Chapter VII: Part 7

On his way from Barcelona, Baron Vaerst met his brother-baron, De Meer, then captain-general of Catalonia, who swayed the province with an iron rule that made him alike dreaded and detested. Such severity was necessary, for the Catalans are a troublesome and mutinous race, and Barcelona especially is the headquarters of sedition and discontent. Baron de Meer had a strong garrison at his orders, the city lies under the guns of Monjuich, and the breadth of the long handsome streets and open squares facilitate the suppression of insurrection. Nevertheless, it had been thought advisable to fortify and garrison several of the large buildings, and, in spite of the opposition of the magistrates and inhabitants, to break through various streets, so as to form long avenues, that might be swept in case of need by artillery. These extreme measures were imperatively called for by the numerous outbreaks in Catalonia, a province which gives more trouble to the government than all the rest of Spain. Barcelona has had a bad reputation for some hundred years past. It is a resort of Italian carbonari, German republicans, and discontented restless spirits from various countries; also the headquarters of sundry revolutionary committees, and of the secret society known as the _Vengeurs d'Alibaud_, to which that helpless and imbecile Bourbon, Don Francisco de Paula, was said, a short time since, to be affiliated. Alibaud himself lived in Barcelona, and only left it to go to Paris and make his attempt on the life of the King of the French. In one month (January 1845) sixty-two persons died a violent death in Barcelona, of whom fifty-one were murdered and five executed, whilst six committed suicide. As regards popular commotions and revolts, so frequent of late years, Baron Vaerst, who has difficulty in admitting that any thing can go on well under a "so-called liberal system," maintains that the Barcelonese have strong cause and excuse for rebellion in the injury done to their manufactures by the close alliance between Spain and England. He apparently imagines the Spanish tariff to be highly favourable to English fabrics, and sighs over the misfortunes of the hardly-used manufacturers, whose smoking chimneys he complacently contemplated from the lofty battlements of Monjuich. In short, he indulges in a good deal of argument and assertion, which sound well, but, being based on false premises, are worth exactly nothing. When he talks of the Catalonian manufactures as important and flourishing, he is evidently ignorant that they are chiefly supplied with foreign goods, smuggled in and stamped with the mark of the Barcelona factories! This fact is notorious, and susceptible of easy proof. The amount of raw cotton imported into Spain would make, as the returns show, but a very small part of the goods issued from Spanish manufactories. Were the contraband system exchanged for legitimate commerce, at moderate duties, a few cotton-spinners, _alias_ smugglers, might suffer in pocket, but the increased trade of Catalonia would employ far more hands than would be thrown out of work by putting down a few badly managed spinning-jennies. The bigoted and brutal Catalan populace, beyond comparison the worst race in the Peninsula, cannot comprehend this fact; and the cunning few who do comprehend it find their interest in suppressing the truth. The French, too, who well know that in a fair market English cottons would beat their's out of the field, take care, by means of such emissaries as Mr Lesseps, to keep up the cheat. So, whenever there is a talk of reducing the present absurd tariff of Spain, the Barcelonese fly to arms, throw up barricades, bluster about English influence, and, whilst thinking to defend their own interests, serve as blind instruments to a disreputable foreign potentate. The Spaniards are a very jealous and a very suspicious people, and have been ill-treated and imposed upon until they have acquired the habit of seeking selfish motives for the actions of all men. Such over-wariness defeats its object. A section--by no means a majority--of the Spanish nation look upon England as having only her own interests in view when she seeks a commercial treaty with Spain, arranged on fair and reasonable bases. Nothing can be more erroneous and delusive. England would gain very little by such a treaty; the great advantage would be derived by Spain, who now receives duty on one-eighth of the British goods annually imported. We need not say how the other seven-eighths enter. Spain has seven hundred and ten leagues of coast and frontier. Gibraltar and Portugal are convenient depôts, and there are one hundred and twenty thousand professional smugglers in Spain, the flower of the population, fine, active, stalwart fellows, imbued with hearty contempt for revenue officers, and whom we would back, after a month's organisation, against the entire Spanish army, now amounting, we believe, under the benign system of Christina, Narvaez, and Company, to something like a hundred and eighty thousand men. In short, it is notorious that Spain is inundated with English and French goods. "In this state of things," says an able and enlightened writer,[4] "I put the following dilemma to Spanish manufacturers:--Your manufactures are either prosperous, or the contrary. In the former case, conceding that the contraband trade knows no other limits to its criminal traffic than those of the possible consumption, the competition from which you suffer is as great as it can be. What does it signify to you, then, whether the goods enter through the custom-house, on payment of a protective duty, or are introduced by smugglers at a certain rate of commission? And if your manufactures are not prosperous, what need you care whether foreign goods enter by the legal road or by illicit trade?" It were impossible to state the case more clearly and conclusively. The smugglers charge fixed per-centages, according to the nature of the goods and the place they are to be conveyed to. These rates are as easily ascertained as a premium at Lloyd's or the price of rentes on the Paris Bourse. Let the duties of foreign manufactures be regulated by them, and smuggling, one of the prominent causes of the demoralisation and misery of Spain, is at once knocked upon the head. At the same cost, or even at a slight advance, every importer will prefer having his goods through the legitimate channel, instead of receiving them crushed into small packages, and often more or less damaged by their clandestine transit. And the money now paid to the smuggling insurers would flow, under the new order of things, into the Spanish treasury, a change devoutly to be desired by Spanish creditors of all classes and denominations.

[4] Marliani, _Histoire Politique de l'Espagne Moderne_, ii. 440.

Between Barcelona and Gerona the Baron was much amused by the energetic proceedings of a _zagal_, or Spanish postilion, who jumped up and down from his seat, with the horses at full gallop, to the great peril of his neck, and sang never-ending songs in praise of Queen Christina and of the joyous life of a smuggler, only interrupting his melody to shout an oft-repeated _tiro! tiro!_ (pull! pull!) and to swear Saracenic oaths at his steaming mules. "By the holy bones of Mahomet!"[5] he would exclaim, "I will make thee dance, lazy _Valerosa_! (the valorous;) rebaptize thee with a cudgel, and then hang thee. Holy St Anthony of Padua never had a lazier jackass!" "And then he ran himself breathless by the side of poor Valerosa, and screamed himself hoarse, and flogged and flattered; and the oddest thing was, that the beasts seemed to understand him, and showed fear or joy as he blamed or praised them. Each mule had a name of its own, pricked up its long ears when addressed by it, and testified, by more rapid movements, that it well knew what laziness would entail. Manuela, Luna, Justa, Generala, Valerosa, Casilda, and Pilar, the zagal loved them all, and preferred caressing to punishing them. If horses are generally bad in France, it is assuredly in great measure because no nation in the world are more unfeeling to their beasts, especially to horses, than the French. A large proportion of the cart-horses are blind from cuts of the whip in the eyes; the postilions cannot harness their cattle without giving them violent kicks in the side; and one sees the poor brutes tremble at the approach of their tyrants. Abuse, oaths, and blows are the order of the day. The Arab makes much of his noble steed, and even the rude Cossack looks to his horse's comfort before providing for his own."

[5] _El santo zancarron_, (literally, the holy dry bone,) an
expression handed down from the Moors, and very dangerous to be used
for some time after their expulsion, when an oath "by Mahomet"
sufficed to make the utterer suspected by the Inquisition of addiction
to the forbidden faith. It was to escape all suspicion of such
addiction that the Spaniards became great consumers of pig's flesh,
still a standard dish, in one form or other, at every Spanish dinner.
Probably it was the excellent quality of Spanish pork, as much as the
fear of the Inquisition, that perpetuated this custom.

The town of Gerona, well fortified, and possessing a strong citadel, is celebrated for its noble defence against the French, related, in interesting detail, by Toreno, in his "History of the War of Independence." Its brave governor, Don Mariano Alvarez, having few provisions, and a large garrison, economised the former, and was prodigal of the latter. In repeated sorties he inflicted severe loss on the besiegers. One officer, ordered on a very perilous expedition, inquired, with some anxiety, what point he was to fall back upon. "Upon the churchyard," was the consolatory reply of Alvarez. When things came to the pass that five reals were paid for a mouse, and thirty for a cat, and somebody talked of capitulating, Alvarez swore he would have the offender slaughtered and salted, and would do the same by all who hinted at surrender. After nine months' continual fighting, all provisions being exhausted, the fortress was given up. The garrison had dwindled from fifteen thousand to four thousand men, and only a small portion of these were capable of bearing arms. The protracted and glorious defence was to be attributed--so some of the Spaniards thought--to the especial protection of the holy St Narcissa. That respectable lady is the patroness of Gerona, where her ashes repose; during the siege, a cocked and feathered hat was put upon her statue, and she received the title of _generalissima_. Figueras, the last town of any note before reaching the French frontier, is also a fortified place. Taken by the French in the Peninsular war, it was recaptured by the Spaniards, who entered in the night through a subterraneous passage. Its citadel of San Fernando is one of the strongest in Spain, and can accommodate fifteen thousand men. The town itself is insignificant, and only celebrated for the scale and solidity of its fortifications, which remain as a monument of former Spanish grandeur. But they lack completion, and are ill situated, which caused some connoisseur in the art to say that the mason should have been decorated, and the engineer flogged.

Pau, the favourite resort of English sojourners in southern France, was selected by the Baron and his companions for their winter-quarters; and although, upon their arrival there, the severe cold and heavy snow induced them to doubt the truth of the praises they had heard of its mild and beautiful climate, they soon became convinced the encomium was well merited. The meadows remained green the whole winter through, and once only, in the month of March, came a fall of snow, which disappeared, however, in forty-eight hours. From their windows, they commanded a magnificent view southwards, bounded in the distance by the lofty summits of the Pyrenees, supreme amongst which rises the snow-covered dome of the _Pic du Midi_,--"a magnificent amphitheatre, whose aspect is most sublime at night, in the full moon-light. Morning and evening, at the rising and setting of the sun, the snowy points of the _Pic_ resemble great spires of flame, blazing through the gloom. With incredible suddenness darkness covers the lowlands, whilst the tall peaks, clothed in ice, still remain illuminated, gleaming far and wide above the broad panorama of mountains, like isolated lighthouses on the shores of the mighty ocean." Many of the Pyrenean mountains are known as the _Pic du Midi_; there is a _Pic du Midi d'Ossau_, another of _Bigorre_, a third of _Valentine_, &c.; but the _Pic du Midi de Pau_ is the highest, and rises fifteen hundred and thirty-one toises (nearly ten thousand English feet) above the level of the sea. In like manner many rivers bear the name of _Gave_, a Celtic word, equivalent to mountain stream; but the Gave de Pau is the greatest and most celebrated of the family. The Pic du Midi, from certain peculiarities of position, was long thought the highest of the Pyrenees, till it was ascertained that the Monperdu, the Vignemale, and the Maladetta, are in certain parts more than a thousand feet higher.

Concerning the English residents at Pau, M. Vaerst says little or nothing, except that he and his companions, although unprovided with introductions, received visits and invitations from them, attentions for which they probably had their titles to thank. The Baron seems to have taken more pleasure in the society of the friendly French prefect, M. Azevedo, with whom he had strenuous discussions on the everlasting subject of the Rhine frontier. The Frenchman, like many of his countrymen, insisted that the far-famed German stream is the natural boundary of France, a proposition which M. Vaerst could by no means allow to pass unrefuted. Indeed, the excellent Baron seems particularly sensitive on this subject, for in various parts of his book we find him in hot dispute with presumptuous Gauls who hinted a wish to see the tricolor once more waving on the banks of that river, which Mr Becker has so confidently affirmed they shall never again possess. The Baron considers a hankering after the Rhine to be ineradicably fixed, in every Frenchman's breast, and now and then shows a little uneasiness with regard to the strife and bloodshed which this unreasonable longing may sooner or later engender. We do not learn how he fared in his discussions at Pau and elsewhere, but in his book he advances eloquent and learned arguments against French encroachment. In the very midst of them he is unfortunately interrupted by a severe attack of illness, against which he bears up with much philosophy and fortitude. "If pain purifies and improves, as I have often been told, I ought assuredly to be one of the best and purest of men. But although I have never yet lost courage under physical or any other suffering, and have ever remained cheerful as in the joyous days of my youth, I have yet no wish to continue thus the darling of the gods, who, as it is said, chastise those they best love." His patience, proof against pain, gave way at last, under a less acute but more teasing infliction, and he breaks out into a humorous anathema of the well-meaning tormentors who pestered him with prescriptions. Every body who came within ten paces of him had some sovereign panacea and unfailing remedy to recommend. He began by taking a note of all these good counsels, with no intention to follow them, but out of malicious curiosity to see how far the persecution would extend. At the end of a week he abandoned the practice, finding it too troublesome. In that short time, he had been strongly enjoined to consult twenty different physicians, and to make trial of fourteen mineral baths. One kind friend insisted on bringing him a mesmeriser, another a shepherd, a third an old woman, all of whom had already wrought marvellous cures. One recommended swan's down, another a cat's skin, another talismanic rings and a necklace of wild chestnuts. He was enjoined to sew nutmegs in his clothes, to wear a certain sort of red ribbon round his throat, to cram himself with sourkraut. And each of his advisers thought him disgustingly obstinate because he turned a deaf ear to their advice, and discredited the virtues of their medicaments, preferring those of his doctor. "I should long since have been a _millionaire_," he says, "if every good counsel had brought me in a louis-d'or. And truly I uphold the old Spanish proverb against advice-givers: _Da me dinero, y no consejos_--Give me money, and not advice."

Chained to the chimney corner by the unsatisfactory state of his health, the Baron devoted himself to study and literary occupation, pored over Froissart, acquired the old French, and revelled in the gallant pages of Queen Margaret of Navarre. At Pau, indeed, his third Pyrenean expedition concludes, but not so his book, for which he finds abundant materials in the reminiscences of his two previous journeys. His account of the Basques is especially interesting, containing much that could only have been gleaned by long residence in the country, and great familiarity with the usages of that singular people. Few in number, these dwellers amongst the western Pyrenees are formidable by their courage and energy; and from the remotest periods of their history, have made themselves respected and even feared. Hannibal treated them with consideration, and was known to alter his proposed line of march to avoid the fierce attacks of this handful of mountaineers. The Roman proconsuls sought their alliance. Cæsar, against whom, and under Pompey's banners, they arrayed themselves, was unable to subdue them. After the fall of Rome, the men of the Pyrenees were attacked in turn by Vandals, Goths, and Franks; their houses were destroyed, their lands laid waste, but they themselves, unattainable in their mountains, continued free. A deluge of barbarians overflowed Gaul and Spain; conquerors and conquered amalgamated, and divided the territory amongst them; still the Pyreneans continued unmixed in race, and undisturbed in their fastnesses. The vanquished Goth retreated before the warlike and encroaching Saracen, and the crescent standard fluttered amongst the mountains of northern Spain. It found no firm footing, and soon its bearers retraced their bloody path, strewing it with the bones of their best and bravest, and pursued by the victorious warriors of Charles Martel. But of all the historical fights that have taken place in the Pyrenees, there is not one whose tradition has been so well preserved as the great defeat of Charlemagne. The fame of Roland still resounds in popular melody, and echoes amongst the wild ravines and perilous passes, whose names, in numerous instances, connect them with his exploits.

The Basques are brave, intelligent, and proud,--simple but high-minded. They have ever shown a strong repugnance to foreign influence and habits; and have clung to old customs and to their singular language. It is curious to behold half a million of men--whose narrow territory is formed of a corner of France and another of Spain, closely hemmed in, and daily traversed, by hosts of Frenchmen and Spaniards--preserving a language which, from its difficulty and want of resemblance to any other known tongue, very few foreigners ever acquire. They have their own musical instruments--not the most harmonious in the world; their own music, of peculiar originality and wildness; their own dances and games, dress and national colours, all more or less different from those of the rest of Spain. There is no doubt of their being first-rate fighting men, but the habit of contending with superior numbers has given them peculiar notions on the subject of military success and glory. They attach no shame to a retreat or even to a flight; but those antagonists who suppose that because they run away they are beaten, sooner or later find themselves egregiously mistaken. Flight is a part of their tactics; to fatigue the enemy, and inflict heavy loss at little to themselves, is upon all occasions their aim. They care nothing for the empty honour of sleeping on the bloody battle-field over which they have all day fought. They could hardly be made to understand the merit of such a proceeding; they take much greater credit when they thin the enemy's ranks without suffering themselves. And if they often run away, they are ever ready to return to the fray. They are born with a natural aptitude for the only species of fighting for which their mountainous land is adapted. We have been greatly amused and interested, when rambling in their country, by watching a favourite game frequently played upon Sundays and other holidays. The boys of two villages meet at an appointed spot and engage in a regular skirmish; turf and clods of earth, often stones, being substituted for bullets. The spirit and skill with which the lads carry on the mock-encounter, the wild yells called forth by each fluctuation of the fight, the fierceness of their juvenile faces, when, after a well-directed volley, one side rushes forward to the charge, armed with the thick bamboo-like stems of the Indian corn, their white teeth firmly set, and a barbarous Basque oath upon their lips, strongly recall the more earnest and bloody encounters in which their fathers have so often distinguished themselves. These contests, which sometimes become rather serious from the passionate character of the Basques, and often terminate in a few broken heads, are encouraged by the elder people, and compose the sole military education of a race, who do not fight the worse because they are unacquainted with the drill-sergeant, and with the very rudiments of scientific warfare. The tenacity with which these mountaineers adhere to the usages of their ancestors, even when they are unfitted to the century, and disadvantageous to themselves, is very remarkable. The Basque is said to be so stubborn, that he knocks a nail into the wall with his head; but the Arragonese is said to surpass the Basque, inasmuch as he puts the head of the nail against the wall, and tries to drive it in by striking his skull against the point. When, in the ninth century, the French Kings conquered for a short time a part of the Basque provinces, they prudently abstained from interference with the privileges and customs of the inhabitants, and when the whole of Spain was finally united into one kingdom under Ferdinand the Catholic, the Basques retained their republican forms. Every Basque is more or less noble. The genealogical pride, proverbially attributed to Spaniards, is out-heroded by that of these mountaineers, amongst whom a charcoal-burner or a muleteer will hold himself as good and ancient a gentleman as the best duke in the land. "In the valley of the Bastan," says the Baron, "all the peasants' houses are decorated with coats of arms, hewn in stone, and generally placed over the house door; the owner of the smallest cottage is rarely without a parchment patent of nobility. A peasant of that valley once told me his family dated from the time of Queen Maricastana. _El tiempo de la reyna Maricastana_, is a proverb implying, 'from time immemorial.'" Certainly there is no country where such equality exists amongst all classes; an equality, however, rather pleasing than disagreeable in its results. The demeanour of the less fortunate of the people towards those whom wealth and education place above them, is as remote from insolence and brutality, as it is from cringing servility. The poorest peasant, tilling his patch of maize, answers the question of the rich proprietor, who drives his carriage past his cottage, with the same frank courtesy and manly assurance, with which he would acknowledge the greeting or interrogatory of a fellow-labourer.

Baron Vaerst indulges in some curious speculations as to the origin of this flourishing and unmixed race of mountaineers. "Some say they are an aboriginal tribe, and that their language was spoken by Adam(!); others set them down as an old Phœnician colony, whilst others again vaguely guess them to be the descendants of a wandering horde from the north or east. The language is like no other, and those who speak it know nothing of its history. Except before God, these people have never bent the knee in homage, and have never paid taxes, but only a voluntary tribute, collected amongst themselves.

"Proud of the independence they have so well defended, they for the most part, in order to preserve their nationality, have married amongst themselves. The Basque tongue has one thing in common with those of Spaniard Gascony, namely, the indiscriminate use of the B. and the V. They say indifferently Biscaya or Viscaya, Balmaseda or Valmaseda. The story is a well-known one, of the Spaniard who maintained French to be a miserable language, because in speaking it no distinction was made between a widow and an ox,--_veuve_ and _bœuf_ receiving from him pretty nearly the same pronunciation. I have still a letter from the well-known Echeverria, addressed to me as Baron Baerst. Scaliger, when speaking of the Gascons and of their custom of confounding the _v_ and _b_, says; _felicitas populi quibus bibere est vivere_." Many troubadours have written and sung in the Gascon dialect; the memory of one of the most ancient of them is preserved in popular legends on account of his tragical fate. Beloved by an illustrious lady, the wife of Baron Castel Roussillon, he was enticed into an ambuscade and murdered by the jealous husband, who then tore out his heart, and had it dressed for the Countess's dinner. The meal concluded, he produced the severed head of her lover, told her what she had eaten, and inquired if the flavour was good. "_Si bon et si savoureux_," she replied, "_que jamais autre manger ne m'en ôtera le gout_." And she threw herself headlong from her balcony. The nobles of the land, the King of Arragon at their head, held the conduct of the husband so unworthy that they threw him into prison, confiscated his estates, and united in one grave the mortal remains of the unfortunate lovers.

Whilst the Basques and Bearnese enjoyed a long series of tranquil and happy years, Roussillon was a prey to bloody wars and to the ravages of ruthless conquerors. Goths and Saracens, Normans, Arragonese, and French, fought for centuries about its possession. This state of perpetual warfare naturally had great influence on the character of the people, who continued wild and savage much longer than their neighbours. The passes of the Pyrenees were a constant motive for fresh hostilities, and pretext for lawless aggression. The rich committed every sort of crime, without being made personally answerable. One of the old laws of Roussillon, significant of the state of the country, fixes the rate of payment at which crimes might be committed. Five _sous_ were the fine for inflicting a wound; if a bone was broken, it was ten times as dear; a box on the ear cost five _sous_, the tearing out of an eye a hundred; a common murder three hundred _sous_, that of a monk four hundred, and of a priest nine hundred. Other luxuries in proportion. From which curious statement, a priest in those days appears to have been worth three laymen, and a gouged eye to have been estimated at twice the value of a broken bone. Flesh-wounds and punches on the head were decidedly cheap and within the reach of persons of very moderate means. For the delightful state of comfort and prosperity, indicated by this tariff of mutilation and manslaughter, the men of Roussillon had to thank their last Count, who, in the year 1173, bequeathed his dominions to Alphonso II. of Arragon. Thence eternal strife with the French, who did not choose to see the key to their country in the hands of a Spanish prince; and Roussillon, the bone of contention, was also the battle ground. Nearly five centuries elapsed before the treaty of the Pyrenees put an end to these dissensions.

The sea, the Ebro, and the Pyrenees, form the natural boundaries and bulwarks of the Spanish Basque provinces. Favoured by these defences, the three provinces were the natural and safe refuge of the Iberians, when hunted by various conquerors from the plains of southern and middle Spain. Of Navarre, only the mountainous portion afforded similar safety; the levels, and especially the rich banks of the Ebro, were occupied by the victors. Biscay, Alava, and Guipuzcoa were never under the dominion of the Moors, who obtained quiet possession of Navarre as far as Pampeluna, but only held it about twelve years. Each of the three provinces has its own constitution and rights, peculiar to itself, some of the privileges and laws being of a very original character. In Alava, the general procurator, or chief of the provincial government, swears every year upon an old knife--the _Machete Vitoriano_--to uphold the privileges of the province. "I desire," he says, "that my throat may be cut with this knife if I fail to maintain and defend the _fueros_ of the land." The Biscayan coasts breed excellent sailors; as already mentioned, they were the first to undertake the distant fisheries of the whale and cod. They are probably better calculated for enterprising merchant-seamen than for men-of-war's men, the inveterate independence and stiff-neckedness of the race being obnoxious to regular military discipline. "_Quisiera mucho mas ser leonero que tener carga de Biscaynos_,"[6] was a saying of Gonsalvo de Cordova. The naval squadrons of Biscay, however, are to be read of in history. It seems strange enough to Englishmen, to whom these petty provinces are known but as obscure nooks of the Peninsula, to read in Baron Vaerst's pages that "the fleet of Guipuzcoa, united with that of Biscay, completely annihilated, in a bloody naval action, fought on the 29th August 1350, the English fleet of King Edward the Third, and thereby procured Spain an advantageous treaty of commerce with England." There is small probability, we presume, of Lord Auckland's sending half-a-dozen frigates to revenge this old insult by fetching the present Spanish fleet into an English port, and there retaining them until the wise men of Madrid reduce their suicidal duties on foreign manufactures. We have stated our firm conviction that England would gain little by such reduction. Little, that is to say, in the way in which Messieurs Louis-Philippe and Guizot and their organs are pleased to assume that she expects to be benefited. "England," says a writer, already quoted, "has never asked any thing for which she did not offer a generous reciprocity. If the Spanish government, blind to its true interests, has constantly refused, in consequence of chimerical fears and false views, to renounce a prohibitive system, rendered illusory by smuggling, itself alone has suffered. For England it is a mere question of morality. The contraband trade compensates her for the ignorance of Spanish rulers.... But the government of a commercial country must grieve to see commercial transactions resting on the basis of smuggling--on a violation of law and of public morality. England, where every thing reposes on credit and good faith, submits with strong repugnance to stipulations so organised that smuggling is the rule, and legal traffic the exception."[7]

[6] "I would much rather be a keeper of lions than have charge of
Biscayans."

[7] Marliani, ii. 317.

JUDAISM IN THE LEGISLATURE.

It has been frequently observed, that the chief events of the English history, during the last three centuries, have turned on religion.

Until the Reformation, our history scarcely deserved the name. The government an iron despotism, the people serfs, the barons tyrants, and the religion Popery, England possessed neither equal law, nor popular knowledge, nor security of property. And she suffered the natural evils of a condition of moral disorder; all her nobler qualities only aggravated the national misfortune, her bravery only wasted her blood in foreign fields. Her fidelity to her lords only strewed the soil with corpses; her devotional spirit only bound her to the observances of a pedantic superstition. While every kingdom of the Continent was advancing in the march of power, or knowledge, or the arts; while Germany in her mail gathered round her the chivalry of Europe; while Italy began that glittering pageant of the arts which has left such brilliant remnants behind, even in her dilapidated archives and tottering palaces; while Portugal was spreading her sails for the subjugation of the ocean, and Spain was sending Columbus to the west for a prouder conquest than was ever won by consul or emperor,--England remained like a barbarian gazer on this passing pomp of kings.

The Reformation changed all,--gave her a new sense of existence, a new knowledge of her own faculties, new views of her destination; and brought her, like the wanderers in the parable, from the highways and hedges, to that marriage feast of power and fame, from which so many of the original guests were to be rejected.

The change was remarkable, even from its rapidity. It had none of the slow growth by which the infancy of nations ascends into manhood. She assumed the vigour of a leading member of the European commonwealth with the life of a generation. Actually expelled from the Continent in the middle of the sixteenth century, she held the balance of European power in its hand before its close. But the effect of the Reformation in England was of a superior order to its effect on the Continent. We shall not say that it lived and died in Germany with Luther; or in France with Calvin; but there can be no doubt, that its purer and loftier portion perished with those great reformers. The schools of the prophets remained; but when the Elijah had been swept upwards on the chariot and horses of fire, they uttered the prophetic voice more feebly, and their harps no longer resounded through Israel. But, in England, the double portion of the spirit had been given; the Reformation had become _national_; and there is scarcely a national act, from that period, which has not held some connexion with Protestantism; been modified by its influence, or required by its necessities, originated in its principles, or governed by its power.

And it is not the less remarkable, that this continued operation has existed in England alone.

The gift of the Reformation was, like the gift of Christianity, a universal offer. It came, as the rising of the sun comes, to all Europe at once. The preaching of Luther and his contemporaries was heard in every country of the civilised world, and by a large portion of that world is retained, in all its substantial doctrines, to the present hour. Within the lapse of a few years, it had made a progress scarcely less rapid and triumphant than the career of the apostolic mission; but in a period incomparably more intellectual, and among nations more active, intelligent, and vigorous, than the dwellers among the languor of Asia Minor, the dissolute populace of ancient Italy, or the rugged barbarians of Thrace and Arabia.

Before the close of the century in which it was born, the Reformation had founded churches far beyond the German frontier, in the most active portion of France, in the British Isles, in the north of Europe; it had even forced its way through the sullen prejudices and fierce persecutions of Spain; by a still more singular success, it had given a temporary impulse to Italy itself; made converts in the natural land of the monk, built churches under the shadow of the convent; and redeemed at least one generation from the profligate supineness of their fathers. But this gush of the living breeze into the cloister was soon overpowered by the habitual heaviness of the atmosphere of cells and censers. The light, which had shot in through the chinks of the dungeon, was soon shut out, and all within was dark as ever. The multitude, at first exulting in their freedom, no sooner found that they must march through the wilderness, than they longed for the fatness and the flesh of Egypt, and returned to their house of bondage. The name of Protestantism still existed on the Continent, but its power was no more. Statesmen, in their political projects, passed it by; philosophers, in their calculations of human progress, left it out of their elements. The popular feelings were no longer roused or abused at its command. The teacher remained, but the gift of miracles was gone.

But, in England, it was a political creator. The manners, the feelings, the laws in a great degree, and the political movements almost wholly, were impressed with this one image and superscription. Since her first emergence from feudalism, when, like the traveller struggling through defiles and forests to the brow of the mountains which shows him the plain and the ocean before him, she saw the first boundless sweep of national power and moral renown before her, Protestantism, in all the casualties of its course, in its purity, or its profanation, in the vindication of its rights, or in the sufferance of its wrongs, in the national zeal for its advance, or in the national zeal for its retrenchment and spoil, has been the great object of contemplation and interest to every leader of the councils of England. It has been the voice which has never died in the statesman's ear, the shape which has met him at every step, the star which, whether clouded or serene, has never set in his horizon. The whole line of British sovereignty seemed scarcely more than royal administrators of the concerns of Religion.

Even the striking variety of royal character, during this long and stirring period, made but slight difference in their general connexion with the public belief. The brutish self-will of Henry, the savage bloodthirstiness of Mary, the proud supremacy of Elizabeth, the chivalry of Charles, the republicanism of Cromwell, the languid decline of the Stuarts, the energy of William, and the law-loving quietude of the Brunswicks, all bore the impress of the same principle.

During the last three hundred years, the world had been singularly active, and England perhaps its most active portion; but what relics of its political questions are left to posterity? The passions and the power of the great parties even of the last century have sunk into their graves. Even their names, which were supposed to have made an imperishable fixture in the political strifes of the country, and under which it was presumed that ministers and opposition would be marshalled for ever, have gone like the rest, and the difficulty would now be, to give a name to the political principles of any party in the state. But the religious questions of our ancestry are still not merely existing, but absorbing all others at this moment; instead of clearing up, they are darkening by time; instead of giving way to the thousand questions which year by year press on public deliberation, they still exalt their frowning front above them all. Ireland and Rome are as powerful objects of anxiety as in the days of Pius V. and Elizabeth; and Protestantism is forced to be as vigilant as in the days when the Bible was first read at Paul's Cross, or the Long Parliament drove the bishops out of the pale of the constitution.

In this language we are claiming no peculiar merit for the character of England; we are not arrogating for her any religious superiority; we are not pronouncing on her especial sensitiveness to conscience; we are simply giving facts; and those urge us to one conclusion alone, that by the determinate and original dispensation of Providence, our country has been selected as the especial arena for great religious inquiries, and the establishment of great religious principles.

On this subject we speak with the utmost sincerity. There is nothing in historical experience to forbid the idea, that peculiar nations may have been appointed to separate purposes, and that they may be even divinely placed under the discipline most suitable to those purposes. If to ancient Greece was almost exclusively given the intellectual advancement of the world; if to ancient Rome was as exclusively given the preparative discipline for its government; there can be no doubt that to Judea was assigned the guardianship of religion.

The process may be diversified in later times; but the principle may remain. The rapidity with which the derelictions of duty in Judah were followed by punishments _declaredly_ divine, finds a memorable counterpart in the annals of England, even down to the present hour. But we shall limit ourselves to the evidence in Ireland; and on this point we shall be as brief as possible.

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, Popery, hitherto kept down, became suddenly triumphant in Ireland, and began its habitual system of severity to the heretic. Confiscation and exile swept away the rights of Protestantism. The result was the national punishment by the scourge of civil war, a renewal of conquest, the expatriation of the Romish army, and the decay of all the sources of national prosperity.

Another era came. Under the government of Protestantism the country had recovered, privileges were successively awarded, and it enjoyed the peace and gradual opulence which belong to English government. But a parliamentary faction at length allied itself with Popery; parliament was subdued by clamour, or seduced by popularity, and the Popish population obtained the elective franchise. The elections instantly became scenes of national iniquity. Perjury was scarcely less than a profession, and that notoriously ruinous system of "sub-letting," which has covered Ireland with pauperism, became general, for the sole object of multiplying votes. This was followed by the foundation of Maynooth, a college expressly formed for the training of a Popish priesthood, whose tenets, every man who voted for this foundation, had sworn to be "superstitious and idolatrous." But when did faction care what it swore? The cup was now full. The priesthood of Maynooth had scarcely begun to learn their trade, when vengeance fell upon both Popery and the Parliament. Instead of the promise of popular gratitude, which had been so ostentatiously given by the Popish associations, and so ostentatiously echoed by parliamentary Liberalism, the first act of the Popish peasantry was to take up arms; a rebellion of the most treacherous and bloody nature broke out, in which the murder of Protestants was perpetrated in cold blood, and with the most horrid atrocity. Ireland was convulsed and impoverished, the rebellion was extinguished and punished by the sword, and at the cost of ten thousand peasant lives. The next blow was on the feeble and factious Parliament. The Irish Legislature was extinguished at a blow; and its fall was as ignominious as it was judicial. Its national pride and acknowledged talent gave way without a struggle, and with scarcely a remonstrance. It had already lost the respect of the nation. The _mind_ of Ireland disdained the deliberations which had suffered the dictation of a mob. Parliament, existing without national honour, perished without national sympathy. Its own principle was retaliated on itself. The Papist sold it, the Borough-monger sold it, the Protestant sold it, not for the baser bribe of the populace, but for the prospect of peace; it was given over to execution, with the calm acquiescence of a sense of justice, and tossed on the funeral pile amid a population which danced round the blaze.

Popery now talks of its restoration. It is impossible. The very idea is absurd. As well might the ashes of the dead be gathered and reshaped into the living man. As well might the vapours of the swamp be purified by filling it with the firedamp. Every hour, since that time, has made the country still more unfit for legislation, more furious and inflammable. As well might the nakedness of the people be covered by rags, reeking with the pestilence.

We rejoice to escape from the subject. It can be no gratification to us to trace the progress of disease through the political frame which it first enfeebles, and then makes a source of contagion. We have no love for the history of an hospital, or those frightful displays of a "surgeons' hall," where every skeleton is connected with public crime, and where science is demonstrated from the remnants of the scaffold. But it is notorious that the morals even of the Irish peasant have been degraded in the exact proportion of his rise in political power.

Every favour of the English parliament, from the beginning of the century until the fatal year 1829, only furnished him with an additional weapon, to be used with a more seditious violence. In that year, the British Legislature was thrown open to him, and he entered it in a barbarian triumph.

From that moment, England and Ireland were sufferers alike. In England, Irish faction was an insolent mercenary, which openly and alternately hired its services to both sides alike. In Ireland it was a ferocious rebel, which, as the notorious preparative for broader hostilities, exercised its arms in midnight murder.

At length the final endowment of Maynooth came; and an establishment, solely for the Romish priesthood, without any admixture of laity, and allowing the means of an increase in the number of those pupils of Rome, and propagators of Romish doctrines, from about five hundred to double the number, was fixed on the empire for ever, taken wholly out of the further deliberation of the Legislature, and conferred, to three times the amount of its former grant, on a religion which professes the worship of a _Creature_, the Virgin Mary; which bows down to _images_; which assigns thrones in heaven to dead men, promoted by itself to nominal saintship; which offers weekly absolution for all crimes; which apportions the judgments of the eternal tribunal in a purgatory, and releases the supposed criminal on payment of money for masses; and which offers the most solemn _adoration_ to a composition of flour and water, manufactured by a baker, distributed by the hands of a priest, and which it actually declares to be the Eternal God, whom "the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain."

These are doctrines utterly abhorrent to the feelings of all sincere Protestants; and unquestionably the encouragement of their teachers, and the virtual propagation of a belief which they pronounce desperate defiances of the truth, startled many wise and religious men with fear of the consequences. We leave the connexion of this most unhappy act with the subsequent events to the various contemplation of our countrymen.

The subject is too solemn for the mingling of human conjectures with its awful reality. But whether in the shape of retribution or warning, the singular force of the blow which has fallen on both--the Irish criminal and the English abettor of the crime--may well humble us before the Power which holds the prosperity of nations in its hand. Yet even now, while the two countries are still lying struck down by the same irresistible flash, and while the cloud which discharged it is still overhanging the horizon--while the only voice which ought to issue from the national lips would be the supplication for help and the hope of forgiveness, they are meditating an act more hazardous and daring than ever.

We disclaim all exclusiveness in the exercise of the common rights of man; we denounce all bigotry as a folly, and abhor all persecution as a crime; but we cannot venture an acquiescence in an attempt which we consider as an abandonment of the first dictates of Christianity; we cannot be silent when the intention is avowed to bring into a Christian legislature a sect which pronounces Christianity to be utterly a falsehood, its founder to be an impostor, (we shudder at the words,) and our whole hope of immortality, dependent on his sacrifice and merits, to be wicked and blasphemous delusion. And this attempt, from no additional discovery of the truth of Judaism or the failings of Christianity, but simply from a sense of political convenience, (a most short-sighted sense, as we conceive;) a feeling of liberalism, (a most childish and uncalled for feeling, as we are perfectly convinced;) and the establishment of the general principle that, in the political system or government of nations, religion has no business whatever to interfere, to be regarded, or to be protected in any shape whatever, (an assumption which we believe to be contrary to all the experience of mankind.) Our remarks, of course, are not made with reference to the individual, of whom we know nothing but the name; we speak only of the principle.

But before we inquire into its good or ill, we shall give a glance at the past condition of the European Jews, and the privileges to which they have been admitted by the generosity of the British legislature.

With Charlemagne the political history of modern Europe begins, and with it we shall begin our sketch of the Jews. The soldiership of Charlemagne made him comparatively regardless of ecclesiastical jealousies, and at the same time made him require the services of agents, negotiators, and traffickers of all kinds. In all the wildest barbarism of the past ages, the sons of Israel had continued to sustain their connexion throughout Europe, and the emperor felt all their importance to his polity. But war always impoverishes, and the Jews were the only masters of European wealth. Thus they were essential in all points to the great warrior, who had spent thirty years of his life in the camp; to the great monarch, who ruled three-fourths of Europe; and to the great statesman, who legislated for Christendom, but who could not write his own name. Charlemagne, therefore, protected the Jews, as he did all whom he made useful to himself; and as disregard of opportunities has been at no time their failing, it is probable that the chief currency of Europe passed through Jewish hands.

The successors of the emperor retained his habits, without inheriting his abilities, and the Jews still stood high in the favour of the throne.

It is probable, too, that they profited enormously; for where they had no laws but their own, and no penalties to dread but those in the hand of the sovereign, the possession of the royal ear, and the replenishing of the royal purse, gave them chances which must have proved highly productive to the Rabbinical exchequer.

But their prosperity was soon to have its winter. Enormous wealth was hazardous in baronial times. The descendants of the Gaulish, the German, and the Norman conquerors--bold soldiers, but bad financiers; fond of magnificence, but narrow in rental; valorous in war, but pauperised in peace--saw with lordly indignation the crouching Israelite able to purchase principalities, while they were often obliged to levy the daily meal of their retainers on the high road.

The result was, a general robbery of the Jews. But as there is no robbery so sweeping as that which is performed under cover of law, the unfortunate Jews were charged with the most improbable crimes against popes and princes. They sometimes escaped the dungeon and the sword by large bribes to the judge and the king; but confiscation was too gainful to cease while there was a Jew to be drained. And at length, within the last years of the twelfth century, all the Jews of France were exiled by a stroke of the pen; their whole property was seized, and all their debts were decreed to be irrecoverable!

Still they were too useful to be entirely dispensed with; and the following Jewish generation, which had forgotten the sufferings of their fathers, once more sought admission into France. They there grew opulent again, were there fleeced again, and there were alternately fattened and fleeced, until a general rage against their existence seemed to seize all Europe. Then, with an injustice which scandalises the name of Europe, and with a cruelty which still more scandalises the name of Popery, they were persecuted, plundered, and hunted into the gentler and honester regions of the Mahometan and the idolator.

The history of the Jews in England commenced about the middle of the eighth century, and was a similar succession of persecutions of the purse. Their persons were generally spared, for the piety of the Saxon monarchs was less provoked than their poverty. The Jews were a never-failing spring; and the Egberts and Ethelberts drank of it in all the emergencies of their dynasty, without ever cooling their royal thirst. Still the Jews clung to a land where they had probably become masters of the whole current coin; and though they complained furiously of the royal pressure, they bore it for the sake of the inordinate rent which they levied on peasant and priest, on baron bold, and perhaps on the monarch himself.

But William the Norman came, and the days of the Israelite brightened. William knew the value of having the synagogue for his bank; and though a descendant of those heroic pirates who had exhibited robbery on the largest scale in history, and plundered every sea-coast of Europe every year of their lives, he yet felt all the necessity of paying his fellow-freebooters, and regarded the Jews, next to his men-at-arms, as the main prop of his throne.

But it is a curious feature in the annals of Jewish wealth, that it has never lasted long; three generations, at the most, are sure to see its end. The gourd of Jonah is its emblem to this hour; the surprising growth of a night followed by the equally surprising decay of a morning.