Kitabı oku: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847», sayfa 17

 
"Something more exquisite still."
 

But I am apparently, Eusebius, leaving the Curate to sleep or to meditate upon his own unhappy condition while I thus turn the current of my talk upon you. Unhappy condition, did I say? He seems to bear it wonderfully lightly; and once or twice, when the subject has been mentioned, indulged in an irreverend laugh. Now, I know you will ask how a laugh can be irreverend. Don't you know the world well enough, Eusebius, to know, that before a very great number of men, women, and children, a curate must not laugh, dare not laugh—blessed indeed, and divested of the wretched rags of humanity, if he cannot laugh. None but a Bishop, or a Dean, who, in the eyes of the many, is a kind of extra-parochial nonentity, can really, in these times of severe reprobation for trifling peccadillos, afford to laugh; and they had better do it in private, and with aprons off—never before the Chapter, who all, themselves, laugh in private. Man, you know, is the only risible creature; but a Curate must begin to know, from the moment he has put on his surplice, that he is to discard at once, and for ever, this human and irreverend instinct. Had you lived in the triumphal days of the Puritans, what penalties would you not have had to undergo, what buffetings and duckings, ere you could finally have overcome your strong natural wicked propensity, and have sobered down, and riveted in iron gravity and moroseness those flexible, those mockingly flexible features of yours. As it is, in these days of "revival," you only meet with considerable contempt, and evil opinion, which, as it comes rather late upon you, comes as an amusing novelty and additional provocative. But you may be sure what you can afford to do, the Curate cannot. For the present, therefore, let his few indulgences that way be a secret. He will mend in time. For so it happens, that though the longer we live the more we have to laugh at, we lose considerably our power of laughing. And that—between ourselves be it said, Eusebius—is, I think, a strong proof of our deterioration. A man, to laugh well, must be an honest man—mind, I say laugh: when Shakspeare says

"A man may smile and smile,

 
And be a villain,"
 

he purposely says smile, in contradistinction to laugh. He cannot laugh and be a villain. A man cannot plot and laugh. A man may be much less innocent even when he thinks himself devout, than in his hour of merriment, when he assuredly has no guile; but a man may even pray with a selfish and a narrow mind, and his very prayers partake of his iniquity: no bad argument for a prescribed form. A man that laughs well is your half-made friend, Eusebius, from the moment you hear him. It is better to trust the ear than the eye in this matter—such a man is a man after your own heart. After your own heart, did I say, Eusebius? Words are the ignes fatui to thoughts, and lead to strange vagaries—of which you have here a specimen; but these few words remind me to tell you an anecdote, in this lull of the Horæ Catullianæ, which I would on no account keep from you. And you will see at once in it a large history in the epitome and the very pith of a fable—such as Æsop's. But I assure you it is no fable, but the simple plain truth; and I will vouch for it, for I had it from the month of our friend S., the truest, honestest of men, who saw with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears, the persons and the sayings. S. was travelling some time ago, beyond the directions of railroads, in a coach. There were two companions—preachers as he found, self-dubb'd Reverends of some denomination or other, besides that reverend one of their own. Their conversation, as is usual with them, was professional, and they spoke of their brethren. In speaking of different preachers, one was mentioned, of whom one of the speakers said emphatically—"Now that's what I call a really good man—that's a man after my own heart—a man quite after my own heart!" The other said with rather doubtful and hesitating confirmation, "Ye-s." "You don't seem to think so highly of him as I do," said the first speaker. "Why," replied the doubter, "I can't say I do; you remember some time ago he failed, and certainly upon that occasion he behaved very ill to, not to say cheated, his creditors." "Ah!" said the first commendator again, "that is very likely—I should have expected that of him."—Henceforth, Eusebius, whenever I hear such a commendation, I shall look out for a map of the gentleman's heart who ventures upon this mode of expressing his admiration. Oh! what a world we live in! This is a fact which would have been immortal, because true and from nature, in the hands of Le Sage; and is worthy of a place in a page of a modern "Gil Blas."

And so all this digression has arisen from a laugh of the Curate's, to whom it is time to turn; or you will think we have been but bad company to each other. I will, however, end this passage with the remark, that a man may do a worse thing than laugh, and happy is he that can do a better.

The Curate and I, then, for the rest of the night conversed upon the affair of his, which so unaccountably was making no little stir in the place. The Curate told me, he was quite sure that his movements had been watched; for that only yesterday, as he was entering the gate of his friends, the family at Ashford, he saw Miffins's boy not far behind him on a poney; and he thinks he came out for the purpose of watching him, for he had scarcely reached the door, when he saw the lad ride hastily back. The Curate likewise confessed to me, that he did entertain some tender sentiments towards one of the inmates, Miss Lydia –, that the family had lived much abroad, and that they had a French lady's-maid, whom on one or two occasions he had certainly seen in this township. You see the thread, Eusebius, which will draw out innumerable proofs for such a mind as Miffins's. Taking a paper out of his pocket, he said it was put into his hands as he was coming away, and he had not opened it. "Perhaps," said he, "it may throw some light on the affair, as it was given me by one who is, I know, on the all-important committee." He broke the seal, read, laughed immoderately for five minutes, and put it into my hands:—

"Rev. Sir,—Wishing to do the handsome to you, and straightforward and downright honest part, the committee inform you that they have reported your misconduct to the Lord Bishop, and I am desired accordingly to send you a copy of their letter. By order of committee.—I am, sir,

"James Jones."

Enclosed was the following, which these wiseacres had concocted—and I have no doubt it was their pride in the composition, and in the penmanship, which induced them to send the copy to the Curate.

"To my Lord, your Lordship the Bishop.

"We the undersigned, the respectable inhabitants parishioners, approach most dutifully our Bishop's worshipful Lordship. Hoping humbly that you will be pleased to dismiss our curate, who, we are credibly informed, and particularly by three exemplary and virtuous ladies, they having been cautioned against him by one who knows him well, and is a friend likewise to said ladies, and doing all the good kindness he can. We learn with sorrow, that our curate has confessed to unbecomingly behaviour, and that he has been seen even kissing. My Lord, our wives and daughters are not safe—we implore your Honour's Lordship to dismiss the curate, and take them under your protection and keeping: We are informed the curate has a foreign lady, not far from this, whom he almost daily visits—and a Papist, which is an offence to your Lordship, and the glorious Protestant cause, to which we are uniformly and respectfully attached, and to your worshipful Lordship very devoted—" here follow the names, headed by Matthew Miffins.

"And what steps do you intend to take?" said I.

"None whatever," said he.

"Let it wear itself out. I won't lengthen the existence of this scandal by the smallest patronage. I will not take it up, so it will die."

"But the Bishop?" said I.

"Is a man of sense," he replied, "and good feeling; so all is safe, in his hands."

We parted for the night.

The Curate called rather early the following morning, and we thought to have an hour over Catullus, and went to seek our host Gratian. We found him in his library in consultation with his factotum Jahn. He was eloquent on the salting, and not burning his weeds, on Dutch clover—"and mind, Jahn," said he, "every orchard should have a pig-stye: where pigs are kept, there apple-trees will thrive well, and bear well, if there be any fruit going:" and he moved his stick on the floor from habit, as if he were rubbing his pigs' backs; and then turning to us he said,—"Why, Jahn has been telling me strange things: Prateapace and Gadabout have gone over to the chapel—left the church; not there last Sunday. But I saw that Brazenstare there, trying, as she sat just before you, to put you, Mr Curate, out of countenance. Well, Jahn tells me that the Reverend the Cow-doctor preached last evening a stirring sermon on the occasion, and was very hot upon the impurities and idolatries of the 'Establishment.' And Jahn tells me they don't speak quite so well of me as they should; for when he plainly told Miffins in his own shop, that he was sure his master would not countenance any thing wrong, the impudent fellow only said, 'May be not; but he and his master might not be of the same opinion as to what is wrong.' The rogue! I should like to have put all his weights in the inspector's scales."

"Yes," quoth Jahn, "but I am 'most ashamed to tell your honour what Tom Potts, the exciseman, said, who happened to be present."

"Out with it, by all means, Jahn," said our friend.

"Well then, sir, as true as you are there, he said that your honour was a very kind gentleman, and your word was worth any other ten men's in most things; but where it might be to get a friend out of trouble, and, for aught he knew, foe either, why then, he thought your honour might fib a bit."

"Surely," said Gratian, "he didn't say quite that?"

"Yes," quoth Jahn, "quite that, and more; something remarkable."

"Remarkable!" said I,—"what could that be?"

"Why, something I shan't forget; and I don't think it was religious and proper," said Jahn; and lowering his voice, and addressing me and the Curate rather than his master, he added,—"He thought his honour had a kind heart, too kind; for that if Belzebub should come of a wet and dark night, and knock at his honour's door, and just say in a humble voice that he was weary and foot-sore, that his honour would be sure to take him in, give him a bed, and a stiff tumbler of brandy and water, and send for the farrier in the morning to fresh shoe him unknowingly; for he would make him stoop, put his claws on the ground, and throw a blanket over him, and make the farrier believe that, out of a whim, he was only a shoeing a great big goat."

Gratian laughed at the whimsical idea of the exciseman, called him a true and good spirit-gauger; then giving some sharp taps to his hip, his knee, and his legs with his stick, rose from his seat, and said, "Come, Curate, you and I must take a walk amongst these people, and see what we can do: it is most time to put a stop to this mischievous absurdity, and, I fear me, of our own making."

Away they went, and I put up my remaining translations from Catullus, took down a book, read awhile, and then meditated this letter to you. And now, my dear Eusebius, when you publish it in Maga, as you did my last, folk will say—"Why, what is all this about? Horæ Catullianæ! It is no such thing." Be it, then, I say, what you will. Do you think I am writing an essay?—no, a letter; and I may, if I please, entitle it, as Montaigne did—"On coach horses," and still make it what I please. It shall be a novel, if they please, for that is what they look for now: so let the Curate be the hero,—and the heroine—but must it be a love story? Then I won't forestall the interest, so wait to the end; and in my next, Eusebius, we will repeat Catullus for the play, and say with the announcing actor, "to conclude with an after-piece which will be expressed in the bills."

My dear Eusebius, ever yours,

Aquilius.

LESSONS FROM THE FAMINE

The two great parties into which the country was divided on the subject of our commercial relations with foreign states, maintained principles diametrically opposite on the effects to be anticipated from the adoption of their respective systems. The Free-Traders constantly alleged, that the great thing was to increase our importations; and that, provided this was done, government need not disquiet themselves about our exportations. Individuals, it was said, equally with nations, do not give their goods for nothing: if foreign produce of some sort comes in, British produce of some sort must go out. Both parties will gain by the exchange. The inhabitants of this country will devote their attention to those branches of industry in which we can undersell foreign nations, and they will devote their attention to those branches of industry in which they can undersell us. Neither party will waste their time, or their labour, upon vain attempts to raise produce for which nature has not given them the requisite facilities. Both will buy cheaper than they could have done if an artificial system of protection had forced the national industry into a channel which nature did not intend, and experience does not sanction. We may be fed by the world, but we will clothe the world. The abstraction of the precious metals is not to be dreaded under such a system, for how are the precious metals got but in exchange for manufactures? Their existence in this country presupposes the exit of a proportionate amount of the produce of British industry. Nobody gives dollars, any more than corn, for nothing. Our farmers must take to dairy and pasture cultivation to a greater extent than heretofore. A certain number of agricultural labourers, may, it is true, be thrown out of employment by the displacing of rural industry in making the transition from the one species of country labour to the other; but the evil will only be temporary, and they will speedily be absorbed in the vast extension of our manufacturing industry. High prices need never be feared under such a system: a bad season is never universal over the world at the same time; and free-trade will permanently let in the superfluity of those countries where food is abundant, to supply the deficiencies of those in which, from native sources, it is scanty.

The Protectionists reasoned after an entirely different manner. The doctrines of free-trade, they observed, perfectly just in their application to different provinces of the same empire, are entirely misplaced if extended to different countries of the world, the more especially if placed in similar, or nearly similar, circumstances. The state of smothered or open hostility in which they are in general placed to each other, if their interests are at all at variance; the necessity of sheltering infant manufacturing industry from the dangerous competition of more advanced civilisation, or protecting old-established agricultural industry from the ruinous inroad of rude produce from poorer states, in which it is raised cheaper because money is less plentiful, render it indispensable that protection should exist on both sides. If it does not, the inevitable result will be, that the cultivators of the young state will destroy the agriculture of the old one, and the manufacturers of the old one extinguish the fabrics of the young. This effect is necessary, and, to all appearance, will ever continue; for the experience of every age has demonstrated that, so great is the effect of capital and civilisation applied to manufactures, and so inconsiderable, comparatively speaking, their influence upon agriculture, that the old state can always undersell the new one in the industry of towns, and the new one undersell the old one in the industry of the country. The proof of this is decisive. England, by the aid of the steam-engine, can undersell the inhabitants of Hindostan in the manufacture of muslins from cotton growing on the banks of the Ganges; but with all the advantages of chemical manure and tile draining, it is undersold in the supply of food by the cultivators on the Mississippi.

This being a fixed law of nature, evidently intended to check the growth of old states, and promote the extension of mankind in the uncultivated parts of the earth, it is in vain to contend against it. So violently does free-trade displace industry on both sides, where it is fully established, that it is scarcely possible to conceive that two nations should at the same time run into the same glaring mistake; and thence the common complaint that no benefit is gained, but an infinite loss sustained, by its establishment in any one country, and that reciprocity is on one side only. As no adequate exchange of manufactures for subsistence is thus to be looked for, there must arise, in the old state, a constant exportation of the precious metals, attended by frequent commercial crises, and a constant increase in the weight of direct taxation. Should it prove otherwise, and two nations both go into the same system, it could lead to no other result but the stoppage of the growth of civilisation in the young one, and the destruction of national independence in the old. The former would never succeed in establishing commerce or manufactures, from the competition of the steam-engine in its aged neighbour; the latter would become dependent for subsistence on the plough of the young one. The rising agricultural state would be chained for ever to the condition of the serfs in Poland, or the boors in America; the stationary commercial state would fall into the degrading dependence of ancient Rome on the harvests of Egypt and Lybia.

Had it not been for the calamitous issue of the last harvest, in a part of the empire, it might have been difficult to say, to which side the weight of reason preponderated in these opposite arguments; and probably the people of the country would have continued permanently divided on them, according as their private interests or wishes were wound up with the buying and selling, or raising and producing classes in society. But an external calamity has intervened;—Providence has denied for a season, to one of the fruits of the earth, its wonted increase. The potato-rot has appeared; and nearly the whole subsistence of the people in the south and west of Ireland, and in the western Highlands of Scotland, has been destroyed. Between the failure in the potato crop, and the deficiency in that of oats, at least £15,000,000 worth of the wonted agricultural produce has disappeared in the British Islands. And the appearances which we now see around us are solely and entirely to be ascribed to that deficiency. No one need be told what these appearances are, or how deeply they have trenched upon the usual sources of prosperity in the empire: they have been told again and again, in parliament, at public meetings, and in the press, usque ad nauseam. Government has acted, if not judiciously, at least in the right spirit; its errors have been those of information, not of intention. The monster meetings, the flagrant ingratitude, the broken promises of the Irish Catholics, have been forgotten. England, as a nation, has acted nobly; she has overlooked her wrongs: she saw only her fellow-subjects in distress. £10,000,000 sterling have been voted by parliament in a single year for the relief of Irish suffering. Magnificent subscriptions, from the throne downwards, have attested the sympathy of the British heart with the tale of Irish and Highland suffering. But, notwithstanding all these astonishing exertions, and notwithstanding the existence of an unprecedented demand for labour in most parts of the country, in consequence of vast railway undertakings being on foot, on which at least £30,000,000 a-year must be expended for three or four years to come, distress is in many places most acute, in all severely felt. And what is very remarkable, and may be considered, as a distinctive sign of the times, specially worthy of universal attention, the suffering has now spread to those classes which are furthest removed from the blight of nature, and fastened upon those interests which, according to the generally received opinion, should have been benefited rather than injured by the calamity which has occurred.

That some millions of cultivators in the southwest of Ireland, and some hundred thousand in the west Highlands of Scotland, should be involved, literally speaking, in the horrors of famine, in consequence of the universal failure of the crop which constituted at once their sole object of labour and only means of subsistence, may easily be understood. That this alarming failure should raise prices of every sort of food to the scarcity-level in every part of the empire, is equally intelligible; and that government, in conformity with the universal sense of the nation, should, in such an extremity, throw open the ports to all kinds of food, and thereby let in an unexampled amount of foreign produce to supply the failure of that usually raised at home, is an equally intelligible consequence. It may not be considered surprising, that starving multitudes should issue in all directions from the scene of wo in the Emerald Isle, to seek relief in the industry or charity of Great Britain; and that all the great towns in the west of the island should be overwhelmed with pauperism and typhus fever, in consequence of their being the first to be reached by the destructive flood; although it was hardly to be expected that a hundred and thirty-two thousand applications for relief were to be made to the parochial authorities of Liverpool in a single week; and that they returned thanks to Heaven when the influx of Irish paupers was reduced to two thousand a-week! But the remarkable thing, and the thing which the commercial classes certainly did not expect, is this:—The calamity has now reached themselves, although the hand of Providence has only stricken the producing agricultural classes. Trade never was lower, monied distress never more severe, markets of all sorts never were more rapidly declining, than during a period when importations of all sorts have been most rapidly increasing. Nearly all the manufactories in Lancashire and Lanarkshire are put on short time; the public funds and stocks of all sorts are falling; the rate of bankers' advances in Scotland is raised to six per cent;⁷ seven per cent is charged in Liverpool and Glasgow on railway advances, and permanent loans are taken on railway debentures by the most experienced persons for three years at five per cent; the Bank of England has raised its discounts; our exports are rapidly declining; and all at a time, when the importation of all sorts of rude produce is on an unprecedented scale of magnitude, and the warehouses of Liverpool and Glasgow are literally bursting with the prodigious mass of grain stored in them from all parts of the world!

Fortunately, statistical documents exist, derived from official sources, which demonstrate beyond the possibility of doubt the coexistence of this vast increase in the amount of subsistence imported, and vast diminution in the amount of manufactures raised or exported in all parts of the British empire. A paper has lately been presented to parliament, showing the amount of imports, exports, and shipping during the year 1846, compared with 1845; from which this important and luminous fact is decisively established, how hard soever it may be to comprehend on the part of a large and influential portion of our politicians. From it it appears that the amount of subsistence imported in 1846 was six times greater than in 1845, although free-trade only commenced in the middle of the former year. It had reached the unparalleled amount in the latter year, of grain or flour, equal to five millions and a half quarters of grain. The tonnage inwards had turned five millions of tons; the custom-house duties, notwithstanding the numerous reductions of duties on imported articles, had risen £700,000 above the preceding year, and still kept above £22.000,000 sterling. Here, then, were all the sources and marks of prosperity, so far as they depended on importations, in a state of unexampled vigour and efficiency. Was this attended, as we were constantly told it would be, by a corresponding impulse given to our fabrics? Has the increased activity of our manufacturing cities compensated for the sterility of so large a part of our fields? The fact is just the reverse. Though free-trade has only been in operation for the last six months of 1846, they were signalised by a universal decline in all the principal articles of our exportation; and, by the unanimous voice of all practical men, trade, so far as exports or production is concerned, never was in a more depressed state than when, so far as imports are concerned, it had attained an unprecedented extension.

Never was a truer observation than is made by the Free-Traders, when they assert that goods will not be sent into a nation for nothing; and that, if our imports increase, something that goes out must have received a proportional augmentation. They forget only one circumstance, which, however, is of some little consequence, namely, that two things may go out, goods or specie. We have melancholy proof, in the present state of the money market, that the latter occurrence has taken place to an inconvenient and distressing extent, and that that is the direct cause of the extravagant rate of interest charged on bankers' advances, and the general scarcity of money felt throughout the country. That the capital of the country is not only sufficient, but abundant, is decisively proved by the fact that, notwithstanding the vast extent of the railway and other undertakings of a public character going on both in Great Britain and Ireland, government has borrowed the loan of £8,000,000 for the relief of Ireland at £3, 7s. 6d. per cent. The three per cents are about 90, yielding about the same return for money. But is currency equally abundant? So far from it, the bankers are charging six, and the persons making advances on railway concerns seven per cent. The holder of capital is glad if he can get three and a half per cent; but the holder of currency will not let his notes or sovereigns out of his hand for less than six or seven per cent. Can there be a more convincing proof that the currency of the country has been unduly drained away, and that the present monetary system, which forbids any extension of it in paper when the specie is abstracted, is based on a wrong foundation? Nor is it surprising that the currency should be straitened when it is notorious that every packet which goes out to America takes out vast sums to that continent to pay for the immense quantities of grain which are brought in. That drain only began to be felt in a serious manner within the last two months, because the great shipments from America took place in November and December last, when the failure of the potato crop in this country was fully ascertained; and consequently, the payments made in bills at three months, required to be made in February and March. And when it is recollected that the quantity of grain imported in seven months only—viz. from 5th July 1846, to 5th February 1847—exceeded six millions of quarters, at the very time that all our exports were diminishing; it may be imagined how prodigious must have been the drain upon the metallic resources of the country to make up the balance.⁸

Sorely perplexed with results so diametrically opposite to all their doctrines as to an increase of importation being necessarily attended with a proportionate increase of exportation, and of all apprehension of an undue pressure thence arising on the money market being chimerical, the Free-Traders lay it all upon the famine at home or abroad. The potato-rot, it is said, has concealed the effects of free-trade: distress in foreign nations has disabled them to purchase our manufactures in return for their rude produce; the increase of British importation has come too soon to operate as yet on their purchase of our manufactures. Here again the facts come decisively to disprove the theoretical anticipations. So far has the increase of our importations been from being sudden, and come last year for the first time on foreign nations, it has been remarkably gradual, and has gone on for years, having received only a great impulse in the articles on which the duty was lessened or removed last summer. Our general imports have steadily advanced for the last three years; and in particular articles the same progress has been conspicuous.⁹ How, then, has it happened that this general, continued, and steady increase of imports has issued only in a diminution to an alarming extent of exports? And observe, the countries from which we have imported so largely last year of grain and articles of subsistence, have not only not suffered by the scarcity general on the Continent, but have profited immensely by it. America has been blessed with a splendid crop of every species of grain; and, in consequence of the famine in Ireland and severe scarcity in France, prices of grain have risen to triple their former amount in the United States. It has risen so much in the southern states of Russia, that the Emperor of Russia has prohibited the farther exportation of it from the Black Sea. But all these floods of wealth flowing into the great grain states from the failure of the crops in France and Ireland, have been unavailing to produce any increased activity in our manufactures. On the contrary, they are all declining; and our immense importations of food are almost all paid for in direct exportations of the precious metals.

In truth, the general depression of manufactures in all the chief seats of our fabrics is so serious, that it is evidently owing to a much more general and stringent cause than the decline, considerable as it is, in our exports. It is not a decrease of two millions out of fifty-three millions—in other words, of less than a five-and-twentieth part—which will explain the general putting of mills in Lancashire and Lanarkshire on short time, the fall in the value of all kinds of stock and general decline in the vent for all kinds of manufactured produce. It is in the home markets that the real and blighting deficiency is experienced. And what is the cause of this decline in the home market? The Free-Traders are the first to tell us what has done it. It is the famine in Ireland. The total manufactured produce of the island is certainly not under £200,000,000¹⁰ annually, of which somewhat above £51,000,000 is for the foreign markets of the world. What is a deficiency of £2,000,000 in such a mass? If that had been the only decline that had taken place, it would have been scarcely perceptible, and would have left no visible effects on our commercial activity or general prosperity. It is clear that the great falling off must have been in the home market. Nor is it difficult to see how this has happened. Fifteen millions' worth of agricultural produce has disappeared; prices of wheat have risen in consequence to 80s. a-quarter, and oats in a still higher proportion; and an alarming drain upon the metallic resources of the country taken place. It is this which has paralysed the manufactures and depressed the commerce of the country. And when it is recollected that the home market now consumes little short of £150,000,000 a-year, it may easily be conceived what a serious check to industry a diminution to the amount of even an eighth or a tenth of the usual domestic purchases must occasion.