1 10 | | Buck-wheat meal | 80 0 0 | | 80 0 0 | | +----------------+------------+-----------------+ | Total of meal } | 320,010 0 26 | 753 3 11 | 320,764 0 9 | | and flour } | | | |

| QUANTITIES charged with duty for Home Consumption in the | | United Kingdom in the month ended April 5, 1849:-- | | | | | | The | | | | | produce | | | | | of, and | | | Species of | Imported | imported | | | Corn, Grain, | from foreign | from, | Total. | | Meal, and | countries. | British | | | Flour. | | possessions| | | | | out of | | | | | Europe. | | +-----------------+----------------+------------+-----------------+ | | Qrs. Bush.| Qrs. Bls. | Qrs. Bush.| | Wheat | 559,602 2 | | 559,602 2 | | Barley | 170,343 5 | | 170,343 5 | | Oats | 149,784 5 | | 149,786 3 | | Rye | 22,432 1 | 1 6 | 22,432 1 | | Peas | 17,782 0 | | 17,782 0 | | Beans | 59,546 5 | | 59,546 5 | | | | | | | Maize or } | 183,604 6 | | 183,604 6 | | Indian corn } | | | | | Buck-wheat | 12 3 | | 12 3 | | Bere or bigg | 800 0 | | 800 0 | | +----------------+------------+-----------------+ | Total of corn } | 1,163,908 3 | 1 6 | 1,163,910 1 | | and grain } | | | | | +----------------+------------+-----------------+ | | | | | | | Cwt. qrs. lb.| Cwt. q. lb.| Cwt. qrs. lb.| | Wheat meal } | 353,799 1 3 | 2509 0 1 | 356,308 1 4 | | or flour } | | | | | Barley meal | | | | | Oat meal | 26 2 8 | | 26 2 8 | | Rye meal | 825 3 6 | | 825 3 6 | | Pea meal | 10 0 0 | | 10 0 0 | | Indian meal | 10,671 1 7 | | 10,671 1 7 | | Buck-wheat meal | 80 0 0 | | 80 0 0 | | +----------------+------------+-----------------+ | Total of meal } | 365,412 3 24 | 2509 0 1 | 367,921 3 25 | | and flour } | | | |

--_London Gazette_, 20th April, 1849.

[19]

"Advenio supplex, non ut proculcet Araxen Consul ovans, nostræve premant pharetrata secures Susa, nec ut rubris Aquilas figamus arenis. Hæc nobis, hæc ante dabas. Nunc pabula tantum Roma precor. Miserere tuæ pater optime gentis, _Extremam defenda famam_--Satiavimus iram, Si quâ fuit. Lugenda Getis et flenda Suëvis Hausimus: ipsa meos exhorret Parthia casus.

* * * * *

Armato quondam populo, Patrumque vigebam Consiliis. Domui terras, urbesque revinxi Legibus: ad solem victrix utrumque cucurri,

* * * * *

Nunc inhonorus egens perfert miserabile pacis Supplicium, nulloque palam circumdatus hoste, Obsessi discrimen habet--per singula letum Impendit momenta mihi, dubitandaque pauci Prescribant alimenta Dies."

--CLAUDIAN, _De Bello_. _Gildonico_, 35--100.

[20] In 1845, the Bank of England notes out with the public were about £23,000,000. Since the free trade began they have seldom been above £18,000,000, and at times as low as £16,800,000, and that at the very time when all the railways were going on.

[21] Newdegate's _Letter to Mr Labouchere_, p. 12-13.

[22] Newdegate's _Letter to Mr Labouchere_, p. 17.

[23]

| | | | Balance of | Balance of Trade | | | | Total | Freight | against Britain. | | | Total | Exports. | carried by | | | | Imports. | Home and | British |Exports and | Deducting | | | | Colonial. | Ships. | Imports. | Freights. | +----+------------+------------+------------+------------+-----------+ |1845| £84,054,272| £70,236,726| £12,979,089| £13,817,446| £838,357| |1846| 89,281,433| 66,283,270| 13,581,165| 22,998,163| 9,416,998| |1847| 117,047,229| 70,329,671| 18,817,742| 46,717,558| 27,899,816| |1848| 92,660,699| 61,557,191| 14,699,491| 31,103,508| 16,404,017| | +------------+------------+------------+------------+-----------+ | |£383,043,633|£268,406,878| £60,077,487|£114,636,675|£54,559,188|

--NEWDEGATE, 12-13.

POSTSCRIPT.

The discussion on the Canadian question, in the House of Lords, has had one good effect. It has elicited from Lord Lyndhurst a most powerful and able speech, in the best style of that great judge and distinguished statesman's oratory; and it has caused Lord Campbell to make an exhibition of spleen, ill-humour, and bad taste, which his warmest friends must have beheld with regret, and which was alone wanting to show the cogent effect which Lord Lyndhurst's speech had made on the house. Of the nature of Lord Campbell's attack on that able and venerable judge, second to none who ever sat in Westminster Hall for judicial power and forensic eloquence, some idea may be formed from the observations in reply of Lord Stanley:--

"I must say for myself, and I think I may say for the rest of the house, and not with the exception of noble lords on the opposite side of it, that they listened to that able, lucid, and powerful speech (Lord Lyndhurst's) with a feeling of anything but pain--a feeling of admiration at the power of language, the undiminished clearness of intellect--(cheers)--the conciseness and force with which my noble and learned friend grappled with the arguments before him, and which, while on the one hand they showed that age had in no degree impaired the vigour of that power, on the other added to the regret at the announcement he made of his intention so seldom to occupy the attention of the house. (Hear, hear.) But I should have thought that if there were one feeling it was impossible for any man to entertain after hearing that speech, it would be a feeling in any way akin to that which led the noble and learned lord to have introduced his answer to that speech by any unworthy taunts. (Loud cheers.) His noble and learned friend's high position and great experience, his high character and eminent ability, might have secured him in the honoured decline of his course from any such unworthy taunts--(great cheering)--as the noble and learned lord has not thought it beneath him on such an occasion to address to such a man. (Renewed cheering.) If the noble and learned lord listened with pain to the able statement of my noble and learned friend, sure am I that there is no friend of the noble and learned lord who must not have listened with deeper pain to what fell from him on this occasion."--_Times_, 20th June 1849.

And of the feeling of the country, on this uncalled-for and unprovoked attack, an estimate may be formed from the following passage of the _Times_ on the subject:--"This debate has also recalled to the scene of his former triumphs the undiminished energy and vigorous eloquence of Lord Lyndhurst. That it supplied Lord Campbell with the opportunity of making a series of remarks in the worst possible taste on that aged and distinguished peer is, we suspect, a matter on which neither the learned lord nor any of his colleagues will be disposed to look back with satisfaction."--_Times_, 22d June 1849.

What Lord Campbell says of Lord Lyndhurst is, that he was once a Liberal and he has now become a Conservative: that the time was when he would have supported such a bill as that which the Canadian parliament tendered to Lord Elgin, and that now he opposes it. There is no doubt of the fact: experience has taught him the errors of his early ways; he has not stood all day gazing at the east because the sun rose there in the morning--he has looked around him, and seen the consequences of those delusive visions in which, in common with most men of an ardent temperament, he early indulged. In doing so, he has made the same change as Pitt and Chatham, as Burke and Mackintosh, as Windham and Brougham, as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. There are men of a different stamp--men whom no experience can teach, and no facts wean from error--who retain in advanced life the prejudices and passions of their youth, and signalise declining years by increased personal ambition and augmented party spleen. Whatever Lord Lyndhurst may be, he is not one of them. He has not won his retiring allowance by a week's service in the Court of Chancery. He can look back on a life actively spent in the public service, and enjoy in his declining years the pleasing reflection, that the honours and fortune he has won are but the just meed of a nation's gratitude, for important public services long and admirably performed.

The Canadian question, itself, on which ministers so narrowly escaped shipwreck in the House of Peers (by a majority of THREE) appears to us to lie within a very small compass. Cordially disapproving as we do of the bill for indemnifying the rebels which the Canadian ministry introduced and the Canadian parliament passed, we yet cannot see that any blame attaches to Lord Elgin personally for giving the consent of government to the bill. Be the bill good or bad, just or unjust, it had passed the legislature by a large majority, and Lord Elgin would not have been justified in withholding his consent, any more than Queen Victoria would have been in refusing to pass the Navigation Laws Bill. The passing of disagreeable and often unjust laws, by an adverse majority, is a great evil, no doubt; but it is an evil inherent in popular and responsible government, for which the Canadian loyalists equally with the Canadian rebels contended. Let our noble brethren in Canada reflect on this. The Conservatives of England have for long seen a series of measures pass the legislature, which they deem destructive to the best interests of their country; but they never talked of separating from their Liberal fellow-citizens on that account, or blamed the Queen because she affixed the royal assent to their bills. They are content to let time develop the consequences of these acts; and meanwhile they direct all their efforts to enlighten their countrymen on the subject, and, if possible, regain a preponderance in the legislature for their own party. The Canadian loyalists, second to none in the British empire in courage, energy, and public spirit, will doubtless see, when the heat of the contest is over, that it is by such conduct that they will best discharge their duty to their country.

_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._

Transcriber's Notes:

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical and spelling errors were corrected.

Italics markup is denoted by _underscores_.

Bold markup is denoted by =equals=.

Greek text has been transliterated and is denoted by ~tildes~.

Provided anchor for unanchored footnote on p. 33.

In the table to the footnote to p. 119 the 1 6 for oats or rye should likely be in the same row.

On p. 122 either the total of £9,460,957 should be £9,360,957 or one of the summands is incorrect.