Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

What, then, is to be done to allay the present ferment, and tranquillise the country, when so rudely shaken by internal distress and external excitement? Are we to sit with our hands folded waiting till the tempest subsides? and if the present system is continued, is there any ground for believing it ever will subside? We answer, _decidedly not_. We must do something--and not a little, but a great deal. But what is required is not to augment the political power of the working classes, but to remove their grievances;--not to give them the government of the state, which they can exercise only to their own and the nation's ruin, but to place them in such a condition that they may no longer desire to govern it. This can be done only by abandoning the system of class government for the interest chiefly of the moneyed interests, and returning to the old system of general protective and national administration.

The first thing which is indispensably necessary towards the restoration of confidence and enterprise in the moneyed classes, and consequent employment and happiness in the poor, is to repeal the Bank Charter Acts of 1844 and 1845; and in lieu thereof to establish such a system as may provide a _safe, sufficient, and equable_ circulation for the empire. Above all, it is necessary to establish a circulation which shall be capable of _expanding_, instead of _contracting_, as specie is drawn out of the country. This is the one thing needful. Till this is done, every attempt to alleviate the existing misery, in a durable way, will prove abortive. Nobody wants to have French assignats issued amongst us, or to have every insolvent who chooses to call himself a banker authorised to issue currency _ad libitum_, and substantially usurp the Queen's prerogative by coining worthless paper into doubtful money. But as little can the nation go on longer with our circulation based exclusively on gold coin, and liable to be contracted as that coin is drawn out of the country; thereby _doubling the evil_, by first inducing speculation when specie is plentiful, and then withdrawing the currency when it becomes scarce. Still less can this be borne, when a system of free-trade has been established amongst us which has enormously increased our importations, especially in articles of food and rude produce, for which experience proves nothing but cash will be taken by the holders; and which, in consequence, has induced a consequent _tendency outward_ in the precious metals, from which, if no corresponding increase in domestic circulation is permitted, nothing but contraction to credit stoppage to speculation, and ruin to industry is to be anticipated. Least of all can such a system of drawing in paper as the gold goes out, be endured when political circumstances have so much increased the demand for the precious metals in the neighbouring states; when the revolutions in France and Germany have at once rendered hoarding general in those countries, and deluged us with their bankrupt stocks, for which nothing but specie will be taken in exchange; and when the commencement of hostilities, both in Italy and Germany, has occasioned the usual demand for gold, as the most portable of the precious metals, to meet the necessities of war.

The way in which the dreadful evils consequent upon commercial credit, and consequently universal employment, being kept dependent on such an unstable equilibrium as that which gold must ever, and most of all in such circumstances, afford, is perfectly evident. What is wanted is something to _equalise the supply of currency_; to contract paper when the precious metals are abundant, and, consequently, credit is becoming dangerously expansive, and to expand it when they are withdrawn, and, consequently, credit is in danger of being ruinously contracted. Sir R. Peel's system does just the reverse of this: it pours paper in profusion through the country, and consequently fosters absurd and improvident speculation, when specie is abundant, and draws it in suddenly, and with frightful rapidity, the moment that the precious metals begin to be withdrawn, either from the effect of extended importations or foreign warfare. To go right, and obviate the dreadful evils which their system has introduced, we have nothing to do but to establish a monetary policy _precisely the reverse_. What is wanted is a _sliding scale for paper-money_,--a system which shall tend to contract paper issues when specie is abundant, and pour them forth with restorative and beneficial vigour the moment that it begins to disappear. Thus, and thus alone, it was that Mr Pitt enabled the country to combat the dangers and surmount the difficulties of the revolutionary war.[9] Under Sir R. Peel's system, the nation, and every one in it, would have been bankrupt when the bank stopped payment in 1797, and we should long ere this have been irrecoverably rendered a province of France.

[9] Bank of England notes in circulation,--

1796 £10,729,520
1797 11,114,120
1800 £16,854,809
1810 21,019,609
--_Alison's England in 1815 and 1845, Appendix._

It belongs to practical men, versed in the mysteries of Lombard Street and the Stock Exchange, to say _how_ this important object is to be attained with due attention to the security of the notes issued, and sufficient safeguards against an over-issue, and consequent injury to capital, by an undue rise of prices owing to that cause. That the thing is _possible_ is self-evident. It appears to be essential to such a system that one of two things should be done. Either that the issuing of notes should be left to all banks, under the limitation that private banks should be obliged to take up their notes at all times,--in Bank of England paper or gold _or silver_--and deposit government securities to the extent of the notes so issued, to be appropriated to their payment in case of bankruptcy; and that the Bank of England should be bound to pay its notes in gold _or silver_, at the price those metals bear _at the time of presentment_. _Or_, that the issuing of notes, like the coining of money, should be confined entirely to government or its officers; and that the regulation of their amount should be entrusted to certain elevated functionaries-- like the commissioners of the national debt--with instructions to them to regulate their issues by the price of gold and silver, _increasing_ them when the rise in the value of those metals showed that they were leaving the country, and contracting them when the price fell, and it was evident that the necessity for an extended paper circulation was passing away.

Of course it would be necessary, under such a system, to impose some limit to the obligation of the Bank of England to pay in specie; but this might be done either by obliging that establishment to pay in either of those metals at the current price they bore in the market at the date of presentment, or by providing, that beyond a certain amount of notes payable on demand, as £40,000,000 for Great Britain, and Ireland, notes of a _different colour_, as red, should be issued, which were exchangeable for specie only when the precious metals had again fallen to a certain price in the market. These notes should be issued when gold rises to a certain price, and is evidently leaving the country--just as grain from government stores should be issued to the people in periods of scarcity--and drawn in when it returns, and the price falls. We throw these out only as crude suggestions, which may or may not be adequate to answer the purpose in view. What we rest upon, and press in the most earnest manner upon the consideration of the country, is the _absolute necessity_ of altering the present system of contracting the paper when the gold is taken away--in other words, _limiting the issues of bread when the beef fails_--and substituting for it one of extending the issue of paper when the precious metals are withdrawn; in other words, _increasing the issues of bread when those of beef have become deficient_.

The next measure which appears indispensable to secure internal tranquillity in the empire is, to make a very considerable government grant, to enable the railway companies to complete the principal lines now on foot, but still in an unfinished state. Every consideration of justice, expedience, and necessity, calls for such a grant. Many of these railways can be completed in no other way. Their directors have already borrowed all the money on the security of the undertaking which the law allows (a third;) and the diminished means and straitened credit of the shareholders, for the present at least, has disabled them from answering any further calls. The works must stand still, a deformity and a disgrace to the country, if government relief is not afforded. Parliament has declared the expedience of these lines by having passed the bills for their formation. Most, perhaps all, of these would have been completed ere this, had not the fetters imposed on the currency by the Bank Charter Act so straitened credit that it has become impossible. The very _name_ of government being willing to advance a certain sum, as two or three millions, to enable these companies to resume their work, would so restore and vivify credit, that it is probable a very small part of the sum voted would be taken up by these undertakings. The restoration of private credit, by such a measure on the part of government, would unlock the immense coffers of wealth which now, from the prostration of private credit, lie unemployed in the country. For, such is the strange and anomalous condition in which we stand, that while our streets are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers and artisans seeking employment, our banks and insurance offices are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed capital seeking investment. Yet these two superfluities cannot reach or relieve each other. Why? Because credit and currency are wanting to enable the one to pass over to the other. Let government lay the foundation of the bridge, and the communication, to mutual advantage, will soon be restored.

Incalculable is the benefit which such a resumption of these works would occasion, both to the individuals connected with, or employed by them, and the country at large. It would give bread at once to hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers, who have been seduced from their regular avocations by the high wages offered two years ago on the lines, and now find return to their former employments impossible, from these having been filled up: it would thin the Chartist and household suffrage meetings, by stopping the distress which fills them, and giving the working classes something better to do than listening to intemperate and seditious speeches: it would render productive the capital and labour already expended on these undertakings, and give their directors the means both of paying a dividend to the proprietors, and liquidating, at no distant period, the whole debt borrowed from the state: it would assuage and relieve unbounded distress, both in the once wealthy and the labouring classes of the state: it would vivify and facilitate commerce, by opening up means of communication through districts requiring it, and to the formation of which the sanction of the legislature on that ground has been given;--but most of all, it would evince, by deeds more eloquent than words, the sympathy of government with the sufferings of the people, wrest from the agitators their strongest arguments against the constitution as it stands, and relieve government of the fearful imputation to which it is now exposed, of first having encouraged the nation to engage in vast and important internal measures, and then deprived them, by legislative enactments, of the means of carrying them, into complete execution.

A third step which is indispensable to disarm the Chartist agitation and restore internal confidence and peace to the country, is to provide on a great scale, and by government machinery, for the relief of the _labour market_. Various causes have now conspired to render this a matter of paramount necessity. In Ireland, the long-continued agitation for Repeal, coinciding with the indolent and improvident habits of the people, the desolating effects of the potato famine of 1846, and the enervating consequences of the noble government grant of £10,000,000 to meet its necessities, joined to the seditious and treasonable efforts of the insane Young Ireland party, have so completely paralysed industry, that the Emerald Isle may now be regarded as little more than a huge workshop of pauperism, a sort of _officina pauperiei_, from whence starving multitudes are incessantly issuing to deluge the adjoining states. The number of emigrants who left it for distant colonies in 1847 was above one hundred thousand, but that is but a small part of the dreadful stream of pauperism which incessantly pours forth from its still crowded shores. In the first nine months of 1847, the number of Irish who came to Glasgow was 49,981: and that number has since been on the increase, for, from the last report of the parochial board of Glasgow, it appears, that in _five_ months and ten days preceding 25th April 1848, the number of Irish who landed in Glasgow was 42,288! This is at the rate of _nearly_ 100,000 _a-year_; and these squalid immigrants, let it be recollected, come, to a country where labour has already, from the effects of free-trade and a fettered currency, and the disastrous stoppage to orders produced by the French and German revolutions, become a perfect drug in the market; and when in and around the single city of Glasgow, above 100,000 human beings, including dependants, are already out of work! Individual charity, local efforts, are nugatory against such prodigious masses of pauperism; you might as well have expected the staff of the Russian parishes to have resisted the invasion of 1812.

Perhaps there is nothing which has occurred, in our time, so much to be regretted, as that the noble grant of ten millions from Great Britain to relieve the distress of Ireland during the famine, was not, in part at least, devoted to the purposes of emigration. We all know how it was spent. No inconsiderable portion was absorbed by the never-failing frauds of the local Irish agents employed in its distribution, and the remainder in making good roads bad ones. No part was employed in a form which could reproduce itself. There was one thing, and but one, _already good_ in Ireland, and that was the roads. On that one good thing the whole magnificent grant was wasted. Now half the grant, £5,000,000 sterling, would not only have provided 700,000 or 800,000 Irish with the means of crossing the Atlantic, but it would have transported them from the coast up the country to the frontier of the Forest. That is the great point which is never attended to by those who contend for free-trade in emigration; in other words, for liberty to transport the emigrants in crowded and crazy ships, half manned and ill provisioned, to the shores of America, and then leave them in sheds at the first harbour to starve or die of fever.

The advocates for free-trade in emigration forget that labour is as great a drug on the sea-coast of America as on the crowded shores of the Emerald Isle: it is no unusual thing to see five thousand emigrants, chiefly from Ireland, land at New York in a single day. But as much as labour is redundant in the American sea-port towns, it is scarce and in demand in the far west. Millions and tens of millions of unappropriated acres are there to be had for the asking; and an able-bodied man is sure to be instantly taken up at half-a-crown or three shillings a-day. The American papers say that "a stout European, with nothing in the world but his arms and his legs, _if moved on to the far west_, is worth _a thousand dollars_ to the United States." He is worth more to England; for, if settled in Canada, the Irish pauper immediately becomes a consumer of British manufactures to the extent of £2 a head: if to Australia, to the extent of £10 a head. The free-trader in emigration stops short of all these things: instead of transporting the emigrant to the edge of the Forest, where his labour could produce these results to himself and his country, it leaves him to pine, with his starving children, in a shed on the quay--a burden to the community he is fitted to bless, and carrying with him the seeds of a mortal typhus pestilence into any region which, if he survives, he may visit. As a proof that these statements are not overcharged, we subjoin an official return of the fate of the emigrants who landed under the free-trade system in Canada in 1847.[10] It displays the most stupendous instance that ever was exhibited of the manner in which the absurd principles of free-trade, when applied to pauperism, misery, and typhus fever, may convert what might, under proper management, be the greatest possible blessing to our own people and the colonies, into the greatest possible curse to both.

[10] FREE-TRADE IN EMIGRATION.--The numbers who embarked in Europe, in
1847, for Canada, were 90,006; viz., from England, 32,228; from
Ireland, 54,329; from Scotland, 3,752; and from Germany, 7,697. Of the
whole number, 91,882 were steerage passengers, 684 cabin, and 5,541
were infants. Deducting from this aggregate the Germans and the cabin
passengers, the entire number of emigrants who embarked at British
ports was 89,738, of whom 5,293 died before their arrival, leaving
84,445 who reached the colony. Of these, it is estimated that
six-sevenths were from Ireland. Among the thousands who reached the
colony, a large portion were labouring under disease in its worst
types, superinduced by the extremity of famine and misery which they
had suffered previous to embarkation. Of the 84,445 who reached the
colony alive, no less than 10,037 died at arrival--viz., at
quarantine, 3,452; at the Quebec Emigrant Hospital, 1,041; at the
Montreal Hospital, 3,579; and at other places in the two Canadas,
1,965--leaving 74,408. But of these no less than 30,265 were admitted
into hospital for medical treatment. Thus it will be seen that more
than one-seventh of the total embarkations died, that more than
one-eighth of the total arrivals died, and that more than one-third of
those who arrived were received into hospital. Up to the 12th of
November last, the number of destitute emigrants forwarded from the
agency at Montreal to Upper Canada was 38,781; viz., male adults,
12,932; female adults, 12,153, children under twelve, 10,616; infants
3,080.--_Report of Executive Council, Canada. Parl. Paper_, May 5,
1848.

What should be done is perfectly plain and generally acknowledged. You will not find ten men of sense or information in Great Britain, out of the precincts of the colonial and other government offices, who have two opinions on the subject. To relieve the labour market in Great Britain and Ireland, a great effort should immediately be made to transport some hundred thousand of _the very poorest class_, who _cannot emigrate on their own resources_, to Canada, the Cape, and Australia. Wages in the latter country are from 4s. to 5s. a-day for common, 6s. and 7s. a-day for skilled labour. Ireland is the great quarter to which this relief should be extended: if its surplus multitudes are taken off, the pressure on Great Britain will speedily be abated. Ships of war, to lighten the cost of transport, should be employed to transport the emigrants as they do our regiments. Government barracks should be established with proper officers, to receive the emigrants at their landing, separate the healthy from the sick, establish the latter in proper hospitals, so as to stop the spread of typhus fever, and forward, at the public expense, the healthy and active to the frontier. Other officers should be appointed there to allot to them ground, find them tools, furnish them with seed, or provide them with employment. This should be done to at least three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand emigrants annually for some years to come. We should like to see the Chartism or Repeal Mania which would long stand against such a course of humane, and withal wise and truly liberal, legislation.

But such great measures would require money. The average cost of each emigrant so transported and looked to in the colony would be £6 or £7; three or four hundred thousand persons so provided with the means of emigration would cost from £2,000,000 to £2,500,000 a-year. Granted.--Could the money be better bestowed? It would not yield no return, like that devoted to making good Irish roads bad ones: it would convert three hundred thousand paupers annually into consumers of British manufactures to the amount of three or four pounds a head: it would add £1,000,000 or £1,200,000 a-year to the export of British manufactures: it would secure a durable vent for our goods by planting British descendants in the New World: it would spread joy and comfort through Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, not less than Tipperary and Galway: it would extinguish--and extinguish by means of Christian beneficence--the flame of disaffection in the realm: it would give to our people all that French socialism has that is really beneficial, and save them from the unutterable and incalculable evils with which it is fraught: it would restore the balance between capital and industry, so grievously and ruinously deranged by the effects of free-trade of late years: it would go far to alleviate the misery which the pernicious dogmas regarding the currency have spread through the country. For blessings such as these, is the issue of exchequer bills to the extent of two or three millions a-year for some years an extravagant price to pay? Would not _five times the sum_ be at once borrowed by the state in a single year if war were to break out with France or America? Are the dangers of any such war to be compared to those which must inevitably be incurred if the present frightful mass of pauperism, idleness, and destitution, is allowed to continue unrelieved, and to go on increasing in the country? What must, in the end, be the result of such a state of things, but internal anarchy, foreign degradation, ultimate ruin? And is there no obligation upon those whose policy since 1846 has brought these calamities on the nation, to apply the national credit in the attempt at least to relieve them? Hear the just and eloquent observations of the _Times_ on the subject:--

"There is a multitudinous population growing yearly more
multitudinous, more exacting, more wretched. The end of each
succeeding year sees the addition of nearly a quarter of a
million of human beings to the inhabitants of this country.
The crowded seats of our manufactures and
commerce--Liverpool and Manchester, Nottingham and
Stockport--teem with the annual increment of creatures, who
exclaim, 'Give us work and bread.' How shall we meet this
cry? Shall we tell them that work is an affair of demand;
that demand depends upon competition; that competition is an
effect of population; that population outruns subsistence;
that they are too many; in a word, that they have no right
to exist? They would be bold men--that would be a bold
government, which should hold such language as this. With
Chartism in front, and discontent in the rear, it would be
perilous to begin such lecturing. But is not the principle
acted on, though not avowed, when--with a vast territorial
dominion, in which labour might grow into power, and poverty
into wealth--with mines of ore and fields of fertility--with
capital calling for labour, and adventure crying for
help--the State refuses to acknowledge the duty of settling
its redundant multitudes in its own distant lands, or
discharges it in a niggardly and grudging mood?

"The danger of such neglect or such parsimony is great. Time
glides on, adding alike to the numbers and the discontent of
the masses. Misery has strange axioms. The misery of
multitudes invents a wild policy. They whose normal
condition is endurance, will avenge themselves on the empire
by a normal agitation. They whom the national wealth does
not assist in bettering their fortune, will wage an
obstinate war against wealth, property, and order. We have
put down Chartism; but we have not conciliated discontent.
Let us beware lest the discontented become the majority.
Much depends upon ourselves, much on the use to which we
turn our existing establishments; and no establishments have
we more valuable than our colonies. A colonial empire
founded on the sparings of our superfluous wealth and the
cravings of our unemployed industry, would be a grander
commemoration of victorious order and triumphant law than a
century of hospitals or a myriad of wash-houses. Those who
were elated and those who were dejected by the 10th of
April, might alike view with pleasure the glorious fabric of
a new empire springing from the ruins of a broken faction
and the energies of a noble purpose, emblematic of the 'bow
of hope that spans the earth'--emblematic of the only faith
that ever yet inculcated liberty, fraternity, and equality
aright."--_Times_, May 12, 1848.

But towards finding this vent for our indigent and unemployed population at home, in the colonies, it is indispensable that the colonies should be preserved to the British crown; and from the effects of free-trade, it is very doubtful whether this will long be the case. Every body knows that the West Indies have been utterly ruined by the act of 1846: estates are valueless, and the planting of canes is rapidly ceasing. We know of an estate which, within fifteen years, was sold for £38,000, which was knocked down within these few weeks for £20! To give an idea of the feelings which the unexampled injustice to which they have been subjected have excited in these once noble and loyal islands, we subjoin an extract from the _Jamaica Despatch_ of April 7:--

"The affairs of Jamaica have now arrived at that desperate
crisis that there is, we believe, not one man in the colony
whose dependence rests solely on property invested within
it, that would not, could his single voice effect the
change, pronounce at once for adhesion to any other
government than that which has beggared him. Loyalty is, at
best, but a sentiment dependent for stability upon
circumstances. We love our country so long as, and because
we think, our country protects our lives, our liberties, and
our properties. We are patriots whilst the government of our
country secures to us those possessions which our industry
has earned for us, and which the written constitution has
guaranteed us. All human experience shows this limit to the
most exalted spirit of loyalty and patriotism. True it is we
have not the power of Canada. We are as unable as we are
unwilling to change our lot by force; but let England beware
lest passive alienation of every sentiment that can attach
us to her as a nation do not prove even more dangerous to
her colonial power than any active spirit of disaffection
could be. This magnificent colony has, indeed, been sinfully
and treasonably sacrificed. _The property of the Queen's
subjects has been confiscated without offence on their
part_; whilst, in a political point of view, each day
renders the colony less and less valuable to the Crown as a
national dependency. All commerce between Jamaica and the
mother country must speedily cease. Of exports there can be
none. Ministers--the fatal Whig Government, which has proved
to be the evil genius of the West Indies whenever destiny
has placed it in the ascendant--have pronounced the final
doom of West Indian cultivation. After August next, when the
present crops shall have been taken off, _five estates in
six must of necessity cease to become sugar
producers_."--_Jamaica Despatch_, April 7.

Canada will, ere long, if the present system be adhered to, follow the example of the West Indies; and having ceased, from the destruction of all its privileges, to have any interest in the maintenance of its connexion with Great Britain, it will take the first convenient opportunity to break it off. If we have lost our colonies, what security have we that they will not refuse to admit the stream of pauperism which now flows into them from the parent state: that they will not treat them as the fraternising French republicans did the British artisans, and send them all home? And even if they should still consent to receive them, what security should we have for the maintenance of export of the £16,000,000 of British manufactures which now go out to our colonies, if, like the Americans, they levy their whole revenue to maintain their independent government upon imports from this country? Recollect the exports to America, with 20,000,000 inhabitants, are not £10,000,000 annually, or 10s. a head; to Canada, with 1,900,000, about £3,800,000, or £2 a head; and to the West Indies, hitherto about £3,000,000 to 800,000 souls, or nearly £4 a head.

If the English like free-trade--if they are content to have their sovereigns by the million go out, as in 1847, to buy foreign grain, and foreign manufactures supplant British in all our staple branches of manufacture, by all means let them have it. Let them perpetuate the year 1847, with all its blessings, to all eternity. Free-trade is their own work; let them taste its fruits, and drain the cup they have selected to the dregs. But the colonies, be it recollected, had no hand in introducing that system. They were utterly and entirely disfranchised by the Reform Bill; schedules A and B cut up their representation by the roots. Free-trade was forced upon them by the representatives of Great Britain, not only without their concurrence, but in opposition to their most earnest remonstrances. Whatever may be said as to our present distress being the work of our own hands, and of our now reaping the fruits of the seed we have sown, that is wholly inapplicable to the colonies. Protection to their industry is what they have always prayed for; it is to them the condition of existence; it is the sole bond which unites them to the empire. Soon the bond and the connexion will be dissolved. And when dissolved, we shall have the woful reflection,--we shall incur the damning imputation with future times, that it was lost for no national or worthy object; from no foreign danger, or external catastrophe; but from the mere ascendency of interested legislation in the parent state: and that the greatest colonial empire that ever existed, that which had grown up during two centuries, and resisted the assaults of Napoleon in the plenitude of his power--was dissolved from the desire to maintain a principle which promised no greater benefit but, for a few years, to lower the price of sugar a penny a pound to the British consumers.

It is from measures such as we have now advocated, and from them alone, that we expect the extinction of the Chartist or household suffrage agitation, and the restoration of the wonted feelings of steady loyalty in the British nation. The subordinate matters, so much the objects of anxiety and care to the legislature, are not to be despised; but they will prove entirely nugatory, if measures such as these are not simultaneously and vigorously adopted. There is no way of really improving the condition of the working classes, but by augmenting the demand for labour. This is what they want; we never hear of them petitioning for wash-houses and cold baths, or a health-of-towns bill: it is a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work" which they always desire. Rely upon it, they are right. By all means give them wash-houses and cold baths; broad streets and common sewers; airy rooms and moderately sized houses; but recollect, if you do not give them work at the same time, it will all prove nugatory. Lodge them all by a miracle, or a successful revolution, in Buckingham Palace and Stafford House to-morrow, and in a week, if you do not give them the means of earning good wages, they will be as filthy, squalid, and diseased as ever. Thirty families will be located in the grand saloon; twenty-five in the green library; forty or fifty starving Irishmen will be comfortably lodged on the great stair. Typhus will spread, sedition will be hatched, treason prepared in the royal palaces, as well as in St Giles, or Manchester. There was not a more depraved or miserable set in Paris than the seven or eight hundred persons who squatted down in the Tuileries after the late revolution, and were only dislodged by bringing up artillery. Restore protection to colonial industry; relieve the great works in progress throughout the empire; engage in a great system of government emigration; give the country a currency adequate to its necessities, and commensurate to its transactions; and you may bid defiance to Chartist agitation, and drain off, if you cannot extirpate, the stream of Irish pauperism and treason.

STODDART AND ANGLING.[11]

[11] _The Angler's Companion to the Rivers and Lochs of Scotland._ By
THOMAS TOD STODDART. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London.
1847.

We do not lose a moment--we take the earliest opportunity--to thank Mr Stoddart for his book. Well, this is a cool piece of effrontery! So say some flippant folks, who fancy themselves abreast of the literature of the day, and in whose arid waste of mind, as in the desert, one may pick up now and then a few dates. They are so kind as to remind us that Mr Stoddart's book was published early in the spring of 1847. Apart altogether from our perfect knowledge of the time of the publication, we fling back the charge of effrontery with imperturbable contempt. The spring of 1847! There never was any such season. Who saw the glimpses of its smiles? who heard the chirping of its songs? who smelt its perfume? who felt its refreshing airs? who nibbled its green shoots? None of the human senses recognised its presence, or acknowledged its influence. Notorious it is that a tiny urchin in an infant school, whose little teeth had been previously knocking together in its head in shivering concussion for a month, refused, when brought up to the mellifluous passage, to perpetrate the vernal invocation of Mr James Thomson; and equally defying the allurements or the terrors--the sugar-cane or the birch-rod--the moral or the physical force of tuition, pronounced with Denmanic emphasis any allusion to "etherial mildness," or "showers of roses," even in the month of May 1847, to be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare. He never angled who speaks of the spring of 1847. The gentle craft perished for a while beneath the obdurate inclemency of the weather, and the ceaseless floods of snow-water, which polluted every lucid stream into "gruel thick and slab." We do not pretend to remember when the cloud and the tempest passed away; at all events, it was too late for angling purposes. In breezy, ay in stormy days, there are many bold and happy hits to be made by the cunning hand; but the zany, who throws his line in the teeth of a perpetual tornado, will catch, of course, nothing except what the indignant lexicographer has placed at the extremity farthest from the worm. Besides, there are those, including our author, who think that angling is a bilateral pastime. It is a part of their creed, (which we may look into hereafter,) that the silly fishes enjoy the fun of being captured, and often chuckle audibly on being "encreeled" by a triumphant artist like Mr Stoddart. And lordly salmon, or gentlemanlike trout, may probably dislike, as much as their adversary, an excess of piercing winds and dirty waters. In short, it was thoroughly understood, in the beginning of 1847, by the fisher and the fished, that the atmosphere was too preposterously rude to deserve encouragement at the hands or fins of either party. The temporary cessation of hostilities was accordingly complete. What could we do?

Little difficulty, to be sure, there was in finding pretexts daily for putting up the rod in the dining-room four or five times in the course of the forenoon, and executing, without line, a phantom cast of unerring accuracy across the table diagonally into an imaginary eddy rippling and softly gurgling on the floor round several bottles of Alsop's pale ale, linking sometimes, in our mood of finest frenzy, such preprandial dexterity, with the apparition in the same locality, at a later hour, of a cod's head and shoulders, not without oyster sauce. The music of the reel was also occasionally stirred by the supposititious tugs of a voracious gillaroo, (which is by far the dreadfullest fish of which we any where read,) enacted for the nonce by the same curly scion of truth who disdained to lend himself, in the miscalled spring of 1847, to the untruthful sycophancy of the bard of Ednam. The very fact, however, of its being "our young barbarian at play," and not a gillaroo in earnest, who was thus--

"Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony,"

carried the sound of the whirring thread to our ears "with a difference." The glancing armoury of the fishing-book, meriting better than Hector's helmet did the untranslatable epithet of Homeric monotony, was over and over again paraded and arranged, disordered and re-classified, extricated and intermingled, from pocket to pocket, until each particular hook in the pools and currents of our fancy became prospectively commemorative of multitudinous massacres, "making the green one red." But the basket or the bag, (and we prefer the latter,) would have felt, in the mean time, heavier under the burden of a single minnow than it ever did feel beneath the possible pressure of shoals of contingent bull-trouts. The experiment of wading through the house in enormous India-rubber boots, taking four steps at once in coming down stairs, and jumping suddenly from chairs upon the carpet, for the purpose of persuading ourselves that we were getting into deep water, afforded but a very transitory hallucination. The act of jerking at dinner a young turkey, with a gaff, from a remote dish, to our plate, did not elicit the general acknowledgment of its graceful precision which we had anticipated; while an excellent and polished steel-yard, with which, in the absence of a salmon, we had been practising in the kitchen on a casual leg of mutton, having dazzled, perhaps, the eye of the butcher's boy, and being forgotten by us for a brief hour or so, has been, "like the lost Pleiad, seen no more below." During such moments, the memory even of delectable old Isaac was losing a little of its perennial fragrance--the reminiscences of all kinds of fishes were beginning to stink in the nostrils. "Who comes here?--A grenadier;" and in walked "The Angler's Companion to the Lochs and Rivers of Scotland, by Thomas Tod Stoddart."

Ordinary mortals, to whom, as to Peter Bell, yellow primroses are simply yellow primroses, might instantly, upon getting the book, open it, read it, and be delighted with it. But we sat for six weeks gazing at the volume without daring or wishing to lay a finger upon it. There was a great deal for us to think about before spreading our sails for another voyage with an old companion. The fact is, that we were humming, after our own fashion, one of Mr Stoddart's angling songs at the moment when his new work was placed before us, Now, these songs were not published yesterday; and many a time and oft out of them had we amused ourselves by forming the liveliest picture of the angler's life, pursuits, meditations, and emotions. From his being up with the sweet thrushes to meet "the morn upon the lea," till "homeward from the stream he turns," we followed him in Stoddart's musical track. His call to "bring him osier, line, and reel"--his scrutiny of the airs and clouds of heaven--his communings with bird and bee, flower and fay--his welcome to the cuckoo--his blessing of the "spring-tide bland"--his entreaty to the winds to waken--

"For the low welcome sound of their wandering wings"--

his repose and summer trance, "beneath a willow wide"--his pensive musings, and comments, shaped by the enchanting realities around him, or by the pleasant shadows of his own memory and fancy--his feats of guile and skill--his patience and his toil--the excitement of his suspense--the exultation of his victory, and the joyousness and harmony which round his well-spent day,--all were represented and embodied in numbers than which none more melodious, heartier, or happier ever strengthened and gladdened, by stream or board, the disciples of Cotton and Walton. We paused before unfolding a new book; and then we read it thoroughly from beginning to end, without missing any word.

But time brings with it many vicissitudes. Winter, when nobody but a Stoddart fishes; swarms of European revolutions, which keep every thing, including fishing-rods, out of joint; and again, in this present 1848, a terrible spring-tide, which, standing sentinel at our doors with the keenness of a sword and the strength of a portcullis, has forbidden any body to think of fishing this year till June;--these things have inevitably, forcibly, and wisely obliged us to be silent. We take the earliest opportunity to thank Mr Stoddart for his book.

"Who is the happy warrior?" appears to us to be an interrogatory as nearly as possible destitute of all meaning. But upon the double hypothesis that it may have some meaning, and that we can paint in fresco, such a question might suggest an idea that the felicitous gentleman for whom the poet asks would be best pictured as Julius Caesar in the act of correcting the proof-sheets of his Commentaries. To do good and great actions is agreeable, but dangerous; to write well and nobly of the great and good things we have done is also agreeable, but troublesome; but when the danger and the trouble are both past and gone, to read what we have well written of what we have well done, with the conviction that an endless posterity will read it after us with pleasure and approbation, must be, we shall venture to imagine, most prodigiously agreeable to any respectable individual, whether he is actually a soldier, having purchased his commission at a heavy regulation price, or whether he is only provisionally obnoxious to be balloted for militia service, or accidentally liable to be called out, with a curse and a cutlet in his month, for the guerilla warfare of a special constable. We avow for ourselves, without a blush, that we are only one of those who may become warriors hereafter by statutory or municipal contingency. As yet we have not served in any campaign. On one occasion, indeed, the housemaid discovered, at early dawn, sprouting from the key-hole of the door, a notice, by which we were hastily summoned to quell a dreadful tumult at nine o'clock the night before. Late as the summons came, on reading it a thrill of posthumous glory permeated our frame; nor, when perusing in the newspapers at breakfast the eloquent recognition by the public authorities of the services of other special constables, could we repress the riotous throbbings of martial spirit and martial sympathy within us, as being one who, though _de facto_ inert in dressing-gown and slippers, was entitled _de jure_, as the notice testified, to be active with badge and baton. We severely reprimanded, of course, the housemaid for bringing into the house stray bits of paper, which might have wrapped up most deleterious combustibles. She promised to be more cautious in future; and it has so happened that the magistrates have never taken practical advantage of our vigilant anxiety to protect the tranquillity of the city. But we are well aware that it has ever been exactly with a corresponding spirit that we have studied the Gallic battles and campaigns of the great Roman, where we have been free alike from the risk of fighting, and the botheration of writing. Our impression is, therefore, on the whole, exceedingly strong that the happy warrior may be more faithfully portrayed by ourselves than by Cæsar.

According to these principles of interpretation, let us inquire, who is the happy angler? To such a question any body who, in the former case, prefers Cæsar's claim to ours, will not fail to reply by bawling out the name of Stoddart. The parallel is a very good one. There is nothing in the science of angling theoretically of which Mr Stoddart is ignorant; there is nothing in the art of angling practically which Mr Stoddart has not tried with his own hand. He has been writing the annals of a laborious, persevering, incessant, and successful experience. He tells others what they may do, by showing them vividly and precisely what he has himself done. It is the record of a conqueror whose career exhibits occurrences so numerous, various, and striking, that the simple narrative of events teaches general principles; the mere accumulation of facts causes theory to vegetate--the movements which lead to victory on a particular occasion are adopted as laws to regulate subsequent operations in similar circumstances; the strategy of the emergency is accepted as universally normal. In a history so instructive, there must necessarily be a remarkable amount of patience and zeal, assiduity and skill, quick apprehension, and sagacious reflection. And where, as in the present instance, it happens that all this information is communicated with healthy racy vigour, and picturesque effect of language, while a dewy freshness of enthusiasm exhilarates the whole composition, it is not surely very surprising that, comfortably pendulous in our rocking-chair, conscious of never having encountered a billionth part of the fatigues undergone by Mr Stoddart, and possessing, in the manageable volume in our hand, a complete repertory of the fruits of the toil, experience, and judgment of that "admirable Triton," we should thus complacently believe that we are the happy angler--leaving it of course to Mr Stoddart, if he likes, to be a Julius Cæsar.

From the frontispiece we start, and after perambulating the book, to the frontispiece we return. "A day's fishing" will then be wondrously intelligible, and ought to be regarded with an angler's love, and an angler's pride. The picture from which the engraving is taken has been long familiar to us. Who painted it? At the left-hand corner of the plate the artist's name is legible enough; but there is much more, besides the name, printed in sympathetic ink which is visible only to the eye of the initiated. A word in thine ear, gentlest of piscatorial readers! The skill of the pencil is the animated reflection of the skill of the fishing rod. Nothing finny has the painter drawn which the angler has not killed. On the canvass his faithful brush has placed nothing which his success as an angler has not enabled him to observe for himself, to mark, and to daguerreotype in his inmost soul. No graceful outline has he traced; no gorgeous bulk has he stretched out in massive breadth or wavy length; no small head has he delicately curved; no, flood of light has he poured on gleaming panoply of interwoven scales of gold and silver; no shifting ray of exquisite colour has he caught in the very instant of brilliant evanescence; no purple spot or crimson star has he made to shine with distinctive brightness on the flank; no aureate or orange tint has he permitted to fade away along the body into pearly whiteness; no fin quivers; no tail curls; no gill is muddy red; no eye is lustreless,--without or beyond the bidding, the teaching, the guarantee, and express image of nature. Pity it is that we should not feel at liberty to say a word or two of other matters--of a happy temper, which has cheered us with its mellow sunshine on many a raw and cloudy day; or of a richly-stored mind, which, when fish were sulky, has often made the lagging hours spin on with jocund speed. Almost, under this hot bright sky, we are tempted, unbidden, to enter the studio, and ask to share with yon sequestered stags the shelter of the favourite pines. But we dare not; for we know the man as well as the artist and angler. We know both the anglers. It is, in sooth, fitting that GILES should illustrate STODDART.

Is not angling cruel? Now, before attempting any responsive observation, be so good as to read the following impetuous passage:--

"Is it not, for instance, in the attitude of hope that the
angler stands, while in the act of heaving out his flies
over some favourite cast? Of hope increased, when he
beholds, feeding within reach of his line, the monarch of
the stream? But now, mark him! He has dropt the hook
cautiously and skilfully just above the indicated spot; the
fish, scarcely breaking the surface, has seized it. A fast,
firm hold it has, but the tackle is fine, and the trout
strong and active. Look! how the expression of his features
is undergoing a change. There is still hope, but mingled
with it are traces of anxiety--of fear itself. His
attitudes, too, are those of a troubled and distempered man.
Ha! all is well. The worst is over. The strong push for
liberty has been made, and failed. Desperate as that
summerset was, it has proved unsuccessful. The tackle--knot
and barb--is sufficient. Look now at the angler. Hope with
him is stronger than anxiety, and joy too beams forth under
his eyelids; for lo! the fish is showing symptoms of
distress. No longer it threatens to exhaust the winch-line;
no longer it combats with the rapids; no more it strives,
with frantic fling or wily plunge, to disengage the hook. It
has lost all heart--almost all energy. The fins, paralysed
and powerless, are unable for their task. So far from
regulating its movements, they cannot even sustain the
balance of the fish. Helpless and hopeless it is drawn
ashore, upturning, in the act of submission, its starred and
gleamy flanks. The countenance of the captor--his movements,
(they are those which the soul dictates,) are all joyous and
self-congratulatory. But the emotion, strongly depicted
though it be, is short-lived. It gives way successively to
the feelings of admiration and pity--of admiration, as
excited on contemplating the almost incomparable beauty of
the captive, its breadth and depth, the harmony of its
proportions, as well as the richness and variety of its
colours; of pity, as called forth in accordance with our
nature,--an unconscious, uncontrollable emotion, which
operates with subduing effect on the triumph of the moment.

"And now, in their turn, content and thankfulness reign in
the heart and develop themselves on the countenance of the
angler; now haply he is impressed with feelings of adoring
solemnity, stirred up by some scene of unlooked-for
grandeur, or the transit of some sublime phenomenon. I say
nothing of the feelings of disappointment, anger, envy, and
jealousy, which sometimes find their way into the bosom, and
are portrayed on the features even of the worthiest and
best-tempered of our craft. Too naturally they spring up and
blend themselves with our better nature; yet well it is that
they take no hold on the heart--scorching, it may be true,
but not consuming its day of happiness.

"Hence it is, from the very variety of emotions which
successively occupy the mind, from their blendings and
transitions, that angling derives its pleasures; hence it
holds precedence as a sport with men of thoughtful and ideal
temperament; hence poets, sculptors, and philosophers--the
sons and worshippers of genius--have entered, heart and
hand, into its pursuit. Therefore it was that Thomson,
Burns, Scott, and Hogg, and, in our present day, Wilson and
Wordsworth, exchanged eagerly the gray-goose quill and the
companionship of books, for the taper wand and the
discourse, older than Homer's measures, of streams and
cataracts. Therefore it was that Paley left his meditative
home, and Davy his tests and crucibles, and Chantrey his
moulds, models, and chisel-work,--each and all to rejoice
and renovate themselves; to gather new thoughts and
energies, a fresh heart and vigorous hand, in the exercise
of that pastime which is teeming with philosophy."