CHAPTER XIV.

The Savoyard looked at me wistfully. I wished to enter into conversation with him. That was not easy. However, I began:--

PISISTRATUS.--"You must be often hungry enough, my poor boy. Do the mice feed you?"

SAVOYARD puts his head on one side, shakes it, and stroked his mice.

PISISTRATUS.--"You are very fond of the mice; they are your only friends, I fear."

SAVOYARD, evidently understanding Pisistratus, rubs his face gently against the mice, then puts them softly down on a grave, and gives a turn to the hurdy-gurdy. The mice play unconcernedly over the grave.

PISISTRATUS, pointing first to the beasts, then to the instrument.--"Which do you like best, the mice or the hurdy-gurdy?"

SAVOYARD shows his teeth--considers--stretches himself on the grass--plays with the mice--and answers volubly.

PISISTRATUS, by the help of Latin comprehending that the Savoyard says, that the mice are alive and the hurdy-gurdy is not--"Yes, a live friend is better than a dead one. Mortua est hurda-gurda!"

SAVOYARD shakes his head vehemently.--"Nô--nô! Eccellenza, non ê mortu!" and strikes up a lively air on the slandered instrument. The Savoyard's face brightens--he looks happy: the mice run from the grave into his bosom.

PISISTRATUS, affected.--"Have you a father--An vivat pater?"

SAVOYARD, with his face overcast.--"Nô--eccellenza!" then pausing a little, he says briskly, "Si-Si!" and plays a solemn air on the hurdy-gurdy--stops--rests one hand on the instrument, and raises the other to heaven.

PISISTRATUS understands.--"The father is like the hurdy-gurdy, at once dead and living. The mere form is a dead thing, but the music lives." Pisistratus drops another small piece of silver on the ground, and turns away.

"God help and God bless thee, Savoyard. Thou hast done Pisistratus all the good in the world. Thou hast corrected the hard wisdom of the young gentleman in the velveteen jacket; Pisistratus is a better lad for having stopped to listen to thee."

I regained the entrance to the churchyard--I looked back--there sate the Savoyard, still amidst men's graves, but under God's sky. He was still looking at me wistfully, and when he caught my eye, he pressed his hand to his heart, and smiled. "God help and God bless thee, young Savoyard."

REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

JUNE 1848.

How far is the application to France, of the epithet employed in the title that heads these pages, a misnomer? This is a question that would be answered very differently by those who study its state of feeling, and those who judge its position by mere established fact. That the fact and the feeling are completely at issue throughout the country, is undoubted, indisputable. A republican government has been established by the _coup de main_ of a small minority in France--has been accepted by the hesitation of surprise--has been maintained by the desire of peace and order:--so far goes fact. Republican principles were hateful to the immense majority of the country at large in the past, uncongenial to its habits and sentiments, impossible according to its views; they are productive, as yet, of nothing but confusion, distress, ruin, riot, and mistrust, in the present; they are looked upon with alarm as regards their results in the future:--so much for feeling. Fact and feeling, then, are at variance and in collision. The result of the conflict lies hidden in the mysteries of that future, the issue of which, at no epoch of history, perhaps, clearseeing eyes and wise foreseeing heads could less pretend to predict, than in the present chaotic hurly-burly of European society. The politicians who declared that the general spirit of the country in France was, in their vague and fantastic language of the Chamber, _centre-gauche_, or the advocate of liberal progress, may have been very right,--but republican it never was, republican it is not. Republican--without pretension to the audacity of a prediction but just stated as impossible--it certainly does not as yet appear ever likely to become.

In its present state of feeling, then, France--that is to say, the country, the provinces, the departments, or whatever France, out of Paris, may be called--is about as much genuine republican, as a white man who suddenly finds his face smeared over with the contents of a blacking-bottle is a genuine negro. But, for the sake of avoiding that confusion of terms and ideas in which the French themselves are so fond of indulging, to an extent that proves the deification of "the vague" to take far higher flights among them, especially in their republican tenets, than any flown by confused German head,--let it be taken as a rule, that fact is to have the precedence of feeling, as in most matters in the world,--and let it be supposed that the misnomer is no misnomer, that there has been no mistake, in truth, in the title of "Republican France."

Between France out of Paris and France in Paris, a great distinction, in speaking of the country, must always be drawn; although, in the matter of republicanism in the feelings of the mass, the same blacking-bottle remark might be applied to the majority of the citizens of the capital, as to the country at large. No family of grown-up daughters, who have been tyrannically kept in the nursery like children when they no longer felt themselves such, and made to wear mamma's worn-out dresses scantily cut down to their shapes, could be more sundered in feeling from their lady-mother, and jealous of her overgrown charms, her gaiety, her splendour, and her power, than the departments,--kept in the nursery upon centralisation system, and fed upon the bread-and-milk of insignificance,--are of the tyrannical supremacy, the overweening superiority, and the disdainful airs, affected to her despised progeny by Mother Paris. The pursuance of the concentrating system has thus produced an estrangement in the family,--a jealousy and spite on the one hand, a greater and increasing assumption of airs of supremacy on the other. The family ties between Paris and France are as wholly disunited as family ties can be, in the necessities of a more or less intimate connexion: the mother has isolated, in her despotism, herself from her children, the children have imbibed distrust and envy of the mother. The consequence is, that there are two distinct families in feeling,--there are two Frances; there is the France of Paris, of Paris that asserts its right to be all France, and the France of the departments, that, in spite of the assertions of Paris, desire to put in their little claim for a small share in the name, and would like to have their own little fingers in the pies of revolutions, and changes of government in the family, that mamma cooks up. True, they are supposed to eat at the same table, but mamma has all the tit-bits. They have a voice in the family council, but it is when mamma has already issued her _dictum_, and declared that such and such things shall be as she has decided it. They help to support the family establishment with the moneys which mamma declares they must contribute out of their heritage; but then mamma, they declare, spends a most undue proportion upon herself, in dressing herself out with finery, keeping up an unnecessary state, and throwing away the sums confided to her to overpay a throng of unruly onhangers, with all the prodigality of fear; while they, the poor daughters, are made to put up with cast-off finery, and to be thwarted and twitted by harsh governesses, and to fight, as best they may, with an obstreperous herd of unpaid pensioners, which mamma's mismanagement has excited to uproar; and then, after all, to kiss hands and thank mamma for whatever they can get,--scanty sugar-plums and many cuffs. Is this to be endured? The children grumble much, and particularly since mamma has chosen to make changes in the direction of the household establishment of which they by no means approve, and has only produced confusion and disorder in it. But at present they can do no more than grumble; mamma has the rod, and they know that she will use it; mamma has the supreme influence, and habit makes them think they must abide by it. There is no doubt, at the same time, that the children and parent would unite in a common bond of union were the family honour to be asserted against an attack from any adversary to the family out of the house. Their intestine jealousies would be forgotten for the time, for the maintenance of the common good--a fancied good; for, after all, mother and daughters have the same blood, the same temperr and character, the same vain-glory, conceit, and irritability, the same strong prejudices of ignorance; and they would join hands and clamour together in the same opposition to the stranger. But this common-cause making, upon occasions of extraordinary pressure from without, detracts nothing, at other times, from the mistrust, jealousy, and angry susceptibility of the children in internal affairs. In moments of family crisis, will matters always go on as heretofore?

Nurseries will be obstreperous sometimes, and children will revolt, and mammas may pass very uncomfortable moments in the face of angry daughters in rebellion. Will the children take upon themselves, at last, to protest against mamma's disdainful commands, and assert a will of their own, and a right to think for themselves? This question is one upon the solution of which depends the fate of France, as well as upon the many thousand chances which the capricious and ever-shifting gales of a revolutionary atmosphere may, at any moment, suddenly blow, like a spark into a powder barrel, shattering the face of the past, and changing the direction of the future. Twice already, since the revolution of February, has the question been nearly answered in the affirmative. The last instance, of which more anon, may be taken as a striking proof that the children may possibly not always submit to the dictates of the mother,--that family mistrust may break out into family quarrel, and family quarrel in nations is civil war. Who again, however, may venture to predict what shall be the destinies of Republican France,--what web of darkness or of light, of blood-streaked stuff or of gold-threaded tissue, it may be weaving with its agitated and troubled hands, or what force it may interpose to tear the work to shreds before it be even yet completed? Most may fear, none may say. But prediction, upon whatever cunning foresight it may be based, must always call a sort of feeling of inspiration, nearly allied to superstition, to its aid: and thus the fanciful mind may, without taking upon itself the airs of a Pythoness, give way to a little superstition, and yet, perhaps, be not too strongly condemned of folly. There exists an old prophecy in France, emanating from a monk of the middle ages, the authenticity of which cannot be doubted, or, at all events, cannot be disputed, in as far as it was in well-known existence at the commencement of this century. It predicts, in mystic language,--dark, it is true, but wonderfully clear after its verification,--all the many revolutionary changes that have taken place in France, and now once more proclaims the reign of the "sons of Brutus." "Armed men," it distinctly says, "will march upon the doomed city," "sword and fire will prevail against it," "the wolves will devour each other." May the seeming superstition of a fantastical question be pardoned! May not these words refer to the future outbreak of the provinces of France against the capital? If they do, in what sense, with what tendencies, to forward the views of what party, may it be? Be that as it may, however, it is not the obscure future that is dealt with here, but the present confused and uncertain state of Republican France.

As it may be inferred from what has been said, Paris, then, has put on its crown, as capital, to some purpose. Never did despot assert his right to dictate his autocratic will to serfs and slaves more authoritatively than does revolutionary and republican Paris to the provinces of France. No three-tailed Bashaw of old melodrams could be more imperative in his ordinances, more arrogant in the conviction of the indisputability of his will. The bare supposition that the provinces could have a will of their own would strike Paris dumb with astonishment. Paris has been accustomed to consider itself not only as the heart, but the head, and the arms and legs to boot, of the whole country. The inert body has no more, in its consideration, to do, than allow itself to be fed with what scanty morsels of bounty and importance Paris may choose to afford, and then not to dare to grumble afterwards if the food prove unsavoury to its tastes, or indigestible to its susceptibilities. Paris is "Sir Oracle," and, when it speaks, no provincial "dog dare bark." Paris, thus, is the great type of the mainspring of the national character,--which works sometimes, we allow, for good as well as for evil:--namely, of that mixture of vanity and overweening conceit, which may be found at the bottom of almost every action of the French. It calls itself "the great capital of the civilised world;" and thus considers that, although the departments may be admitted to the reflected rays of lustre that emanate from its superior glory, they must look upon themselves as mere satellites, created to revolve at its liking and its high will, and perform their revolutions in whatever direction it deems fit to make its own revolution. Let it not be supposed that this representation is exaggerated, or that it proceeds from the distorted views of a foreigner. Hear the Parisian himself speak; list to his expressions of contempt for those unknown and barbarous regions called departments; mark how he asserts the unutterable superiority of his Parisian essence; see how he tosses his head and curls his lip with an infinitely aristocratic air, when he condescends to notice them with a word; and never was Paris more eager in the maintenance of its tyrannical supremacy; never was it more despotically and autocratically disposed; never more aristocratic, to use the pet phrase of the day, than under the rule of _soi-disant_ liberty, and of liberty of opinion, above all other liberties proclaimed by the French republic.

What were the expressions of the first republican minister of the interior, that type of republican exclusiveness and despotism, in his famous and rather too famous _bulletins de la republique_, issued to all France as the language and opinions of the government of the day? Paris, they informed the world, was the heart of France, from which all life and living principle emanated, through which every drop of the country's blood must flow, in order that it might beat in unison, and be refreshed with true republican vitality. Paris, they said again, was the hand that had created and fashioned the republic, and that was to direct its steps, lead it vigorously forward in its way--as it was the head that conceived, it was the hand that executed: it was more than all this, it was the _soul_ of France--the pure and true essence emanating from the new deity, the republic. Paris, they asserted in as many direct words, was the mistress whose will was to be obeyed. It is unnecessary to point out how little such declarations were in accordance with republican principles, what little affinity they had with the three great watchwords of the day, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." Republicanism in France, according to those old traditions, to which those who call themselves the only true and pure republicans seem always to be looking back as the only true and pure models for their admiration and imitation, was always based upon despotism, supported by constraint, compulsion, violence, and even terrorism; and the first efforts of modern republicanism were evidently exerted to place their old, newfangled, statue of bastard liberty upon the same heterogeneous pedestal. The instructions of the same Bashaw-minister to the emissaries whom he despatched as Bashaws of lesser and fewer tails into the provinces, to see that they were duly disposed to fall down and worship the Goddess Republic, that had been set up, were modelled after the same and still rougher fashion.

The missionaries were invested with autocratic powers to make and unmake according to their own autocratic will; to send away functionaries who might appear lukewarm in the cause; to put in their places such acolytes as might better serve the altars of the goddess, and to offer up sacrifices to her, civil and military, judicial and political, as they might think pleasing to the divinity, or convenient and agreeable to their own hates and prejudices. They were particularly requested to _travailler_ the country, to torture it, as the French phrase goes; and were taught, if they could not hammer the hard and unbending metal of departmental feeling to the shape they fancied, just gently to make the iron red-hot with the fire of terrorism, and then twist it to the suitable form. How well the workmen, in many instances, performed the task--how well they employed the fiery passions of the mob to produce the desired red-hot effect, and then strike--is a matter of historical fact.

In the elections for the National Assembly, the same dogmas of republican religion were strenuously enforced. No emissaries of the Inquisition ever used more moral violence to propagate a faith among suspected schismatics, than did these ministers of republican despotism to enforce the full, entire, and uttermost doctrines of their creed, even to the minutest articles. Where the moral influence appeared unlikely to penetrate as deeply into men's hearts as was desired, other and more direct methods were adopted to make entire converts; and, when these methods were found too mild to work the intended effect, and purge the land of moderatism and anti-whole-hog-ism, another stronger and more racking dose was administered: the mob was excited to overawe with threat and terrorism, and, where it could not prevent, to destroy. How should the departments dare to have a will of their own? The rebellious children were to be whipped like schoolboys into learning their lessons of pure and undefiled republicanism, and reciting them as Master Commissioner taught them; there was no better rod in pickle for such naughty urchins than the scourge of the fury of a mob, carefully taught another lesson, and one it was not slow of learning--namely, that it was master, and must constrain obedience to its will; while, in fact, itself obeyed the influence, and was the instrument of the master-spirit that ruled up above, and made the best, or rather the worst use of its rule. That all these measures failed in a great measure--those of violence as well as those of moral constraint--is attributable to a variety of complicated reasons, connected with the present state of the departments; and the how and why they failed, will be the subject of a few considerations presently.

What, again, were the expressions of the more violent and so-called only true republican party in the capital, proceeding from its organs, the clubs, upon the same occasion of the elections? To all the candidates who presented themselves before them, the same question was propounded. If, when the votes of all France were taken, it should be found that the departments declared themselves averse to the establishment of a republic, what would be the duty they would have to perform,--what steps would they take? Those who did not declare that they would turn against that National Assembly, of which they themselves might then be members, and take up arms to march upon it, were denounced as traitors to their country, unworthy of the votes of true men, and hooted from the tribune, in which they had dared to stand forward as future representatives of the people. It would have been in vain to insinuate to these good gentlemen, that, in the application of the principle of universal suffrage, in which every man was not only an elector, but eligible as representative, the voice of the majority would be the voice of all France; and that it was for all France, by the voice of its majority, to decide upon the form of government best suited to all France. In vain, indeed. The ready answer would invariably have been--that Paris was the mistress of France, and had a right to dictate its will; that Paris had made the revolution, and that, consequently, Paris was privileged to support the principles of that revolution, and to arrogate to itself all its advantages: that the country at large, in fact, had nothing to do but to give in its approval, and be happy that its concurrence was so far demanded, and that, should it dare to have an opinion of its own, woe betide it! All this insolent bombast of the ultra party in Paris might have been spared, however; the cause of "Paris _v._ the Departments" was never called into the court of the country. The departments had accepted the establishment of the republic as a _fait accompli_: they never desired to subvert the new order of things by another convulsion, that would have plunged the country, already so miserable, into an increase of misery; but they protested in favour of a republic of peace and order, upon moderate principles; and, lo and behold, Paris itself combined with them in this desire. The disappointed party of the directing master-spirits of Paris have been none the less furious in their expressions of contempt for the openly declared will of all France. They had long kicked down their idol of universal suffrage with disdain, as soon as they had found that, in spite of all the hidden machinery they had set to work in it, the idol had not obeyed their will, or declared their oracles. Universal suffrage they pronounced a hoax: constraint, tyranny, anarchy, conspiracy, civil war, were proclaimed by them the only true elements of the only true republic. Frantic with disappointment at the result of their own manœuvres, by which they had been caught in their own toils, they seized upon the pretext of sympathy in the sorrows of another country; and, aided by the treachery of certain of their own party in authority, invaded the obnoxious Assembly, overthrew the government for an hour, and proclaimed a terrorist government of their own. Foiled again in this audacious attempt, _foiled at least for the time being_, they now endeavoured to patch up the shaking soil that has given way beneath their feet, and plunged their leaders into a quagmire, and to build new foundations for fresh aggressions upon the discontent of a part of the working-classes. For this purpose they have taken two newfangled tools into their hands, the one of impulsion, the other of repulsion--the one of enthusiasm, the other of alarm; and both are so vaguely fashioned, and of so unintelligible a nature, that the real fact of their existence can never be proved, although their use, their purpose, and their design, in the hands of these men, are very clear. The one of these tools is a bugbear, a phantom, a bogie, to which they endeavour to give as terrific an aspect as possible, in order to fright ignorant men over into their own ranks. This evil spirit, they declare, has an existence, although no one ever saw it, no one ever felt it, no one ever knew where it dwells. No superstitious people was ever endeavoured to be worked up into a more irrefragable belief of some mysterious demon that haunts them in dark woods and obscure places to devour them--nor, generally, with more complete success over the credulous; for fear is the most powerful agent over the minds of the masses, and more especially when the fear is of the unknown and mysterious: and certainly no demon was ever described with a more hideous or blacker face. This bogie, phantom, bugbear, is a supposed influence called "Reaction." No precise form is given to it, for that would be to deprive it of more than half its terrors. No! _onme ignotum pro terribili_ is the policy. Nothing can be more vague or indefinite than this same monster, Reaction; it remains an Ossianic cloudlike spectre, floating no one knows whence, but bringing death and pestilence in its train. If the working-classes suffer, it is the Reaction, they are told, that is the cause of all their sufferings. If all their exactions, however exorbitant and impossible, _are not conceded at once_, it is because that horrible Reaction labours that their just demands should be withheld. If the most violent of their own body are not elected as the true representatives of the people, it is because that pestilential Reaction has cast a spell over the minds of all the electors. The Reaction has also, potent demon although it be, all the freaks and caprices of a lesser imp; it performs the strangest and most incomprehensible feats,--for if a discontented mass of workmen revolt unsuccessfully, and gain not their ends, it was the Reaction again that was the cause of all. The Reaction, for its own vile reactionary purposes, it was, that treacherously induced them to revolt, when they themselves were naturally inclined to be the most peaceable, contented, and the least exorbitant people on the earth. See how perfidious, Machiavelic, and Jesuitical, is this horrible monster Reaction! Pity it is that, in order to establish the fact of its real existence, it should not as yet have made itself visible to mortal eyes in any incarnate form! The Reaction is, however, no less, men are told, the enemy of the republic, the adversary of all true republican principles, labouring ever to overthrow it; above all, the enemy of the people and the people's interests, their undermining serpent, their secret assassin. It is already sapping, unseen, the foundations of the republic, and it intends to pull down the ruins of that august structure upon the heads of the people, and crush it for ever beneath them. In spite of the infinite harm worked upon the spirit of the lower classes by the establishment of the belief in this phantom, there would, perhaps, be no real danger in the effect produced by the clamours of insensate ultra journals, the preachings of agitating demagogues, and the insidious insinuations of anarchist _meneurs_ among the crowd, did not certain members of the government itself, and some of those in authority, render themselves parties concerned to the propagation of the belief, either genuinely, from having been themselves carefully inoculated with the _virus_ of false fear, until they have really taken the disease, or designedly, for the advancement of their own purposes--did they not, in fact, throw a sop continually to mob-lecturers, by insinuating their own conviction in the existence of "bogie" by their decrees, edicts, and proclamations, and, when they are called to put down anarchy, never obey without crying "Reaction" at the same time, and vainly giving the phantom a slap on the face. As it is--and herein lies the evil--the people are taught that the National Assembly, as it is now constituted, is the concentrated essence of the spirit of Reaction--that the representatives of the people, with but few exceptions, are the ministering imps in a visible form of the invisible demon. If a word of reason is spoken in the Assembly against the clamours of unreasonable demand--"Look ye there! reaction!" is the cry; if it prepares safe measures of repression against the open efforts of anarchy--"reaction;" if it defends its own existence against the subversive attempts of conspirators--"reaction;" if it attempts to establish the republic upon a firm and solid, but moderate basis--"reaction;" if it does any thing--"reaction;" if it does nothing--"reaction;" if it cannot perform impossible wonders for the amelioration and prosperity of the lower working-classes,--at which, however, it labours most hard,--"reaction--reaction--reaction; the reaction of aristocratic feeling--the reaction of ill will--the reaction of indifference and indolence;" thereby always meaning reaction against the true republic, and its true representatives, the lower classes. The phantom Reaction is thus used as a tool by a wild and violent party against the present order of things; against the moderate majority of the Assembly more particularly; against all things and all men not suiting its views, its schemes, its dreams, and its ambitions; and the bugbear is not ill got up to scare the credulous of the lower classes more completely into the toils of the malcontents, with the fear that reaction really may destroy that idol from which they have been taught to expect all the good gifts of "roasted larks," for which they have only to open their mouths, and "showers of gold," for which they have only to stretch forth their hands--that idol that has been lacquered over with the false gilding of delusive promises by imprudent rulers, and which the many still fancy to be all of solid gold--in a word, the Republic. The reaction, in truth, exists not, or exists not in the manner that people would be led to believe. If it exists, it is in the disgust of the more laborious and less tumultuous of the lower classes themselves, who, in their increasing misery, would be happy to accept the Lama of Thibet, or any other abstraction, with an absolute government, in the place of the false idol of their hopes, that has as yet only deluded them into greater misery-- it is in the reactionary cry of the wretched, who call for "King Log," or any other senseless ruler that would bring with it peace, and order, and a hope of well-being.

The other tool employed by the designing malcontents--that of impulsion--is the banner upon which is inscribed "_Republique Democratique_." We have a republic, it is true, they say, but not the republic of our wishes. This is only a mere republic like any other: we want a democratic republic, and the democratic republic is taken from us; but the democratic republic we must and will have. Ask them what they mean by their "_republique democratique_," they will not be able to inform you. They launch into phrases which are but phrases: they lose themselves in a cloudy confusion of terms and ideas: they pretend to give you vague and chaotic explanations, that are no explanations at all: they know not themselves what they mean. Universal suffrage upon its broadest basis, with all the rights and privileges thereto attached, in their most democratic sense, is no democratic republic according to their view. What is? Who can tell?--certainly not they. "They have clamoured for the moon," says a wit of the day, "and the moon has been given them; and now they cry, 'we are betrayed; we wanted the sun, and the sun we will have.' But have a care! the sun will blind your eyes, my friends, and you will stagger in still greater darkness; the sun will burn your fingers, and you will smart beneath the blisters. But they heed not; they still clamour for the sun." At all events, the banner on which flaunts aloft the words--"_Republique démocratique_" is a good rallying banner for all malcontents, a good banner under which to enlist the unwary among their ranks. It is a cry, a clamour, and all the more enticing because it is vague, unexplained, mysterious in its fresh promises of some fancied good that has not yet arrived, full of the great and alluring unknown. Thus it serves a purpose.

But to return from this long digression upon the efforts of subversive parties, to the state of feeling that subsists in Republican France between its now well-sorted and divided elements--Paris and the provinces.

What are, again, the expressions used by the lower classes with regard to the departments? what the feelings they express? Ever the same. Paris, they declare, makes, has made, and will make all the revolutions of the country. Paris, consequently, is all in all in France: Paris is the mistress, and the queen, the supreme arbitress of the destinies of France: Paris must be obeyed in all its wishes and its high will. What were the words of the workmen of the national workshops, in a late revolt, to the Minister of Public Works? They were told that there was no longer any work for them in the capital, that their pretended labour was an irony of labour, that the country paid them for doing nothing, and that they were eating the bread of idleness under the name of work: they were told that they were to be dispersed in the provinces, to be employed upon great works of public utility--upon railroads and canals, that stood still for want of hands: while money was lavishly promised them for this work, which the treasury could no longer afford upon unproductive labour. What was their answer? That they, the people, had made the revolution in Paris, that they were the masters of Paris, that Paris was theirs, to work in it their work; that, as masters of Paris, they were not to be bid leave it; that leave it they would not; that if labour failed, money must be found them at all events, or they would find means of taking it; in short, that they would not be _degraded_ by being sent into the provinces. The workmen of Paris claim, then, to be the masters of the capital, and still more, in their esteem, the masters of all France. The people of Paris, then, is _the_ people; it owns no other. Now the people, in modern republican phrase, and alas! in government decrees also, is by no means the nation; it means the lower classes alone. The people, it has been previously declared, is the sovereign people, whose voice is the voice of God; then, they reply, by the simplest reasoning, the sovereign people, whose voice is the voice of God--it is alone we: it is the lower classes. But there is still another deduction to be drawn. Among the lower classes it is only the active, the stirring, the discontented, the disorderly and tumultuous, who come forward in evidence as the representatives of this people. And thus it is very clear that the sovereign people, whose voice is the voice of God, the sovereign of France, is a small body of uneducated, misled, and wrong-headed men in the capital. So stands the account in theory. And who can deny that, in theory, they are in truth the masters? Who shall say when the chances of revolutionary struggles may not make them so in fact?

So stands the state of feeling on the side of Paris--how stands it on the other side?

When the revolution of February broke out, the departments scarcely knew themselves, their wishes, or their feelings. They had no mutual understanding. They were taken by surprise. They had not the time to consult their sentiments. Notoriously anti-republican as has been shown to have been the spirit of all France in the departments, they accepted, however, from old habit, the _dictum_ of Paris: they accepted, as has been before remarked, from that species of resignation shown in France to a _fait accompli_: they accepted from a wish to avoid all further convulsion, from a love of established order in whatever shape it might come--from a hope that, whatever the form of government proclaimed and imposed upon the country, all would "go well." And besides, the republic, they were told, was only a provisional form of government at a moment of crisis, when no other could be adopted: upon its future form of government, the country, it was said, was to be freely consulted: the provinces were not prepared for the ulterior _dictum_ of Paris, that, without consulting the nation at all, the republic was to be considered as definitive; and that those who desired a change would be regarded as traitors to their country. But France is not what it was; it is enlightened by the experience of successive revolutions. The jealousy of the departments, towards despotic Paris had long been boiling in men's hearts: it did not at first boil over; but when, instead of order and peace, the provinces found that the new government produced only results of disorder, animosity, and ruin, the departments began to grumble and murmur openly--for the first time they seemed determined to show that they ought to have, and would have, a will of their own. In the commencement all was tranquil. In some parts of France the republic was accepted, if not with that enthusiasm which lying Parisian papers would have induced the world to believe, at all events with a species of contentment, arising from the trust that a more equitable popular government would relieve the mass from some of those charges which weighed so heavily upon them under the former government, and remove constraints that were painful to them. In other parts, there prevailed a sort of sullen resignation to the establishment of a _régime_ which was dreaded from an experience of a hateful past, and was repulsive to its tastes--but it was a resignation to the _fait accompli_. Some thus hoped, and others feared; but all combined in assuming an attitude of quiet expectation.

In this state was France, when an imprudent Minister of the Interior, pushed on by ambitious, designing, misguided, and reckless men, sent down as a scourge upon the country those commissaries of obnoxious memory, who were publicly charged to work their will upon the departments as they pleased, by the means they pleased, by whatever oppressive or repressive measures they pleased, provided they worked the suspected and mistrusted departments into a proper feeling of true republican principle, according to the most ultra traditional doctrines of old republicanism. Down upon the country came the autocratic commissaries with these instructions; and, in too many instances, with the best intentions of torturing and tormenting the country, after their own fashion and according to their own views, to their heart's content. Down they came, with their history of the first republic in their heads, and the desire in their hearts of emulating the zeal of those fearful representatives of the people of the last century, who ruled in the departments, each a petty, but a bloody tyrant. To all alike the same violence of disposition must not be attributed: there were a few more prudent and better-thinking men among the number--although they, in certain instances, were afterwards accused in high quarters of mild laxity, and recalled as suspected of moderatism; but the many were evidently disposed to play the tyrant to the life, in their desperate measures to twist the country to their will. The times, however, were changed; the spirit of the age no longer permitted of the same violence. _Messieurs les Commissaires_ could not well proceed by the old-established and expeditious method of cementing the foundations of republics, one and indivisible, by blood, or erecting the scaffolding of the edifice on scaffolds. Shootings, drownings, and guillotinings were instruments rather too rough to be accepted by the manners of the time. But they had other means in their power, and according to the tenor of their instructions, which they thought to use, and attempted to use, with just as much effect. They dismissed functionaries in wholesale numbers--put their creatures, or those who cringed and worshipped, in their places, with orders to brow-beat and bully the recalcitrant, and with the exhibition of high example before their eyes. They threatened and accused; and when these means failed, according to their fancy, or when they were too mild for the taste of Master Commissary, the other underhand instruments of terrorism, already mentioned, were employed to make men crouch and tremble. The manner in which mobs have been excited against the better classes, or those who were suspected of moderatism, by manœuvres unequivocally traced to the agency of the commissaries themselves, and the frightful excesses committed, are matters of common notoriety and of newspaper history. The scenes of the old Revolution were resorted to, although in another form; and not only supposed anti-republican sentiment, but moderatism, was endeavoured to be kept down by agents of terror, and the ever-ready riotous populations of the great towns. It would be an endless and a useless task to re-transcribe all the scenes of the violence of an insensate mob, secretly got up by the republican agents in authority, more than secretly connived at, and openly and avowedly excused and applauded. The rod that the commissary himself could not prudently employ, he placed in the hands of a designedly inflamed and infuriated people, to scourge the country to his will. One of the strongest instances, however, may be found in that state of continual terror on the one hand, and violence on the other, which for many long weeks hung over the head of the doomed city of Lyons. See there the mob constituting itself into illegally armed bodies, sundered from and inimical to the national guards, assuming names, such as _les voraces_ and _les dévorants_, by which they themselves marked their character, ruling the whole city of Lyons by fear; exacting, spoliating, arresting _suspects_ at will; searching the houses of quiet inhabitants under the pretext of conspiracies against the republic that did not exist, and of concealed arms, such as they themselves illegally bore, that never could be found; dragging trembling priests from the altar to be confined in cellars, because they were suspected of anti-republicanism; laying their hands upon church plate as the property of traitors; liberating prisoners arrested for revolt and disorder--arresting the magistrates who had condemned them; dictating their orders to military officers for the release of soldiers put under restraint; pulling a general from his horse, and nearly immolating him to the wrath of their high justice in the streets; commanding the fortresses, making barricades at the least opposition to their will, domineering over the whole city as masters--a herd of power-intoxicated savages--and the commissary looking on, applauding, sanctioning their deeds, rubbing his hands with satisfaction, and approving them with the words "_Allez, mes enfans! vous faites bien!_" Such scenes as these, carried to the utmost limits of anarchy and excess in Lyons, have been exhibited also in almost all the great towns of France, with all the effect of well-applied terrorism. There is scarcely one that has not similar outrages, from the violence of an excited mob, to lay to the charge of him who was set in authority over them--to work his will, so said the letter of his instructions--but to preserve peace and order, in a country where convulsions, collisions, and commotions were so infinitely to be dreaded and avoided--so should his duty have told him. It ought to be said, at the same time, that the acknowledged authorities of the government were aided in their high revolutionary mission, and in the extraordinary means they employed in its execution, by less acknowledged agents, in the persons of emissaries from the violent ultra clubs of Paris; who, arrogating to themselves the right to the true expression of the only true feeling of Paris--and consequently, _à fortiori_, of all France--racked the country with their manœuvres, their excitements to violence, their bullying threats and intimidations. Unacknowledged by government authority as they were, however, their missions were bestowed on them by the quondam friends and fellow-conspirators, under the former reign of the Minister of the Interior; their expenses were supported by funds, supplied no one could say by what hand, although most might divine; their measures were evidently taken in accordance, and in perfectly good understanding, with the departmental commissary.

What, however, was the result? The very reverse from that intended by _Messieurs les Commissaires_ and their supporter, the Minister of the Interior. They over-reached themselves, and worked the very effect they attempted to exterminate. Instead of subjugating the departments to their will of ultra-republicanism by the violence of terrorism, they almost roused the whole better feeling of the country, at first quietly disposed and resigned, against the very principles of republicanism in general. The sentiment at first accepted was soured and embittered; the discontent and aversion daily increased; and it was more than once openly affirmed that the departments were ready to revolt, and formed the design of marching upon Paris. That this subject was actually discussed in large, and not even secret meetings in the provinces--and even in such as had been always considered ultra-liberal and democratic in their opinions, as parts of Normandy, for instance--admits of but little doubt; and this feeling, although it was never actually embodied in any living and active fact of resistance, may be taken as one example in support of the opinion, that the children may not always prove so submissive to the dictates of the mother, and may one day raise their voices and hold forth their hands to dispute her will. The open and general outbreak of the provinces, which was at one time expected, and was the common topic of conversation in Paris, was suppressed, however, by the influence of the better-thinking and more prudential men in the country. But the feeling of opposition and resistance did not fail to manifest itself in minor demonstrations. Expostulations were at first made against the tyranny and the inflammatory manœuvres of the government commissaries; then broke out angry remonstrances on the part of the _bourgeoisie_, backed by the better and quieter of the working-classes; and at last, when all these more legitimate means failed, the populations of several of the larger towns rose against the provisional despot, who played the autocrat and the tyrant in the name of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."

The national guards took up arms to demand the revocation and the departure of the obnoxious commissary. The commissary, in opposition, acted the self-same part of which a despotic king has since been so violently accused by the republican journals. As Ferdinand of Naples is said to have excited the dregs of the populace, the lazzaroni, to aid him in a reactionary movement in his favour, so did even the republican commissary after the self-same system. He caused the mob to be roused to his assistance, as to that of the only true democratic friend of the people; he called upon them to take up arms and combat in his defence: the lazzaroni mob of the departments was the weapon he wielded to overcome the resistance of the majority to his will. In most instances the recalcitrant part of the provincial populations prevailed. In several of the larger towns, as in Bordeaux, Bourges, and many others, the commissary was obliged to take to flight: in some the palace of the little tyrant was stormed, he himself was made prisoner, and was taken to the railroad, and "packed off" back to that Paris which had sent him. In a very few instances only the influence of the commissary gained the day: in still less was he again returned, to be enforced upon the department from which he had been driven; and in one case he was sent back by the powers that were, only to be again ignominiously expelled.

In the department of the Ariège, at the town of Foix, a journal, founded under the auspices of the commissaries of the government, and professing the most violent ultra-republican doctrines, was publicly burnt by the magistrates and most influential persons of the place, to show their contempt and abhorrence of the principles and actions of the authority set over them. Other instances of the general opposition, either to the commissaries themselves or to the agents they had appointed and supported, on account of their violence, their tyrannical measures, and their anarchical principles, are too numerous to quote; and, generally speaking, the feeling was so strong, that the _Messieurs les Commissaires_, or rather, _les Citoyens Commissaires_, were obliged to give way before the expression of popular indignation.

The departments then, for the first time, have begun to show that they are determined not to be treated as the mere humble serfs of the capital,--that they are resolved to have a will and an action of their own. The results have been such that, even among the staunch republicans in the provinces, and among those who look to the republic as the only form of government at present suitable to France, symptoms of a tendency to a federal system have indubitably sprung up,--of a tendency, in fact, to that system in opposition to which, under the first revolution, the title of "one and indivisible,"--so little understood at the present day, so constantly repeated by the herd without any real meaning being attached to it,--was bestowed upon the republic. The fear of a powerfully organised resistance to the sacred principles of French republicanism,--unity and indivisibility,--is, at this very time, one of the bugbears by which those in power are terrified and haunted. But, whether this fear be well founded or not, it suffices for the present purpose, to show that a disunited feeling exists to a great extent between the departments and the capital; and that, while on the one hand the former begin to show a disposition to resist the overweening influence and tyrannical importance of the former, on the other, a dread is beginning to be expressed of their growing discontent, and a suspicion is constantly expressed of their increasing tendency to reactionary principles, likely to prove eventually subversive to the republic. Among those "lookers-on," who proverbially "see the most of the game," there are some who, in their exceptional and impartial position as foreigners, are able to see expressed in letters from the provinces "curses, not loud, but deep," against "that detestable, unruly, and insolent Paris, that has made alone a hateful revolution, which it imposes on all France." It cannot, however, be said, at the same time, that any reactionary feeling against the republic itself, and a republican form of government, prevails in the country at large. That which is thought to be stigmatised by the ultra party with the term of "reaction," appears, as yet, to be nothing but the acceptation of a republic based upon the principles of peace and order; but, at the same time, an opposition to all views and doctrines likely to produce disorder and anarchy. And yet still, in another sense, the feeling of the country at large cannot be said to be strictly republican: the "true men" might be in vain sought except in the disorderly, tumultuous, excitable, and easily stirred populations of the great manufacturing towns.

Shortly after the appointment of the obnoxious commissaries, several causes arose to increase the discontent of the departments, not only among the _ci-devant_ upper and middling classes, but among the lower classes,--particularly in the agricultural districts, and more especially among that peasant population that has so universally in France acquired a little property in land. One of these causes was the imposition of the new taxes. Under the former _régime_, France had been crushed down by the weight of its impositions. One of the first advantages of the republic was announced, in official proclamations, to consist in the removal of taxes, and in the enormous diminution of state expenses necessarily attendant upon a republican form of government. Already the country people looked to a release from the greater part of their obligations: the system of "no taxes at all," they thought, in their _naïveté_, was to follow; instead of which came very shortly the decree, begging the country for the loan of a certain proportion of the taxes for the ensuing year beforehand, in order to meet the deficiencies in the finances, followed up almost immediately by the more imperative ordinance, imposing the additional 45 per cent in support of the increased, not diminished, expenses of the republican government. In many parts of the country the peasant population refused to pay this additional tax, or responded only to the demand with that equivocal answer, so characteristic of the French peasant, "We'll see about it." It nevertheless, however, refused to pay at the same time the rents of its landlords, upon the pretext that it was ruined by the revolution, and the exactions of the republic. It was in vain that the government protested that these measures were necessitated by the financial dilapidations of the dethroned dynasty. Clear-sighted enough where their own interests are concerned, the French peasants in the provinces replied by denunciations of that odious Paris. Paris, they declared, had chosen to make for the nonce a revolution in which they had not aided, and which they had not desired; and then Paris turned to its own advantage alone the results of that revolution. It had imposed upon all France, by calling for resources from a country already drained, to be lavishly squandered in rewarding the idleness of its own tumultuous and unruly inhabitants among the working-classes, which it dreaded, by the establishment of its expensive so-called _ateliers nationaux_, and by paying fresh troops under the name _gardes mobiles_,--when the standing army was already such a burden the country,--for the sake of draining off and regularising the worst dregs of its own population, and satisfying the caprices of a riotous Parisian mob, that chose to object to the presence of the old military force among it, while it accepted a new defensive and repressive force, in addition to the former, under a new title. Upon such questions, of vital importance to their own interests, the country people of the provinces were not disposed to listen to argument or reason; and in the discontent at the exorbitant exactions of the capital the jealousy of the departments towards Paris waxed stronger and stronger.

Another cause, which added greatly to the increasing apprehension and aversion was the preaching of the communist doctrines in Paris, upon the first establishment of republican principles, and the support apparently given to these wild and spoliating principles by certain members of the Provisional Government itself. If there be any feeling more alive than any other in the breast of the French peasant, it is that attached to the acquirement and the possession of landed property in however humble a form, be it but a small field or a tiny vineyard. If he has any hope, any ambition, any sentiment, which he thinks worth living for, it is the extension, by any and every means, of his small domain. On the fact of this possession are concentrated all the mainspring motives and agencies of his whole existence--in this, his industry, his talent, his cunning, his thoughts, his affections, his very love for his children, to whom he hopes to transmit it. The great _mobile_ of the character of the French peasant is self-interest in this respect. The doctrines, then, which preached that the possession of all landed property by individuals is an infamous spoliation of the _res publica_, filled the country people in the provinces with the liveliest alarm, and contributed to establish a still greater hatred to a state of things that tended to produce results so fatally detrimental to all that they held dear. The Parisian, almost as blindly ignorant of the state of his own country--which, in his theory that Paris is all France, he looks upon with indifference, if not contempt--as he is proverbially utterly ignorant of every other country beyond the frontiers of France, even the most neighbouring--and, in fact, of every thing that touches upon geography or the state of nations, of which he has only the vaguest and most incorrect notions--thought that all his wild fraternity schemes, developed and accepted by those who possessed nothing, in the capital, would be received with enthusiasm also by the "miserable, oppressed, and tyrannised inhabitant of the fields and plains;"--such was the language used, and eagerly caught up. The Parisian soon found, by experience, that he had made a gross mistake. The emissaries sent down into the provinces by the professors and high-priests of communism, or by the ultra clubs, and supported, there is every reason to believe, by the members of the government before alluded to, met only with the most active repulsion. Their Utopian ideas of universal fraternity and spoliation of property were scorned, scouted, and opposed: themselves were hooted, pelted, almost lapidated as incendiary enemies of the peasant. "The innocent and humble inhabitant of the fields" was indignant, insulted, aggrieved, that he should be so contemptuously considered "miserable and oppressed:" he showed himself in the light of the landed proprietor, the most avariciously interested in the possession of property, and by no means the _naif_ individual the Parisian had been accustomed to believe him, according to his text-books of _vaudevilles_ and melodramas. The agents of communistic doctrines were forced to retreat in dudgeon, to declare the French peasant the most ignorant and pig-headed animal upon earth, still under the yoke of the tyrants, and _endoctriné_ by the aristocrats; and to avow that the departments were not ripe for the enlightenment of communism, perhaps even to denounce them as infamously reactionary. Certain it is that communistic doctrines found no enthusiastic disciples in the country; or, if the propagandism made any steps, it was after the fashion so characteristically depicted in a caricature published by the _Charivari_, in which a peasant appears before the mayor of his _commune_ to say, that, since a general _partage des biens_ is to take place, he puts down his name for the _château_, but makes a most wofully wry face upon hearing that his own field has been already divided among the paupers of the village. The propagation of communism, then, only excited fears instead of hopes, consternation instead of joy, and tended still more to indispose the country people, and excite their aversion and discontent towards a state of things likely to become so prejudicial to their interests: more than ever, they were disposed to revolt.

In this state was the feeling of the country at large when the general elections came on, accompanied by all the violence of party manœuvre to support the principles of ultra-republicanism, advocated by the unscrupulous minister of the nation; but all these efforts tended only to indispose it still more, and to call forth, in spite of the desperate opposition made, its sense in favour of respect of property, order, and moderatism of views in the republic, if republic there was to be. As is well known, an immense majority of those men of moderate principles, whom all the ill-judged and hateful efforts of the violent and reckless republicans at the head of affairs had so greatly contributed to form into a decided, self-conscious, and compact party of opponents, was returned to the Assembly. Most of the leading men of the liberal party under the former dynasty, who had stood forward as friends of progressive reform, but not as opponents to the constitutional monarchy principle, were likewise elected, with great majorities, by the suffrages of the people. The country declared its will to be against the views of the principal and stirring influence which emanated from the reckless man who governed the interior affairs of the country in the capital. But it did not forget, at the same time, and it still bears an inveterate grudge to the violent agents of that ultra-republicanism, chiefly concentrated in Paris, who had filled the country with disorder, tumult, terror, and, in some cases, bloodshed, by the atrocious and outrageous means it placed in the hands of a riotous mob to overawe them, and sway the direction of the elections, and by the base manœuvres employed to attain their ends. It does not forget the despotism of certain commissaries, who, after having their own lists of ultra-democratic candidates, whom they intended to force down the throats of the electors, printed, threatened the printer, who should dare to print any other, with their high displeasure, and caused them to shut up their press. It does not forget the seizure of those papers that proposed moderate candidates, with every attempt to strangle in practice that liberty of the press which was so clamorously claimed in theory. It does not forget the voters' lists torn from the hands of voters by a purposely excited mob. It does not forget the odious manœuvre by which agents were largely paid and sent about to cry "_Vive Henri V._" in the streets of towns, in order to induce the belief in a Bourbonist reactionary party, and thus rouse the passions and feelings of the flattered and declamation-intoxicated mob against the moderates, regardless of the consequences--of the animosity and the bloodshed. It does not forget the intimidation, the threat of fire and sword, the opposition by force to the voting of whole villages suspected of moderatism--the collision, the constraint, the conflict, the violence. It does not forget all this, nor also that it owes the outrage, the alarm, and the suffering, the ruin to peace and order, to commerce, to well-being, to fortune, to that central power which turned a legion of demons upon it, in the shape of revolutionary emissaries and agents. It forgets still less the scenes of Limoges, where a mob were turned loose into the polling-house to destroy the votes, drive out the national guards, disarm these defenders of order and right, and form a mob government, to rule and terrorise the town, while Master Commissary looked on, and told the people that it did well, and laughed in his sleeve. It forgets still less the fury of the disappointed upon the result of the elections, their incitements to insurrections, their preachings of armed resistance for the sake of annulling the elections, obtained, it must never be forgotten, by _universal suffrage_, in face of their culpable manœuvres: the emissaries again sent down from the clubs, and with an apparent connivance of certain ultra-members of the government, from the charge of which, now more than ever since the conspiracy of the 15th May, they will scarcely be able to acquit themselves: the efforts of these emissaries to make the easily excited and tumultuous lower classes take up arms, and the bloody conflicts in the streets of Rouen: the complicity of the very magistrates appointed by these members of the government--the terror and the bloodshed, and then the cry of the furious ultras that the people had been treacherously assassinated--the conspiracies and incendiary projects of the vanquished at Marseilles, the troubles of Lisle, of Amiens, of Lyons, of Aubusson, of Rhodez, of Toulouse, of Carcassonne--why swell the list of names?--of almost every town in France, all with the same intent of destroying those elections of representatives which the country had proclaimed in the sense of order and of moderatism. It forgets still less the dangers of that same 15th May, when the government was for a few hours overthrown, by the disorderly, the disappointed, the discontented, the violent ultra republicans, the conspirators of Paris,--when some of those, who had been formerly their rulers, were arrested as accomplices, and others still in power can scarcely yet again avoid the accusation and conviction of complicity.

All the other troubles of this distracted country, since the revolution of February, may be passed over--the ruin to commerce, the poverty, misery, and want, the military revolts excited by the same emissaries to cause divisions in the army, as likewise the unhappy troubles of Nismes, where the disturbances took a religions tendency--as a conflict of creeds between Roman Catholics and Protestants, rather than a political or even a social character,--although they still bore evidence of the disorder of the times and the disturbance of the country. The elections, then, contributed more powerfully than ever to the fermentation, the discontent, the mistrust, and the ill-will of the country.

In this state of France, with the feeling of impatient jealousy and irritation against tyranny and despotism expressed by the departments towards the capital, with the evident disunion between the provinces and Paris, what are likely to be the destinies of the Republic hereafter? Again it must be said--who can tell, who foresee, who predict? The Republic has been accepted, and is maintained, from a love of order and the _status quo_: but there is no enthusiasm, no admiration for the republican form of government throughout the country at large; there is, at most, indifference to any government, whatever it may be, provided it but insure the stability and prosperity of the country. If an opinion may be hazarded, however, it is, that the danger to the present established form of things will not arise so much from the conflict of contending parties in the capital, as from the discontent, disaffection, jealousy, and, perhaps, final outbreak and resistance of the departments. Terrorism has had its day; and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to apply the system once again to the country in its present state. What other means will the violent possess--what coercive measures, if, when parties come to an issue, the wearied and disgusted country should rise to protest against the disorders of Republican Paris? There seem at present to be none. The result of such an outbreak would be inevitable civil war. The strong instance before alluded to, of the determination of the departments to assert a will of their own, was given in a very striking manner in the affair of the 15th May. One of the conspirators got possession of the electric telegraph at the Home Office, and sent down despatches into all the provinces, to inform the country that the Assembly was dissolved, and the new government of the ultra-anarchist party had taken the reins of power. Instead of being awed into submission as heretofore, instead of calmly and resignedly accepting the _fait accompli_ as was their wont, the departments immediately rose to protest against the new revolution of Paris. Before a counter-despatch could be sent down into the provinces, to let them know that the former order of things was restored, the national guards of all the great towns were up and out, with the cry "to arms!" and it was resolved to march upon Paris. It was not only in the towns within a day's journey of the capital that the movement was spontaneously made. In the furthest parts of the country, from the cities of Avignon, Marseilles, Nismes, and all the south of France, the national guards were already on their way towards the capital, before the information that declared the more satisfactory result of the day could be made public. It is more than probable, then, that, should a desperate faction ever seize upon the power, or even should a close conflict of parties further endanger the safety of the country and its tottering welfare, that the provinces would again take up arms against Paris, and that a civil war would be the result.

This is rather a suggestion hazarded, than a prediction made, as to the future fate of the French republic. Whatever that future may be, an uneasy submission on the part of a great anti-republican majority to the active agency of a small republican minority--but, at the same time, a desire of maintaining a government, whatever it may be, if supportable, for tranquillity's sake; a feeling of humiliation and degradation in this utter submission to the will of Paris throughout the country--but, at the same time, an apparent growing determination eventually to resist that will, should it at last prove intolerable--such is the present state of Republican France.

COLONISATION.

_Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia_, &c. By Lieut.-Colonel Sir T. MITCHELL, Surveyor-General, &c. 1 vol. London: Longmans.

Australia is the greatest accession to substantial power ever made by England. It is the _gift_ of a _Continent_, unstained by war, usurpation, or the sufferings of a people. But even this is but a narrow view of its value. It is the addition of a territory, almost boundless, to the possessions of mankind; a location for a new family of man, capable of supporting a population equal to that of Europe; or probably, from its command of the ocean, and from the improved systems, not merely of commercial communication, but of agriculture itself, capable of supplying the wants of double the population of Europe. It is, in fact, the virtual future addition of three hundred millions of human beings, who otherwise would not have existed. And besides all this, and perhaps of a higher order than all, is the transfer of English civilisation, laws, habits, industrial activity, and national freedom, to the richest, but the most abject countries of the globe; an imperial England at the Antipodes, securing, invigorating, and crowning all its benefits by its religion.

Within the last fifty years, the population of the British islands has nearly tripled; it is increasing in England alone at the rate of a thousand a day. In every kingdom of the Continent it is increasing in an immense ratio. The population is becoming too great for the means of existence. Every trade is overworked, every profession is overstocked, every expedient for a livelihood threatens to be exhausted under this vast and perpetual influx of life; and the question of questions is, How is this burthen to be lightened?

There can be but one answer,--Emigration. For the last century, common sense, urged by common necessity, directed the stream of this emigration to the great outlying regions of the western world. North America was the chief recipient. Since the conquest of Canada, annual thousands had directed their emigration to the British possessions: the conquest of the Cape has drawn a large body of settlers to its fine climate; but Australia remained, and remains for the grand future field of British emigration.

The subject has again come before the British public with additional interest. The Irish famine, the British financial difficulties, and the palpable hazard of leaving a vast pauperism to grow up in ignorance, have absolutely compelled an effort to relieve the country. A motion has just been made in Parliament by Lord Ashley, giving the most startling details of the infant population; and demanding the means of sending at least its orphan portion to some of those colonial possessions, where they may be trained to habits of industry, and have at least a chance of an honest existence. We shall give a few of these details, and they are of the very first importance to humanity. On the 6th of June Lord Ashley brought in a resolution, "That it is expedient that means be annually provided for the voluntary emigration, to some one of her Majesty's colonies, of a certain number of young persons of both sexes, who have been educated in the schools, ordinarily called 'ragged schools,' in and about the metropolis."

In the speech preparatory to this resolution, a variety of statements were made, obtained from the clergy and laity of London. It was ascertained that the number of children, either deserted by their parents, or sent out by their parents to beg and steal, could not be less than 30,000 in the metropolis alone. Their habits were filthy, wretched, and depraved. Their places of living by day were the streets, and by night every conceivable haunt of misery and sin. They had no alternative but to starve, or to grow up into professional thieves, perhaps murderers. Of the general population, the police reports stated, that in 1847 there had been taken into custody 62,181 individuals of both sexes and all ages. Of these, 20,702 were females, and 47,479 males. Of the whole, 15,693 were under twenty years of age, 3,682 between fifteen and ten, and 362 under ten. Of the whole, 22,075 could neither read nor write, and 35,227 could read only, or read and write imperfectly.

The average attendance last year in the "ragged schools" was 4000. Of these 400 had been in prison, 600 lived by begging, 178 were the children of convicts, and 800 had lost one or both their parents, and of course were living by their own contrivances. Out of the 62,000, there were not less than 28,113 who had no trade, or occupation, or honest livelihood whatever!

The statement then proceeded to consider the expense to which the nation was put to keep down crime. It will perhaps surprise those readers who object to the expenses of emigration.

In 1847. The expense of Parkhurst Prison was £14,349 " Of Pentonville Prison, 18,307 In 1846. Of County Gaols, 147,145 " Of County Houses of Correction, 160,841 " Of Rural Police, 180,000 " Of Prosecutions for Coining, 9,000 In 1847. Of Metropolitan Police, 363,164

The whole but a few items, yet amounting to a million sterling annually. In this we observe the Millbank Penitentiary, an immense establishment, Newgate, the Compter, and the various places of detention in the city, are not included; and there is no notice of the expenses of building, which in the instance of the Penitentiary alone amounted to a million.

Yet, to dry up the source of this tremendous evil, Lord Ashley asks only an expenditure of £100,000 annually, to transform 30,000 growing thieves into honest men, idlers into cultivators of the soil, beggars into possessors of property, which the generality of settlers become, on an average of seven years.

There can be no rational denial of the benefit, and even of the necessity, of rescuing those unfortunate creatures from a career which, beginning in vice and misery, must go on in public mischief, and end in individual ruin. Lord Ashley's suggestion is that the plan shall be first tried on the moderate scale of sending 500 boys, and 500 girls, chosen from the ragged schools of London, under proper superintendents, to the most fitting of the colonies; by which we understand Australia. The plan may then be extended to the other parts of the kingdom, to Scotland and Ireland. He concluded by placing his motion in the hands of government, who, through the Home Secretary, promised to give it all consideration.

It is certainly lamentable that such statements are to be made; and we have little doubt that the foreign journalist will exult in this evidence of what they call "the depravity of England." But, it is to be remembered that London has a population of nearly two millions--that all the idleness, vice, and beggary of an island of twenty millions are constantly pouring into it--that _foreign_ vice, idleness, and beggary contribute their share, and that what is abhorred and _corrected_ in England, is overlooked, and even cherished abroad. It is also to be remembered, that there is a continual temptation to plunder in the exposed wealth of the metropolis, and a continual temptation to mendicancy in the proverbial humanity of the people.

Still, crime must be punished wherever it exists, and vice must be reformed wherever man has the means; and, therefore, we shall exult in the success of any judicious plan of emigration.

It happens, at this moment, that there is an extraordinary demand for emigration; that every letter from Australia calls for a supply of human life, and especially for an emigration of females,--the proportion of males to females in some of the settlements being 9 to 1, while the number of females predominates, by the last census in England.

There is a daily demand for additional labourers, artificers, and household servants, and with offers of wages which in England neither labourer nor artisan could hope to obtain. Thousands are now offered employment, comfort, and prospective wealth in Australia, who must burthen the workhouse at home. The advantages are so evident, the necessity is so strong, and the opportunity is so prompt and perfect, that they _must_ result in a national plan of constant emigration, until Australia can contain no more--an event which may not happen for a thousand years.

It happens, also, by a striking coincidence, that Australian discovery has just assumed new vigour; and that instead of the barrenness and deformity which were generally supposed to form the principal characteristics of this vast territory, immense tracts have been brought to European knowledge for the first time, exhibiting remarkable fertility, and even the most unexpected and singular beauty. We now give a sketch of the journey in which those discoveries were made.

To explore the interior of this great country has been the object of successive expeditions for the last five-and-twenty years. But such was the want of system or the want of means, that nothing was done, except to increase the tales of wonder regarding the middle regions of Australia. The theorists were completely divided; one party insisting on the existence of a mediterranean or mighty lake in the central region, _because_ there was a tendency in some of the small rivers of the coast to flow inward. Others, with quite as much plausibility, laughed at the idea; and, from having felt a hot wind occasionally blowing from the west, had no doubt that the central region was a total waste, a desert of fiery sand, an Australian Sahara! while both parties seem to have been equally erroneous, so far as any actual discovery has been made.

But it seems equally extraordinary, that even the only two expeditions which within our time have added largely to our knowledge, alike should have neglected the most obvious and almost the only useful means of discovery. The especial object of exploration must be, to ascertain the existence of considerable rivers pouring into the sea, because it is only thus that the government can effectively form settlements. The especial difficulty of the explorers is, to find provisions, or carry the means of subsistence along with them. Both difficulties would be obviated by the steam-boat, and by nothing else. The natural process, therefore, would be, to embark the expedition in a well appointed and well provisioned steamer; to anchor it at the necessary distance from the coast, which in general has deep and sheltered water, within the great rocky ridge; and then send out the explorers for fifty or a hundred miles north and south, making the steamer the headquarters. Thus they might ascertain every feature of the coast, inch by inch, be secure of subsistence, and be free from native hostility.

Yet all the expeditions have been overland, generally with the most imminent hazard of being starved, and occasionally losing some of their number by attacks from the natives. Thus also the present expedition of the surveyor succeeded but in part, though it had the merit of discovering that the reports of Australian barrenness belonged but to narrow tracts, while the general character of the country towards the north was of striking fertility. The purpose of Sir T. Mitchell's late expedition was, to ascertain the probability of a route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria. But as this route was to be made dependent on a presumed river flowing into the gulf, the actual object was to reach the head of that river--an object which could have been more effectually attained by tracing it upward from the gulf; and, in consequence of not so tracing it, the expedition ultimately failed.

To establish an easy connexion between the colony of New South Wales and the traffic of the Indian Ocean had long been a matter of great interest. Torres Strait, the only channel to the north, is a remarkably dangerous navigation; while, by forming an overland communication directly with the Gulf of Carpentaria to the west of the strait, the commerce would find an open sea. A trade in horses had also commenced with India, which was impeded by the hazards of the strait. There had also been a steam communication with England by Singapore, and there was a hope that this line might be connected with a line from the gulf.

The idea of tracing a river towards the north was a conjecture of several years' standing, in some degree founded on the natural probability that an immense indentation of the land could not but exhibit some outlet for the course of a considerable fall of waters, and also that there had been a report by a Bushman, of having followed its course to the sea.

After some difficulties with the governor, which were obviated by a vote of the Colonial Legislature of £2000 for the expenses of the expedition, it set out from Paramatta on the 17th of November 1845. The expedition consisted of Sir Thomas Mitchell; E. B. Kennedy, Esq., assistant-surveyor; William Stephenson, Esq., surgeon and naturalist; twenty-three convicts, who volunteered for the sake of a free pardon, which was to be their only payment; and three freemen. They had a numerous list of baggage conveyances, &c. &c.; eight drays, drawn by eighty bullocks; two boats, thirteen horses, four private horses, three light carts, and provisions for a year, including two hundred and fifty sheep, which travelled along with them, constituting a chief part of their animal food. They had also gelatine and pork. The surveyor-general preferred light carts, and horses in place of bullocks; but it was suggested that the strong drays were necessary, and that bullocks were more enduring than horses--the latter an opinion soon found to be erroneous. It is rather singular, that either opinion should not have been settled fifty years ago.

Some natural and well-expressed reflections arise, in the course of this volume, on the lonely life of the settler. Its despondency, and its inutility to advance his moral nature, are in some measure attributed to the absence of the "gentler sex."

"At this sheep station," says Sir Thomas, "I met with an individual who had seen better days, and had lost his property amid the wreck of colonial bankruptcies; a 'tee-totaller,' with Pope's 'Essay on Man' for his consolation, in a _bark hut_. This man spoke of the depravity of shepherd life as excessive.... The pastoral life, so favourable to the enjoyment of nature, has always been a favourite with the poets. But here it appears to be the antipodes of all poetry and propriety, simply because man's better half is wanting. Under this unfavourable aspect the white man comes before the aboriginal. Were they intruders, accompanied with wives and children, they would not be half so unwelcome. In this, too, consists one of the most striking differences between settling and squatting. Indeed, if it were an object to _uncivilise_ the human race, I know of no method more likely to effect it, than to isolate a man from the gentler sex and children. Remove afar off all courts of justice and means of redress of grievances, all churches and schools, all shops where he can make use of money, and then place him in close contact with savages. 'What better off am I than a black native!' was the exclamation of a shepherd to me."

A general description of the aspect of New South Wales would be difficult, from its extreme diversity in parts; but the general face of the country is marked by lines of granite hills; short water-courses, which in summer are dry, or retain the water only in pools; clumps of trees, generally dotted over the soil, and occasional _prairies_. But the soil is generally fertile, and, in the spring, exhibits a great variety of flowers. Thus the land is every where fit for European life, though in the same latitude with the hottest portions of Africa. It has occasional gushes of intense heat, but they seem not to have affected the health of the expedition; and with that progress of comforts which follows all civilisation, the heat and cold alike may be successfully mitigated. We have not heard of any endemic in Australia; the epidemic has never visited its shores. The chief want in the pasture-grounds is water, but even that is merely the result of the rudeness of early settling; for vast quantities of water run to waste, or are lost in swamps, which future colonists will receive in tanks, and check with dams. The capricious abundance and deficiency of this prime necessary of life, for it is more essential than food, is shown in a striking, passage of this picturesque Journal. They were still within the sheep-feeding country. Water was much wanted. Mr Stephenson, the naturalist, was sent out on the inquiry. He returned soon, having met two of the mounted police, who told him that "a flood was coming down from the Turon Mountains."

"But the little encampment was held in suspense. Still, the bed of the Macquarie continued so dry, that the report could scarcely be believed. Towards evening, a man was stationed with a gun, to give a signal on the appearance of the flood. The shades of evening came, but no flood; and the man returned. This was a period of considerable anxiety, for the need of water was urgent.

"Some hours later, and after the moon had risen, a murmuring sound, like that of a distant waterfall, mingled with occasional cracks, as of breaking timber, drew our attention." They then returned to the river bank. Still no flood appeared, though they continued to hear the sounds of the crashing timber. At length an increase of the sounds told them that the water was in the next bend. All this, in a serene moonlight night, was new. At length it came, and came in power and beauty.

"It rushed into our sight, glittering in the moonbeams, a moving _cataract_; tossing before it ancient trees, and snapping them against its banks. It was preceded by a _point_ of meandering water, picking its way, like a thing of life, through the deepest parts of the dark, dry, and shady bed of what thus again became a flowing river." The phenomenon might make a fine subject for the pencil, if our artists were not divided between the palace and the pigstye. The noble river rolling along under a _tropical_ moon; the wild country around, with its forests and hills touched by the light; the bronzed faces and bold figures of the men of the expedition, gazing with natural surprise and gladness at this relief, and at the majestic object before them; and even the cattle hurrying up from the encampment, to cool the thirst which had pressed so severely on them during the day, all were made for the finest efforts of the pencil.

"By my party," says Sir T. Mitchell, "situated as we were at the time--beating about the country, and impeded in our journey solely by the almost total absence of water--suffering excessively from thirst and extreme heat,--I am convinced the scene can _never_ be forgotten! _There_ came abundance at once, the product of storms in the far-off mountains, that _overlooked our homes_! My first impulse was to have welcomed this flood on our knees; for the scene was sublime in itself, while the subject, an abundance of water sent to us in a desert, greatly heightened the effect to our eyes. I had witnessed nothing of the kind in all my Australian travels."

But the writer is an accomplished man of science, and he leads the contemplation to still more glorious things, "Even the heavens presented something new, at least uncommon, and therefore in harmony with this scene. The variable Star of Argol had increased to the first magnitude, just above the beautiful constellation of the Southern Cross, which slightly inclined over the river, in the only portion of sky seen through the trees. That very red star, thus increasing in magnitude, might, as characteristic of her rivers, be recognised as the 'Star of Australia,' when Europeans cross the line. The flood gradually filled up the channel nearly bank high, while the living cataract travelled onward much slower than I had expected to see it; so slowly, indeed, that more than an hour after its first arrival, the _sweet music_ of the head of the flood was distinctly audible from my tent, as the murmur of waters and crash of logs travelled slowly through the tortuous windings of the river bed. I was finally lulled to sleep by that melody of waters."

It has been often remarked, that Europeans once accustomed to a life of wandering, can never return to the life of cities; and even the clever journalist before us appears to have been a little captivated with this life of the wilderness. It may be easily admitted, that vigorous health, and active exercise, variety of objects, even if those objects are no more than new ridges of mountains or new rills of water; with keen appetite and sound sleep, are all excellent things in their style. But, is life given to man only to eat, gaze, and sleep? What is the life of the wilderness above that of the brute? The true improvement of man, and, therefore, the especial employment intended for man, is, that increase of knowledge, of command over the powers of nature, and of the various means of adding to the conveniences, comforts and value of human existence, which, delivered down to us by our forefathers, it is our part to deliver with increase to our posterity. But the savage improves in nothing; he is as much a brute this year as he was a thousand years ago. Savagery is, in practice, a total defeat and denial of all the original purposes for which our nature was made. And it is with some regret and more surprise, that we quote, from such a source, such language as the following:--

"We set out, guided by our native friend," (a savage whom they had hired to lead them to some water-courses.) "He was a very perfect specimen of the _genus_ homo, and such as is _never_ to be seen, except in the precincts of savage life, _undegraded_ by any scale of _graduated classes_; and the countless _bars_ these present to the free enjoyment of existence." Whether this is actually a recommendation that we should throw off our clothes and walk in nudity, for the purpose of recovering the original elegance of our shapes, or whether it is the borrowed rapture of some savage in person which the gallant officer has transplanted into his pages, to vary his more rational conceptions, we know not; but he has _not_ made us converts to the pleasures of cold, hunger, filth, and bloodshed, which furnish the realities of savage life, even in the paradisaic solitudes of Australia.

The savage, in his original state, is simply an animal, superior to his own dog only in sharpness of intellect; but wholly inferior to his dog in fidelity and affection. All savages are tyrannical--cruel to their wives, if wives they can be called--and in general cheating and plundering wherever they can. As to their bodily organs, of course, they cannot be perverted where they cannot reach temptation; but no savage comprehends moral restraint, and he gets drunk whenever he has the opportunity, and robs wherever he finds any thing to steal. On the other hand, civilisation necessarily enfeebles no man, and what the gallant Colonel regards as its "degradation of man by classes," produces quite the contrary effect; for the humbler the class, generally the more vigorous--as the peasant is a stronger man than the artisan, and the artisan than the nobleman. Even the idea that savage limbs can do more than civilised, is equally erroneous. A well clothed and well fed Englishman, if well formed, and with some training, will outwork, outrun, and outwrestle any savage from pole to pole. A ropedancer, a tumbler, or a horserider, at any of our theatres, though bred in the very heart of civilisation, or even in the hotbed of its temptations, will perform feats of activity which would defy all the muscles of a generation of savages. The truth is, that civilisation improves the features, the form, and the powers of the human frame. Men in society may be indolent, and throw away their advantages; but society is the place for man. Rousseau, once made a noise by talking nonsense on this subject; but Rousseau _knew_ that he was talking nonsense. Whether his imitators are equally cognisant of their own performances, is another question; but we come to better things.

This journey settled the disputed point of "horses or bullocks, light carts, or heavy drays." The bullocks and the drays were a perpetual annoyance; to feed and water the one, and to drag the other, soon became the grand difficulty of the expedition. We find the Colonel perpetually leaving them to follow, when any peculiar object of exploration was in view. At length the whole "park" was left to take its rest, under the second in command; and the Colonel, with eight men, two native boys, fourteen horses, and two light carts, with provisions for ten weeks, moved to the northward, to trace where the division of the waters was to be found, and then follow some of them down to the Gulf.

We were not prepared for the beauty sometimes exhibited by the Australian landscape. The Journal compares it to a succession of Ruysdaels. "The masses of rock, lofty trees, shining sands, and patches of water in wild confusion; the mimosæ, the Anthistiria-grass, of a red brown, contrasting most harmoniously with the light green bushes; all those again so opposed to the dark hues of the casuarinæ, mimosæ, and rifted rocks, that a Ruysdael or a Gainsborough might have found an inexhaustible stock of subjects for the pencil."

This wild travelling has its discomforts, and now and then its dangers; but it is a perpetual source of exciting sensations. Every step is new, and every day's journey may place the traveller within some region of unexpected value or beauty. One of the hopes of the Journalist, on commencing this portion of his travels, was to discover a chain of hills to the northwest, from which he might trace the course of a river to the Gulf. At last this chain rose before his eyes.

"The most interesting sight to me was that of blue pics at a great distance to the northwest, the object of all my dreams of discovery for years. _No white man had before seen them._ There we might hope to find the division of the waters still undiscovered--the pass to Carpentaria still unexplored. I called this hill Mount First-View, and descended, delighted with what I had seen from its rocky crest." The latitude was 27°, yet the thermometer at sunrise was but at 45°, at noon 68°, and at 9 P.M. 45°.

The captivations of the scenery were equal to the delights of the temperature, though so near the tropics.--"An Australian morning is always charming. Amid those scenes of primæval nature it seemed exquisitely so. The barita or gymnoskina, the organ-magpie, was here represented by a much smaller bird, whose notes, resembling the softest breathings of a flute, were the only sounds that met the ear. What the stillness of evening adds to such sounds in other climes, is felt more intensely in the stillness of morn in this."

The forms of the vegetation, both tree and shrub, are picturesque, and the colours are finer still:--"Instead of autumnal tints, there is a perpetual blending of the richest hues of autumn with the most brilliant verdure of spring; while the sun's welcome rays in a winter's morning, and the cool breath of the woods in a summer morning, are equally grateful. This was in the depth of the Australian winter, and, which sounds oddly to the European ear, in the 'merry month of June.'"

Advancing still to the north, a country of an extraordinary kind was reached in July; and they had now found, that most important of all objects in a wilderness, a fine "flowing stream, full of sparkling water to the margin." The Journalist seems quite enamoured with the surrounding scene, a miniature Australian Switzerland:--"The hills overhanging it surpassed any I had ever seen, in picturesque outline. Some resembled Gothic cathedrals in ruins; some forts; other masses were perforated; and being mixed and contrasted with the flowing outlines of evergreen woods, and having a fine stream in the foreground, gave a charming appearance to the whole country. It was a vision worthy of the toils of a pilgrimage. Those beautiful recesses of unpeopled earth could no longer remain unknown. The better to mark them out on any map, I gave to the valley the name of Salvator Rosa. The rocks stood out sharply and sublimely from the thick woods, just as John Martin's fertile imagination would dash them out in his beautiful landscapes. I never saw any thing in nature come so near those creations of genius and imagination." But this river, which they followed for some time, ran so far to the east, that they justly began to doubt its being the one of which they were in search and they turned again to the north. They now passed into a fine level country, incomparably formed for settlement. "An almost boundless extent of the richest surface in a solitude corresponding to that of (southern) China, yet still unoccupied by man. A great reserve provided by Nature for the extension of his race."

They left the Salvator between the 21st and 22d degrees of latitude, and moved to the north-west. There at length their aspirations, though only partially, were probably realised. In the middle of September they reached some heights, from which lay before them a vast extent of open downs traversed by a river, traceable to the utmost verge of the horizon, and falling to the _north-west_! "Ulloa's delight at the first view of the Pacific could not have surpassed mine," is the natural exclamation of the Journalist. "Nor could the fervour with which he was impressed have exceeded my sense of gratitude for being allowed to make such a discovery. From that rock the scene was so extensive as to leave _no room for doubt_ as to the course of the river, which, then and there revealed to me alone, seemed like a reward direct from Heaven for perseverance, and as a compensation for the many sacrifices which I had made, in order to solve the question as to the interior rivers of tropical Australia."

From the 16th to the 24th of September the course of the river was followed, which still was north-west, but at this period the party returned. The reason stated is the failure of provisions. This must have been a most vexatious disappointment--so vexatious, that we cannot comprehend how it could have been submitted to without some more remarkable effort than any thing that we find recorded in these pages. That an expedition equipped for a four months' journey should have turned back at the very moment when a few days', perhaps a few hours', march, might have completed its object, is altogether incomprehensible, while it had any conceivable means of subsistence. In such a condition of things, the traveller ought to have eaten his horse, if he could get nothing else. But there was actually, at no great distance behind, a depôt of their own bullocks and sheep, all feeding comfortably, and, as the party found on marching back to them, "Sheep and cattle fat, the whole a sort of farm." A good stackyard had been set up, a storehouse had been built, a garden had been fenced in, and contained lettuce, radishes, melons, and cucumbers. Indeed, the whole establishment exhibited the effects of good order and discipline.

Why, then, did not the Journalist return on his track, and establish the discovery which was the express object of his mission? This exceeds our knowledge. The only direct intimation of his necessities in these pages is, "our provisions were nearly out, the sun having reduced the _mess sugar and melted the bacon_, which had been boiled before we set out." Whether the _lean_ of Australian bacon may liquefy in the sun is more than our European experience can tell, but we presume it must be ranked among the wonders of a new country; at all events, the Journalist returned without having done the very thing for which his expedition had been fitted out, and left the object to be completed by his subordinate, who was subsequently despatched in the direction of the north-west. Thus, though probabilities are in favour of the river, which the Colonel named the Victoria, the point is by no means settled, and Australian curiosity may be disappointed after all.

As the party approached the river, they saw considerable numbers of the natives. On reaching one of the lagoons, the shrieks of many women and children, and the angry voices of men, apprised them that they had at length overtaken the tribe, and unfortunately had come on them by surprise. "Aya, minya!" was vociferated repeatedly, and was understood to mean, "What do you want?" I steadily adhered to my own tactics towards the aborigines, and took not the slightest notice of them, but rode on according to my compass-bearing. On looking back for my men, I saw one beckoning me to return. He had observed two natives with spears and clubs hide themselves behind a bush in the direction in which I was advancing. On my halting, they stole away. The whole seemed to have been amusing themselves in the water during the noonday heat, which was excessive, and the cool shades round the lagoon looked most luxuriant. Our position, on the contrary, was any thing but enviable. Even there, in the heart of the interior, on a river utterly unheard of by white men, an iron tomahawk glittered in the hand of a chief. The anxious care of the females to carry off their children seemed the most agreeable feature of the scene. Some had been digging in the mud for worms, others searching for fresh-water mussels, and if the whole could have been witnessed unperceived, such a scene of domestic life among the aborigines had been worth a little more risk. The strong men assumed a strange attitude, which seemed very expressive of surprise, having the right knee bent, the left leg forward--the right arm dropping, but grasping clubs--the left arm raised, and the fingers spread out. "Aya, aya, minya," they continually shouted. However, the party rode on, and the shouts died away.

The Journalist occasionally recovers from his enthusiasm for savagery. We have no more bursts in his earlier style, "Such truth and exemption from disease, such _intensity_ of existence, in short, must be far beyond the _enjoyments of civilised men_, with all that art can do for them. And the proof of this is to be found, in the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncultivated earth to forsake it for the tilled ground. They prefer the land, unbroken and free from the earliest curse pronounced against the first banished and first created man." All this unfortunately shows nothing, but that the gallant Colonel would be the wiser for going back to his Bible, where he would find the words, "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake." But at last (page 328) we have a sketch of the reality. "It would appear that, the finer the climate and the fewer man's wants, the more he sinks towards the condition of the lower animals. Where the natives had passed the night, no huts, even of bushes, had been set up. A few tufts of dry grass only marked the spot, where, beside a small fire, each person had sat, folded up like the capital letter N. Their occupation during the day was only wallowing in a muddy hole, in no respect cleaner than swine. They have no idea of any necessity for washing themselves between their birth and the grave, while groping in mud for worms." After admitting the filth, the indolence, and the uselessness of the savage; contrasting, however, his teeth and tongue favourably with those of the civilised man or child, of which he pronounces it to be "ten to one but he should find _only impurity and decay_," (a point in which we are wholly at issue with him,) he asks, "what then is civilisation in the economy of the human animal?" He answers, "Cultivated man despises the perishable substance, and pursues the immortal shadow." We are but little satisfied with the language of this solution, nor is its meaning much more intelligible. In the first place, man, in a civilised state, does not necessarily injure his bodily organs. The fool who cannot stir, or even sit, without a cigar in his mouth, or the drunkard who continually sacrifices health and understanding to intoxication, has only to condemn himself. But, give the savage tobacco and rum, and he will as speedily destroy his organs, and bring himself to the grave, as the most civilised profligate in existence. And as to the grand supposed use of civilisation--the fixing our minds on "immortal shadows"--if by this he meant giving us ideas of religion, there are many highly civilised nations which think but very little of religion, and many highly civilised persons who think of it nothing at all. Yet, it is only justice to the gallant Colonel to quote this sentence. "Animal gratification is transient and dull compared to the acquisition of knowledge, the gratification of mind,--the raptures of the poet, or the delight of the enthusiast, however imaginary. Such were my reflections on this day of rest, in the heart of a desert, while protected from the sun's rays by a blanket."

But even his metaphysics are entirely a misconception. The original purpose of civilisation is, to enable man to live in society; that is, in peace, with the advantages of mutual assistance. That those objects are powerfully aided by religion is true, and that science may be best cultivated in settled life, is equally true; but those are merely collateral. Civilisation means the work of law, of safe intercourse, of secure property, and of all the safeguards of society which ultimately enable man to polish the general manners, and to improve the general mind. Religion is not the consequence, but the origin of Civilisation.

We now take leave of the journey, with the sketch of the rivers. After moving for some distance between two streams, they approached the junction, which formed--"the broad, deep, and placid waters of a river as deep as the Murray. Pelicans and ducks floated upon it, and mussel shells of extraordinary size lay in such quantities, where the natives had been in the habit of eating them, as to resemble snow covering the ground. But even that reach seemed diminutive, when compared with the vast body of water of which traces had been left there; affording evidence, that though wide, they must have been impetuous in their course. Verdure alone shone now, over the wide extent to which the waters sometimes rose. Beyond that channel lay the almost boundless plains; the whole together forming the finest region I had ever seen in Australia."

Still the luckless character of the Australian rivers appears; and after expecting that this fine channel, which there seemed navigable for steamers, would continue, in a few miles more it exhibited only ponds. Whether the great central stream may not exhibit the same caprice, is still the question.

The party returned to Sydney in January 1847; and in March, Mr Kennedy, the second in command, was sent, as has been already stated, to explore the course of the Victoria.

There are some valuable observations on the aborigines. It is said that they have good natural faculties, all one of them named Uranigh, an attendant on the expedition, obtains especial praise for sagacity, fidelity, and courage. But, from inevitable circumstances, it appears to be the fate of the natives to waste away before the European blood, and, even without any violence or oppression, gradually to vanish. To teach them to earn their bread, to adopt European habits of any kind, or even to live with any sense of comfort in the vicinity of European settlers, seems impossible, and thus they gradually retire into the interior. This process has so uniformly occurred in all colonised countries, where a new civilisation has been introduced, that it may be regarded as almost a law of nature. "Fire, grass, and kangaroos," are essential to native life; and when the pastures are no longer suffered to be burned, and when the kangaroos disappear, the savage _must_ retire. Sir T. Mitchell's favourite project would be, to send away a young married pair to the south of Europe, where they might learn the cultivation of the grape and olive, fig, &c.; then to bring them back with their children. But we are afraid they would make but few converts; that the benevolent experiment would be totally thrown away; and that the poor, idle, and useless being, whom Sir Thomas will persist in calling the noble savage, must be left to eat rats and mice, to live in misery and wretchedness, and to be inevitably pushed into the wilderness, to make way for a superior class of human capability.

But, regarding the condition of the natives as utterly beyond European influence, except so far as it may and ought to be exerted to protect them from all injury,--there are other questions of high importance, relative to the condition of the convicts. The preamble of the Transport Act made the reformation of the culprit a primary object. There never was any use of forced labour so effective. The galley-slaves of France and Italy were in general made more wicked, if possible, by their imprisonment and work. We think it also next to an impossibility that any culprit, punished by temporary imprisonment, and then thrown out again among his associates, _can_ change his habits. Who will employ a known felon? A single act of robbery may give him more means of gross gratification, than he could obtain by the severest toil in a twelvemonth. The temptation is too strong. The only hope of his recovery, is in his being sent where his bad character will not utterly prevent his getting a good one; where he will have profitable work, (let the profit be more or less;) where he will have few temptations, and none of his old ones; and where he may have a prospect of bettering his condition among his fellows. All these he had, and has, in New South Wales.

But it is remarkable and unfortunate, that we seldom have a new head of the colonial department who does not bring with him some new theory; and the fashionable theory now is, to try the effect of prison discipline. We have no hesitation in denouncing this theory, as ineffectual, intolerably costly, highly dangerous, and even actually cruel. We take the points in succession: we doubt whether it has really reformed one prisoner out of a thousand. Its expense is enormous: the single prison at Millbank cost a million sterling, and probably £100,000 a-year for its support. The model prison at Pentonville is an architectural _bijou_, but terribly expensive. Men cannot be reformed by turnkeys in the most moral costume, or by locks of the most exquisite invention.--It is dangerous: because those felons, once let loose, almost invariably become felons again; and a general jail-delivery once a year, from handcuffs and shackles, may people the streets with ruffianism.--It is even cruel. The prisoners are not merely deprived, for a long succession of years, of all healthful exercise--for who ever could take healthful exercise within prison walls?--but shut out from all the view and enjoyment of nature, and especially from matrimony; they cannot be husbands or fathers. It is true, that the felon forfeits all rights, if they are found incompatible with the public safety; but we have no _right_ to inflict on him any suffering beyond that which is absolutely necessary. If by sending him to Australia we can accomplish, without cruelty, those objects which we _cannot_ accomplish without cruelty at home, it is our duty to send him to Australia.

We know that a middle system of imprisonment, to be followed by transportation, has been attempted, but we have no faith in its operations. The true place is Australia.

Sir Thomas Mitchell, the very best authority on such subjects, tells us, "There is no country in which labour appears to be more required to render it available to, and habitable by civilised man, than New South Wales. _Without_ labour, the inhabitants must be savages, or such helpless people as we find the Aborigines. With equal truth, it may be asserted that there is _no region_ of earth susceptible of so much improvement solely by the labour and ingenuity of man." There are no unwholesome savannahs; the rocky ranges afford the means of forming reservoirs, &c., of water, which, under the tropics, is life, abundance, and health; there is an immensity if it be properly used, and Australia might be made the finest scene of vegetation and luxuriance in the world.

We take our leave of this volume with regret. It is strikingly written; it excites and rewards curiosity, and (a few rambling ideas excepted) it powerfully increases our interest in Australian discovery, and in that whole mighty region of the Pacific, which God's providence has given into the hands of England, for the happiness of mankind.

SIBERIA.

_Travels in Siberia: including Excursions Northwards, down the Obi to the Polar Circle, and Southwards to the Chinese Frontier._ By ADOLPH ERMAN. Translated from the German by W. R. COOLEY. Two vols. London, 1848.

Of no important portion of the dominions of the five great European powers are such vague and imperfect notions entertained, as of the vast tract comprised between Russia in Europe and the Kamschatkan sea, between the Chinese empire and the Arctic Ocean. Courageous explorers have not been wanting, of the inclement steppes and rugged mountains forming Europe's bulwark against the Mongul and the Tartar. Men of enterprise and distinction have undertaken the task, and executed it well. But their journeys, usually performed with special objects and scientific views, have been recorded for the most part in a similar spirit. Either an ardent love of science and zeal for its advancement, or the strong encouragement and liberal subsidies of an enlightened government, are requisite inducements to brave the perils and hardships of Siberian travel. The mere inquisitive and speculative traveller has difficulty in persuading himself, that the country can reward him for the discomfort and inconvenience he must endure in traversing it. Not that Siberia is entirely devoid of wild attractions and romantic associations. To the adventurous hunter, its vast forests and thinly-peopled plains give assurance of sport. The motley character of its native and immigrant population affords to the philosopher curious matter of consideration. A place of deportation for traitors and criminals--and not unfrequently for the innocent--its name is inseparably connected with the memory of innumerable unfortunates who have there pined out their existence in expiation of crime, or in obedience to mandates often as unjust as arbitrary. Fallen favourites of the Czars, rebels against their tyranny, traitors to their person, murderers, and other malefactors, and even prisoners of war, have here found a living grave till released by death, clemency, or flight. Did the tears of exiles fertilise, Siberia should be a teeming land. Since its first subjugation by Ivan the Terrible, how many a Russian magnate, lord of thousands of serfs, owner of millions of rubles, proud of his position, and confident of imperial favour, has suddenly found himself travelling eastward under escort, banished and a beggar. How many mournful trains of minor offenders have plodded their weary way across the Uralian chain, guarded by barbarian Bashkirs, to labour in the mines of Nerchinsk, or to lead a peasant's toilsome life on the margin of the Frozen Sea. From those vast and ice-bound regions, escape can rarely be accomplished. But at intervals, during the last five-and-thirty years, bearded and toil-worn men of martial aspect have crossed the German frontier, and astonished those they accosted by wild tales of suffering, and ignorance of the most notorious events. Some have inquired for Napoleon, and wept when they learned he was a captive, or dead. Circumstances of current history, known to each child and peasant, were to them a mystery and a marvel. These strange wanderers, escaped from long bondage in Siberia, were amongst the last survivors of that countless host led northwards by a Corsican's ambition, and whose funeral pile was lighted in Moscow's city.

Amongst the delineators of Siberia and its inhabitants, of the produce, customs, and peculiarities of the country and its people, one of the most successful is the German gentleman and scholar whose admirable work has just now appeared in a clever English dress. The son of a man of great learning and high attainments, Mr Adolph Erman treads nobly in his father's footsteps. Still young, he has done much to increase the lustre of the honourable name transmitted to him. Born in the year 1806, he was but two-and-twenty years of age when he undertook, at his own cost, a journey round the world, having for its chief object a series of magnetical observations. The expedition was completely successful. Starting from Berlin to St Petersburg, he crossed northern Asia, with occasional digressions of a few hundred leagues, took ship at Okhotsk for Kamschatka, thence proceeded to California, visited Otaheite, and came round by Cape Horn and Rio Janeiro to Europe and Berlin. Then he sat down to write of what he had seen, entitling his work--"Journey round the Earth, across North Asia and both Oceans." But the tale of travel so extensive takes time to tell; and, up to the present date, he has not protracted his narrative beyond Okhotsk. What he has done, however, is complete in itself, very interesting, and withal somewhat voluminous, since its abridged translation forms two heavy octavos, heavy in amount of paper and print, but not, we must in justice admit, in the nature of their contents. Whilst recording scientific investigations, the author does not neglect subjects more generally interesting. Upon all he brings to bear an extraordinary amount of reading and research. The result is a book of travels of no ephemeral nature, but that will long be esteemed as a standard work, and respected as a valuable authority.

Mr Erman commences his narrative of travel on the day of his departure from Berlin; but its earlier portion has been compressed by the translator, in order to escape as soon as possible from Europe, and get upon the less trodden ground east of Tobolsk. Much has been written of late years concerning European Russia and its inhabitants, and it was hardly to be expected that even so acute an observer as Mr Erman should find any thing particularly novel to say about them. He takes a sensible and practical view of the condition, character, and disposition of the population; and is happy in his detection and indication of national peculiarities. He does not, like the majority of travellers in Russia, enter the country with a settled determination to behold nothing, from the White Sea to the Black, but oppression and cruelty on the one hand, slavery and suffering upon the other. He does not come to a premature decision, that because Russia is ruled by an absolute monarch, all happiness, prosperity, and justice are essentially banished from the land. It is really pleasant to find a deviation from the established routine of books about Russia. These are now nearly all concocted upon one and the same plan. The recipe is as exact as any in Mrs Rundell: and is as conscientiously adhered to by literary cooks, as that great artist's invaluable precepts are by knights and ladies of the ladle. Tyranny, misery, and the knout are the chief ingredients of the savoury dish. We are shown a nation of cretins, crushed under the boot-heel of an imperial ogre; whilst a selfish, servile aristocracy salaam their admiration, and catch greedily at the titles and gewgaws thrown to them as a sop by their terrible master. This is the substance of the mess, which, being handsomely garnished with lying anecdotes of horrible cruelties practised upon the unfortunate population, is deemed sufficiently dainty to set before the public, and is forthwith devoured as genuine and nutritive food by the large body of simpletons who take type for a guarantee of veracity. Mr Erman despises the common trick and claptrap resorted to by vulgar writers. Avoiding anecdotage, and abuse of the powers that be, he gives, in brief shrewd paragraphs, glimpses of Muscovite character and feelings, which clearly prove the people of that vast empire to be far happier, more prosperous, and more practically free, than the inhabitants of many countries who boast of liberty because anarchy has replaced good government. Judging less from any distinct assertions or arguments advanced in these volumes, than from their general tenor, and by the inferences to be gleaned from them, we must consider the Russians a contented and flourishing nation, likely to make the larger strides in civilisation that they are unimpeded by revolutionary agitation. Propagandists meet little encouragement amongst the loyal and light-hearted subjects of the autocrat. "We have often observed at Moscow," says Mr Erman, "birch-trees hewn for fencing, yet still alive in the horizontal position, and throwing out shoots. The great distinction of the vegetable nature in this region is its tenacity of life; and, singularly enough, the same capability of existing under oppression, and of withstanding stubbornly every revolutionising influence, is here the characteristic of man also. The ear of the stranger is sure, at every turn of conversation, to catch the sounds--'Kak ni bud,' (no matter how,) with which the Russians are used to give expression to their habitual indifference, and renunciation of all care.... Notwithstanding the great variety of condition which the population exhibit, every thing has the stamp of nationality, and an obstinate adherence to established usage may be plainly recognised as a fundamental principle. Some foreign customs, indeed, are adopted from strangers residing in Moscow; but they are, at the same time, so changed as to be assimilated to the national manners. Russian nationality may be compared to a river, which receives other streams without changing its name; or, still better, to a living organism, which, while devouring every variety of food, continues still the same."

It was on the 29th of July that Mr Erman, who travelled in company with the Norwegian professor Hansteen, left Moscow, and moved eastwards, passing through a productive country, strewn with populous and comfortable villages. At Pokròf, his first halting-place, his chamber walls were adorned with rude carvings and paintings, whose subjects were taken from the events of 1812, and represented the valiant deeds of the peasantry. Buikova, a village forty miles east of Moscow, was the farthest point to which the French penetrated. Their invasion has left but a faint impression upon the popular mind in Russia--even in Moscow, which suffered so much at their hands. Conflagrations have been common occurrences in that city, and the inhabitants are accustomed to be burned out. We read of seven such events, from the thirteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, in all of which the destruction was complete, or very nearly so. The fire of 1812 spared many of the stone churches, on whose towers "the Mahomedan crescent rises above the cross, a monument of earlier revolutions. The yoke of the Tatars was so lasting and oppressive, that later events of a similar kind seem comparatively unimportant; and even the French invasion is here thought little of, being usually compared with the irruptions of the Pechenegues and that of the Poles in later times, but never set on a level with the Tatar domination." The French have little prestige in Russia. Whatever respect they previously enjoyed there, was completely annihilated by the pitiful figure they cut in the Moscow campaign; retreating, as they did, a ragged, disorderly, frost-bitten remnant, before a swarm of armed peasants and irregular horse. And Muscovite sign-painters and saint-carvers decorate village walls with episodes of the disastrous overthrow of an army, probably the most powerful and really efficient ever got together. Any notion entertained by the Russians of French invincibility was as completely dissipated in that country by the events of 1812, as it was in Germany by the ensuing, and scarcely less important, campaign of 1813.

Passing Murom, where a sort of Yankee tradition exists of a "robber-nightingale," which entices travellers into the woods by its song, and then kills them by the power of its notes, Mr Erman reached Nijni Novgorod at the moment of the great annual fair. The mixture of European and Asiatic produce and manufactures gives the Russian fairs an appearance singularly striking to the foreigner's eye. Things the most opposite are there brought together. _Obrasá_, or Greek holy images, amulets, and other objects used in the solemnities of the Græco-Russian church, are seen in juxtaposition with the elegant luxuries and superfluities of extreme European civilisation. The clumsy carvings of Uralian peasants are found in the next warerooms to the fragile and fashionable masterpieces of a Parisian milliner. The chief part of the goods come from great distances. Amongst the important articles of traffic are tea from China, horse-hides from Tatary, iron bars from Siberia, shawls of camel's-down from Bokhara. The Bokharians also import large quantities of cotton, partly raw and partly spun. This is one of the principal objects of trade at Nijni. Concerning the origin of this useful substance, curious fables were current in Russia not quite a century ago. "It appears to me certain," says Mr Erman, "that the story of the zoophytic plant called Baránez, or lamb-plant (formed as a diminutive from Barán, a sheep,) originated in some embellished account of the cotton plant. Herberstein relates it at full length and unchanged, just as he had heard it. 'There has been seen, near to the Caspian Sea, a seed, rather larger and rounder than that of a melon, from which, when set in the ground, is produced something similar to a lamb, of the altitude of five palms, having a very fine fleece, &c., &c. The German edition of Herberstein (Basel, 1563) adds that the Baránez has a head, eyes, ears, and all the limbs, like a sheep. But it mentions correctly '_the very fine fleece which the people of that country commonly made use of to pad their caps withal_.' This is the ordinary use which the Tatar tribes in general make of cotton at the present day." The fair at Nijni lasts two months, and brings together six hundred thousand persons of different nations and tribes, or about thirty-three times the number of the stationary population. It produces a large revenue to the imperial treasury,--the letting of the wooden booths, and of two thousand five hundred and twenty-two stone storerooms, (to each of which latter is attached a chamber for the owner of the goods to live in) alone yielding, so far back as 1825, nearly four hundred thousand rubles; whilst the population of the government, or district, amounting to nearly a million of souls, paid taxes to the amount of fourteen millions of rubles.

Nijni Novgorod is the point of rendezvous for criminals from the western provinces of the empire, condemned to Siberian exile. They arrive there in small detachments, to pursue their journey in large bodies. In the vicinity of every post-house along the road is another building known as the Ostrog or fort, which is merely a large barrack divided into numerous small chambers, and surrounded by a fence of palisades, where the convicts are lodged upon the journey. From various passages scattered through Mr Erman's book, it appears that these Siberian exiles are by no means so badly treated as has frequently been stated and believed. In most instances the punishment derives its severity less from any painful toil or cruel discipline imposed upon them, than from the rigidity of the climate, the separation from friends, and the mortal ennui those accustomed to civilisation and society cannot but experience, whilst leading the monotonous life of a peasant or Cossack in regions as dreary as any the globe's surface affords. The first caravan of prisoners encountered by Mr Erman, at about a hundred versts beyond Nijni, were well clothed and cared for, and seemed neither dissatisfied with their past journey, nor overwhelmed with care about the future. "With every train of them are several waggons, drawn by post-horses, to carry the women and the old and infirm men; the rest follow in pairs, in a long train, after the waggons, escorted by a militia established in the villages. It is but rarely that one sees special offenders with fetters upon their legs during the march." The majority of tales circulated by romancing travellers, with reference to Siberian exile, have little foundation save in the imagination of the narrators. Amongst these fictions is to be reckoned the statement that certain classes of the banished are compelled to pass their lives in hunting the sable, and other animals. The great majority of the delinquents are condemned only to settle in Siberia; and when hard labour in the Uralian mines, and in certain manufactories, is superadded, it is generally for a year or other limited period. Those of the peasant class have to support themselves, whilst offenders of a higher rank, and unused to manual labour, have an allowance made them by the government. In various places Mr Erman met with exiles, from some of whom he obtained curious information. They are usually known by the mild name of "_the unfortunates_," and are held in no particular disfavour by the natives, with whose families they intermarry. By a remarkable enactment of the Russian law, serfs, when transported to Siberia, become in all respects as free as the peasants in western Europe. Mr Erman refers to this with strong approval, and attributes to it the happiest results. "I have often," he says, "heard intelligent and reflecting Russians mention, as an almost inexplicable paradox, that the peasants condemned to become settlers, all, without exception, and in a very short time, change their habits and lead an exemplary life; yet it is certain that the sense of the benefit conferred on them by the gift of personal freedom is the sole cause of this conversion. Banishment subservient to colonisation, instead of close imprisonment, is, indeed, an excellent feature in the Russian code; and though the substitution of forced labour in mines for the punishment of death may be traced back to Grecian example, yet the improving of the offender's condition by bestowing on him personal freedom, is an original as well as an admirable addition of a Russian legislator." It is of course by the higher class of exiles that the banishment is most severely felt; but these live in the towns, that the succour received from government may reach them the more easily, and submit, for the most part, with great equanimity to the startling change from the luxury of Moscow or St Petersburg, to the dulness and simplicity of Tobolsk, and even of worse places. Some of them have to do penance in church for a certain time after their arrival, and a portion of these continue the practice when it is no longer compulsory. At Beresov, a town in western Siberia, which Mr Erman passed through on an excursion northwards from Tobolsk, the oral chronicles of the inhabitants furnish curious details of the numerous illustrious exiles who have there ended their days. Menchikoff, the well-known favourite of Peter I., was one of these. "After his political extinction, he prepared himself, by devout penitence, for his natural decease. He worked with his own hands in erecting the little wooden church, now fallen to decay, which stands thirty or forty feet above the bank of the Sosva, at the southern extremity of the town: he then served in it as bell-ringer, and was finally buried by the grateful inhabitants of Beresov, immediately before the door of the building." It was here, at Beresov, that Mr Erman fell in with a number of unlucky conspirators, who had lost fortune, rank, and home, by their association in a recent abortive revolutionary attempt. Amongst them were a M. Gorski, at one time a count and general of cavalry, and the ex-chieftains Focht and Chernilov. They usually wore the costume of the country, but upon holidays they donned European coats, _in order to display the vestiges of the orders which had once been sewed upon them_. A curious instance of vanity, traceable, perhaps, to a desire to distinguish themselves from persons condemned to the same punishment for crimes of a more disgraceful nature.

In the streets of Yekaterinburg, the first town of importance after crossing the Asian boundary, parties of exiles are a frequent spectacle; the number passing through in a year being estimated at five thousand, or about two-fifths of the annual export of convicts to Siberia, as stated by Mr Stepanov, whose statement, however, Mr Erman seems disposed to consider exaggerated. The detachments are usually guarded by Kosaks of the Ural, and by a company of Bashkir militia. These Uralian Kosaks are well uniformed, armed, and mounted, and enjoy the same privileges as the Kosaks of the Don. They are allowed an immunity from every impost, but are bound to devote themselves to the public service. Touching the Bashkirs, another irregular and half-savage militia, serving to swell the ranks of Russia's enormous army, Mr Erman, who made some stay at Yekaterinburg, the northern limit of their residence, gives curious particulars. They are the only aboriginal Siberian tribe whose mode of life regularly alternates from the nomadic to the fixed. Their winters are passed in permanent villages of wooden huts, erected usually upon the skirt of a forest. But when spring approaches, they collect their flocks and herds, strap hair tent-cloths upon their saddles, and are off to the plains. They appear to live upon horseback, and are indolent, indocile, and useless out of the saddle. The only thing the men do, is to drive home the mares at milking-time; all other domestic toil is left to the women. And although grass abounds in the summer pastures, hay is unknown amongst them. The cattle sustain life in winter as best they may, on stunted or decayed herbage, sought under the snow and gathered on the dunghills. Fermented mare's milk is the favorite drink of the Bashkirs, who live chiefly upon mutton and fish, and upon the fruit of the bird-cherry (_Prunus padus_) kneaded into a sort of cake. In the chase they make use of hawks, which they are particularly skilful in training. The smaller species of these birds are used to take hares, whilst the greater will strike foxes, and even wolves. The roving careless life of the Bashkirs possesses a peculiar charm, admitted even by the civilised Russians; and it is with no good will that, on the return of winter, the tribes re-enter their settled habitations. "They approach them with reluctance, and believe that Shaitan, or the evil spirit, has taken up his abode in the huts that oppress them with such a sense of restraint. The men accordingly remain at some distance from the settlement, and send the women forward, armed with staves, with which they strike the door of every hut, uttering loud imprecations; and it is not till they have made the rounds with their noisy exorcisms, that the men ride forward at full speed and with terrific shouts, to banish the dreaded demon from his lurking-place." The chief weapon of these Bedouins of the north is the same which so forcibly excited Captain Dalgetty's risibility upon his visit to the Children of the Mist. But although in these days of Paixhans and percussion, bows and arrows certainly appear rather anomalous, they are by no means contemptible weapons in the hands of some of the Siberian tribes. Of this Mr Erman had abundant opportunity to convince himself, especially when his ramble northwards from Tobolsk brought him amongst the Ostyaks of the river Obi. The ordinary hunting weapons of these people are bows six feet long, of very slight curve, and from which four-feet arrows are discharged with murderous effect. Much practice and strength are required to draw these bows; and our scientific traveller, who, not having taken the necessary precaution of shielding the left arm with a piece of horn, from the recoil of the string, had been unable to draw his bow to more than one third of the arrow's length, was not a little astounded to see an Ostyak pigmy, with sore eyes and a sickly aspect, send a blunt arrow one hundred and sixty feet, and strike the object aimed at, the stem of a larch, near its summit, fully sixty feet from the ground. Blunt arrows, headed with flattened iron balls, are used to kill sables and squirrels, that the skin may not be injured; the sharp ones are a settler for any quadruped the country produces.

After many days' journey through Tatar villages of wooden huts, and towns that are little better, the first view of Tobolsk, obtained some miles before reaching the place, is quite imposing; and the traveller, who might think he had got a few stages beyond civilisation, is cheered and encouraged by the sight of church-towers, lofty monasteries, and well-built houses. In vain does he seek an inn. Such things are unknown in Siberia; and, if he has no acquaintance in the town, he must apply to the police-master, who recommends him to the hospitality of an inhabitant, by whom he is made welcome during his stay, without demand for remuneration, although, if proffered, it will sometimes be accepted. In this manner Mr Erman and his companions were accommodated in the upper storey of a well-built wooden house; and here their progress eastward was arrested by the character of the weather. It was the commencement of October, the period of transition from summer to winter, and the traveller's entrance into the town was rendered memorable by a heavy fall of snow--"white flies," as the postilions called the flakes, which they beheld with much pleasure. Their satisfaction was probably owing to the fact that in Siberia the coldest part of the year is the most favourable for travelling, a matter of interest to people of their profession. But the moment of transition, whilst the struggle lasts between summer and winter, when snow encumbers the ground, and frost has not yet hardened it, is known, as well as the similar period at the close of winter, as "the time of the unroading," (spoiling of the roads;) and the Russians have even manufactured a verb "to be unroaded." The snow obstructs wheeled carriages, and forbids the use of the sledge; and, unless peremptorily compelled to move forward, the Russian merchants--the most experienced of Siberian travellers--await, in some convenient resting-place, the hardening of the winter road. From Mr Erman's account, a better place than Tobolsk could scarcely be found, in those wild regions, wherein to pass a few weeks of compulsory inaction. Nevertheless, and although cordially received by the governor-general, Velyaminov, from whom, and from other Russian officers, he got much useful information, our traveller was impatient to be off. He had a pet scheme in view. From the very commencement of the journey he had planned an excursion to the mouth of the Obi, within the Arctic circle. To this he was partly induced by the desire of tracing certain magnetic lines, and partly by "the alluring prospect of enjoying, on the northern part of the Obi, the first undisturbed intercourse with the aboriginal possessors of the land, where they are little changed by foreign influence." Accordingly, towards the middle of November, the drifting ice upon the Irtuish having united into a solid sheet, Mr Erman joyfully made final preparations for his journey to Obdorsk. They were few, and soon completed. A Kosak guide and interpreter, a fur dress, a copper kettle, bread and ham, salted salmon and caviar, were stowed in a couple of sledges, one of which was light enough to be drawn by dogs or reindeer. It was held advisable also to take out a fresh passport, signed by the governor of Tobolsk, in lieu of the one delivered at St Petersburg, for, in places far removed from the great road across Siberia, people have confused and indistinct notions of the power which issues from the capital of the empire. The larger sledge was provided with otvódi or guides--two strong bars placed lengthways on either side the carriage to prevent an upset. "Towards the end of winter, the snow-ways, which are constantly travelled upon, have an undulating surface, like that of a stormy sea, and give the sledge a motion so like that of a ship tossed on the waves, that travellers unused to it often grow sea-sick on the road, and the use of otvódi is a very necessary precaution." Russian travelling, delightfully rapid, has many drawbacks. Upon the log-roads, (formed of tree-trunks,) the violent and incessant jolting is said to have even worse effects than the excessive undulations of the sledge. After a few years, it not only brings on a complete paralysis of the mental faculties of the Russian postilions, but also occasions spinal disease, to such an extent as to have obtained for those roads the significant name of spine-crushers.

On the 22d November, when Mr Erman began his slide northwards, traffic had not yet given the road that wavy configuration so uncomfortable to the bilious traveller. The post from Tobolsk to Beresov had made but one journey on the winter-track, and the sledges glided rapidly and smoothly on the almost virgin snow-way. Beyond Tugalova, a village 140 miles from Tobolsk, they travelled on the frozen Irtuish, and frequently passed the self-acting machinery used for the winter fishing. This consists of a strong pole in an inclined position, with its lower extremity frozen fast in the ice. "At the upper end of this pole was a continuation made of switches, which, bending down, reached to the surface of the ice; at that point was a hole through which was let down the hook and line. The upper part of the apparatus is seen bent down more or less according as the bait is still untouched, or as a fish pulling at it has freed a check put to the elasticity of the rod, and is thus, in consequence of its own efforts, drawn nearer to the surface of the water." The ingenuity of this contrivance would avail little, however, were not means found of rousing the sleepy sturgeon from their winter slumbers. They lie in muddy hollows in the bed of the river, quite motionless, and clustered together for the sake of warmth. To awaken them, hard balls of clay, heated in the fire, are thrown from time to time into the water, below the line. Driven from their resting-place, they swim up stream, according to their custom, and come upon the bait. This mode of fishing is very productive. Fishing, of one kind or other, is the principal occupation of the Ostyaks, in the heart of whose country, after three or four days' journey, Mr Erman found himself. The rivers abound with excellent fish--eels, especially, being very abundant, but not much eaten, although their skins are in great request as window-panes. These are rubbed with fat, to make them more transparent, but there are small roundish swellings in the skin which refract and confound the rays of light. A better substitute for glass is a flake of ice, used by the Sosnovian Ostyaks, a tribe further north. The flakes are about a foot thick, and are propped from without by a pole, whose lower end bears obliquely against the ground. The fire, kept burning in the hut, thaws the inner surface of the ice, rendering it smooth as a mirror. A whiter and brighter light penetrates through these windows than through the fish-skins, which the Sosnovians use for boots, and even for clothes. Strong and air-tight, and well rubbed with fat, they are almost as warm as fur, and better against the wet.

The commencement of a fishing season or expedition is celebrated by the Ostyaks with all manner of queer saturnalia. Although nominally Christians, and accustomed to attend church once a-year, they are very heathenish in some of their rites and ceremonies, and make a strange jumble of their old superstitions and their new faith. The priests do not invariably set them a good example. "Our Russian informant complained bitterly of the priest in his neighbourhood, who came into the village on holidays so drunk, that the congregation assembled to no purpose." With such pastors, no wonder if the sheep cleave to some of their ancient usages. Those who are departing on an expedition, slaughter a tame animal, and smear their faces with its blood, accompanying the sacrifice with a carousal. In one village Mr Erman found the huts remarkably empty, and was told that the men had just gone a-fishing, and that their wives were drinking brandy in the kabak or public-house. The sale of spirits in Siberia, as in all the Russian dominions, is a government monopoly, and brandy is only to be had in certain houses, to whose keepers the privilege is farmed. In a small dark room, scarcely ten paces wide, Mr Erman found ten or twelve Ostyak dames clustered round the bottle, and benevolently drunk. His account of their maudlin state is amusingly grave and sentimental. "A number of short corpulent figures, with black sparkling eyes, could be just seen, moving and mingling together, in the narrow space. They all talked with animation, and with remarkably delicate voices, which now gave expression only to soft and joyous emotions. They embraced, one after the other, the Yamschik, who entered with us; and their soft voices, now almost whining, seemed attuned, not so much to words of old acquaintance, as to the endearments of young and growing love." The ladies having emptied their purses without quenching their thirst, the good-natured German, who observed that "the pleasure of drinking had but just risen to its highest pitch," opened them a credit with the kabak-keeper. "They now took especial pains to show themselves deserving of the European treat, by good Christian observance. Devout Russians are in the habit of neutralising the Satanic operation of spirituous liquors by a rapid movement of the right hand, intended to describe the cross, or by a softly-ejaculated prayer, or merely by blowing the breath upon the glass. But the good-humoured Ostyaks, novices in Christian prayer as in drinking, made the sign of the cross to such an extent, so slowly and with such deep bowing of the body, as would be required by the church only on the most solemn occasions."

Although much engrossed by fishing, the Ostyaks do not neglect the chase. Their thick woods abound in the better kinds of fur animals, and the annual tribute of two sable skins, payable by each family to the Russian government, is not very difficult to obtain. It is seldom found necessary to pay an equivalent in other skins. Although quite the beginning of winter, Mr Erman's host, in an Ostyak village, showed him a fine sable skin, which he kept in a strong box, like a treasure, concealed in a corner of his dwelling. Its value was diminished by a yellowish tinge, ascribed to the animal's having lived in a wood where there was too much light. Besides sable and squirrel, the reindeer, the fox, the glutton, and the elk, are objects of chase. Mr Erman tried to get at the fact of the enmity said to exist between the two latter animals. The reply to his inquiries was the old story current in Europe--how the glutton leaps from a branch on the elk's neck, and keeps his seat till the death of his steed. No one, however, had seen any thing of the kind: it was matter of tradition, handed down from their dead fathers. The ermine is taken in traps. The fox is in great variety, the most esteemed being the crossed stone fox, whose colour is partly a grayish yellow, partly white, so distributed that the grayish parts unite prettily to form a cross, one bar of which extends along the back, whilst the other stretches obliquely down the middle ribs to the belly. The fur of this animal is greatly prized by the Russian clergy, for whom pelisses, covered with natural crosses, are made from it. The latitude of the town of Beresov is the headquarters of the Siberian beaver, hunted not for the fur but for the precious castoreum or beaver-stone, to which such great medical virtues are ascribed. Attempts have been made in Germany to obtain from the beavers of that country a product which might replace that of Siberia; but all in vain. The fine quality is only to be had in the far north, where, as Mr Erman fancifully observes, nature scatters animal perfumes in place of fragrant flowers. "The Kosaks and Russian traders have exalted the beaver-stone into a panacea.... To the sentence, 'God arose, and our enemies were scattered,' the Siberians add, very characteristically, the apocryphal interpolation, 'and we are free from headache.' To ensure this most desirable condition, every one has recourse, at home or on his travels, and with the firmest faith, to two medicines, and only two, viz., beaver-stone, or beaver-efflux, as it is here called, and sal-ammoniac." From the strength of the castoreum, the Siberians infer that other parts of the animal must possess peculiar virtues. Gouty swellings are said to subside rapidly when rubbed with the fat, and the beaver's teeth are popularly believed to cure toothach.

The beaver is the only fur animal in these latitudes that does not change its colour in the course of the year. This is probably owing to the circumstance, that in winter it dwells wholly in the water, thus enjoying a comparatively equable temperature. In the river Obi, at Beresov, the water does not usually freeze below the depth of four feet eight inches, and the beaver always has two entrances to his dwelling, one high on the bank above the stream, the other below the freezing limit. The architectural and wood-cutting habits of the animal are the same here as in America; but two assertions, new to Mr Erman, were made respecting it by the Beresov hunters. He was assured that "among beavers, as with bees and men, there are distinctions of ranks; each chief keeping a number of labourers, the toils of which he oversees and directs without taking part in them; and, again, it was stated that the contents of the castoreum bags depend on the moon." It was impossible to verify the veracity of these two statements. As regards the moon's influence, however, there is ground for a suspicion that its advantages are rather felt by the hunter, than essential to the virtues of the drug. Full moon is maintained, both by Ostyaks and Russians, to be the propitious time.

The most northern tribe of Ostyaks, who dwell between the rivers Obi and Yenisei, surpass their southern neighbours in venatorial skill, as they, in their turn, are surpassed by the Samoyedes, who live in the northernmost regions of Siberia. The men of the Yenisei kill wolves, which, on account of their long soft hair, are reckoned greatly superior to the forest and steppe wolves of middle Siberia. They are also famed for their dexterity in killing and capturing reindeer. "Tying leathern cords between the tops of the antlers of their tame deer, they turn the animals loose, one by one, in the neighbourhood of a wild herd: these do not fail to attack the strangers, and their antlers becoming entangled in the cords during the contest, they are held fast by the tame deer till the men arrive. These Ostyaks know also how to plant spring-bows, which send the arrow against the animal's breast." But the Samoyedes, besides these ordinary artifices, have other and ingenious ways, peculiar to themselves, of ensnaring and slaying the brute creation, by putting themselves as much as possible on an equality with the animals pursued, going on all-fours, and imitating them in voice and clothing. The Polar bear is a common victim to their cunning devices, and even to their open attacks; for their intimate acquaintance with the formidable beast makes them regard him as an easy prey. "The Samoyedes assert that the white bear far exceeds the black bear in ferocity and strength, whilst fully equal to it in cunning; yet, owing to his unwieldiness, they encounter it without fear, and always reckon on victory as certain. A man will often go singly against a Polar bear, eight feet long, without any other weapon than his knife, which he fastens to the end of a pole. In spring and autumn these animals are found upon the ice, near the hole, whence the seals come forth to breathe. There the bear covers himself up with snow, facing the hole, and with one paw stretched into the water." The Samoyede seal-hunters imitate the bears, and when the seal walks out upon the ice, they shove a board over the hole and capture the phoca. Concerning the bear the Ostyaks entertain peculiar notions, viewing it with a sort of superstitious respect. "A member of the court of justice told me that, in suits between Russians and Ostyaks, it is still the custom here (at Beresov) to bring, into court the head of a bear, and that this animal, which is supposed to be omniscient, is there appealed to as a witness by the Ostyaks. In swearing, they make the gesture of eating, and call upon the bear to devour them in like manner if they do not tell the truth." Some similar reverence for Bruin exists, we believe, amongst certain North American tribes.

The draught-dogs, so faithful and useful to the northern Siberians, often receive but scurvy treatment at their masters' hands. The Ostyaks, who are honesty personified, and who laugh at the common European precautions of locking up valuables and bolting doors, cannot endure the predatory propensities of their canine allies, and fly into a passion whenever an unlucky dog sneaks into their dwelling in search of warmth or food. The poor brute is immediately a mark for the blows and kicks of every body present, the storm of abuse being justified by the cunning and greediness of its object, who, if allowed to abide in the house, would soon reduce its inmates to short commons. There is some excuse for the dogs' voracity, however; for, according to Mr Erman's account, they are considerably more than half-starved, and are rarely admitted to the fire to be fed, save when they return weary and distressed from a long journey. Severe as is the cold in those regions, protection from it is not essential to the existence, or even to the health of these hardy dogs. They sleep outside the houses, in holes which they thaw in the snow by their own warmth. At Obdorsk, where there are no pastures, and consequently no horses, four hundred dogs are kept by sixty inhabitants, and each of them is estimated to draw five poods' (two hundred pounds) weight in the loaded sledge. About eight o'clock in the evening these four hundred brutes set up a hideous howling, by way of claiming their daily meal, consisting invariably of fish, which, for them as well as for their owners' consumption, is first dried in the sun and then pounded, bones and all. Except this evening concert, a bark or a cry is rarely uttered by these dogs, unless at first starting when yoked to the sledge, or on coming across a reindeer team upon the road. Hydrophobia would be a terrible scourge in this dog-district, but the disease is fortunately unknown there. Steller has stated the same thing of the dogs of Kamschatka, and Mr Erman concludes that the malady is a result of the European system of living in towns. And as the Siberian dogs are so very moderately fed, he infers that excess, not want, generates the morbid habit. We are inclined to attribute more importance to the quality than to the quantity of the food. A fish diet may be more conducive to a wholesome state of the animals' blood than the masses of horse-flesh, paunch, and other rank and unclean offal commonly given to dogs in Europe, and especially in England, where the carnivorous addictions of the bipeds induce a belief in the propriety of unlimited flesh-feeding for quadrupeds.

The large annual importation of exiles, the system of conscription, and the advantages offered to public officers volunteering for Siberian service, are the most important and efficacious measures by which Russia proceeds gradually but steadily with the colonisation and civilisation of her Asiatic dominions. The conscripts are sometimes drawn, not only from Tobolsk, but from the remotest parts of Siberia, and the term of military service being twenty-eight years, it is probable that only a small proportion return to their native villages. Those who do are looked up to as oracles by their countrymen. They are objects of pride to their families and of respect to every body else; the place of honour is theirs by right, and they are addressed by the title of Master Soldier.[7] The ferry of the Irtuish, by Tobolsk, whose passage is considered the symbol of political death to the numerous exiles who each year cross it--bestows a step of rank on all public servants offering themselves for duty in Siberia Proper. The passion for rank, stronger in Russia than in any other country, drives hosts of officers across this important boundary; but as they are not obliged to remain more than three years, most of them return home at the end of that time. Far nearer to St Petersburg than the Asiatic frontier, civilisation is still at a very low ebb amongst the aboriginal tribes. Close to Nijni Novgorod, and within a very short distance of Moscow, the prevailing population consists of Cheremisses and Chuvashes, two tribes many of whose customs are nearly as barbarous as their names. These people are shy and timid, very slow in acquiring industrious habits, and addicted to sundry practices stamping them as semi-savages. In some places they cling to paganism, and offer up horned beasts, fruit, and vegetables to their various deities. The Chuvash ladies wear a sort of bustle of sheet copper, hanging from the girdle backwards over the hips, and having appended to it all manner of metal ornaments, making a perpetual clatter in walking. But these tribes are the pink of refinement by comparison with those in the northern portion of the Muscovite empire,--with the Ostyaks, who eat out of the same trough with their dogs, or with the Samoyedes who tear with their teeth, and swallow with infinite relish, huge lumps of raw and reeking flesh. The women of the latter people wear, as their favourite decoration, (certainly no inappropriate one) a glutton's tail, hanging down the back of their pelisse. Their hair is plaited in tails, to which all manner of lumber, brass and iron rings, and rusty musket-locks, are attached. Mr Erman's account of "Life in the _Chum_" (the skin tent of the Samoyedes) is quaint and graphic.

[7] _Gospodin Slujivui._ Gospodin is equivalent to the French Monsieur or Seigneur, and Slujivui means literally one who has served in the army.

"The reindeer calf, which we had got on the way, was killed and cut up in front of the tent a few minutes, after our arrival. The men now brought the bleeding flesh into the tent, and began devouring it immediately, quite raw, with the heartiest appetite. The old man was satisfied with sucking the brain from the head, whilst each of our younger comrades gnawed away at a limb of the animal, even to the bone. They laughed at the amazement which my good-humoured Esthonian attendant expressed at their blood-stained faces; and when he gave them to understand, through the interpreter, that they were no better than wolves, they seemed quite unprepared for such reproof; replying gravely, that they were at the same time no worse than the wolves, since they shared honestly with them, and left the bones and some scraps of flesh merely for their sake." In this same tent there was a little monster of a boy named Peina, whom one reads of with a sort of shudder, and with a strong suspicion that the creature was not _canny_. Mr Erman himself seems to write of him with peculiar reserve, stating facts, but evidently unwilling to give an opinion as to the exact nature of the beast. Peina, who had first-rate masticators, got his share of the raw meat, which did not prevent his drawing on his mother's lacteal resources, and thumping her brutally till she honoured the draft, or handed him the pot-ladle, with which he supped scalding porridge to his great internal contentment. The travellers' bread, although frozen hard and not easy eating for adult jaws, disappeared by wholesale within those of Peina. At night the anomalous urchin was laid naked in a canoe-shaped basket, and covered up so thickly with furs that his cries seemed to come from the depths of the earth. In the morning his mother took him from his bed and set him up, still naked, before the fire to warm himself. Sugar, when first presented to him, he called snow, and threw away, but when once he had tasted the dainty, his demands for it were unceasing and peremptory. Taking into consideration the uncomfortable and uncleanly peculiarities of the Samoyedes, both young and old, we cannot feel surprised that Mr Erman's interpreter conceived an intense dislike to their society, and so managed matters that one morning, whilst the man of science was busy measuring a base-line to ascertain the heights of some mountains, his Samoyede companions suddenly disappeared with their tent and their reindeer, leaving him with three ill-equipped sledges and a few Ostyak attendants, and with no choice but to make the best of his way back to Obdorsk, whence he soon afterwards returned to Tobolsk. There he passed his Christmas, and then resumed his journey; but this time in a southerly direction. After having penetrated to sixty-seven degrees north, the region of eternal frost, he struck southwards to the latitude of the Land's End, making a dip into China, which furnishes some of the best chapters in his book.

Irkutsk, the last town of importance north of the Chinese frontier, consists of nineteen hundred houses, fifty being of brick, and the remainder of wood, and is probably the cheapest place in the civilised world as regards articles of food. We say "civilised," because, although situate in a barbarous region, and possessing a population of a very motley character, the town has much that is European in its aspect and usages. It possesses an exchange, government factories, where newly-arrived convicts are employed, a school of medicine, a gymnasium, and a handsome parade-ground. In the market, formed of wooden booths, the stores of food were enormous. Beef cost about a halfpenny a pound; of flour one penny would purchase nearly eight and a half pounds; partridges and heathfowl were sold at five farthings a-piece. But we are in haste to get amongst the Celestials. First comes a gallop across More Baikal, a large lake just beyond Irkutsk, on which the Russian government maintains an armed flotilla. This gallop is a fine bit of helter-skelter, over ice brilliant as glass. "There was no snow upon the ice, so that its surface shone like a polished mirror in the moonlight. The horses that were put under our sledges in Kadilnaya had to be held on each side till the very moment of starting, when they broke at once into full gallop, which they kept up till we landed on the further shore. We completed seven German miles in two hours and a quarter, undoubtedly the most extraordinary as well as the most speedy stage upon any route in Russia." Thence, onwards to the frontier line. "We followed the crowd that pressed forward towards a narrow door in the front of a long wooden building. This admitted us into the inner quadrangle of a Russian warehouse. A corresponding door, at the opposite side of this court, opens just upon a wooden barricade, which constitutes the barrier of China. In this there is a wide portal, ornamented with pillars, and displaying the Russian eagle above it, along with the cipher of the reigning emperor, Nicholas the First, by whom it was erected." On passing through this gate, the change is immediate and striking,--from Russian sobriety of aspect and hue to the gaudy finery of China. Maimachen, the name of the Chinese town visited by Mr Erman, has a very masquerading air to a European eye. The walls on either side of the streets do not look like house walls, the roofs being flat and invisible from the street. "Indeed, they are nearly altogether concealed by the gay-coloured paper lanterns and flags, with inscriptions on them, hung out on both sides of the way. Cords, with similar scrolls and lanterns, are likewise stretched from roof to roof across the street. These dazzling decorations stand out in glaring contrast with the dull yellow of the ground and walls. In the open crossings of the streets, which intersect each other at right angles, stood enormous chafing-dishes of cast-iron, like basins, upon a slender pedestal four feet in height. The benches by which they were surrounded were occupied by tea-drinkers, who sat smoking from the little pipes they carry at their girdles, whilst their kettles boiled at the common fire." Mr Erman had the good fortune to be on the frontier at the period of the Chinese festival of the White Moon, which is in fact the celebration of the new-year, and he had the still greater luck to be invited to share in it at Maimachen. He found the town in its gayest costume. The expenditure of flags and lanterns was prodigious. The scrolls usually contained the names of the families before whose houses they were hung out, coupled with words of auspicious import, as gladness, riches, wisdom, &c. There was a great firing of crackers and rockets, partly to celebrate the day, but chiefly in honour of the guests. Before dinner the latter were diverted by a theatrical representation. Maimachen boasts a regular company of actors, and upon this great occasion they did their best. Their orchestra was of a rather violent description, consisting of "wooden drums, shaped like casks, brass cymbals, and plates of the same metal, or gongs, held by a string and beaten with knockers, and wooden truncheons, of different sizes, which they used as castanets." There were no actresses; but the deficiency was not to be detected, the younger and more delicate men personating women to the life by the aid of wigs and long tresses of black hair, but especially by curls pressed flat upon the forehead. Masks were not used, but paint was in abundance; in some cases with a view to represent spectacles, mustachios, &c.; in others to conceal the human features, or give them a monstrous aspect. "One face was covered with coloured rays, issuing from the mouth. The same actor had also a feather on his head--in Chinese comedy the conventional mark of a ghost or apparition. Another wore a golden helmet, which constituted him a warrior. Several kept beating themselves incessantly on the hip with a cane, and by so doing intimated that they were on horseback." The play itself was more like a game of romps than any regular dramatic representation. Little was said; but, on the other hand, there was a deal of dancing, drumming, and running about. Mr Erman could make neither head nor tail of the proceedings. By way of experiment, however, he made some tender gestures to one of the pseudo-ladies, who acknowledged them in the most amiable manner, and after that the horsemen without horses paid him much attention, pointing with their sticks to his spectacles, and trying to touch them as they passed. All this greatly diverted the Mongol audience, evidently delighted to see a real counterpart to the painted spectacles of some of the actors.

The play over, Mr Erman and the other guests, preceded by the uproarious orchestra, marched off to dinner at the house of the sarguchei or chief officer of Maimachen. This gentleman, a tall, thin person of stern countenance, dressed in gray velvet, had a white button on the crown of his black felt hat, indicating his rank, and a chalcedony ring, an inch wide, upon his right-hand thumb, this being a mark of official dignity. "His nails," says our traveller, "did not extend above half an inch beyond the tips of his fingers, his personal vanity being in this respect subdued, as might be expected in a man of sober mind and mature years." The man of short nails and sober mind was exceeding hospitable, welcomed his guests in a soft and sonorous voice, and sat down with them to dinner at tables covered with scarlet cloth. The regale that followed might have caused a European _chef_ to pale his ineffectual fires from sheer envy. It began, oddly enough, with fruits, sweetmeats, and tea. These discussed, a piece of fine paper, for a napkin, and a pair of ivory chopsticks, were laid before each guest, and the tables, which were six feet wide, were covered over thickly with small porcelain plates full of all manner of complicated edibles. Fat abounded in the dressing, to neutralise which weak vinegar was used. The first series of saucers duly honoured, a second was brought in and put on the top of its predecessor. Others followed, and as the previous stratum was never removed, there soon arose upon the table a lofty pile of gastronomical curiosities. Pipes and _chowsen_, a Chinese spirit distilled from rice, concluded the feast, as the strangers thought;--but they were vastly mistaken. The soup course had still to come, and that was followed by an infusion of cabbage-leaves, drawn out of an urn by a cock, and drunk steaming hot. How a dinner commencing with preserved apricots, and concluding with cabbage water, agreed with German stomachs, Mr Erman does not inform us. After managing to taste upwards of a hundred dishes, he went to visit the temple of Fo, whose court was guarded by two clay lions painted green, whilst at his shrine were deposited, on account of the festive season, a prodigious heap of delicacies. Whole sheep without the skin, plucked chickens, pheasants, and guinea-fowls, in their natural positions, and glistening with fat, lay in hillocks at the feet of half-a-dozen grotesque and indecent idols. On a long table, a wall of offerings was built up, consisting of dressed meat and cakes of every kind, the whole surrounded with an elaborate lattice-work of white dough, five or six feet high, the openings of which were filled with dried fruits and confectionary of the finest kind. Perfumed candles burned before the disgusting idols, and brass discs hung from the ceiling, and were struck with clappers when any bearing offerings approached.

The contents of the shops at Maimachen gave Mr Erman a very high opinion of Chinese skill and ingenuity. He saw scientific instruments of great merit, very clever clockwork, paintings drawn and finished with the greatest care, (although highly objectionable by the indelicacy of their subjects,) porcelain, sculpture, bowls, vases, and figures of various kinds of stone. "There were large spherical bowls, and oval vases, of chalcedony and agate, and reliefs cut in cornelians, nephrit, and other coloured stones. Of the latter kind, the most common are flowers, the several parts of which are formed of various and tastefully selected stones, and then cemented with mastic on a foundation of stone. For many of these articles, highly elaborate, and at the same time quite useless, the merchants of Maimachen asked four thousand tea-bricks, (a standard of currency,) or about two thousand five hundred Russian dollars. In this we saw a proof of luxury and profuse expenditure amongst the Chinese. Many other branches of industry indicated enervation and effeminacy of manners:" musk, for instance, and other perfumes, enclosed in little bags, and considered indispensable appendages to a young man's dress. A curious plaything, considered equally essential, is composed of two polished balls, about an inch in diameter, which the men always carry with them. "These are taken in the right hand, at idle times, and rolled and rubbed one over the other with the fingers; the noise they make amuses, and perhaps there is something agreeable also in the feel of them. Here, in Maimachen, I saw some of these balls made of glass, striped green and white, and, hollow, containing within them a little lump of clay, which rattled with every motion." The musk and perfumes, however abundantly used, are all insufficient to counteract a very peculiar and unpleasant smell attributed by Mr Erman to the Chinese. He first perceived it at the theatre, and took it to arise from an inordinate addiction to leeks on the part of actors and audience, whose breath and clothes were infected with the disagreeable odour of that bulb. But he was subsequently induced to regard it as a national taint, a Chinese exhalation, not to be overcome by any amount of artificial perfume, and whose cause is matter of inquiry for the chemist. Doubtless the Chinese would get rid of it, were it possible so to do, for the care they bestow on personal beauty and elegance is very great. Another striking defect in the inhabitants of Maimachen is to be found in their black and decayed teeth. The cause of this Mr Erman suspects to be the solution of copper, produced by the empyreumatic oil of tobacco in the bronze mouth-pieces of their pipes.

At a post-house upon his road back to Irkutsk, Mr Erman and his party were met by a deputation from no less a personage than the Khamba Lama, the high-priest of the Buraets, a Mongolian tribe closely allied in language and customs to the natives of the northern provinces of China. The embassy consisted of four lamas or priests attired in scarlet robes and bright yellow hats. They brought an invitation to a grand festival, which was readily accepted,--and a very remarkable business it proved to be. The discordant theatrical music at Maimachen was a mere trifle compared to the monstrous noise made by the Buraet kettle-drums, so large that they were dragged upon four wheels, and by copper trumpets ten feet long, borne by one man and blown by another. "The grave prelude of the wind instruments was like a roaring hurricane, and the chorus of brass gongs, drums, &c., resembled the crash of a falling mountain." In this place we find some curious and interesting details respecting the Buddhist religion and priesthood, after which Mr Erman returns to Irkutsk, and resumes his journey eastward, through the valley of the Lena, to the land of the Tunguzes and Yakuts. The chief town of the latter people, Yakutsk, is two degrees to the south of Beresov, which Mr Erman had visited on his way to Obdorsk; but, nevertheless, the cold is far more severe at the former place, where frozen earth is found near the surface all the year round, and the same condition of the ground continues to the depth of six hundred feet. "The inhabitants of the Swiss Alps would not unjustly think themselves lost if they were compelled to live at the height of ten thousand feet, or two thousand three hundred feet above the hospital of the great St Bernard, and there to support and clothe themselves by keeping cattle, and with the productions of the surrounding mountains; yet they would then, and not until they arrived at that height, be settled on ground having the same temperature which I found here amongst the Yakuts, who are rich in cattle. It would seem, therefore, as if that succeeded in Siberia which was impossible in Europe, if we did not take into account that the same constant temperature of the ground may be made up at different places of very different elements." Notwithstanding the severity of their climate and resistance of their frozen soil, the Yakuts are a prosperous people, having attained a considerable degree of civilisation, and amongst whom crime is rare, although the influence of Russian example and contact daily renders it less so. There is much interest in Mr Erman's account of them, and of the wandering Tunguzses, the last tribe with whom he consorted before his arrival at Okhotsk. Here his reception was not very flattering. "We were looked at with much curiosity from all the house-doors on the way, for the devout elders of the place had been filled with anxious forebodings by the accounts of the arrival of a foreigner. They signed themselves with the cross whenever he was mentioned. And I learned to-day that they had fears of war, conscription, and other calamities." Nor was their alarm abated by learning that "the heathen foreigner wore snow-shades (spectacles) even in thick weather, and that he carried a dog in the sledge with him. Thus the return to civilised man was marked in the first instance by the encounter of intolerant superstition, and it was necessary to forget the nobler traits of the wilderness before we could become reconciled to the Russians of Okhotsk." At which place Mr Erman's narrative ceases. We await with interest its promised continuation--an account of his adventures in Kamschatka, California, and the Pacific.

THE SCOTTISH DEER FORESTS.

_Lays of the Deer Forest, with Sketches of Olden and Modern Deer Hunting, &c. &c._ By JOHN SOBIESKI and CHARLES EDWARD STUART. 2 vols., post 8vo. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.

We would that, like stout Lord Percy of yore, it were in our power at this present moment to chronicle a vow that we should forthwith take our pastime for three summer days on the pleasant hills of Scotland. Alas for us, that we are doomed, from divers causes, to absent ourselves from felicity awhile, and, amidst the heat and noise of London, listen with intense disgust to the brutal bayings of the Chartists! This very night, we hear, the ignoble hunt is to be up in Bishop Bonner's fields. Crowds of dirty, unshaven, squalid ruffians, who have not the strength to use the pike, but the will to employ the knife of the assassin--fellows whom even Cobden would be chary to recognise as his _quondam_ supporters, defenders, and dupes--not unmingled with foreign propagandists, whom even France, in the fury of her revolutionary tornado, repudiates--are thronging to the place of rendezvous, where, doubtless, their souls will be worthily regaled by the ravings of some rascally vendors of sedition, blasphemy, and treason. Then will ensue the usual scene which for nights has disgraced the metropolis. Some unfortunate tradesman, whose curiosity has been stronger than his prudence, will be fixed upon as a "special" or a spy--the cowards, presuming upon their numbers, and the apparent absence of all executive power, will attempt a deliberate murder--the police will sally from their hiding-place to the rescue--there will be a storm of brickbats, a determined charge with the baton, a shop or two will be gutted, some score of craniums cracked, and to-morrow morning the greasy patriots, at the bar of Bow Street, will read their recantation, and, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, protest their loyalty to the Queen. Such are the pastimes of merry England in the month of June, and such the results of that enlightened policy which yields every thing to popular clamour, adopts the most fatal delusions as distinct principles of right, and then shrinks, trembling and aghast, from the inevitable result of their development!

We do not want--in this article, at least--to be political, and we vow that we took up our pen three minutes ago in a spirit of perfect good-will and harmony towards all manner of men. But the hoarse bawling of these cannibals has somewhat ruffled our temper, dispelled for the moment our dreams of the mountains, and forced us back to the sterner realities of popular tumult and the truncheon. If this sort of thing lasts, we shall indubitably emigrate. Assassination, as recommended by the modern Hamilcar, is by no manner of means to our taste. Our opinion coincides with that of the gracious Captain of Knockdunder, and, were we promoted to a judicial function, "the chiel they ca' the Fustler" should ere long fustle in a tow. Neither are we at all disposed to fraternise with the milder Cuffey--a fellow, by the way, who is not without some redeeming scintillations of humour. We have no wish to be introduced to him even at a mesmeric soiree; and, acting upon the principle of Jacquey, we shall pray heaven to decrease our acquaintance, and put the Tweed as speedily as possible between ourselves and the partisans of O'Connor. We hope the Lord Provost, though discomfited in his Police Bill, has been looking after the tranquillity of the Calton. If not, we must move further north, and finally locate ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of Dalnacardoch. The deuce is in it, if the revolutionary mania has penetrated to that sequestred region! No son of the mountains has ever yet given in his adhesion to the Charter--treason hath not stained the tartan, and no republican pins have ever been exposed beneath the checkered margin of the kilt. There is loyalty at least in the land which was traversed by Montrose and Dundee; and without the slightest fear that any of the numerous points of that interesting but incomprehensible public document, which Mr Joseph Hume proposes to condense, shall be unduly obtruded on our notice, we shall at once exchange our London dwelling for the more pleasant bothy of the hills.

As for a companion, we shall seek none better--for we could not find one--than this last publication of the Stuarts. And here, once for all, let us draw a line of distinction betwixt the poetry and the prose of these very remarkable brothers. We have not the remotest intention of sitting in judgment on the "Lays," or of testing the poetical merits of John Sobieski and Charles Edward, either by the canons of Longinus, or by that superior code of literary laws which Maga has promulgated to the world. The poems, which occupy exclusively the first of these volumes, are, with one exception, fugitive in their nature, and appear to have been penned rather from occasional impulse, than from any deliberate intention of publication. Accordingly, we find that most of them relate to topics personal to the authors themselves--and with these we do not meddle. In others, there are flashes of the deep national spirit which still survives--though our rulers do not seem to mark it--in Scotland: indignation at the neglect with which too many of our national institutions have been treated, and mournful lamentings over the misfortunes of a former age. But the impulse which leads to the composition of poetry does not always imply its accomplishment. Poetry, as an art in which excellence can only be obtained by a combination of the simple and the sublime, requires a study far more intense and serious than the mere critic is apt to allow. In a former Number we devoted an article to an exposition of those principles, which are absolutely invariable in their application, and which must be thoroughly understood, if they are not intuitive to the poet; and, being in no mood for repetition, we shall simply say that we adhere to our recorded doctrines. The Stuarts, it must be confessed, are more successful with the rifle than the lyre. We would far rather meet them in the garb of the forester, than in the more fantastic fashion of the minstrel: be theirs the lot of Ryno the hunter, not the darkened destiny of the bard.

Do, therefore, what you please with the first volume--pack it up in your portmanteau, or place it on the shelf beside Chambers' History and the collections of good old Bishop Forbes. But if you profess to be a deer-stalker--though we fear your profession to be false--or if you are but an aspiring neophyte, and hankerer after that proud position--or if you merely bound your aspirations towards the compassing of the death of a roebuck--or if simply you have a keen and a kindly eye for nature, and are a lover of the sylvan solitudes--in one or other, or all of these characters, we pray you to deal more leisurely with the other tone, which is the Hunter's Vade-Mecum, the best guide ever yet published to the haunts of the antlered monarch.

We are fond of Mr Scrope, and we have an excessive partiality for St John. Two finer fellows never shouldered a rifle; and our conscience does not accuse us of having used too superlative, in epithet in their praise. This was the more creditable on our part, because we knew them both to be Southrons; and while freely admitting the sportsman-like qualities of the one, and the strong picturesque style and spirit of the other, we felt a slight, passing, but pardonable pang of jealousy, that they should have stepped in, and pre-occupied the native field. Where, thought we, are our Scottish deer-stalkers? Can the lads not handle a pen as well as touch a trigger? Will none of them, who have been trained to the hills since they were striplings, stand forth for the honour of Albyn, and try a match with these fustian-coated circumventers of the stag? By the shade of Domhnull Mac-Fhionnlaidlhnan Dan, we blush for the literary reputation of our country, and almost wish that we were young enough ourselves to take the hill against the invading Sassenach! At length--and we are delighted to see it--the reproach has been swept away. Two stalwart champions of the forest have risen in the persons of the Stuarts--they have encountered the Englishmen with their own weapons, and, in our opinion, beaten them hollow.

Mr Scrope had the merit of producing the earliest work in which deer-stalking was treated as a distinct and peculiar branch of the art venatory. We speak of it now from recollection; for our copy, somewhat frayed and worn by the fingers of ambitious sportsmen, is in the snug corner of a library some hundred miles to the northward. But we remember well the Waltonian character of the book--the professional style in which the elder practitioner enforced his precepts upon the dawning intellect of his companion; and the adventures, neither few nor feeble, which were depicted in the heart of the Atholl forest. Taken as the production of an English sportsman, Mr Scrope's book is highly creditable: considered as the manual of a deer-stalker, it is at the best indifferent. Nor, indeed, could it well be otherwise. Not until middle age, if we are informed rightly, did Mr Scrope first send a ball into the ample shoulder of a hart: his young blood never beat tumultuously in his veins at the sight of the mighty creature rolling over upon the heather, and its antlers buried in the moss. His boyish enthusiasm, we fear, was expended upon game of less mark and likelihood--partridges, perchance, as they whirred from the turnips, or possibly he was "entered" with the hare. Wordsworth's maxim, that the boy is the father of the man, is peculiarly applicable in sporting matters. Upon the character of the country in which the latent spirit of the hunter is earliest developed, depends, in a great degree, his future success, and certainly his accomplishment as an Orion. The young squire, who has been brought up in the faith of Sykes, who never stirs abroad without a keeper, and who is accustomed to see his delicate pointers execute their manœuvres with almost mathematical precision on the flat stubbles of Norfolk, labours under a huge disadvantage in the higher branches of his science, compared with the Highland boy who has received his education on the hill. What though the single barrel of the latter be a clumsy implement indeed in competition with the Purdie which decorates the shoulder of the former--though the hound that sometimes attends him, though oftener he is alone, never slept a single night in a kennel, and is the ruggedest specimen of his kind--still he is in the enjoyment of advantages incomparably superior for the development of all his faculties, and the sharpening of every sense. The triumph of the sportsman does not lie so much in the killing as in the finding of his game. Were it otherwise, the pigeon-slayer of Battersea or the Red-house would have just claims to the honours of Sir Tristram, and the annihilator of poultry to rank with the Nimrods of the world. Our young friend the Squire shoots well--that is to say, he can kill with reasonable precision: but, after all, what is he save an instrument? Take Ponto away from him, tie up Juno, send a bullet through the brain of Basta, and a pretty beggarly account you will have of it in the evening when we come to the emptying of the bags! Or lead him down to the sea-shore, and show him a whaup, which in the English tongue is denominated a curlew; request him to use all his possible skill to compass possession of the bird; but do not set your heart on having it, else, as sure as fate, you are doomed to disappointment. Whaup is quite alive to his own interests, and by no means unsuspicious of the Saxon, who advances straight towards him with a hypocritical air of unconcern. Had the Highland lad been there, what a difference! He would have dropped like a stone behind that rock, wriggled like a serpent over the sand, kept the bird between himself and the sea, taken advantage of every inequality in the ground, discerned from the attitude of his quarry whether its suspicions were aroused or not, and in ten minutes a pluff of white smoke and a report would have announced its extermination. As it is, the curlew remains apparently unconcerned until the Lord of the Manor has reduced the intermediate distance to a hundred and twenty yards, and then, with a shrill whistle, takes flight along the margin of the tide. Or set him to stalk a blackcock, perched high of an Autumn morning on a dyke. How clumsily he sets about it! how miserable is his stoop! how wretchedly he calculates his distance! That wide-awake hat, which, for the sake of symmetry, he has been pleased to surmount with a feather, is as conspicuous to the country for miles round, and of course to the blackcock, as was the white plume of Murat in the field of battle, and as potent to effect a clearance, of which we presently have ocular demonstration.

We contend, therefore, that it is extremely difficult for the man, be he ever so addicted to field-sports, who has been educated in a cultivated country, to disembarrass himself of the artificial habits which he is tolerably sure to acquire. His trolling may be excellent--indeed, English gentlemen are, generally speaking, first-rate shots--but he will be deficient in the science of the naturalist, and in that singular acuteness of perception which can hardly be gained save by an early intimacy with nature, on the mountain, the moor, or in the glen. No subsequent education or experience can make up for the normal deficiency, least of all in the pursuit of an animal so wary, so instinctive, and so peculiar in its habits as the deer. Of course we do not mean to deny that there is much which may be learned. What a pointer is to partridges, some wary and experienced forester may often be made to the deer; and if you put yourself under his tuition, and scrupulously obey his orders, you may very possibly succeed in attaining the object of your desires. Nor indeed can you do better, up to a certain point, notwithstanding the strictures of the Stuarts, who are, we think, unnecessarily wroth at the system which would call in the aid of any supplementary assistance. We hope no gentleman who has rented a forest for the ensuing season will be deterred from following the feet of a Highland Gamaliel on account of any ridicule which may be attached to the fact of his having been "taken up" to a deer. If he should rashly attempt stalking at his own hand, without any preliminary instruction, we should be sorry to found our hopes of dinner on the chance of his acquisition of a haunch.

"When advancing upon deer [say our authors]--except in strange ground--the forester, or any other attendant, should be left behind a stone, or in some covert, before the stalker commences his approach; not from any recognition of the false reproach made against the guides by Mr Scrope, but because there is no occasion for an assistant, and the action of one has more celerity, independence, and security from discovery, than when a greater number are in motion. The charge made by the author of 'The Art of Deer-stalking,' that the forester is often in the way, and sometimes obstructs the shot, is not true, unless in instances of inexperienced and awkward individuals, who are not to be found among that class of foresters of whom the guest of the _Atholl Forest_ proposes his remarks. With a MacKenzie, or a MacDonald, a Catanach, and a MacHardie, the asserted inconvenience must proceed from the ignorance or maladroitness of the gray worm which crawls at his back, and who often does not know what he is doing, or where he is going, with his ideas _égaré_ on his sensitive knees and varnished Purdie, unconscious of what he ought to do and nervous for what he ought not, flurried with eagerness and disgusted with his posture, and who, never seeing a deer except once in the year, is led up to him like a 'blind burraid,' by one whose language he scarcely understands. In general, therefore, the embarrassments of the 'creep' are those of the superior, who is frequently so ignorant, unpractised, and dependent upon the guidance of the forester, that to be '_taken up to the deer_' has become the modern forest phrase for the approach of the sportsman. This contemptible term, and its contemptible practice, has only been introduced within the last quarter century, since the prevalence of stalking gentlemen utterly unacquainted with the ground and pursuit of deer. Of old, the '_Seàlgair uasal nam bèann_' was initiated to the hill when yet but a '_biorach_' of a stalker; and when he became a matured hill-man, he should no more have suffered himself to be--'_taken up_ to his deer' by an attendant, than a Melton fox-hunter to be trained after the hounds by a whipper-in with a leading rein.--What should have been the sentiments of the old chiefs and Uaislean of the last century--the Dukes of Atholl and Gordon--Glengarrie--John Aberardar--Iain dubh Bhail-a-Chroäin--to hear a deer-hunter speak of being '_taken up to his deer_!'--Certainly that he was a noble 'amadan' or 'gille-crùbach,' who had not the faculties or the limbs to act for himself.--But this is only one of the many instances for which the hills of Gael may mourn with the mountains of Gilboa--'_Quomodo ceciderunt robusti!_'"

Far are we from insinuating that Mr Scrope is at all liable to the remarks contained in the foregoing extract. On the contrary, we hold him to be a man of vigorous mind and acute eye, and any thing but a contemptible foe to the stags, after the measure of his own experience. If he is deficient at all, it is in the poetry and higher mysteries of the art, which hardly would be expected from a stranger, whose initiation was necessarily late. Waverley, though a respectable shot, and a man of literary taste, would, we apprehend, have described the driving and disposition of the tainchel less effectively, and certainly far less truly, than Fergus M'Ivor; so great a difference is there betwixt the craft of the master and his pupil. Let Mr Scrope, therefore, rest content with the laurels he has won, and the trophies he has taken from the forest. Not unforgotten is his name in Atholl, nor unloved. Let him be a guide to the Southren, but he must not dream of rivalling the Stuarts in woodcraft, or Stoddart in the science of piscation.

Of Mr St John's "Wild Sports of the Highlands," we have already spoken in terms of unqualified praise. A more delightful volume was never adapted for the pocket of the sportsman: a more truthful or observant work has seldom issued from the pen of the naturalist. His sketches and pictures of deer-stalking we allow to be as perfect in their way as the compositions of Landseer; and having said so much, we shall not make any further call upon that gentleman's blushes. Still, even his experience is limited, and his knowledge imperfect. He has given us a brilliant account of his own exploits upon the hill, but he has not lived long enough in the wilder haunts of the deer accurately to understand their habits. Not so our authors, who for years have been denizens of the mountains, speaking the tongue of the Gael, wearing the native garb, and following the chase with an ardour and enthusiasm unparalleled in these degenerate days.

Gentlemen who complain of the inferior accommodation afforded by some of the more distant hostelries of Scotland--who are shocked at the absence of warming-pans, and tremulously nervous about your sanatory condition, when subjected to the enormity of damp sheets--how would you like to spend a few nights on the misty hill-side, or even in the hut of the hunters? We shall take you if you please to the latter spot, merely premising that, in order to reach it, we must cross the Findhorn, now roaring down in spate. A terrible stream is that Findhorn, as Mr St John well knows; but we question whether he ever ventured to ford it on the rise, as was done by one of the Stuarts. For the information of distant friends, we beg to put our imprimatur to the following description of this furious Highland flood, which rolled between the residence of the hunters and their favourite ground.

"That stream, however, which was so calm, and bright, and sunny, when the otters floated down its current in a still summer's morning, was a fierce and terrible enemy in its anger; and, for a great part of the year, the dread of its uncertainty and danger was a formidable cause for the preservation of that profound solitude of the forest which so long made it the sanctuary of deer, roe, and every kind of wild game. The rapidity with which the river comes down, the impassable height to which it rises in an incredibly short time, its incertitude and fury, would render it an object of care to bold forders and boatmen; but with the peasants of the 'laich,' unaccustomed, like the Highlanders, to wrestle with a mountain torrent, and, excepting in rare instances, unable to swim or manage a coble, it inspires a dread, almost amounting to awe, and none except ourselves ventured to keep a boat above the fishing-station of Slui. Pent within a channel of rocks from fifty to a hundred and eighty feet in height, the rise of the water is rapidly exaggerated by the incapability of diffusion; and the length of its course sometimes concealing beyond the horizon the storms by which it is swelled at its source, its floods then descend with unexpected violence. Frequently when, excepting a low wreath upon Beann-Drineachain, the sun is shining in a cloudless sky, and the water scarce ripples over the glittering ford, a deep hollow sound--a dull approaching roar may be heard in the gorges of the river; and almost before the wading fisherman can gain the shore, a bank of water, loaded with trees, and rocks, and wreck, will come down three--four--five feet abreast--sweeping all before it in a thunder of foam and ruin. In ordinary cases, after two days of rain, the stream will rise twenty or thirty feet--it _has_ risen nearly ten fathoms in its rocky gulf; and once upon this occasion it mounted fifteen feet in a quarter of an hour. When the dawn broke, it appeared sweeping through the trees, which the evening before hung fifty feet above its brink--a black roaring tempest loaded with ruins and debris, from which were seen to rise at times the white skeletons of trees peeled of their bark, beams and couples of houses--a cart--a door--a cradle, hurrying and tilting through the foam and spray, like the scattered 'floatsome' of a wreck.

"It may be judged how far it was convenient in winter to hunt a forest separated by such a boundary, of which the nearest certain passage was by a bridge two miles to the west, with frequently the view of hunting three miles to the east. Often we have gone out in a clear sapphire morning, when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water on the ford was not over our 'glunachan,' and when we returned at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines which descended to the river, have heard a roar as if the world was rolling together down the black trough before us, and as we came out on the bank, found a furious tempest of water, tumbling, and plunging, and leaping, over stock and rock twenty feet upon the clatach, where we had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morning; while, in the far, deep, birch-embowered channel, where the stream was then so still and placid that you could only guess its course by the bright glistening eye which here and there blinked between the trees and stones,--now it came yelling, and skirling, and clamouring down the rocks and falls, as if all the air was full of gibbering, babbling, laughing demons, who were muttering, and yammering, and prophesying, and hooting, at what you were going to do, if you attempted to cross."

We pray you at your leisure to read on, and you will presently see what peril our authors underwent at the fearful fords of the Findhorn. Once or twice in our life we have been in similar jeopardy, and we can testify with unction to the singular sensations which beset a man in the midst of a roaring river, when the rapids are shooting away below, and the boulder-stones rolling beneath his feet. We pass over some perilous instances of adventure, which at length became so frequent as to lead to the construction of the hut.

"Such continually and unexpectedly were the ferries of the Findhorn, and many such escapes we had, in daylight and in darkness.--Twice I have been swamped, often nearly upset, and more than once carried off my legs in the fords; and--I say it with humility, and always under the mercy of heaven--that I owed rescue either to actual swimming, or to the confidence inspired by that power when struggling with the strong and terrible enemy.

"This continual exposure to battle and disappointment, however, became at length too vexatious an abridgment of sport and certainty; and as I would--and often--have made my bed under a fir tree rather than go round by the bridge of Daltullich, I resolved upon another alternative--to build in the forest a '_bothan an t-sealgair_,' or 'hunter's hut,' where we might lodge for the night when it was impossible to cross the water.

"There is a high and beautiful craig at the crook of the river near the 'Little Eas,'--a precipice eighty feet in height, and then like a vast stone helmet crowned with a feathery plume of wood, which nodded over its brow. From its top you might drop a bullet into the pool below, but on the south side there is an accessible woody bank, down which, by planting your heels firmly in the soil and among the roots of the trees, there is a descent to a deep but smooth and sandy ford. Upon the summit of the rock there is, or there was--my blessing upon it!--a thick and beautiful bird-cherry, which hung over the craig, and whose pendant branches, taking root on the edge of the steep, shot up again like the banana, and formed a natural arbour and close trellis along the margin of the precipice. Behind its little gallery, there is a mighty holly, under which the snow rarely lays in winter, or the rain drops in summer. Beneath the shelter of this tree, and within the bank at its foot, I dug a little cell large enough to hold two beds, a bench, a hearth, a table, and a 'kistie.' The sides were lined with deals well caulked with moss, and the roof was constructed in the same manner, but covered with a tarpauling, which, lying in the slope of the surrounding bank, carried off any water which might descend from thaw or rain, and, when the autumn trees shook off their leaves, could not be distinguished from the adjoining bank. Its door was on the brink of the craig, veiled by the thick bird-cherries on the edge of the precipice; and the entrance to the little path, which ascended from either side upon the brow of the rock, was concealed by a screen of birch and hazel, beneath which the banks were covered with primroses, wood-anemones, and forget-me-not. Bowers of honeysuckle and wild-roses twined among the lower trees; and even in the tall pines above, the rose sometimes climbed to the very top, where all its blossoms, clustering to the sun, hung in white tassels out of the dark-blue foliage. There the thrush and the blackbird sang at morning and evening, and the owl cried at night, and the buck belled upon the Torr.--Blessed, wild, free, joyous dwelling, which we shall never see again!"

A lovely place indeed must that have been in the pleasant days of summer! We do not wonder at the fondness with which the Stuarts speak of that lodge in the wilderness, reared as it was in the midst of the most beautiful and romantic scenery which exists within the compass of the seas of Britain, or, for aught we know, elsewhere. Years have rolled by since we last set foot upon the banks of Findhorn; but never shall we forget the glories of that deep ravine, or the noble woods of Altyre, still possessed by the descendants of the princely Comyns. Did we not expect to be summoned out within half an hour to contribute to the safety of the realm by breaking the head of a Chartist, we should ourselves launch out into description, and try conclusions with Horatio M'Culloch. But, after all, it would be a work of supererogation. Mr St John has already illustrated most charmingly that abode of the faithful; and he will not be displeased to see that, even in painting, he has met with formidable rivals. Rarely, indeed, have we met with any thing so perfect as the following sketch:--

"Near Slui on the Findhorn there is a range of precipices and wooded steeps crowned with pine, and washed by a clear and rippling stream of the river, through which there is an excellent ford, very well known to the roe, for escaping to the woods of Slui when pressed by the hounds. This reach is called the Ledanreich, from a remarkable craig, a sheer naked even wall of sandstone, lying in horizontal strata eighty or ninety feet high: At the eastern extremity of this rock there is a great division, partly separated from the main curtain by a deep woody slope, which dips into the precipice with little more inclination from the perpendicular than to admit of careful footing. In the face of the divided craig, the decomposition of the softer stone between the courses of the strata has wasted it away into narrow galleries, which, passing behind the tall pillars of the pines growing from the rifts and ledges, extend along the face of the precipice, veiled by a deep tapestry of ivy, which spreads over the mighty wall of rock, and hangs from shelf to shelf over the covered ways. Beyond the craigs, the bank of the forest, an abrupt steep, covered with oak and copsewood, slopes down to the river, its brow darkened with a deep-blue cloud of pines, and its descent carpeted with moss, primroses, and pyrolas, here and there hollowed into quaint 'cuachs,' filled with hazels, thorns, and giant pines. Along this woody scarp, and through its thick copse, the roe had made narrow galleries, which communicated with the ivy corridors on the face of the craig, to which there were corresponding ways upon the opposite side. In that fortress of the rock, for shelter from the sun and flies, and seclusion from the stir of the world during the day in the heat of summer, the red-deer and roe made their secret haunt, concealed behind the deep dim veil of leaves, unseen and unsuspected in the cool hollows of the cliff. The prying eye might search the craig from below, and the beaters or the woodmen might whistle, and whoop, and shout above, but nothing appeared or moved except the gray falcon, which rose channering out of the rifts. Above the craig the wooded bank was so abrupt, that to the front view there was no indication of a slope, and any who passed quickly over the brow was immediately out of sight. At each descent beyond the extremities of the whole range of rocks there was a common roe's run and pass, which was supposed to be 'deadly sure' if the deer took the path, since the precipice below was believed to be an infallible barrier against any intermediate escape. Often, however, when pressed upon the terrace above, the deer neither went through the passes nor turned against the beaters, but vanished as if by magic--nobody could tell where; and it was the common opinion of the drivers and fishermen, that, when forced near the river, they threw themselves over the craigs 'for spite,'--a belief often confirmed by old Davie Simpson, who declared that he had often found their bodies beneath the rocks, and in the Cluach, the Clerk's Pool, and the 'Furling Hole.' He did not, however, relate what _wounds_ they had, and the truth was, that those which disappeared at the brow of the Ledanreich dashed down the sudden dip of the bank between the precipices, and, turning through the ivy corridors, went out through the copse galleries upon the other side, and either descended to the water or skirted below the pass, and went back into the forest. Those which were found dead were such as had been mortally wounded at some in-wood pass, and, unable to take, or cross the water, had died on the beach, or been carried down by the river. In the same mysterious passages which gave concealment and escape to the stags and bucks, the does were used to lay with their kids, and from thence at morning and evening they brought them out to pluck the tender grass upon the green banks beyond. Often from the brow above, or from behind the ivy screen, we have watched their 'red garment' stealing through the boughs, followed by their little pair drawing their slender legs daintily through the wet dew, and turning their large velvet ears to catch every passing sound upon the breeze as it brought the hum of the water, or the crow of the distant cock--now trotting before, now lingering behind their dam, now nestling together, now starting off as the gale suddenly rustled the leaves behind them--then listening and re-uniting in a timorous plump, pricking their ears, and bobbing their little black noses in the wind,--then, as the doe dropped on her knees in the moss, and laid her side on the warm spot where the morning sun glanced in through the branches, they gambolled about her, leaping over her back, and running round in little circles, uttering that soft, wild, plaintive cry like the treble note of an accordion, till, weary of their sport, they lay down at her side, and slept while she watched as only a mother can. No marvel it was that they loved that safe and fair retreat, with all its songs and flowers, its plenty and repose. All around was sweet, and beautiful, and abundant, such as the poetical imagination of the painter can rarely compose, and _never_, unless like Salvator he has lived in the wilderness with its free denizens. Upon the summit above the craig there was a broad and verdant terrace surrounded by ivied pines and feathering birches, and upon a little green glade in the midst grow two of the most beautiful objects ever produced by art or nature. These were a pair of twin thorns exactly similar in size, age, and form, and standing about three yards from each other: their stems as straight as shafts, and their round and even heads like vast bushes of wild thyme, but each so overgrown with ivy and woodbine, that their slender trunks appeared like fretted columns, over which the thorny foliage served as a trellis to suspend the heavy plumes of the ivy and the golden tassels of the woodbine. Many a 'ladye's bower' we have seen, and many a rich and costly plant reared by the care of man, but none so beautiful as those lonely sisters of the forest, planted by His hand in His great garden, where none beheld but those for whom He made it lovely--the ravens of the rock, the deer who couched under its shade by night, and the birds who sang their matins and their even-song out of its sweet boughs."

If we go on quoting at this rate, we shall never reach the hill, and as yet we have not started from the hut. To say the truth, we are in no hurry, and neither, we suspect, upon many occasions were the Stuarts, indomitable huntsmen as they are. What though at night the river swept with the sound of thunder below, making the solid rock vibrate to its deep foundation,--what though the wind swept mightily down the ravine, swaying the trees like saplings, and threatening to tear them away,--what though the windows of heaven were open, and the deluge came down, and the bark of the hill-fox sounded sharp above the roaring of the water and the wood,--yet within that little bothy that rests upon the face of the craig, the wearied huntsmen slept peacefully; and in the morning, says one of them,--"I was awakened as usual by the whistle of the robin in the bird-cherry, and the sharp note of the blue bonnet sharpening his little saw on the top of the holly. I went out to the narrow terre-plain over the craig. The wind was gone, and the sun smiling on the still leaves and dewy grass--the flood torrent of the river dancing and laughing in its light, and the calm bright air breathing with the sweet perfume of the damp plants, and all the freshness and fragrance of the forest wilderness." We back it against the forest of Ardennes!

Every true hunter is humane. What! you say--do you call it humane to persecute the unfortunate stag, the monarch of the wilds, to the death?--to drive rifle-bullets into the target of the harmless roe? to murder otters by the dozen, and to slaughter seals by the score? Indubitably we do. Let us reason a little upon this. Yesterday, you recollect that you dined upon very juvenile veal, smothered in a mess of dingy vegetable matter which we apprehend to have been sorrel, after the beastly fashion of the Gauls. Posterior to that, you devoured the larger moiety of a duckling. This morning we saw you, with our own eyes, regaling yourself at the club, between the intervals of muffin, with what assuredly were cutlets of lamb. After all this, can you have the face to stand up and defend your own humanity? For how many days had the sun dawned upon that luckless calf, the mangled fragments of which upon your platter rather resembled the rags of a kid-glove, than food meet for the stomach of a Christian? How long had the feeble quackle of Draco been heard round the row of peas near which he unsuspiciously perambulated, little dreaming how much the pods thereof were mixed up with his future destiny? How many races were run upon the meadow by that perished daughter of the sheep? Three infantine lives cut off simply for your sole gormandising! This is but a slight case. Set you down to a rook-pie, and you will engulf a dozen unfortunates before you bury your visage in the pewter. Pay for you at Blackwall, and the whitebait will disappear by the thousand. It is in vain that you attempt to shift the atrocity of your inordinate appetite from your own shoulders to those of the grazier, the butcher, the poulterer, or the fisherman. Cobden, or Joe Hume, or any other of the political economists belonging to the tribe who would starve the workman in order that they may guzzle themselves, will tell you that invariably the demand regulates the supply. You, therefore, are the responsible party: the young have fallen into your Scylla--the immature of days have been swept into the vortex of your Charybdis! Moreover, if you were a sportsman--which you are not--our minds would be grievously troubled for the future safety of the singing-birds. Welford, the friend of Bright, as we all remember, proposed a grand crusade throughout Britain against the feathered tribe; and you are not at all unlikely to join in a general St Bartholomew of the sparrows. Do you venture to retort upon us? Do you think we take life unnecessarily, or that we are base enough to use our weapons until the quarry has reached its prime? No calf or fawn ever fell by the hand of the genuine hunter--no cheeper or pout ever sullied the interior of the sportsman's bag. Not until the better part of his life has been run,--till his muscles are hard as iron, his slot deep, and his branches towering on the beam,--not until he has lived and loved, do we strike down, as if with lightning and painless death, the great hart in the middle of the wilderness. But to all innocent things--to the harmless indwellers of the forest and moor, the true hunter is a guardian and a friend. The strong man is ever brave, and none but the strong can pass to where the herds of the mountain dwell.

One more scene at the Hut, and we shall illustrate this subject further.

"But though our bothie was far from resembling the Peri Paribanon's cell, or the rock-palace where the old kaiser keeps his court in the bowels of the Unterberg--we loved it, not only for its bucks and stags, and all its greenwood cheer, but for the love of nature by which it was surrounded. Beyond its 'vert and venison,' there was a world of life and interest for those who had the eye to mark and the heart to read its book. On every side we had companions; from the passenger which came from Norway, to the little native guest--the robin which roosted in the holly-bush above us. '_The_ robin?'--you smile and say. Yes, there was but one. He lived in the bush, as we lived in the bothie, and we were his neighbours too long not to be very well acquainted. His species, as well as all the small tribes, conformable to the minuteness of their range and habits, are very local, and may be found all the year in, or near, the same place; and those who feed them will rarely wait many minutes for their appearance. There were many robins which lived about the bothie, and all were continually in its vicinity, and very tame; but none so gentle and grateful as our little neighbour in the holly. They would, however, enter the hut, sit on the bed or the table, and hop about the floor, and, when I went out, follow me to the brae. They liked very much to see me turn up the soil, which always provided them with a little feast; accordingly, they were never absent at the planting of a shrub or a flower; and when I brought home, in my shooting-bag, a tuft of primroses, pyrolas, or lilies of the valley, they were always in attendance to see them put into the bank. For watching my occupation, they preferred something more elevated than the ground, but not so high as the branches of the trees, which were too far from the earth to give them a clear sight of what I turned up; for their accommodation, therefore, I made little crosses and crotchets, and, when I was planting, set them up beside me, moving them as I proceeded from place to place. Each was immediately occupied by an attentive observer; and, whenever an insect or a worm was discovered, one of the nearest darted down and caught it, even from between my fingers, and disappeared for a few moments under the rock or behind the great holly, to enjoy his success undisturbed. At his disappearance his place was immediately occupied by another, but at the return of the first it was amiably resigned by his successor. The blue-bonnets were almost as numerous as the robins, but they never arrived at the same intimacy and confidence. They never entered the bothie in my presence, and even when I fed them they would not approach as long as I remained outside the door; but as soon as I went in they descended four or five together, chattering and fluttering about the entrance, peeping in at the little window, and stretching their necks as far as they could, to see where I was, and if all was right. Then they would begin their breakfast on what I had left for them, talking a great deal about it, but occasionally ogling the door, in a manner from which I concluded that there was but small esteem or gratitude in their conversation.----Far different was the friendship of our little neighbour in the holly. In the morning he used to come down and perch on the arm of the bird-cherry, which stretched over the precipice before the door, waiting for its opening and the preparation of the breakfast, which he always shared; and when we were seated he would venture over the sill, and gather the crumbs about the table at our feet. Often when the first blood-red streaks of the autumn morning shone like lurid fire through the little window, we were awakened by his sad and solitary whistle, as he sat on his usual branch, his jet-black eye cast towards the door, impatient for our appearance. Many of his little cousins there were in the wood, with whom we were also well acquainted, and between us happened many an incident, which increased our interest and familiarity.

"I remember a day, one of those deep still blue days so solemn in the forest; the ground was covered with a foot of snow, and all the trees were hanging like gigantic ostrich feathers; but all the world was blue,--the sky was a sleeping mass of those heavy indigo clouds which forebode a 'feeding storm,'--not a tempest, but a fall of snow; for, in Scotland, snow is called '_storm_,' however light and still it falls: thus, in tracking the deer, we say he 'has brushed the _storm_ from the heather;' and a '_feeding storm_' is when the clouds are continually feeding the earth with its velvet pall.--The reflection of those deep-blue clouds cast a delicate tint of the same colour over the whitened world. I was standing with my back against a huge pine--one of the old remnant of the great forest of Moray, which had, no doubt, heard the bell toll for the first Stuart earl.--I counted the rings in a smaller tree which once stood in the same hollow;--I shunned its wreck as I would have avoided a corpse which I could not bury, and always, when I passed near it, averted my face; but one day running to cut off a buck, and just heading him, I dropped on my knee to receive him as he came out from a mass of junipers, and when reloading, I found that I had knelt by the stump of my old friend.--I counted two hundred and sixty-four rings in his wood!--how many earls had he seen?--Well, I was leaning against his elder brother, as I suppose by the size. I had been there for a long time, waiting to hear the dogs bring back a buck from--I don't know now from where.----As I had been through all the swamps, and stripes, and wet hollows on that side of the forest, and waded through two and three feet of snow-wreaths, my kilt and hose, and, as it seemed, my flesh was saturated to the bones with 'snaw-bree,' and I began to beat, first one foot, and then the other, to quicken the blood, which was warm enough in my trunk.--I had scarce commenced this exercise, when I heard a little 'tic!' close to my ear, and the soft low voice of a bird--a sound, neither a whistle nor a chirp, but which I knew very well before I turned and saw the robin, who sat on a dry branch within a yard of my cheek. I guessed what had brought him: he was very cold, his ruffled back humped as round as a ball, and his tail drooping almost perpendicular with his legs, as if it was a little brown peg to lean on, like that on which the travelling Tyrolean merchant rests his pack. He looked at me with his large black eye, then, with a flirt of his tail and a bow with his head, indicated that, if I had no objection, he should like to descend to the place which I occupied; the object of which he expressed, by turning his head sidelong, and directing one eye into the black earth which my foot had beaten bare in the snow. I immediately drew back a couple of feet, and he instantly dropped into the spot of mould, peeped and picked under every leaf and clod of earth, and, when there was nothing more, hopped up on the guard of my rifle, on which I was leaning, and, turning his head, looked at me with his upper eye.--I again stepped forward, and recommenced my foot-exercise, during which he returned to his branch, examining my progress with some impatience. As soon as my foot was removed, he again dropped into the hollow, and busily collected all the little grubs and chrysales which, though too small for me to see as I stood, I knew abounded beneath the sere leaves and thatch of moss and sticks. In this manner I repeated his supply several times, on one of which, when I was too long, or he too impatient, he dropped from his perch, and hovered over the space in which my foot was at work, and, as I continued, lighted on the point of the other shoe, and remained there, peeping into the hollow, until I withdrew my foot, and then descended to finish his repast. When he was satisfied, he ruffed his feathers, looked up sidelong to me, and, after a shake of satisfaction, resumed his perch close to my head, and, after pruning and oiling his feathers, mounted another branch higher, and opened his little throat with that most sad, sweet, and intermitting warble which gives such a melancholy charm to a still winter's day."

Take a picture of the roe, and you will hardly doubt the humanity of our sportsmen. But why talk of it thus? No one, we hope, save a member of the Manchester manufacturing school could feel otherwise--certainly not a genuine hills-man; and we quote the passage simply for its extreme beauty and perfect fidelity to nature. No creature is more beautiful than the kid of the roe-deer, especially when seen in their rest, or moving through the ferns, on a summer evening, beside their gentle mother the doe.

"In the bedding season the does retire into the most secret thickets, or other lonely places, to produce their young, and cover them so carefully that they are very rarely found; we have, however, deceived their vigilance. There was a solitary doe which lived in the hollow below the Bràigh-cloiche-léithe in Tarnaway. I suppose that we had killed her 'marrow;' but I was careful not to disturb her haunt, for she was very fat and round, stepped with much caution, and never went far to feed. Accordingly, when at evening and morning she came out to pick the sweet herbs at the foot of the brae, or by the little green well in its face, I trode softly out of her sight, and if I passed at noon, made a circuit from the black willows, or thick junipers, where she reposed during the heat. At last, one fine sunny morning I saw her come tripping out from her bower of young birches as light as a fairy, and very gay and 'canty'--but so thin, nobody but an old acquaintance could have known her. For various mornings afterwards I saw her on the bank, but she was always restless and anxious--listening and searching the wind--trotting up and down--picking a leaf here and a leaf there, and after her short and unsettled meal, she would take a frisk round leap into the air--dart down into her secret bower, and appear no more until the twilight. In a few days, however, her excursions became a little more extended, generally to the terrace above the bank, but never out of sight of the thicket below. At length she ventured to a greater distance, and one day I stole down the brae among the birches. In the middle of the thicket there was a group of young trees growing out of a carpet of deep moss, which yielded like a down pillow. The prints of the doe's slender-forked feet were thickly tracked about the hollow, and in the centre there was a bed of the velvet 'fog,' which seemed a little higher than the rest, but so natural, that it would not have been noticed by any unaccustomed eye. I carefully lifted the green cushion, and under its veil, rolled close together, the head of each resting on the flank of the other, nestled two beautiful little kids, their large velvet ears laid smooth on their dappled necks, their spotted sides sleek and shining as satin, and their little delicate legs as slender as hazel wands, shod with tiny glossy shoes as smooth and black as ebony, while their large dark eyes looked at me out of the corners with a full, mild, quiet gaze, which had not yet learned to fear the hand of man: still they had a nameless doubt which followed every motion of mine--their little limbs shrunk from my touch, and their velvet fur rose and fell quickly; but as I was about to replace the moss, one turned its head, lifted its sleek ears towards me, and licked my hand as I laid their soft mantle over them. I often saw them afterwards when they grew strong, and came abroad upon the brae, and frequently I called off old Dreadnought when he crossed their warm track. Upon these occasions he would stand and look at me with wonder--turn his head from side to side--snuff the ground again, to see if it was possible that he could be mistaken--and when he found that there was no disputing the scent, cock one ear at me with a keener inquiry, and seeing that I was in earnest, trot heavily onward with a sigh.

"The affection of the roe for their young is very strong; and timid and feeble as they are by nature, inspired by the danger of their offspring, they become brave and daring, and, in their defence, will attack not only animals but men. We were one day passing along the west walk of Eilean-Agais, and, beyond a turn in the path, heard the sound of feet running towards us, and immediately out shot a cat round the corner, and, close at her heels, a doe pursuing her with great eagerness. Knowing that her pursuer could not overtake her, and having no instinctive dread of her kind, the cat did not give herself the trouble to run faster than just sufficient to keep beyond her reach, while the doe pursued her with an angry scrambling pace, and, whenever she was near overtaking her, endeavoured to kneel on her back. This is a mode of attack common to deer as well as cattle, which, when they have overthrown their object, not only gore them with their horns, but bruise and crush them with their knees. At our appearance there was a pause; the cat cantered up the brae to the top of a little rock, where she lay down in the sun to see what would happen between us and her pursuer. The doe, after a few bounds, turned round and looked indignantly at us, and stamped and belled in great displeasure; this she continued for some moments, glancing occasionally at the cat with a strong desire to resume her chase; but being restrained by a sense of prudence, she slowly ascended the hill, stopping at intervals to stamp and bell at us, who knew very well that she had two kids in the junipers upon the craig."

Now let us up to the hill, where the mighty herds are feeding. Scotland will, in all probability, never see a tainchel more; indeed, save at a royal hunting, it were scarcely desirable now. The feudal system has melted away, the clans are broken and scattered, and we care not again to see a pageant which is indissolubly connected in our memories with national gallantry and misfortune. But the deer are still on the mountain and in the wood, and we shall seek them in their former haunt. Wood-stalking, though the Stuarts speak of it with considerable enthusiasm, was never much to our taste. It is true that the largest stags are generally to be met with in the wood, and we have followed the sport ere now in the Spessart, among the pines of Darmstadt, and the thickets of Strath Garve; but it must always partake more or less of the character of driving, and we never have felt, while engaged in it, that enthusiasm and keenness which sends the blood to the heart of the hunter when he first discovers a herd in the gorge of some solitary glen. Then he feels that he must put forth the whole resources of his art--that he must baffle the acutest of all instincts by the aid of human cunning--that he has a thousand difficulties to overcome before he can arrive within reach of his quarry, and that a single false step or miscalculation is sufficient to destroy the labour, the patience, and the vigilance of a day.

Great, fat fallow-deer, waxing into obesity in a park, do not seem to mind the approach of a human being, even were he an alderman redolent of black-currant jelly. But the red-deer, as many incipient stalkers know to their cost, has a very different amount of perception. Unless you take the wind of him, he is off like a shot, though your distance may be upwards of a mile. In the words of the old stalker, "Above all things, let not the devil tempt you to trifle with a deer's nose: you may cross his sight, walk up to him in a gray coat, or, if standing against a tree or rock near your own colour, wait till he walks up to you; but you cannot cross his nose, even at an incredible distance, but he will feel the tainted air. Colours or forms may be deceptive or alike; there are gray, brown, and green rocks and stocks as well as men, and all these may be equivocal; but there is _but one scent of man_, and that he never doubts or mistakes; that is filled with danger and terror, and one whiff of its poison at a mile off, and, whether feeding or lying, his head is instantly up, his nose to the wind, and, in the next moment, his broad antlers turn, and he is away to the hill or the wood; and if there are no green peas, corn, or potatoes in the neighbourhood, he may not be seen on the same side of the forest for a month." A word to the wise, from the lips of a Celtic Solon!

So much for your chance, if, in the plenitude of your full flavour, you take the hill, regardless of the currents of the air, which, moreover, are perpetually shifting. But there are other difficulties. Though not impossible, it is very ticklish work to get within shot of a deer by any other means save diligent creeping, and sometimes, when the ground is unusually flat and open, that method of approach is impracticable. Then there are divers enemies--that is, of yours, for in reality they are scouts to the deer--whom you must try particularly to avoid. This is not easy. Sometimes when you are sinuating like a serpent towards the especial stag of your heart, a blundering covey of grouse will start from the heather, and give an effectual alarm; sometimes the shrill whistle of the plover will change your anticipated triumph into mourning; and sometimes a charge of that disagreeable cavalry the mountain sheep, little less sagacious and wary than the deer themselves, will put the whole of the glen into disorder. But the worst enemies you have to guard against are the hinds, who are usually so disposed as to be out upon the feeding-grounds, and thus to mask the stag. In such a position, it becomes a point of honour to circumvent the lady, which is any thing but an easy task. The Stuarts give us an admirable recollection of such a scene in the forest of Glen-Fidich, which is so exciting that, though rather long, we make no apology for transferring it to the columns of Maga.

"After about an hour's stalking, we came upon the shoulder of a long slope, which looks into the gorges of two or three short glens, opening to a narrow plain, on which we saw a noble sight--a herd of four or five hundred deer, among which were many very fine stags. After having feasted my eyes with this splendid sight--the illustrious cavalry of the hill, the crowned and regal array of the wilderness--I began to calculate how to make the approach, how to slip between the chain of vidette hinds, and numerous picquets of small stags, which commanded almost every knoll and hollow. In the centre of the main body, with a large plump of hinds--which he herded within a wide vacant circle--there was a mighty black hart, with a head like a blasted pine, and a cluster of points in each crown. Though each stag of the surrounding circle had not less than ten points, there were none which approached his size, and they all kept at a respectful distance, while he marched round and round the central group of hinds. 'He will have them all in the ring before long,' said MacLellan; 'yon's one of the old heroes of the Monadh-liath; he has not been four-and-twenty hours in the forest.' I looked with an eager and longing eye at his gigantic stature, but there was no apparent possibility of approaching even the outward circle of stags. The herd was scattered over all the ground between the hills, and every little knoll and eminence had its restless picquets, and plumps of discomfited stags, which had been beaten by the great hart, and were chafing about, driving off and broding the buttocks of all the inferior stags which came in their way, then returning and staring with jealous disgust at the mighty stranger, who gave them no notice, except when one or two more audacious, or less severely beaten, made a few steps before his companions; upon which he immediately charged, drove them before him, and scattered the nearest in every direction. Upon these occasions, some hind of greater levity than the rest took the opportunity of extending her pasture, or paying her compliments to her companions, for which she immediately received a good prod in the haunch, and was turned back again into the centre.

"'There is no doing any thing there,' said I.

"''Deed no', replied MacLellan, shutting up his glass, 'we be to go down to the foot of the burn.'

"This was a stream which runs through the middle of the narrow plain, and empties itself into the Fidich, about four miles below, at the east end of the forest. Before resolving upon this, however, we made an attempt to cross the little glen to the north-west; but, after passing round one hill, and nearly to the top of another, we fell in with a small herd of insignificant stags, but none among them being worth the disturbance of the great herd; and being unable to pass them unobserved, we were obliged to adopt the last alternative, and descend to the Fidich. In about an hour and a half we performed this retrogration, and, having crossed at the forester's house, ascended the burn till we again approached the deer, and stealing from knoll to knoll, again came in sight of the herd. The outskirts of its wide circle had been much broken and deranged by the jousts and expulsions during our absence; and we saw that it was impossible to get near the better stags without taking the channel of the stream. We immediately descended into the water, and crept up the middle, sometimes compelled to crouch so low, that the pools reached our hips, and, as the stones were round and slippery, it was very uneasy to proceed without floundering and splashing. At length, however, we were within the circle of the deer: there was not a breath of wind, and the least sound was audible in the profound stillness. We slipped through the water like eels, till we came to a little rock, which, crossing the burn, made a shelving fall, which there was no means of passing, but by drawing ourselves up the shoot of the stream. With some difficulty I pushed my rifle before me along the edge of the bank, and then, while the water ran down our breasts, we glided up through the gush of the stream, and reached the ledge above. The return of the water, which I had obstructed, made, however, a rush and plash different from its accustomed monotonous hum, and I had scarce time to lay flat in the burn, when a _hind_ sprung up within a few yards, and trotted briskly away, then another, and another. I thought that all was over, and that, in the next moment, we should hear all the clattering hoofs going over the turf like a squadron of cavalry. All remained still, however, and, in a few seconds, I saw the first hind wheel about, and look back steadily towards the fall. I was rejoiced to observe that she had not seen us, and had only been disturbed by the unusual sound of the water. She continued, however, anxious and suspicious--watched and listened--picked off the tops of the heather--then walked on, with her ears laid back, and her neck and step stilting away as stiff as if she had been hung up in the larder for a week. This, however, was not the worst; all the surrounding _hinds_ which noticed her gait gathered here and there, and stood on the tops of the little knolls, like statues, as straight as pucks, with nothing visible but their narrow necks and two peg-legs, and their broad ears perked immovably towards us, like long-eared bats. MacLellan gave me a rueful look. 'Cha n'eil comas air.' 'Never mind,' said I, 'we shall see who will be tired first.' The forester gave a glance of satisfaction, slid up his glass on the dry bank, and we lay as still as the stones around us, till the little trouts, which had been disturbed by our convulsion, became so accustomed to our shapes, that they again emerged from under the flat pebbles, and returned to their station in the middle of the stream, skulling their little tails between my legs with no more concern than if I had been a forked tree. At length the immobility of the hinds began to give way: first one ear turned back, then another, then they became sensible of the flies, and began to flirt and jerk as usual, and, finally, one applied her slender toe to her ear, and another rubbed her velvet nose upon her knee;--it was more than half an hour, however, before, one by one, they began to steal away, perking and snuffing, and turning to gaze at the least air that whiffed about them. At length they all disappeared, except one gray, lean, haggard old grandmother of hinds, who had no teeth, and limped with one leg, probably from a wound which she received fifty or perhaps a hundred years before I was born. Her vigilance, however, was only sharpened by age; time, and the experience of many generations, had made her acquainted with all the wiles and crafts of the hill,--her eyes and ears were as active as a kid's, and I have no doubt she could smell like Tobit's devil.--MacLellan looked at her through his glass, and spit into the burn, and grinned against the sun--as if he was lying in the bilboes instead of cold water.--The old sorceress continued to watch us without relaxation, and at last lay down on the brow of the knoll, and employed her rumination in obstinate contemplation of the bank under which we were ambushed. There was now no alternative but to recommence our progress up the burn; and as I was determined to circumvent the hind, I prepared for every inconvenience which could be inflicted by the opposite vexations of a sharp, rough, slippery, and gravelly stream. Fortunately, at the place where we then were, it was so narrow, that we could hold by the heather on both sides, and thus drag ourselves forward through the water, between each of which advances I pushed my rifle on before me. In this manner we reached the turn of the brook, where I concluded that we should be round the shoulder of the knoll, and out of sight of the hind, who lay upon its east brow. This was effected so successfully, that, when we looked behind, we only saw her back, and her head and ears still pointing at the spot which we had left. One hundred yards more would bring us within sight of the great hart; the general position of the herd had not changed, and I hoped to find him near the central knoll of the flat, at the base of which the burn circled. We were almost surrounded by deer; but the greater number were small vigilant hinds, the abomination and curse of a stalker. At length, however, we reached the knoll, and rested, to take breath, at its foot; I examined my rifle, to see that the lock was clean and dry. We took a view of all around us, and, drawing ourselves cautiously out of the burn, slid up through the heather on the south side of the eminence.--Scarce, however, had our legs cleared the stream, when we discovered a pair of ears not above fifteen yards from the other side.--'_Mo mhallachd ort!_' [My curse upon you]--whispered MacLellan. She had not discovered us, however, and we glided round the base of the knoll--but on the other side lay three hinds and a calf, and I could see no trace of the great hart.--On the edge of the burn, however, further up, there were five very good stags, and a herd of about thirty deer, on the slope of the north brae. All round us the ground was covered with hinds; for the prevalence of the westerly wind, during the last few days, had drawn the deer to that end of the forest. Upon the spot where I lay, though I could only see a portion of the field, I counted four hundred and seventy; and it was evident that no movement could be made upon that side. We tried again the opposite slope of the knoll;--the hind which we had first seen was still in the same place, but she had laid down her head, and showed only the gray line of her back over the heather. We drew ourselves cautiously up the slope and looked over the summit. On the other side there was a small flat moss, about seventy yards in breadth; then another hillock; and to the left two more, with little levels, and wet grassy hollows between them. Upon the side of the first knoll there were two young stags and some hinds; but the points of some good horns showed above the crest.--The intervening ground was spotted with straggling hinds, and we might lay where we were till to-morrow morning, without a chance of getting near any of the good deer. While we deliberated, MacLellan thought that, by crawling with extreme caution up a wet hollow to the left, we might have a chance to approach the stags whose horns we had seen behind the other knoll, and, as nothing better could be done, we decided upon this attempt. The sun was going down from the old towers of Auchandùn, and we had no more time than would give light for this venture.--We slid away towards the hollow, and, drawing ourselves, inch by inch, though the heather and tall thin grass, had reached the middle of the level between the hillocks, when we heard a stamp and a short grunt close beside us--I had scarce time to turn my head, and catch a glimpse of a base little gray hind who, in crossing the hollow, had stumbled upon us.--It was but a moment: a rapid wheel and rush through the long grass, and I heard the career of a hundred feet going through the hollow. I sprung on my knee, and skaled a dozen small stags and hinds which came upon us full speed; for those behind, not knowing from whence came the alarm, made straight for the hill. The herd were now gathering in all directions; charging--flying--re-uniting, dispersing, and reassembling in utter disorder, like a rout of cavalry.--I made a run for the middle knoll,--two stags, with pretty good heads, met me right in the face.--I did not stop to look at them, but rushed up the brae.--What a sight was seen from its top!--upwards of six hundred deer were charging past--before, behind, around, in all directions.--The stately figure which I sought--the mighty black hart, was slowly ascending an eminence about three hundred yards off, from whence he reconnoitred the ground below; while the disarray of stags and hinds gathered round him, like rallying masses of hussars in the rear of a supporting column. I was so intent upon the king of the forest, that I saw nothing else.--No other heads, forms, numbers, took any place in my senses; all my faculties were on the summit of that height.--At this moment I felt my kilt drawn gently; I took no notice--but a more decided pull made me look round:--MacLellan motioned up the slope, and I saw the points of a good head passing behind a little ridge, about eighty yards away. I looked back at the hart--he was just moving to the hill. What would I have given to have diminished a hundred and fifty yards of the distance which divided us! He passed slowly down the back of the eminence and disappeared, and the gathering herd streamed after him. '_O Chìal! A Chìal!_' exclaimed the forester--'_bithidh è air fàlbh!_' The stag whose horns I had seen had come out from behind the ridge, and stood with his broad side towards me, gazing at the herd; but as they moved away, he now began to follow. The disappearance of the great hart, and the disappointment of MacLellan, recalled me to the last chance. I followed the retreating stag with my rifle, passed it before his shoulder, whiz went the two-ounce ball, and he rolled over headlong in the heath, on the other side of the knoll, which the next stretch would have placed between us. I looked to the hill above: the whole herd was streaming up the long green hollow in its west shoulder headed 'by the mighty of the desert.' They rounded and passed the brow, and sloped upward on the other side, till the forest of heads appeared bristling along the sky-line of the summit. In a few moments afterwards, as the sun was going down upon Scùr-na-Lapaich, and the far western hills of Loch Duaich, the terrible wide-forked tree came out in the clear eastern sky on the top of the hill, and, crowding after, at least two hundred heads--crossing, and charging, and mingling--their polished points flashing in the parting sunbeams, and from many a horn, the long steamers of the moss fluttering and flying like the pennons and bannerolles of lances. The herd continued to file along the ridge of the hill, and wheeling below the crest, countermarched along the sky-line, till their heads and horns slowly decreased against the light."

With such a book as this before us, we could go on alternately commenting and extracting until we had broken the back of the Number. Even now we are dying to pilfer the account of the late Glengarry's course with "Black Dulochan," and the no less exciting history of the three day's ruse with a roebuck. But abstinence is a virtue which is forced upon us in the present instance, rather from the lack of space than from any exercise of voluntary discretion; and we shall now leave the deer without further molestation for a season, hoping soon to encounter them in person with our rifle somewhere about the skirts of Cairn-Gorm.

This is, we have no hesitation in saying, the best work on deer-stalking which has yet been written; and the amount of information which it contains regarding the habits of the stag and roe, combined with the vivid pictures of which we have made such ample use, cannot fail to render it popular. In an antiquarian point of view, it is also highly interesting; for it embodies a large amount of traditionary lore, sketches of the clans, and fragments of Highland song, of much superior merit to those which have hitherto come into our hands. The disquisitions, too, upon the disappearance of some animals once indigenous to Scotland--such as the wolf, the elk, the wild bull, and the beaver--exhibit a great amount of research, and supply a gap which has long been wanted in the page of natural history.

One word to the authors--though we fear our words must travel a long way before they can reach them in a foreign land. Why should they not recast and add to their second volume, so as to make it a single and unrivalled work upon the noblest sports of the Highlands? If it has proved so fascinating, as in truth we have felt it, in the more cumbrous shape of notes, how much better would it be if issued, not as an appendage to the poems, but in a distinct and articulate form? Perpend upon this, John Sobieski and Charles Edward, at your leisure; and let us add, that we trust some of your more gloomy anticipations may fall short of reality; that the walks of Eilean-Agais, that little Eden of the north, may again be gladdened by your presence; and that the sound of your hunting-horns may once more be heard in the woods of Tarnaway, and on the hills near the sources of the Findhorn.

THE BURIED FLOWER.

In the silence of my chamber, When the night is still and deep, And the drowsy heave of ocean Mutters in its charmèd sleep,

Oft I hear the angel voices That have thrill'd me long ago,-- Voices of my lost companions, Lying deep beneath the snow.

O, the garden I remember, In the gay and sunny spring, When our laughter made the thickets And the arching alleys ring!

O the merry burst of gladness! O the soft and tender tone! O the whisper never utter'd Save to one fond ear alone!

O the light of life that sparkled In those bright and bounteous eyes! O the blush of happy beauty, Tell-tale of the heart's surprise!

O the radiant light that girdled Field and forest, land and sea, When we all were young together, And the earth was new to me!

Where are now the flowers we tended? Wither'd, broken, branch and stem; Where are now the hopes we cherish'd? Scatter'd to the winds with them.

For ye, too, were flowers, ye dear ones! Nursed in hope and rear'd in love, Looking fondly ever upward To the clear blue heaven above:

Smiling on the sun that cheer'd us, Rising lightly from the rain, Never folding up your freshness Save to give it forth again:

Never shaken, save by accents From a tongue that was not free, As the modest blossom trembles At the wooing of the bee.

O! 'tis sad to lie and reckon All the days of faded youth, All the vows that we believed in, All the words we spoke in truth.

Sever'd--were it sever'd only By an idle thought of strife, Such as time might knit together; Not the broken chord of life!

O my heart! that once so truly Kept another's time and tune, Heart, that kindled in the spring-tide, Look around thee in the noon.

Where are they who gave the impulse To thy earliest thought and flow? Look around the ruin'd garden-- All are wither'd, dropp'd, or low!

Seek the birth-place of the lily, Dearer to the boyish dream Than the golden cups of Eden, Floating on its slumbrous stream;

Never more shalt thou behold her-- She, the noblest, fairest, best: She that rose in fullest beauty, Like a queen, above the rest.

Only still I keep her image As a thought that cannot die, He who raised the shade of Helen Had no greater power than I.

O! I fling my spirit backward, And I pass o'er years of pain; All I loved is rising round me, All the lost returns again.

Blow, for ever blow, ye breezes, Warmly as ye did before! Bloom again, ye happy gardens, With the radiant tints of yore!

Warble out in spray and thicket, All ye choristers unseen, Let the leafy woodland echo With an anthem to its queen!

Lo! she cometh in her beauty, Stately with a Juno grace, Raven locks, Madonna-braided O'er her sweet and blushing face:

Eyes of deepest violet, beaming With the love that knows not shame,-- Lips, that thrill my inmost being With the utterance of a name.

And I bend the knee before her, As a captive ought to bow,-- Pray thee, listen to my pleading, Sovereign of my soul art thou!

O my dear and gentle lady, Let me show thee all my pain, Ere the words that late were prison'd Sink into my heart again.

Love, they say, is very fearful Ere its curtain be withdrawn, Trembling at the thought of error As the shadows scare the fawn.

Love hath bound me to thee, lady, Since the well-remember'd day When I first beheld thee coming In the light of lustrous May.

Not a word I dared to utter-- More than he who, long ago, Saw the heavenly shapes descending Over Ida's slopes of snow:

When a low and solemn music Floated through the listening grove, And the throstle's song was silenced, And the doling of the dove:

When immortal beauty open'd All its grace to mortal sight, And the awe of worship blended With the throbbing of delight.

As the shepherd stood before them Trembling in the Phrygian dell, Even so my soul and being Own'd the magic of the spell;

And I watch'd thee, ever fondly, Watch'd thee, dearest, from afar, With the mute and humble homage Of the Indian to a star.

Thou wert still the Lady Flora In her morning garb of bloom; Where thou wert was light and glory, Where thou wert not, dearth and gloom.

So for many a day I follow'd For a long and weary while, Ere my heart rose up to bless thee For the yielding of a smile,--

Ere thy words were few and broken As they answer'd back to mine, Ere my lips had power to thank thee For the gift vouchsafed by thine.

Then a mighty gush of passion Through my inmost being ran; Then my older life was ended, And a dearer course began.

Dearer!--O, I cannot tell thee What a load was swept away, What a world of doubt and darkness Faded in the dawning day!

All my error, all my weakness, All my vain delusions fled: Hope again revived, and gladness Waved its wings above my head.

Like the wanderer of the desert, When, across the dreary sand, Breathes the perfume from the thickets Bordering on the promised land;

When afar he sees the palm-trees Cresting o'er the lonely well, When he hears the pleasant tinkle Of the distant camel's bell:

So a fresh and glad emotion Rose within my swelling breast, And I hurried swiftly onwards To the haven of my rest.

Thou wert there with word and welcome, With thy smile so purely sweet; And I laid my heart before thee, Laid it, darling, at thy feet!--

O ye words that sound so hollow As I now recall your tone! What are ye but empty echoes Of a passion crush'd and gone?

Wherefore should I seek to kindle Light, when all around is gloom? Wherefore should I raise a phantom O'er the dark and silent tomb?

Early wert thou taken, Mary! In thy fair and glorious prime, Ere the bees had ceased to murmur Through the umbrage of the lime.

Buds were blowing, waters flowing, Birds were singing on the tree, Every thing was bright and glowing, When the angels came for thee.

Death had laid aside his terror, And he found thee calm and mild, Lying in thy robes of whiteness, Like a pure and stainless child.

Hardly had the mountain violet Spread its blossoms on the sod, Ere they laid the turf above thee, And thy spirit rose to God.

Early wert thou taken, Mary! And I know 'tis vain to weep-- Tears of mine can never wake thee From thy sad and silent sleep.

O away! my thoughts are earthward! Not asleep, my love! art thou, Dwelling in the land of glory With the saints and angels now.

Brighter, fairer far than living, With no trace of woe or pain, Robed in everlasting beauty, Shall I see thee once again,

By the light that never fadeth, Underneath eternal skies, When the dawn of resurrection Breaks o'er deathless Paradise.

W. E. A.

HUZZA FOR THE RULE OF THE WHIGS!

AIR--"_Old Rosin the Beau._"

All ye who are true to the altar and throne, Come join in this ditty with me; And you who don't like it may let it alone, Or listen a little and see. How quietly now we may sleep in our beds, And waken as merry as grigs; Though fears of rebellion hang over our heads, We're safe while we're ruled by the Whigs.

In the 'nineties we saw (I remember the day) Revolution disguised as Reform; But the country was saved in a different way, By the Pilot that weather'd the storm. Our vessel was steer'd by the bravest and best, And, except a few quality sprigs, The whole English nation had thought it a jest To propose being ruled by the Whigs.

But as matters now stand in this ill-fated realm, When old comrades will give us the slip, We are strangely compell'd to put men at the helm. To prevent them from scuttling the ship. Only think, for a moment, if Russell were out, How wild he'd be running his rigs! About popular rights he would make such a rout-- 'Tis lucky we're ruled by the Whigs.

The Church--can you doubt what her danger would be Were Tories at present in power? Lord John, or his friends, we should certainly see Attacking her posts every hour. But as long as the Bishops may help out his lease, He won't injure a hair of their wigs; Nay, he even proposes the list to increase-- So huzza for the rule of the Whigs!

If Grey were at large, how he'd lay down the law On the cures he for Ireland had found; And swear that he never would rest till he saw Her Establishment razed to the ground. But Grey, while in office, sits muffled and mum, Like a small bird asleep in the twigs; And Ward, in the Commons, is equally dumb-- So huzza for the rule of the Whigs!

If any of us had made war on Repeal With the weapons that Clarendon tries, What shrieks of indignant invective from Shiel At the wrongs of Old Erin would rise. By millions of noisy Milesians back'd, From the peer to the peasant that digs-- How would Monaghan murmur that juries were pack'd!-- So huzza for the rule of the Whigs!

On Aliens or Chartists to hear them declaim, You'd think Castlereagh come from the dead. Though the mixture of metaphors isn't the same, And the courage and coolness are fled. But the Whigs are becoming respectable men As any that ever kept gigs, They are practising _now_ all they preach'd against _then_-- So huzza for the rule of the Whigs!

Go on, my good lads--never think of retreat, Though annoy'd by a squib or a squirt; You're fulfilling the fate such impostors should meet, And eating your bushel of dirt Then swallow it fast, for your hour may not last-- We shall soon, if it pleases the pigs, Give your places to men of a different cast, And get rid of the rule of the Whigs!

THE NAVIGATION LAWS.

"When the Act of Navigation," says Adam Smith, "was made, though England and Holland were not actually at war, the most violent animosity subsisted between the two nations. It is not impossible, therefore, that some of the regulations of this famous act may have proceeded from national animosity. They _are as wise, however, as if they had all been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom_. National animosity, at that particular time, aimed at the very object which the most deliberate wisdom would have recommended,--the diminution of the naval power of Holland, the only naval power which could endanger the security of England. The Act of Navigation is not favourable to foreign commerce, or to the growth of that opulence which can arise from it. As defence, however, is of much more value than opulence, the Act of Navigation is perhaps the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England."[8] Before these pages issue from the press, this, undoubtedly the wisest of all the commercial regulations of Great Britain, and under which the maritime strength and colonial empire of England have risen to a pitch of grandeur unknown in any other age or country, will be numbered among the things which have been. The House of Commons, by a majority, have voted for the repeal of the Navigation Laws.

[8] _Wealth of Nations_, iv. c. 2.

Free trade will soon have done its work, so far, at least, as the House of Commons is concerned. It is gradually but unceasingly advancing, and swallowing up successively all the great interests of the empire, save that of the capitalists, as it moves forward. The agricultural interests will find themselves deprived, in February next, of all protection; and the British cultivator exposed to the competition, without any shield save a nominal duty of 1s. a quarter, of states where wheat can be raised, with a fair profit in average years, at 18s. a quarter, and brought to this country for 10s. at the very utmost of freight. As soon as we have two fine harvests in succession, it will be seen to what state this system will reduce British rural production. The West India interests have been next assailed; and our colonies, upon whom free labour has been forced, upon a compensation being given to the proprietors on an average of a fourth of the value of their slaves, are speedily to be exposed, with no protection but a differential duty of 5s. 6d. a hundredweight, diminishing 1s. 6d. a-year, till, in 1854, it disappears, to the competition of slave colonies, where sugar can be raised for £4 a ton, while in the British colonies the measures of government have precluded its being raised for less than £10 a ton. As a natural consequence, cultivation is about to cease in those noble settlements; the forest and the jungle will speedily supplant the smiling plantations, and £100,000,000 worth of British property will be lost beyond redemption.

Domestic manufactures were at the same time assailed, though with a more gentle hand than rude produce. Protective duties on them were lowered, though not entirely removed; and the consequence is, that at this time there are 8000 hands wholly unemployed at Manchester, and above 10,000 at Glasgow, and distress to an unparalleled extent pervades the whole commercial and manufacturing classes. Nothing daunted by these calamitous results, so exactly what the opponents of free trade predicted would ensue, so diametrically the reverse of the unbounded prosperity which they promised the nation as the consequence of their changes, the Free-traders, in pursuance of their usual system of preferring their own opinions to the evidence of facts, are preparing to apply the same system to the commercial navy of the country, and, by the repeal of the Navigation Laws, against the opinion of Adam Smith, to depress our shipping interest as much as they encourage that of foreign states, and endanger our national existence, by crippling our own means of defence as much as they augment the means of attack in the hands of our enemies. Not content with rendering us dependent for a large part of our bread on foreign nations, they are determined on measures calculated to deprive us of the means of maintaining our naval superiority, or upholding the national independence. They are set upon saying the nation a few millions a-year in freight, though the consequence is, that we shall be alike unable to withstand a pacific blockade or hostile aggression.

Many estimable and thoughtful persons in the country, struck with astonishment at the adoption and determined adherence to such a suicidal policy--alike by our rulers and a powerful party in the country--in the face of the decisive evidence afforded by facts, and the universal distress of the nation, as to its ruinous tendency, have come to the opinion, that we have been struck with a judicial blindness, and that Providence, as a just punishment for our sins, and for the furtherance of its mysterious designs in the general government of mankind, has rendered our own infatuation the means of working out our destruction. They think it affords a marvellous proof of the weakness of the human mind, and the impotence of man against the arm of his Creator, that this vast empire, which has done such mighty things in the annals of history, and which has stood proof against the hostility of the combined world, directed by consummate ability, when its rule was that of justice, should thus crumble away and perish, not from external violence or foreign aggression, but solely from domestic infatuation, when that rule has passed away. And observing that this country has already suffered greater losses, and been more severely crippled in its resources by the effects of three years of free trade and fettered currency policy, than by the whole efforts of France during a war of twenty years--and still the same course is blindly persevered in--they draw the conclusion that the evil is irremediable by human means, and that the nation, if not absolutely shipwrecked, will approach as near the verge of ruin as the providence of God will permit human infatuation to effect.

Without denying that there is much truth in these observations, and humbly acknowledging a Divine superintendence alike in the rise and the decline, the prosperity and decay, of nations, it yet appears more reasonable to trace the extraordinary obstinacy of the ruling party in the nation to the causes which, humanly speaking, seem to have been mainly instrumental in producing it. The fanaticism of the political economists, who, like all other fanatics, are inaccessible to reason or experience, is, without doubt, a main cause of the disastrous policy to which the nation seems now irrevocably pledged. But a still more powerful agent in producing the determined adherence to this system, in the face of the most conclusive evidence of its pernicious tendency, is to be found in the _class_ government which it is now apparent the Reform Bill has imposed upon the nation. It is now unhappily proved that the _trading_ interest, in whom a decisive majority both in the constituency and the number of seats in parliament has been vested by the Reform Bill, are alive, like all other classes, mainly to the suggestions of their own advantage; and that advantage they think is, to buy cheap and sell dear. Whatever we were in the days when Napoleon said it, we are now, if not a nation of shopkeepers, at least a nation _ruled by shopkeepers_. The colonies are entirely unrepresented. Schedules A and B, sixteen years ago, cut off all their representatives. The landed interest is in a minority, from two-thirds of the seats in the Commons being for boroughs; and those boroughs, owing to the depression of the producing classes by the currency laws, and the vast increase of the trading interests from the same cause, being for the most part under the direction of the commercial part of the community. It is in these circumstances that we are to look for the real causes of the adoption of free-trade principles of late years by our statesmen, and the determined adherence to it, in spite of all experience, by a majority of the House of Commons. Such conduct is the inevitable result of every _uniform_ system of representation, because that lands the government in the class government of the majority, composed of a particular interest. The evil was not felt under the old constitution, because it was _not_ a class government, being based on a multifarious, not a uniform representation. Its _defects_, as they are now called, _i. e._ its nomination boroughs, combined with the extension of our colonial and shipping interests, had let in a most efficient representation of _all_ the interests in the empire, as well as that of the inhabitants of those islands, into the House of Commons. It is to this cause that the protection of _all_ interests by the old House of Commons is to be ascribed. Doubtless, under the old system the Corn Laws would have been upheld; but the West Indies would have been saved from ruin, domestic industry rescued from bankruptcy and the Navigation Laws, the palladium of our national independence, preserved from destruction.

That the Navigation Laws have been a great advantage to our shipowners and seafaring interests is self-evident. They afforded superior advantages in conducting the trade of the empire to British over foreign shipowners; and they nursed up, accordingly, the immense and hardy body of British seamen, who have founded and protected our colonial empire, and rendered Great Britain the terror and admiration of the world. What, then, is the great benefit which is anticipated from the repeal of laws, the practical operation of which has been attended with such uniform and unparalleled benefits? The benefit is, that it will save our merchants some millions a-year in the payment of freights. It is calculated by the Free-traders that £30,000,000 yearly is paid by Great Britain for freights; and of this sum, it is thought a fourth, or £7,500,000 yearly, may be saved by the employment of foreign instead of British sailors in the conducting of our commerce, or the reduction of freight and seamen's wages in these islands, which will result from their unrestrained competition. This is the benefit to attain which our Navigation Laws, the nursery of our seamen, are to be sacrificed. And the question to be considered is,--Is the gain real, or apparent only; and, supposing it is real, is it worth the risk with which it is attended?

Is the advantage real, or apparent only? Concede to the Free-traders all they contend for: call the saving to the nation annually in freights, to be effected by free trade in shipping, not £7,500,000 but £10,000,000 annually. The strength of the argument will admit of almost any concession. Admit this, and consider what it is worth, and on whom it is made. It is not worth a _fiftieth part_ of the revenue of the nation, which, in the produce of land and manufactures alone, is above £500,000,000 annually. A week of sunshine in autumn, a favourable set of Fall orders from America, the stoppage of a revolution in Europe, are each worth more to the nation. But, such as it is, from whom is it gained? Why, it is all _gained from our own people_: it is a saving effected to _one class of our inhabitants by impoverishing another class_. If our merchants and the purchasers from them pay £20,000,000 a-year for freight of goods sea-borne, instead of £30,000,000 as formerly, undoubtedly there is a saying of £10,000,000 _to them_, or the consumers who buy from them. But of whom is this saving made? From whom is it derived? Is it not from our shipbuilders, shipowners, and seamen, who get so much the less: either by being driven out of the market by foreign mercantile navies, or by getting their own profits or wages reduced by external competition to that amount? Ten millions now earned by shipowners and sailors in Great Britain, is, on the most favourable supposition for the Free-traders, _taken from them_, and given to the dealers in or consumers of the commodities which they transport. Is the nation, as a whole, any gainer by that transfer? If ten pounds are taken from John and given to James, are John and James, taken together, any gainers by the transfer? And is not the great family of the nation composed of all its members, not of John only, but of John and James taken together? Is not the repeal of the Navigation Laws, in this view robbing Peter to pay Paul? This is the mighty advantage, for the attainment of which we are going to crush by external competition our mercantile shipping; and endanger the national independence, by withering the nursery of the navy, by which it can alone be maintained! Can there be a stronger proof of how completely, by the operation of the Reform Bill, we have fallen under the influence of class government; and how entirely such class government blinds the vision even of the most clear-sighted, to any thing but the perception of its own immediate interests?

The evidence taken before the Commons' committee, on the comparative cost of building and navigating ships in the north of Europe and in this country, comes to this, that both are about _twice_ as expensive in this country as on the shores of the Baltic. A copper-sheathed vessel, which there costs £4500, cannot here be constructed for less than £9000: a master's wages there, which are £2, 11s. a month, are here £5 for the same period: seamen's, there 7d. a day, besides provisions, &c., are here 1s. 2d. Every thing else is in the same proportion. Shipbuilding and ship-navigating are twice as costly in Great Britain as they are in Norway and Denmark. How could it be otherwise, when they have the materials of ships and rigging at their doors, while we have to transport them to the British shores from Canada or the Baltic; and they are the poor nations, whose money being scarce goes far, and we are the rich one, whose money being comparatively plentiful goes but a little way. Compare the cost of living in London during the season, with what it is in Aberdeen or Inverness, and you will at once see the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the value of money, and consequently in the money-price of articles, in the two situations. The difference in the cost of shipbuilding and seamanship, viz. one half, is nearly the same as the difference in the cost of raising sugar in our free-labour colonies and the foreign slave ones, which is £10 a ton in the former situation, and £4 in the latter. And it is in the perfect knowledge of the entire ruin which the approach even to a free trade in sugar has brought, under these circumstances, upon the British West India islands, that government are prepared to force a similar disastrous competition upon the British shipowners, and through them on the palladium of British independence, the royal navy.

Mr Labouchere said, in the debate on this subject in the House of Commons, that the Protection Party seemed to consider every importation as in itself an evil, inasmuch as it displaced a corresponding amount of native industry; but that till he found that goods were brought by merchants into the country for nothing, he never could see how importation did not encourage domestic industry as much as home orders. This is manfully spoken: it comes home to the kernel of the question. It is pleasing to have to contend with such an antagonist. We will answer him equally briefly, and, as it seems to us, decisively. The difference between home orders and foreign orders is this, that the one encourages industry at _both ends_, viz., in the consumers and the producers; the other, at _one end only_, viz., in the consumer. This difference, however, may become vital to the national fortunes. If a London merchant pays £20,000 a-year to British shipowners and seamen, he keeps in motion at once the industry of the consumers, by whose produce the freights are ultimately paid, and the industry of the seafaring classes by whom they are earned. But if he pays the £20,000 a-year not to British but foreign shipowners, the only industry put in motion, so far as we are concerned, is that which raises the produce which is to pay the freight. The other end of the chain is placed in Norway or America, and any encouragement to industry there afforded is wholly lost to England. It is just the difference between rents spent in Great Britain, and rents spent in Paris or Naples.

Doubtless they are the same thing, so far as the whole world is concerned; but are they the same thing so far as that portion of the world in which we are interested, viz., the British Islands, is concerned? Unquestionably they are not. What the Protectionists say is, not that no British industry is encouraged when importation takes place: they know perfectly it is encouraged at _their end_ of the line; what they say is, that it is not encouraged at the _other end_, because that other end rests in foreign states; and that it is unwise to encourage industry at _one end_ only, when it is possible to do so at _both_. Adam Smith saw this perfectly when he so well explained the difference between the home trade and foreign trade, and said the former was "worth all foreign trade put together." But his observations on this head are as much forgotten by the majority of our legislators as those he made on the great wisdom of our Navigation Laws, as the only security for our national independence.

Mr M'Gregor said in debate on the same subject, that "he admitted our naval strength had co-existed with the Navigation Laws, but he denied that they were cause and effect. They had about as much to do with each other as the height of the Pyramids had with the floods of the Nile."[9] We agree with the honourable member for Glasgow in one part of this observation. The Navigation Laws have had as much to do with our maritime prosperity as the Pyramids had with the floods of the Nile; and we will tell the ex-secretary of the board of trade what the relation was--it was that of cause and effect. Mr M'Gregor is too well informed not to know that there exists in Cairo a _Nilometer_, and that, during the period of the inundation, the spirits of the people and the animation of commerce rise and fall with the rise or fall of the prolific stream. It is no wonder they do so, for it is the source of life and prosperity to the whole community. Raised by the power of the Pharaohs from the riches produced by the inundations of former times, the Pyramids are the Nilometer of antiquity, as much as the tower of Babel and the ruins of Babylon were the monument of the opulence of the plain of Shinar; or as Waterloo Bridge is of the wealth produced by the favourable maritime situation of London, or York Cathedral of the agricultural riches of the plains of Yorkshire. In all these causes there is a relation between the natural advantages which produce the riches and the durable monument to the construction of which they lead, and that relation is that of cause and effect. We entirely concur with the member for Glasgow in thinking that the same connexion, and no other, subsists between the Navigation Laws and the maritime greatness of England as existed formerly between the Pyramids of Egypt and the fertilising floods which encircle their base.

[9] _Times_, June 9, 1848.

To prove that these remarks are not made at random, but that the Navigation Laws really are the foundation of the maritime greatness of England, and that, when they are repealed, it must of necessity languish and ultimately expire, we subjoin three tables: one showing the progress of British as compared with foreign shipping, from 1801 to 1823, when the protection of the Navigation Laws was first infringed upon by the adoption of the reciprocity system with the Baltic powers; and another showing the comparative progress of our foreign and home shipping with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Prussia, the countries with whom reciprocity treaties were first concluded, from 1823 to the end of 1847, when the reciprocity system had been a quarter of a century in operation.

TABLE showing the comparative progress of British and Foreign Tonnage inwards, from 1821 to 1847, both inclusive, with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Prussia.

[Transcriber's note: Column headings: Y=Year. Bt=Brit. tons. Ft=For. tons.]

| | SWEDEN. | NORWAY. | DENMARK. | PRUSSIA. | | | | | | | | Y | Bt | Ft | Bt | Ft | Bt | Ft | Bt | Ft | +------+-------+--------+-------+--------+-------+--------+--------+--------+ | 1821 | 23,005| 8,508| 13,855| 61,342| 5,312| 3,969| 79,590| 37,720| | 1822 | 20,799| 13,692| 13,377| 87,974| 7,096| 3,910| 102,847| 58,270| | 1823 | 20,986| 22,529| 13,122| 117,015| 4,413| 4,795| 81,202| 86,013| | 1824 | 17,074| 40,092| 11,419| 135,272| 6,738| 23,689| 94,664| 151,621| | 1825 | 15,906| 53,141| 14,825| 157,916| 15,158| 50,943| 189,214| 182,752| | 1826 | 11,829| 16,939| 13,603| 90,726| 22,000| 56,544| 119,060| 120,589| | 1827 | 11,719| 21,822| 13,945| 96,420| 10,825| 52,456| 150,718| 109,184| | 1828 | 14,877| 24,700| 10,826| 85,771| 17,464| 49,293| 133,753| 99,195| | 1829 | 16,536| 25,046| 9,985| 86,205| 24,576| 53,390| 125,918| 127,861| | 1830 | 12,116| 23,158| 6,459| 84,585| 12,210| 51,420| 102,758| 139,646| | 1831 | 11,450| 38,689| 4,518| 114,865| 6,552| 62,190| 83,908| 140,532| | 1832 | 8,335| 25,755| 3,789| 82,155| 7,268| 35,772| 62,079| 89,187| | 1833 | 10,009| 29,454| 5,901| 98,931| 6,840| 38,620| 41,735| 108,753| | 1834 | 15,353| 35,911| 6,403| 98,303| 5,691| 53,282| 32,021| 118,711| | 1835 | 12,036| 35,061| 2,592| 95,049| 6,007| 49,008| 25,514| 124,144| | 1836 | 10,865| 42,439| 1,573| 125,875| 2,152| 51,907| 42,567| 174,439| | 1837 | 7,608| 42,602| 1,035| 88,004| 5,357| 55,961| 67,566| 145,742| | 1838 | 10,425| 38,991| 1,364| 110,817| 3,466| 57,554| 86,734| 175,643| | 1839 | 8,359| 49,270| 2,582| 109,228| 5,535| 106,960| 111,470| 229,208| | 1840 | 11,953| 53,337| 3,161| 114,241| 6,327| 103,067| 112,709| 237,984| | 1841 | 13,170| 46,795| 977| 113,045| 3,368| 83,009| 88,198| 210,254| | 1842 | 15,296| 37,218| 1,385| 98,979| 5,499| 59,837| 87,202| 145,499| | 1843 | 6,435| 44,184| 1,814| 97,248| 4,148| 82,940| 70,164| 163,745| | 1844 | 12,806| 59,835| 1,315| 125,011| 7,423| 123,674| 108,626| 220,202| | 1845 | 15,157| 89,923| 1,215| 129,897| 4,528| 84,566| 49,334| 256,711| | 1846 | 12,625| 80,649| 3,313| 113,738| 9,531| 105,973| 63,425| 270,801| | 1847 | 7,037| 117,918| 2,318| 128,075| 20,462| 116,382| 88,390| 303,225|

--PORTER'S _Parliamentary Tables_; and _Parliamentary Report, 3d April 1848_.

Thus, while our shipping with the whole world _quadrupled_, as compared with the foreign employed in the same trade, under the protective system, from 1801 to 1823; it declined under the reciprocity system of equal duties, in the countries to which that system was applied in the next twenty years, till it had dwindled to a perfect fraction;--our tonnage with Sweden being, in 1847, not more than a _sixteenth_ part of the foreign; with Norway, a _fiftieth_ part; with Denmark somewhat above a _sixth_; with Prussia somewhat under a _fourth_.

But then it is said these are _selected_ states which do not give a fair average of the reciprocity system, or afford a correct criterion of its probable effects when applied, as it is about to be by a general repeal of the Navigation Laws, to the whole world. If they are "selected states," we can only say they were selected by Mr Huskisson and the Free-traders themselves as likely to afford the best specimen of the effect of their principles, and therefore as the first on which the experiment was to be made. But we are quite willing to take the general tonnage of the empire as the test; and we shall commence with a quotation from the tables of the great statistical apostle of free trade, Mr Porter, to show the effect of free trade in shipping on the comparative growth of our whole tonnage, as compared with that of foreign states, from 1801 to 1823, when the reciprocity system began; and again from thence lo 1847, when free trade in shipping was in full operation by the temporary suspension of the Navigation Laws, from the effect of the Orders in Council in March 1847 suspending the Navigation Laws under the pressure of the Irish famine:--

| | Tons inward, | Tons inward | | | Year. | British. | Foreign. | TOTAL. | +-------+--------------+-------------+------------+ | 1801 | 922,594 | 780,155 | 1,702,749 | | 1802 | 1,333,005 | 480,251 | 1,813,256 | | 1803 | 1,115,702 | 638,104 | 1,753,806 | | 1804 | 904,932 | 607,299 | 1,512,231 | | 1805 | 953,250 | 691,883 | 1,645,138 | | 1806 | 904,367 | 612,904 | 1,517,271 | | 1807 | Records lost | | | | 1808 | Records lost | | | | 1809 | 938,675 | 759,287 | 1,697,692 | | 1810 | 896,001 | 1,176,243 | 2,072,244 | | 1811 | | | | | 1812 | Records destroyed by fire. | | 1813 | | | | | 1814 | 1,290,248 | 599,287 | 1,889,535 | | 1815 | 1,372,108 | 746,985 | 2,119,093 | | 1816 | 1,415,723 | 379,465 | 1,795,188 | | 1817 | 1,625,121 | 445,011 | 2,070,132 | | 1818 | 1,886,394 | 762,457 | 2,648,851 | | 1819 | 1,809,128 | 542,684 | 2,351,812 | | 1820 | 1,668,060 | 447,611 | 2,115,671 | | 1821 | 1,599,274 | 396,256 | 1,995,530 | | 1822 | 1,664,186 | 469,151 | 2,133,337 |

--PORTER'S _Progress of the Nation_, 407.

It appears from this most instructive table that, under the protection system, from 1801 to 1823, the British shipping employed in conducting our commerce had gained so decisively on the foreign employed in the same commerce, that it had increased, from having been on an average of five years, at the commencement of the second, about two British tons to one foreign, to be, on the last five years, about _four_ British tons to one foreign: in other words, during these twenty-two years, the proportion of British to foreign shipping had _doubled_.

Turn now to the contrast afforded by the comparative progress of British and foreign shipping from 1823, when the reciprocity system was introduced with certain states, to 1847, when it was made universal by the suspension of the Navigation Laws in March of that year:--

| Year. | Tons inward, | Tons inward, | TOTAL. | | | British. | Foreign. | | +-------+--------------+--------------+------------+ | 1823 | 1,740,859 | 582,996 | 2,323,855 | | 1824 | 1,797,320 | 759,441 | 2,556,761 | | 1825 | 2,144,598 | 958,132 | 3,102,730 | | 1826 | 1,950,630 | 694,116 | 2,644,746 | | 1827 | 2,086,898 | 751,864 | 2,839,762 | | 1828 | 2,094,357 | 634,620 | 2,728,977 | | 1829 | 2,184,525 | 710,303 | 2,894,828 | | 1830 | 2,180,042 | 758,828 | 2,938,870 | | 1831 | 2,367,322 | 874,605 | 3,241,927 | | 1832 | 2,185,980 | 639,979 | 2,825,959 | | 1833 | 2,183,814 | 762,085 | 2,945,899 | | 1834 | 2,298,263 | 833,905 | 3,132,168 | | 1835 | 2,442,734 | 866,990 | 3,309,724 | | 1836 | 2,505,473 | 988,899 | 3,494,372 | | 1837 | 2,617,166 | 1,005,940 | 3,623,106 | | 1838 | 2,785,387 | 1,211,666 | 3,997,053 | | 1839 | 3,101,650 | 1,331,365 | 4,433,015 | | 1840 | 3,197,501 | 1,460,294 | 4,657,795 | | 1841 | 3,361,211 | 1,291,165 | 4,652,376 | | 1842 | 3,294,725 | 1,205,303 | 4,500,028 | | 1843 | 3,545,346 | 1,301,950 | 4,847,296 | | 1844 | 3,647,463 | 1,402,138 | 5,049,601 | | 1845 | 4,310,639 | 1,735,079 | 6,045,718 | | 1846 | 4,294,733 | 1,806,282 | 6,101,015 | | 1847 | 4,942,094 | 2,253,939 | 7,196,033 |

--PORTER'S _Progress of the Nation_, 407, 2d edition; and _Parliamentary Paper, 3d April 1848_.

Thus it appears that under the reciprocity system with some countries since 1823, and free trade in shipping with all in 1847, the foreign shipping employed in carrying on the British trade had so rapidly grown upon the British, that, while at the commencement of the period the British stood to the foreign as 174 to 58, or _3 to 1_ exactly, at the close they stood as 49 to 22, or _somewhat above 2 to 1 only_. And observe the vast start of foreign shipping as compared with British, since free trade was introduced by Sir R. Peel in 1846. For while the British tonnage was to the foreign in 1845 as 43 to 17, or as 2-1/2 to 1; in the year 1847 it was as 49 to 229, or 2-1/3 to 1 only. So rapid has been the growth of foreign shipping over British in eighteen months of general free trade. In ten years of such a system, it is easy to see that the foreign tonnage employed in carrying on our trade will be equal to the British; and then our national independence is gone for ever, for we have nursed up in our harbours a body of foreign seamen equal to our own.

But we have not yet done with the parliamentary returns. From the return 3d April 1848, it appears that the total tonnage, British and foreign, employed in carrying on our trade was--

British Islands. Foreign. Total. 4,942,094 2,253,939 7,196,033 tons.

Deduct British and foreign tons employed in the colonial trade, viz.--

Tons Brit. Tons For. inward. inward.

Brit. N. Amer. colonies 953,466 3,274 West Indies 243,388 Channel islands 131,899 3,049 Gibraltar 11,623 Malta 33,554 3,789 Ionian islands 13,101 Africa 203,812 6,983 Asia and Australia 379,529 2,774

Total to colonies 1,970,372 19,847

Thus the British trade to our colonial settlements is about _a hundred times_ the foreign, and constitutes nearly a _third_ of the whole tonnage employed in carrying on our commerce, and about two-fifths of the total British tonnage,--(1,970,372 out of 4,942,094.)

But it is important to discover what proportion the British tonnage employed in conducting our trade with all the world, _except our colonies_, bears to the foreign tonnage employed in the same work. That is easily found:--

Tons Brit. Tons For. 1847. Total British Tonnage, 4,942,094 Total For. ton. 2,253,939 Deduct British colonial tonnage, 1,970,372 Foreign do. 19,847 Remains in trade with all --------- --------- the world except colonies, 2,971,722 2,233,092

So that, setting aside our colonial trade, the British tonnage is to the tonnage with all the rest of the world as 29 to 22, or as 4 to 3 only! Considering the rapid strides which, under the reciprocity system established only with a limited number of countries in 1823, the foreign shipping is making in encroachment upon the British, this fact affords room for the most serious reflections. It is clear, from the great advance of foreign over British shipping in the single year of temporary suspension of the Navigation Laws, under the pressure of famine in 1847--viz. from 1,735,679, to 2,253,979; while the British in the same period advanced only from 4,310,639, to 4,942,094,--that two or three years of free trade in shipping will bring the foreign vessels employed in conducting our trade, exclusive of those engaged in the colonial, to an _equality with the British_. The moment that period arrives, our maritime superiority, and with it our national independence, hang entirely on our colonial trade, which, and which alone, strikes the balance at present in our favour. And yet, the colonial trade is the precise thing which it is the object of the repeal of the Navigation Laws to throw open to foreign nations! In their anxiety to cheapen every thing, the Free-traders would gladly expose our shipping interest engaged in the colonial trade to the same competition, which has already proved so disastrous to that part of it which is engaged in the traffic with foreign nations.

Observe how one false step in policy by nations, like one deviation from virtue in private life, leads by natural consequences to a repetition of errors and crimes, till irreparable ruin ensues. The agricultural interest at home was first attacked; and by the cry of cheap bread, and the weight of class legislation, its protection was taken away. The West India islands were the next victims; because, if the farmer in England raises his wheat with nothing but a nominal protection, it was plausible to say the West India planter must raise his sugar on the same terms. The ruinous competition to which this exposed the West India planters naturally produced in them a desire to be liberated from any burdens to which they were subjected for the benefit of the mother country; and in this demand the Canadians, exposed to the competition of American grain, for a similar reason concurred. Thus the cry for cheap freights, originating in free-trade principles in England, came to be responded to from the British colonies on the other side of the Atlantic; and the Navigation Laws began to be repudiated by the colonies--the very thing which formerly it was their most anxious desire to uphold. The firm though unseen bond of mutual interest, founded on protective principles, which has hitherto held together the vast and widely separated dominions of the British empire, is dissolved. Being deprived of the benefit of protection, they very naturally wished to be relieved of its burdens. Such is the maze of error and danger into which we have been led by the sophistry of free trade; and such the way in which the greatest and best consolidated empires are first loosened, and then destroyed, by the delusions of those entrusted with their guidance.

The manner in which foreign shipping has encroached upon British, since the reciprocity system began in 1823, is clearly proved by the centesimal proportions of each, published by Mr Porter, from 1820 to 1844, both inclusive.

It will be seen from the following table, that, since 1820, the centesimal proportion of British shipping employed in conducting our trade has _declined_ from 78 to 72, while that of foreign nations has _increased_ from 21 to 27. But this proportion, such as it is, is solely upheld by our colonial trade, which, as already shown, employs nearly 2,000,000 tons of our shipping. But for it, the encroachment of foreign on British shipping would appear in such alarming colours as to strike the most inconsiderate. It is the rapid growth of our colonial trade under the protective system which has alone concealed the ravages effected on it by free trade under the reciprocity.

Centesimal Proportions of the British and Foreign Tonnage employed in the Import Trade of the United Kingdom from 1820 to 1844.

| Year. |Brit. inward.|For. inward.|Year.|Brit. inward.|For. inward.| +--------+-------------+------------+-----+-------------+------------+ | 1820 | 78·84 | 21·16 | 1834| 73·37 | 26·63 | | 1821 | 80·14 | 19·86 | 1835| 73·85 | 26·15 | | 1822 | 78·00 | 22·00 | 1836| 71·41 | 28·59 | | 1823[10] 74·91 | 25·09 | 1837| 72·23 | 27·77 | | 1824 | 70·29 | 29·71 | 1838| 69·68 | 30·32 | | 1825 | 69·12 | 30·88 | 1839| 69·96 | 30·04 | | 1826 | 73·75 | 26·25 | 1840| 68·64 | 31·36 | | 1827 | 73·51 | 26·49 | 1841| 72·24 | 27·76 | | 1828 | 76·74 | 23·26 | 1842| 73·21 | 26·79 | | 1829 | 75·46 | 25·54 | 1843| 73·14 | 26·86 | | 1830 | 74·18 | 25·82 | 1844| 72·23 | 27·77 | | 1831 | 73·02 | 26·98 | 1845| ... | ... | | 1832 | 77·35 | 22·65 | 1846| ... | ... | | 1833 | 74·13 | 25·87 | 1847| ... | ... |

--PORTER'S _Progress of the Nation_, 416, 2d edition.

[10] Reciprocity System introduced.

Mr Porter himself tells us that the centesimal proportion of our trade with the European powers has _declined_ (p. 410) from 65 to 52·38, while that of our colonies has increased thus,--

| | 1802. | 1814. | 1835. | 1844. | | | Tons. |Cent.| Tons. |Cent.| Tons. |Cent.| Tons. |Cent.| | | |prop.| |prop.| |prop.| |prop.| | +-------+-----+-------+-----+---------+-----+---------+-----+ |America |336,344|18·54|343,658|19·32| 886,524|26·21| 984,850|19·50| |Africa | 7,270| 0·40| 13,514| 0·76| 40,131| 1·21| 157,364| 3·12| |India, &c.| 67,627| 3·72| 74,117| 4·16| 161,473| 4·88| 264,978| 5·25| |Australia | ... | ... | 488| ·02| 16,019| 0·48| 36,454| 0·74| | +-------+-----+-------+-----+---------+-----+---------+-----+ | |411,241|19·66|431,727|24·26|1,104,147|32·78|1,443,646|28·61|

Such has been the working of the reciprocity system, as compared with the protective and colonial--in other words, free trade in shipping with some particular nations--in twenty years. And it is from this experience of the effects of the partial adoption of these principles that the Free-traders now propose to make it universal!

America is the country to which, in comparison with Great Britain, the Free-traders constantly refer for a demonstration of the justice and beneficial operation of their principles. We accept the instance, and proceed to inquire into the comparative value of the American protected trade with our own colonies, and the American free trade with the United States, both at this time and in the respective progress of each for the last twenty-five years.

The foreign and British tonnage with the United States, Canada, and the West Indies, in the year 1847, stood thus, viz.:--

| |British tons.|Foreign tons.| Total. | | +-------------+-------------+---------+ |British North American Colonies | 953,466 | 3,724 | 954,190| |British West Indies | 243,388 | ... | 243,388| | +-------------+-------------+---------+ | Total protected | 1,196,854 | ... |1,197,578| |United States of America | | | | | (unprotected) | 437,095 | 651,189 |1,088,284|

--_Parliamentary Paper, 3d April 1848._

So that, while our West India and North American colonies, under this Protective system, support 1,196,854 tons of British shipping against 3,724 of foreign, or 300 to 1 nearly; the American trade with the United States only maintains 437,095 of British against 651,189 of foreign; in other words, about 2 to 3 nearly! But the Free-traders think it better to adopt the system which makes the foreign shipping to the British as 3 to 2, than uphold the one which has brought the foreign shipping to the British, in the colonial trade, as 1 to 300!

Observe, too, the decisive proof which the same return affords of the vast superiority, in every point of view, of our colonial trade to our foreign, even in the hands of our best free-trade customers, the Americans. For while less than 3,000,000 of souls between the West India and North American colonies furnished employment to 1,197,000 tons of British and foreign shipping, of which 1,193,000 was British; twenty millions of Americans in the United States only furnished employment to 1,088,284 tons of shipping, in all of which no more than 437,095 were British! And this is the pet instance of the Free-traders--their favourite _cheval de bataille_--to demonstrate the great superiority of free and foreign over protected and colonial trade!

Again, if we take the comparative progress of British and American tonnage in conducting the trade of the United States, since the reciprocity system was begun in 1823, the same conclusion is forced upon the mind. Not only is the American shipping, throughout the whole period, superior to the British in the proportion generally of 3 to 1, but this superiority in their favour remains undiminished in any material degree. We take the following returns from Mr Porter:--

Year. British American tons inwards. tons inwards. 1823 63,606 165,699 1826 47,711 151,765 1829 64,343 162,367 1832 95,203 167,359 1835 86,383 226,483 1838 83,203 357,467 1841 121,777 294,170 1844 206,183 338,737 1845 224,089 444,609 1846 205,123 435,399

It is easy to see how it has happened that, in competition with the shipowners of every country, the British shipowners have suffered so much under the partial operation of the free-trade principles which the reciprocity system has afforded. It is the inevitable fate of the old and the rich state, in shipbuilding and agriculture, to be undersold by the young and the poor one. The reason is, that the old state, by the very magnitude of its wealth, the amount of its transactions, the number of its inhabitants, the multitude of its fabrics, is obliged to pay much higher for labour and materials of all sorts than the young and the poor one. Machinery and the steam-engine compensate, and more than compensate, this superiority in regard to manufactured articles. England undersells Hindostan, where wages are a penny or twopence a day, by the work of steam-power looms working on cotton raised on the banks of the Ganges. But there is no steam-power loom in shipbuilding any more than in agriculture. Great things in nautical affairs, as in rural economy, can be effected only by the labour of man's hands and the sweat of his brow, in the last ages of civilisation, as in the first. It would appear to be a permanent law of nature, to which there is no exception in any age of the world, or any stage of human progress, that the chief branches of industry on which the subsistence and defence of nations rest--agriculture, and the naval and military arts--are pursued more cheaply, and with more success by young and rising than old and opulent states. History is full of examples in which the manufactures of rich and ancient nations have obtained an undisputed supremacy over the fabrics of poor and rising ones; but it presents still more examples of the encroachments made on the industry and power of old nations by the agricultural produce, or naval and military efforts, of young ones. It is this law of nature which provides for the decay and ruin of nations when they are approaching the limit of their allotted space of existence, and should give place to others entering on the career which they have terminated. No efforts of human energy or virtue can prolong, for any considerable period, this allotted space. But it is the peculiar reproach of free trade, whether applied to agriculture or nautical affairs, that it tends to shorten, instead of prolonging, the life of the nation to which it is applied, by oppressing instead of relieving those vital branches of industry on which its existence depends, and thus both aggravates the natural evils incident to old age, and accelerates the approach of the political society to the tomb.

When Mr Huskisson, in 1823, introduced the Reciprocity System, he did not dispute that it would injure our maritime interests; but he contended that it would open a new field for our manufactures,--that the time had now arrived when the Protective System could no longer be maintained, and it had become indispensable to sacrifice to a certain extent our maritime interests, in order to preserve the chief vents on Continental Europe for the industry of our artisans. The sacrifice was made, and the tables already given show with what fatal effect to our shipping interest. Has it extended the market for our manufactures, or diminished the jealousy with which they are regarded by the states of Continental Europe? Let the Zollverein league, at the head of which Prussia has placed herself, and which has imposed duties to an amount, in practical operation, of fifty per cent on our manufactures, give the answer. The exports which we send to the states of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Prussia, are still, after a quarter of a century's experience of the immense impulse it has given to their maritime interests, and corresponding depression to ours, a perfect trifle.[11] Our exports to America are less than they were fifteen years ago, despite the boasted conciliatory effect of twenty years' reciprocity.[12] What can be more injudicious, therefore, than to persist in, and even extend, a system which, without diminishing in the slightest degree the jealousy of Continental nations at our manufacturing superiority, has inflicted a serious and gratuitous wound on the naval resources by which alone that superiority can be maintained?

[11]

Exports from Great Britain--to 1844 Sweden £108,475 Norway 152,824 Denmark 286,679 Prussia 505,384

PORTER'S _Progress of the Nation_, p. 366, 2d edition.

[12]

Exports to United States of America:--

1836 £12,425,605 1844 7,938,079

PORTER, _ibid._

We have recently made a very great stride in free-trade principles, by the sacrifice of our agricultural protection, and the throwing open the English markets to cultivators of all nations. In the three last months of 1846 and even of 1847, in consequence of the import duties being removed, above £30,000,000 sterling was sent out of the country to purchase foreign grain; and the moderate duty of eight shillings a quarter has since been reimposed on wheat,--yet it terminates in February next, and corn from all quarters will then be admitted for the nominal duty of one shilling a quarter. We have abandoned the protection of our colonies to conciliate the slave-growing states, and augment the market for Manchester goods in Cuba and Brazil. With what disastrous effects these changes have been attended, upon the best interests of the empire, need be told to none who are familiar with the total ruin which has in consequence overtaken our West India colonies, and the unprecedented distress which prevails in all the great seats of our manufacturing industry. The loss of half the realised wealth of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, and the creation of nearly a hundred thousand persons, including dependants, in a state of pauperism, in each of those once rich and prosperous cities, is the price which, in a year and a half, we have paid for the adoption by Sir R. Peel of Mr Cobden's principles of free trade, and Mr Jones Loyd's principles of a fettered currency. Have we, in consequence, reaped any countervailing advantage, or does the increase of our export and import trade show any benefit derived to the nation, to compensate such dreadful wounds inflicted on its internal prosperity, in the attempt to disarm the jealousy of foreign manufacturers? So far from it, our exports and imports have steadily _declined_ since free-trade principles were introduced. All the main sources of our strength have diminished since Sir R. Peel abandoned protection in July 1846.[13] In adopting these principles, we have gratuitously inflicted a grievous wound on our own people, without having obtained for them the shadow even of a benefit to compensate the evil.

[13]

| | EXPORTS. | | | | |British Produce and| IMPORTS. | REVENUE. | | | Manufactures. | | | | | Declared Value. | | | +------+ | | | | 1845 | £53,227,451 | £85,281,958 | £52,009,324 | | 1846 | 51,227,060 | 75,953,579 | 54,473,762 | | 1847 | 50,897,790 |Not yet made up,| 52,082,757 |

--_Porter's Parl. Tables_; and _Parl. Paper, 3d April 1848_.

Such have been the effects of free-trade principles on the comparative prosperity of British and foreign shipping, on the showing of the Free-traders themselves, and according to the figures which their great statistician, Mr Porter, has prepared and published at the Board of Trade. We were unwilling to mix up a great national question, such as the repeal of the Navigation Laws, with any subordinate examination as to the accuracy or inaccuracy of the view of our maritime affairs which these figures exhibit. Such is the strength of the case, that it will admit of almost any concession; and the opponents of their repeal have no occasion to go farther than to the statistics of their adversaries for the most decisive refutation of their principles. But there are two observations on the tables published by the Board of Trade, so important that they cannot be passed over in silence. The first is, that in 1834, when Mr Poulett Thomson was president of the Board of Trade, a regulation was made by the Board as to the measurement of vessels, which had the effect of adding _a fifth_ to the apparent tonnage of all British vessels, subsequent to that date. This change was clearly proved by the witnesses examined before the Commons' committee; but though Mr Porter, in his last edition of the _Progress of the Nation_, mentions the change, (p. 368,) he makes no allusion to it in comparing the amount of British and foreign tonnage since 1834. Of course a fifth must be deducted from British tonnage, as compared with foreign, since that time; and what overwhelming force does this give to the facts, already strong, in regard to the effect of the reciprocity system on our maritime interests!

The second is, that the tonnage with countries near Great Britain, such as France, Belgium, and Holland, _includes steam vessels_ carrying passengers, and their repeated voyages. In this way a boat, measuring 148 tons, and carrying passengers chiefly, comes to figure in the returns for 24,000 tons! It is evident that this important circumstance deprives the returns of such near states of all value in the estimate of the comparative amount of tonnage engaged in the trade with different countries. That with France will appear greatest in spring 1848, in consequence of the number of large vessels then employed in bringing back English residents expelled by, or terrified at, the Revolution--though that circumstance was putting a stop to nearly all the commercial intercourse between the two countries. As steam navigation has so immensely increased since 1834, when the changes in the measurement was introduced--and Great Britain, from its store of coal and iron, enjoys more of that traffic than all Europe put together--this is another circumstance which militates against the returns as exhibiting a fair view of our trade, compared with that of foreign nations, especially with near countries, and fully justifies Mr Porter's admission, when examined before the Lords' committee, that "considerable fallacy is to be found in the returns." Unfortunately for the Free-traders, however, who had the preparation of them in their hands, these fallacies all point one way--viz. to augment the apparent advantages of free trade in shipping.

Such as free-trade principles are, they are evidently not likely to remain, if these islands are excepted, long in the ascendant either in the Old or the New World. The American tariff shows us how little we have to expect from Transatlantic favour to our manufactures: the savage expulsion of English labourers from France, how far the principles of "Liberty, Equality, and _Fraternity_," are likely to be acted upon by our enthusiastic and democratic neighbours on the Continent of Europe. It is clear from the communist and socialist principles now in the ascendant, both at Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, that the interests of _labour_ will above all things be considered by their governments in future times, and that the most rigorous measures, in the form of fiscal regulations, if not _absolute prohibition_, may shortly be expected in France, Italy, and Germany, against manufactures of any sort which interfere, or seem to interfere, with the interests of the dominant multitude of operatives. Why does our government adhere so strongly, in the face of the clearest evidence of their ruinous tendency, to the present system of free trade and a fettered currency? Because it works well for the great capitalists, who desire to have money dear, and the great manufacturers, who wish to have labour cheap, and because a majority of the House of Commons has been placed by the Reform Bill under their influence. Give the operatives the majority, and the opposite interest will instantly prevail. A successful Chartist revolt would at once send the whole free trade and fettered currency measures by the board in three months. In truth, it is the disasters they have produced which has revived Chartism, and rendered it so menacing in the land. We should like to see how long a legislature, elected by universal suffrage, would allow Spitalfields and Macclesfield to be pauperised by Lyons silks, and Manchester invaded by Rouen cottons, and the shipwrights of Hull and Sunderland to be ruined by Baltic shipbuilders. As the operative classes have obtained the ascendency in the principal Continental states, a similar jealousy of foreign interference with industry may with certainty be looked for in Continental Europe. Can any thing be more insane, therefore, than to persist in a policy fraught, as every thing around us demonstrates, with such ruinous social injury to ourselves, and which the progress of political change on the Continent renders incapable of producing the ultimate benefits, in exchange for those evils which their authors hold out as the inducing causes of the measures which have produced them?

While the political changes which have recently occurred on the Continent of Europe have rendered any reciprocity of advantages utterly hopeless from the most violent adoption of free-trade principles, they have augmented in a proportional degree the dangers to this country of foreign aggression, and the risk to be apprehended from any diminution of our naval resources. The days have gone by when the dream of a free-trade millenium, in which a reciprocity of advantages is to extinguish all feelings of hostility, and war is to be looked back to as a relic of the pre-Adamite world, can with safety be indulged. It is rather too late to think of the termination of the angry passions of men, when Europe, in its length and breadth, is devastated alike by civil dissension and foreign warfare; when barricades have so recently been erected in all its chief capitals; when bloodshed is hourly expected in Paris and Berlin; when the Emperor of Austria has fled to Innspruck; when every station in London was, only a few days ago, occupied by armed battalions; and when a furious war, rousing the passions of whole races of men, is raging on the Mincio and the Elbe. Threatened by a raging fire in all the countries by which we are surrounded, uncertain whether we are not slumbering on the embers of a conflagration in our own, is this the time to relax in our warlike preparations, and, by crippling the nursery of our seamen, expose ourselves, without the means of resistance, to the assaults of hostile nations, envious of our fame, jealous of our manufactures, covetous of our wealth, desirous of our ruin?

While Western Europe is torn by revolutionary passions, and the seeds of a dreadful, because a popular and general war, are rapidly springing to maturity from the Seine to the Vistula, Russia is silently but unceasingly gathering up its giant strength, and the Czar has already 300,000 men, and 800 pieces of cannon, ready to take the field against the revolutionary enthusiasts of France and Germany. Sooner or later the conflict must arrive. It is not unlikely that either a second Napoleon will lead another crusade of the western nations across the Niemen, or a second Alexander will conduct the forces of the desert to the banks of the Seine. Whichever proves victorious, England has equal cause for apprehension. If the balance of power is subverted on Continental Europe, how is the independence of this country to be maintained? How are our manufactures or revenue to be supported, if one prevailing power has subjugated all the other states of Europe to its sway? It is hard to say whether, in such circumstances, we should have most to dread from French fraternity or Russian hostility. But how is the balance of power to be preserved in Europe amidst the wreck of its principal states? when Prussia is revolutionised, and has passed over to the other side; when Austria is shattered and broken in pieces, and Italy has fallen under the dominion of a faction, distinguished beyond any thing else by its relentless hatred of the aristocracy, and jealousy of the fabrics of England? What has Great Britain to rely on in such a crisis but the energy of its seamen and the might of its navy, which might at least enable it to preserve its connexion with its own colonies, and maintain, as during the Continental blockade, its commerce with Transatlantic nations? And yet this is the moment which our rulers have selected for destroying the Navigation Laws, so long the bulwark of our mercantile marine, and permitting all the world to make those inroads on our shipping, which have already been partially effected by the nations with whom we have concluded reciprocity treaties!

The defence of Great Britain must always mainly rest on our navy, and our navy is almost entirely dependent on the maintenance of our colonies. It is in the trade with the colonies that we can alone look for the means of resisting the general coalition of the European powers, which is certain, sooner or later, to arise against our maritime superiority, and the advent of which the spread of democratic principles, and the sway of operative jealousy on the Continent, is so evidently calculated to accelerate. But how are our colonies to be preserved, even for a few years, if free-trade severs the strong bond of interest which has hitherto attached them to the mother country, and the repeal of the Navigation Laws accustoms them to look to foreigners for the means of conducting their mercantile transactions? Charged with the defence of a colonial empire which encircles the earth, and has brought such countless treasures and boundless strength to the parent state, Great Britain at land is only a fourth-rate power, at least for Continental strife. At Waterloo, even, she could only array forty-five thousand men to contend with the conqueror of Europe for her existence. It is in our ships we must look for the means of maintaining our commerce, and asserting our independence against manufacturing jealousy, national rivalry, and foreign aggression. Is our navy, then, to be surrendered to the ceaseless encroachments of foreigners, in order to effect a saving of a few millions a-year on freights, reft from our own people, and sapping the foundations of our national independence?

How can human wisdom or foresight, the energy of the Anglo-Saxons, or the courage of the Normans, maintain, for any length of time, our independence in the perilous position into which free-trade policy has, during the short period it has been in operation, brought us? The repeal of the Corn Laws has already brought an importation of eight or ten millions of foreign quarters annually upon our people--a full sixth of the national subsistence, and which will soon become indispensable to their existence. A simple non-intercourse act will alone enable Russia or America, without firing a shot, to compel us to lower the flag of Blake and Nelson. Stern famine will "guard the solitary coast," and famished multitudes demand national submission as the price of life. The repeal of the Navigation Laws will ere long bring the foreign seamen engaged in carrying on our trade to a superiority over our own, as has already taken place in so woful a manner with the Baltic powers. Hostile fleets will moor their ships of the line across our harbours, and throw back our starving multitudes on their own island for food, and their own market for employment. What will then avail our manufacturers and our fabrics,--the forges of Birmingham, the power-looms of Manchester, the iron-works of Lanarkshire,--if the enemies' squadrons blockade the Thames, the Mersey, and the Clyde, and famished millions are deprived alike of food and employment, by the suicidal policy of preceding rulers? Our present strength will then be the measure of our weakness; our vast population, as in a beleaguered town, the useless multitude which must be fed, and cannot fight,--our wealth, the glittering prize which will attract the rapacity of the spoiler. With indignant feelings, but caustic truth, our people will then curse the infatuated policy which abandoned the national defences, and handed them over, bound hand and foot, to the enemy, only the more the object of rapacity because such boundless wealth had accumulated in a few hands amongst them. Then will be seen, that with our own hands, as into the ancient city, we have admitted the enemies' bands; we have drawn the horse pregnant with armed men through our ramparts, and our weeping and dispersed descendants will exclaim with the Trojans of old--

"Fuimus Troës, fuit Ilium, et ingens Gloria Teucrorum."

_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the ext have been retained as printed.

Mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed.

The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

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