Part 2

It is very characteristic that the National Church is called an Establishment,--in other words, something that stays where it was put some time ago. The thing which ought to move first, and move continually through all the avenues of the public life, to keep them clear of the obstructions of ignorance and superstition, and prevent the great travel and intercourse of thought from stagnating, is the thing in England which is most unwilling to stir. Already a fearful accumulation of passengers and vehicles, whose patience is nearly exhausted, is anxious to be let through in time to keep appointment with the world's grave business. Young thoughts are hurrying to be indorsed; mature paper dreads to be protested; the hour of the world's liberal exchange is about to strike. Depend upon it, at the critical moment, when the pressure in the rear becomes the most emphatic, the people in the omnibus will have to get out and assist the passengers in drawing it to one side, where it will remain a long time unmolested.

But the first thing which you say concerning the men and institutions of England is, that they are established. In America some things are finished before they are done; but there are no tottering trestle-bridges in the routes of English enterprise to let the travellers through. When a business firm becomes fairly built up, it lasts a hundred years or more. Shop-signs are not taken down except by the weather; new fronts grow so slowly along the ancient streets that they appear to be deposited by secretion, like corals and shells. I took a book to a printer, and found he was the grandson of the man who published "Junius" in 1769, doing business in the same dingy court and office, with the old regularity and deliberation. When I said, that, for want of time, I should have to risk formidable errata and print at the rate of sixty-four pages a day, he plainly suspected me of derangement and of a desire to impart my condition to his machinery. On repeating it with calmness, he set it down for Yankee braggadocio, and assured me that not an author in England could print at that rate. Then he went to work. They detest being hurried, but their latent momentum is very great. Limited suffrage and many administrative abuses will feel it soon, as similar things have felt it before.

But you are deceived at first, and anticipate deterioration rather than improvement for the people of England. The city of London, with its two and a half millions of inhabitants, looks like a huge stone that has been pried over a sweet well; nobody need expect to draw water there any more; fresh ones must be dug, we say, in America, in Russia, to reach primitive human nature again, and set it free to make the wilderness blossom. London looks as if it had slowly grown from the soil and the climate, like a lichen that clings closely to its rocky site. The heavy, many-storied buildings of Portland stone are blackened by the smoke till they appear more like quarries then habitations; the swarms of human beings look ephemeral as moths. The finest architecture becomes in a few years indistinguishable, and delicate ornamentation is as much superfluous as among the weather-stained cliffs and boulders of the coast. Monumental inscriptions are smutted and half-obliterated, but the scurf protects the monument. Under the huge pile of St. Paul's the ceaseless traffic of human passions passes as through a defile of the hills. When the lights spring forth towards evening, and sparkle on the great dull masses, it seems as if the buildings had been there forever, and forever would be, endowed with some elemental process which puts forth the lighting. Newgate itself, without windows towards the street, a huge angle of dead walls, with heavy iron fetters suspended over the gateways, and statues so blackened in their niches as to dispel the illusion that they ever did or could suggest humanity, is a settled gloom in the midst of the city, like the thought of a discouraged and defeated man. It has a terrible suggestion that crime is established in London,--immutable methods of being guilty and of being condemned--all old, old, and irrepealable.

From Primrose Hill, beyond Regent's Park, and towards the open country, the profile of the city can be seen at one view, as it emerges from the smoke, is heavily described athwart it, and plunges into it again, like a great, silent feature of the earth itself, lifted in an atmosphere whose density seems to be a part of the antiquity. Hidden in that smoke the streets roll night and day, like great arteries, to feed, replace, repair, business, pleasure, and misery, but to change it no more than the blood changes the tricks of an old brain or the settled beating of a stubborn heart.

These are some of the physical aspects which seduce a traveller into the impression that the vigor and glory of England have culminated, and would fall apart sooner than take on new forms or yield to the moulding power of popular ideas.

The impression is deepened by the feeling of hostility to American institutions, and by the special dislike of the North, which the past four years have betrayed. The commercial and ruling classes had been skilfully prepared, by applications of Southern sentiment, for the declaration of neutrality, which was supposed to contain the triple chance of destroying a dangerous republic, of securing unlimited supplies of cotton by free-trade, and of erecting in the South an oligarchic form of government. Under the circumstances, they felt that neutrality was a kind of merit in them, and a magnanimity which the declining North ought to have hailed with enthusiasm, as it showed that England scorned to take a more deadly advantage of our perilous position. This anti-Northern feeling is, and always has been, confined to the Tory classes, in and out of the Government, to the rich and their dependants, to the confirmed High-Churchmen. Even an American resident, if he was wealthy, and liked the Church of England, and had settled down into a British country-seat with British ways of living, would be sure to misrepresent the North, to be pleased at its defeats and annoyed by its successes, partly from commercial and partly from pro-slavery considerations. The America which he remembered, and regretted that he could not still be proud of, was the America where Pierce and Buchanan were Presidents, where Jefferson Davis and John B. Floyd were Secretaries of War. He had, in short, become a Tory; for Toryism is regard for usages at the expense of men. He and the English Tory desired the triumph of Slavery, because it was the best thing for the negro, and the quietest thing for trade and government. The only difference between them is, that he would own slaves, if he had an opportunity, while the Englishman would not, partly because his own servants are so excellent. But both of them would subscribe to the Boston "Courier." The English Tory hates to have the poor classes of London use the railways on the Lord's Day, to go and find God's beauty in the Crystal Palace and the daisy-haunted fields. One of the most striking spectacles in London is found on Sunday, by standing on some bridge that spans the Thames, to watch the little river-steamers, black with human beings, that shoot like big water-bugs from the piers every five minutes, and fussily elbow their way down-stream to various places of resort. On that day people cluster like bees all over the omnibuses, till the vehicle looks like a mere ball of humanity stuck together, rolling down to some excursion-train. This is a bitter sight to an old-fashioned Churchman.[A] The American Tory will hate _any_ day that releases the poor and the oppressed into God's glorious liberty. One of the most worthy and offensive men you can meet in London is the American Tory of this description: worthy, because honest and clean and free from vice; offensive, because totally destitute of republican principle. If stripped of his wealth, he might become a rich man's invaluable flunky, and carry the decorous prayer-book to church, bringing up the rear of the family with formalism. Toryism has a profound respect for external godliness, and remembers that the Southerner sympathizes with bishops, who, like Meade of Virginia, preach from the text, "Servants, obey your masters," and, like Polk of Louisiana, convert old sermons upon the divine sanction of Slavery into cartridge-paper. We must recollect, too, that a good many educated Englishmen dislike republican institutions because they have identified the phrase with all the atrocious things which successive pro-slavery administrations have conceived and perpetrated; for the Englishman is dull at understanding foreign politics, and reads the "Times," though he strongly avers that he is not influenced by it. An administration appears to an Englishman to be the country; he has not yet heard an authoritative interpretation of republicanism, for a Washington cabinet has not till lately spoken the mind of the common people. But when he understands us better he will dread us all the more, because the people in all countries speak the same language in expressing the same wants; and when universal suffrage puts universal justice on its throne in America, injustice will everywhere uneasily await the ballot which shall place it in the minority. The dislike of the English Tory is already passing into this second stage, when his hope of a dissolved Union gives place to his dread of a regenerated country that hastens to propagate its best ideas.

There were three elements in this anti-Northern feeling. First, a sympathy with the smaller and feebler party. This is a trait which puts the English people by the side of the Turk in the Crimea, the Circassian in the Caucasus, the Pole, the Dane,--which inspired Milton's famous letter, in the name of Cromwell, that espoused the cause of the Waldenses. In fact, wherever the smaller and weaker party has no relations with England, the country hurries to protect it. But where, as in the case of the Irish, the Sepoy, the New-Zealander, the Caffre, and the Chinese, England's interest is touched by the objections of people to her own harsh and inveterate rule, she has no magnanimity, and forgets the sentiments of her nobler minds. The same Cromwell who threatened Europe in behalf of the Waldenses contrived the massacre of the Irish at Drogheda. So when sympathy with the distant South harmonized with dread of the North, she was willingly misled by Southern agents to see a war of conquest and aggression.

The second element is a fear of the ultimate consequences of a Union reconstructed without Slavery; for then Mr. Bright may argue in favor of universal suffrage, uninterrupted by allusions to the arrogance and coarseness, the boastful and aggressive spirit belonging to a pro-slavery America. "Why do you desire the dissolution of the Union?" asked one Englishman of another. "Oh, I have no reason, except that the Americans are so bounceable I want to see them humbled." But we were the weakest when Slavery made us so loud-mouthed and vaporing; we shall be strongest when the cause of our boasting has disappeared. When a country is fully conscious of the principles that belong to it, and sees them cleansed with her children's blood, through eyes that stand full with tears, she will invite, but no longer threaten; and the flag which she once waved in the face of all mankind to exasperate will rain persuasion as often as it is unfurled.

But it will be a long time before the Englishman appreciates the altered condition of this country and resigns his prejudices, in consequence of another element in this un-American feeling, namely, insular ignorance. Among the contraband articles which are with difficulty smuggled into any point of the English coast is an accurate knowledge of the polity and condition of another country. Indifference is the coastguard which protects, without moving, every inlet and harbor. The Englishman is surprised, if all the world is not intimately acquainted with the British Constitution, which is not a written document, but a practical result that appears in all the administrative forms of the country, and can be studied only on the spot; but he will not take the trouble to inquire into the relation which the separate States bear to the Federal government; and he seems prevented by some congenital deficiency from understanding how the latter is the direct result of the independence of the former. The question he asks most frequently is, "Why has not an independent State the right to secede?" He is infected by nature with Mr. Calhoun's fallacy. You cannot make a Tory understand that powers are derived from the consent of the governed, and that the consent is itself an institution. "What becomes of State rights?" he asks. And when you reply, that the concentred function of each State is contained within a diffused popular will whose centre is at Washington, and that thirty-four concentrations of this kind are nothing more than thirty-four general conveniences, he takes you slowly by the button, looks pityingly in your face, and says, "That is a Northern crotchet, which this civil war has come to cure," and then he leaves you. It is in vain that you shout after him, "That is a Northern principle, which this war has come to confirm": he was out of hearing before he left. You feel that you are a stranger in the house of your own mother. You walk about among these slow, good-natured men, with plump boys' faces and men's chests, and hear them speak your language without your sense. They have a limited one, like their monarchy. How admirably it keeps the square miles of their own island! how shockingly it tends the acres of Ireland! how haughtily it ignored and trampled upon the instincts of the Hindoo! how unwilling it is to see a difference between the circumstances of Australia and those of England! How it blundered into a neutrality which was a recognition of infamy! This is the distance which Toryism spreads between the mother country and our own.

But this must not be accepted as a final statement of the prospects of England, or of its relation to America. There is, in the first place, a great popular sympathy with the North, and it prophesies the future condition of England. When you use the phrase, "people of England," understand that the Toryism which governs England is left out. Bigoted Churchmen, who are afraid that the island will drag its anchor because Bishop Colenso notices some errors in the Pentateuch,--shifty politicians, like Russell and Palmerston,--sour ones, like Roebuck,--scandalous ones, like Lindsay,--and conservatives, like Cecil and Gladstone, now make all the political blunders which they call governing England. Their constituents are two thirds of the merchants, nearly all the literary men, nearly all the clergymen, half the University fellows and professors. But the people of England have not yet been mentioned. They govern England at this moment, and yet John Bright sits almost alone for them in Parliament; John Stuart Mill, Professors Cairnes, Newman, Goldwin Smith, are almost their only powerful writers. The people of England put the broad arrow of their Queen upon the Rebel rams. They stay at home, and by taking the penny papers slowly undermine the "Times." They have defeated every attempt to organize a party for Southern recognition, by simply staying away from the public meetings which the sympathizers called. Once they uttered their opinion by the lips of starving operatives, when the distress in the manufacturing districts was deepest, and capitalists were chary of their aid. The Southern agent was busy then, in all the towns and villages where the misery dwelt. "You are starving."--"Yes."--"And it is for want of cotton."--"So it seems."--"Well, do you mean to sit here? Come out in great force, as in the old Chartist times; tell the manufacturer and the minister to break that blockade and let bread into the mouths of your little ones." And the answer was, "We prefer that they should starve." Again and again, the answer was, "We would rather starve." And this haggard patience was saving the manufacturer himself from ruin, who had been engaged in over-manufacturing, till his warehouses groaned with an enormous stock which the cotton blockade enabled him to work off. Great fortunes have been made in this way, while the operative slowly went to rags, road-mending, and the poor-rates. In London, hard upon midnight, I have often been attracted by the sound of street-music to a little group, in the centre of which stood half a dozen pallid and threadbare men, playing gentle tunes upon the faithful instruments which clung to their sad fortunes. And on a square of canvas, lighted by a lantern, or set in the flaring gas, I have read, to the sound of these paupers' music, the story of America: "Lancashire Weavers out of Work," "Poor Operatives' Band,--a penny, if you please." That music keeps the heart of England quiet while your cannons roar. It is the pulse of the people of England, responding in the faint distance to the throb of victory.

Another sight which can be seen by day in London streets belongs also to the people of England. When there was a dearth of troops during the Crimean War, the coast forts were stripped of their garrisons, and there was a call made by Government for volunteers to fill their places. Citizens came forward and manned the forts. This was the origin of the volunteer force of England, which has grown to be very formidable,--since jealousy of France, dread of invasion, and the need of troops for India have always deterred the Government from recalling the arms which it first put into the hands of the people. The force now comprises infantry, cavalry, light and heavy artillery, organized like the regular army, and under the control of the Horse Guards. Rifle-corps and target-practice have become a mania. The Government encourages it by magnificent reviews and prizes for the best shooting, utterly unconscious that Government itself may one day be the target. But a bloody revolution can hardly occur again in England. It will only be necessary, at some critical moment, for the London volunteers to march as far as Charing-Cross on their way towards Parliament and the Palace. The concession would be there before them.

Mr. Holyoake, who is one of the most vigorous champions of free thought and popular rights in England, says,--"Revolution is no longer necessary in English politics. Our wise and noble forefathers, of those old times of which modern radicals in many towns know too little, laid broad foundations of freedom in our midst. It only needs that we build upon these, and the English educated classes, who always move in the grooves of precedent, will acquiesce with a reasonable readiness."[B]

The feeling of the radical class of English workmen is elsewhere illustrated by Mr. Holyoake with a story from the Allendale mining district. "Four miners published a volume of poems. One of these four in his poem talks of tyranny falling at a moment's notice. Tyranny is not in such a hurry. A 'voice of thunder' is to proclaim its doom. Alas, it is the voice of steady intelligent purpose, much more difficult to elicit, and not that of 'thunder,' which is to accomplish that. The poet of course has a vision about the 'equal share' which the fall of tyranny is to end in. The 'equal share' system would not last a day, as everybody who reflects knows, and would give endless trouble to renew it every morning."[C]

It is a striking characteristic of English Toryism, that it gives way just in time. Every reform has hitherto been granted as it was on the point of being extorted. Official carriages roll over the very spot where Charles I. dropped his self-willed head; Lady Macbeth might wash her hands as soon as the English people their memories of the civil bloodstain. Toryism knows one thing well: that no water-pipes can be made strong enough to withstand the sudden stoppage of a long column of water. They will burst and overflow. No matter what material may be in motion, if the motion be suddenly arrested, heat, in a direct ratio to the motion, is developed. A decided popular tendency will never be peremptorily stopped in England.

It is therefore a grand sight to an American, when the well-appointed companies of London riflemen march up Fleet Street and the Strand, through Temple-Bar, that bars nothing any longer, and stands there a decaying symbol of Toryism itself. The brass bands may play, "Britannia rules the Waves," or "God save the Queen," but to the American ear they sound, "The Waves rule Britannia," "God save the Common People!" Every shouldered musket shall be a vote; the uniform shall represent community of interest and sentiment. The rhythm of the living column is the march of England's steady justice into coal-mines and factories, Church and State.

For this reason we ought to cultivate pacific relations with the Government of England. Beware lest the question of the Alabama break loose to prey upon the true commerce of mankind! A war would put back the people of England for fifty years. When England is at war, the people are apt to rally to the Government. The island is so small, that, when a feeling once gets started, it sweeps all men away into an inconsiderate and almost savage support of the public honor. If Toryism cannot secure to itself the benefit of a war upon some point that involves an English prejudice or interest, it cannot prevent the rising strength of the people from going into opposition. Dissenters of every class are emptying the pews of the Establishment; liberal thinkers now hold University fellowships only to avoid surrendering all the ground to a reactionary party. The abolition of the stamp-tax has freed the daily press, and expensive newspapers no longer represent little cliques, but belong to the people of England, who take their pennyworth of honest criticism every morning; and the best of these newspapers have been for three years on the side of Northern republicanism. This is the instinct of human nature, which knows its rights and hungers to possess them.

We are maintaining half a million of men in the field, half a million outlets of our heart's blood, because we believe that inclusion is better than exclusion. The nation's instinct for that truth has gone into camp. It is a belief that the life of the Republic depends upon including every State, and including every citizen, and including every emigrant, and including every slave, in the right to live, labor, and be happy, and excluding none. We feel that the blood we lose in fighting for that plain maxim of republican economy will make again fast enough when the maxim has prevailed. The weaver of Lancashire, who plays out his hunger in London streets, and our seamen who make the weaver wait while they watch three thousand miles of seaboard, are both listening to the rote of the same great truth, as it dashes on the shores of Time, and brings bracing air to the people who are sick with waiting. If we are gaining battles because we love the rights of the common people, our success will include the English weaver, Dissenters will build churches on our corner-stone of Liberty, the taxed will borrow our ballot-boxes to contain their votes, and none shall be excluded but the betrayers of mankind.

FOOTNOTES: