Chapter X: Conclusion: Of the War in Affghanistan (1)

We trust we may now look back on by far the most disastrous passage which occurs in the military history of Great Britain, as so definitively concluded, that in the future we shall be unable to trace it as still disadvantageously operative in its effects. A series of decisive victories has neutralized, to a considerable extent, the influence of the most fatal campaign in which a British army was ever engaged. But this is all. One of our poets, in placing in a strong light the extreme folly of war, describes 'most Christian kings' with 'honourable ruffians in their hire,' wasting the nations with fire and sword, and then, when fatigued with murder and sated with blood, 'setting them down just where they were before.' It is quite melancholy enough that our most sanguine expectations with regard to the Affghan war should be unable to rise higher by a hair's-breadth than the satiric conception of the poet. We can barely hope, after squandering much treasure, after committing a great deal of crime, after occasioning and enduring a vast amount of wretchedness, after a whole country has been whitened with the bones of its inhabitants, after a British army has perished miserably,--we can barely hope that our later successes may have had so far the effect of effacing the memory of our earliest disasters, that we shall be enabled to sit down under their cover on the eastern bank of the Indus, 'just where we were before.' And even this is much in the circumstances.

We have seen the British in India repeat the same kind of fatal experiment which cost Napoleon his crown, and from which Charles XII. dated his downfall; and repeat it, in the first instance at least, with a result more disastrous than either the flight from Pultowa or the retreat from Moscow. And though necessarily an expedition on a similar scale, it seemed by no means improbable that its ultimate consequences might bear even more disastrously on British power in the East, than the results of the several expeditions into Russia, under Charles and Napoleon, bore on the respective destinies of Sweden and of France. That substratum of opinion in the minds of an hundred millions of Asiatics, on which British authority in India finds its main foundation, bade fair to be shivered into pieces by the shock.

There are passages in all our better histories that stand out in high relief, if we may so speak, from the groundwork on which they are based. They appeal to the imagination, they fix themselves in the memory; and after they have got far enough removed into the past to enable men to survey them in all their breadth, we find them caught up and reflected in the fictions of the poet and the novelist.

But it is wonderful how comparatively slight is the effect which most of them produce at the time of their occurrence. It would seem as if the great mass of mankind had no ability of seeing them in their real character, except through the medium of some superior mind, skilful enough to portray them in their true colours and proportions. Who, acquainted with the history of the plague in London, for instance, can fail being struck with the horrors of that awful visitation, as described in the graphic pages of Defoe? Who, that experienced the visitation of similar horrors which swept away in our own times one-tenth part of the human species, could avoid remarking that the reality was less suited to impress by its actual presence, than the record by its touching pictures and its affecting appeals? The reality appealed to but the fears of men through the instinct of self-preservation, and even this languidly in some cases, leaving the imagination unimpressed; whereas the wild scenes of Defoe filled the whole mind, and impressed vividly through the influence of that sense of the poetical which, in some degree at least, all minds are capable of entertaining.

On a nearly similar principle, the country has not yet been able rightly to appreciate the disasters of Affghanistan. It has been unable to bestow upon them what we shall venture to term the historic prominence. When one after one the messengers reach Job, bearing tidings of fatal disasters, in which all his children and all his domestics have perished, the ever-recurring 'and I only am escaped alone to tell thee,' strikes upon the ear as one of the signs of a dispensation supernatural in its character. The narrative has already prepared us for events removed beyond the reach of those common laws which regulate ordinary occurrences. Did we find such a piece of history in any of our older chronicles, we would at once set it down, on Macaulay's principle, as a ballad thrown out of its original verse into prose, and appropriated by the chronicler, in the lack of less questionable materials. But finding it in the Record of eternal truth, we view it differently; for there the supernatural is not dissociated from the true. How very striking, to find in the authentic annals of our own country a somewhat similar incident; to find the 'I only am escaped alone to tell thee' in the history of a well-equipped British army of the present day! There occurs no similar incident in all our past history. British armies have capitulated not without disgrace. In the hapless American war, Cornwallis surrendered a whole army to Washington, and Burgoyne another whole army to Gates and Arnold.

The British have had also their disastrous retreats.

The retreat from Fontenoy was at least precipitate; and there was much suffered in Sir John Moore's retreat on Corunna. But such retreats have not been wholly without their share of glory, nor have such surrenders been synonymous with extermination. In the annals of British armies, the 'I only have escaped alone to tell thee' belongs to but the retreat from Cabul. It is a terrible passage in the history of our country--terrible in all its circumstances. Some of its earlier scenes are too revolting for the imagination to call up.

It is all too humiliating to conceive of it in the character of an unprincipled conspiracy of the civilised, horribly avenged by infuriated savages. It is a quite melancholy enough object of contemplation, in even its latter stages. A wild scene of rocks and mountains darkened overhead with tempest, beneath covered deep with snow; a broken and dispirited force, struggling hopelessly through the scarce passable defiles,--here thinned by the headlong assaults of howling fanatics, insensible to fear, incapable of remorse, and thirsting for blood,--there decoyed to destruction through the promises of cruel and treacherous chiefs, devoid alike of the sense of honour and the feeling of pity; with no capacity or conduct among its leaders; full of the frightful recollections of past massacres, hopeless of ultimate escape; struggling, however, instinctively on amid the unceasing ring of musketry from thicket and crag, exhibiting mile after mile a body less dense and extended, leaving behind it a long unbroken trail of its dead; at length wholly wasting away, like the upward heave of a wave on a sandy beach, and but one solitary horseman, wounded and faint with loss of blood, holding on his perilous course, to tell the fate of all the others. And then, the long after-season of grief and suspense among anxious and at length despairing relations at home, around many a cheerless hearth, and in many a darkened chamber, and the sadly frequent notice in the obituaries of all our public journals, so significant of the disaster, and which must have rung so heavy a knell to so many affectionate hearts, 'Killed in the Khyber Pass.' To find passages of parallel calamity in the history of at least civilised countries, we have to ascend to the times of the Roman empire during its period of decline and disaster, when one warlike emperor, in battle with the Goth,

'in that Serbonian bog,
Betwixt Damieta and Mount Cassus old,
With his whole army sank;'

or when another not less warlike monarch was hopelessly overthrown by the Persian, and died a miserable slave, exposed to every indignity which the invention of his ungenerous and barbarous conqueror could suggest.

Britain in this event has received a terrible lesson, which we trust her scarce merited and surely most revolting successes in China will not have the effect of wholly neutralizing. The Affghan war, regarded as a war of principle, was eminently unjust; regarded as a war of expediency, it was eminently imprudent. It seems to have originated with men of narrow and defective genius, not over largely gifted with the moral sense. We have had to refer on a former occasion to the policy adopted by Lord Auckland respecting the educational grants to Hindustan. An enlightened predecessor of his Lordship had decided that the assistance and patronage of the British Government should be extended to the exclusive promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India. His Lordship, in the exercise of a miserable liberalism, reversed the resolution, and diverted no inconsiderable portion of the Government patronage to the support of the old Hindustanee education,--a system puerile in its literature, contemptible in its science, and false in its religion. Our readers cannot have forgotten the indignant style of Dr. Duff's remonstrance. The enlightened and zealous missionary boldly and indignantly characterized the minute of his Lordship, through which this revolution was effected, as 'remarkable chiefly for its omissions and commissions, for its concessions and compromises, for its education without religion, its plans without a Providence, and its ethics without a God.' Such was the liberalism of Lord Auckland; and of at least one of the leading men whose counsel led to the Affghan expedition, and who perished in it, the _liberalism_, it is said, was of a still more marked and offensive character. What do we infer from the fact?

Not that Providence interfered to avenge upon them the sin of their policy: there would be presumption in the inference. But it may not be unsafe to infer, from the palpable folly of the Affghan expedition, that the _liberalism_ in which Lord Auckland and some one or two of his friends indulged is a liberalism which weak and incompetent men are best fitted to entertain. His scheme of education and his Affghanistan expedition are specimens of mental production, if we may so speak, that give evidence of exactly the same cast and tendency regarding the order and scope of the genius which originated them. We have been a good deal struck by the shrewdness of one of Prince Eugene of Savoy's remarks, that seems to bear very decidedly on this case. Two generals of his acquaintance had failed miserably in the conduct of some expedition that demanded capacity and skill, and yet both of them were unquestionably smart, clever men. 'I always thought it would turn out so,' said the Prince. 'Both these men made open profession of infidelity; and I formed so low an opinion of their taste and judgment in consequence, that I made myself sure they would sooner or later run their heads into some egregious folly.'

It is satisfactory in every point of view that Britain should be at peace with China and the Affghans. War is an evil in all circumstances. It is a great evil even when just; it is a great evil even when carried on against a people who know and respect the laws of nations. But it is peculiarly an evil when palpably not a just war, and when carried on against a barbarous people. It has been stated in private letters, though not officially, that a soldier of the 44th was burned alive by the Ghilzies in sight of the English troops, and that on the approach of the latter the throat of the tortured victim was cut to ensure his destruction. And it is the inference of an Indian newspaper from the fact, that such wretches are not the devoted patriots that they have been described by some, and that the war with them cannot, after all, be very unjust. We are inclined to argue somewhat differently. We believe the Scotch under Wallace were not at all devoid of patriotism, though they were barbarous enough to flay Cressingham, and to burn the English alive at Ayr. We believe further, that an unjust war is rendered none the less unjust from the circumstance of its being waged with a savage and cruel people. The barbarism of the enemy has but the effect of heightening its horrors, not of modifying its injustice. It is possible for one civilised man to fight with another, and yet retain his proper character as a man notwithstanding. But the civilised man who fights with a wild beast must assume, during the combat, the character of the wild beast. He cannot afford being generous and merciful; his antagonist understands neither generosity nor mercy. The war is of necessity a war of extermination. And such is always the character of a war between wild and civilised men. It takes its tone, not from the civilisation of the one, but from the cruel savageism of the other.

_December 3, 1842._

PERIODICALISM.

The poet Gray held that in a neglected country churchyard, appropriated to only the nameless dead, there might lie, notwithstanding, the remains of undeveloped Miltons, Hampdens, and Cromwells,--men who, in more favourable circumstances, would have become famous as poets, or great as patriots or statesmen; and the stanzas in which he has embodied the reflection are perhaps the most popular in the language. One-half the thought is, we doubt not, just. Save for the madness of Charles, Cromwell would have died a devout farmer, and Hampden a most respectable country gentleman, who would have been gratefully remembered for half an age over half a county, and then consigned to forgetfulness. But the poets rarely die, however disadvantageously placed, without giving some sign. Rob Don, the Sutherlandshire bard, owed much less to nature than Milton did, and so little to learning that he could neither read nor write; and yet his better songs promise to live as long as the Gaelic language. And though both Burns and Shakespeare had very considerable disadvantages to struggle against, we know that neither of them remained 'mute' or 'inglorious,' or even less extensively known than Milton himself. It is, we believe, no easy matter to smother a true poet. The versifiers, placed in obscure and humble circumstances, who for a time complain of neglected merit and untoward fate, and then give up verse-making in despair, are always men who, with all their querulousness, have at least one cause of complaint more than they ever seem to be aware of,--a cause of complaint against the nature that failed to impart to them 'the divine vision and faculty.' There are powers, however, admirably fitted to tell with effect in the literature of the country, for they have served to produce the most influential works which the world ever saw--works such as the _Essay_ of Locke, the _Peace and War_ of Grotius, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of Montesquieu--which, with all their apparent robustness, are greatly less hardy than the poetic faculty, and which, unless the circumstances favourable to their development and exercise be present, fail to leave behind them any adequate record of their existence. It is difficult to imagine a situation in life in which Burns would not have written his songs, but very easy to imagine situations in which Robertson would not have produced his _Scotland_ or his _Charles V._, nor Adam Smith his _Wealth of Nations_. We have no faith whatever in 'mute, inglorious Miltons;' but we do hold that there may be obscure country churchyards in which untaught Humes, guiltless of the _Essay on Miracles_, may repose, and undeveloped Bentleys and Warburtons, whose great aptitude for acquiring or capacity for retaining knowledge remained throughout life a mere ungratified thirst.

It has remained for the present age to throw one bar more in the way of able men of this special class than our fathers ever dreamed of; and this, curiously enough, just by giving them an opportunity of writing much, and of thinking incessantly. It is not, it would seem, by being born among ploughmen and mechanics, and destined to live by tilling the soil, or by making shoes or hobnails, that the 'genial current of the soil is frozen,' and superior talents prevented from accomplishing their proper work: it is by being connected with some cheap weekly periodical, or twice or thrice a week newspaper, and compelled to scribble on almost without pause or intermission for daily bread. We have been led to think of this matter by an interesting little volume of poems, chiefly lyrical, which has just issued from the Edinburgh press,--the production of Mr. Thomas Smibert, a man who has lived for many years by his pen, and who introduces the volume by a prefatory essay, interesting from the glimpse which it gives of the literary disadvantages with which the professionally literary man who writes for the periodicals has to contend. Periodical literature is, he remarks, 'to all intents and purposes a creation of the nineteenth century, in its principal existing phases, from Quarterly Reviews to Weekly Penny Magazines. Newspapers,' he adds, 'may justly be accounted the growth of the same recent era, the few previously published having been scarcely more than mere Gazettes, recording less opinions than bare public and business facts.' The number of both classes of periodicals is now immensely great; and 'equally vast, of necessity, is the amount of literary talent statedly and unremittingly engaged on these journals, while a large additional amount of similar talent finds in them occasional and ready outlets for its working.' 'When one or two leading Reviews, Quarterlies, and Monthlies alone existed, they called for no insignificant individual efforts of mind on the part of their chief conductors and supporters, and those parties almost took rank with the authors of single works of importance. But within the last twenty years periodical literature has become extensively hebdomadal, and even diurnal; and, as a necessary consequence, the essays of those sustaining it in this shape have decreased in proportionate value, at once from the larger amount of work demanded, and from the shorter time allowed for its execution. Such essays may serve the hour fairly, but can seldom be of high worth ultroneously.' 'The extent and variety of the labours called for at the hands of those actively engaged on modern cheap periodicals can scarcely be conceived by the uninitiated public. If their eyes were opened on the subject, they would certainly wonder less why it is that the literary talent of the current generation does not tend to display itself by striking isolated efforts: they would also more readily understand wherefore parties in the situation of the present writer may well experience some unsatisfactory feelings in looking back on the labours of the past. Though years spent in respectable periodical writing can by no means be termed misspent, yet such a career presents in the retrospect but a multitude of disconnected essays on all conceivable themes, and such as too often prove their hurried composition by crudeness and imperfections.' The consideration of such a state of things 'may furnish a salutary lesson to the many among the young at this day, who, possessing some literary taste, imagine that the engagements of common life alone stand in the way of its successful development, and that to be enabled to pursue a life of professional writing in any shape would secure to them both fame and fortune to the height of their desires. They here err sadly. No doubt supereminent talents will sooner or later make themselves felt under almost any circumstances; but the position described assuredly offers no peculiar advantages for the furtherance of that end. Ebenezer Elliot, leaving his forge at eve with a wearied body, could yet bring to his favourite leisure tasks a mind less jaded than that of the _littérateur_ by profession.' 'The regular periodicalist, too, of the modern class has usually no more stable interest in his compositions than has the counting-house clerk in the cash-books which he keeps. To publishers and conductors fall the lasting fruits. Let those among the young who feel the ambition to seek fame and fortune in the walks of literature think well of these things, and, above all, ponder seriously ere they quit, with such views, any fixed occupation of another kind.'

There is certainly food for thought here; and that, too, thought of a kind in which the public has a direct interest. If such be the dissipating effect of _writing_ for newspapers and the lighter periodicals, it is surely natural to infer that the exclusive _reading_ of such works must have a dissipating effect also. It is too obvious that the feverish mediocrity of overwrought brains becomes infectious among the class who place themselves in too constant and unbroken connection with it, and that from the closets of over-toiled _littérateurs_ an excited superficiality creeps out upon the age. And hence the necessity to which we have oftener than once referred, that men should keep themselves in wholesome connection with the master minds of the past. Mr. Smibert's remarks preface, as we have said, a volume of sweet and tasteful verse; and we find him saying that, 'most of all, the operation of Periodicalism has been unfavourably felt in the domain of poetry.'

'The position of literature,' he adds, 'in the times of the Wordsworths, Crabbes, and Campbells of the age just gone by, was more favourable than at present to the devotion of talent to great undertakings. These men were assuredly not beset by the same seductive facilities as the _littérateurs_ of the current generation for expending their powers on petty objects,--facilities all the more fascinating, as comprising the pleasures of immediate publicity, and perhaps even of repute for a day, if not also of some direct remuneration. These influences of full-grown Periodicalism extend now to all who can read and write. But it entices most especially within its vortex those who exhibit an unusually large share of early literary promise, involves them in multitudinous and multifarious occupation, and, in short, divides and subdivides the operations of talent, until all prominent identity is destroyed, both in works and workers. To the growth of this modern system, beyond question, is largely to be referred the comparative disappearance from among us of great literary individualities; or, to use other and more accurate words, by that system have men of capacity been chiefly diverted from the composition of great individual works, and more particularly great poems.'

We are less sure of the justice of this remark of Mr. Smibert's, than of that of many of the others. It is not easy, we have said, to smother a true poet; and we know that in the present age very genuine poetry has been produced in the offices of very busy newspaper editors. Poor Robert Nicoll never wrote truer poetry than when he produced his 'Puir Folk' and his 'Saxon Chapel,' at a time when he was toiling, as even modern journalist has rarely toiled, for the columns of the _Leeds Times_; and James Montgomery produced his 'World before the Flood,' 'Greenland,' and 'The Pelican Island,' with many a sweet lyric of still higher merit, when laboriously editing the _Sheffield Iris_. The 'Salamandrine' of Mr. Charles Mackay was written when he was conducting the sub-editorial department of a daily London paper; nor did he ever write anything superior to it. And we question whether Mr. Smibert himself, though he might have produced longer poems, would have written better ones than some of those contained in the present volume, even had his life been one of unbroken leisure. It seems natural to literary men, who fail in realizing their own conceptions of what they had wished and hoped to perform, to cast the blame upon their circumstances. Johnson could speak as feelingly, not much later than the middle of the last century, of the 'dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer,' as any literary man of the present time, who, while solicitously desirous to give himself wholly to the muses, is compelled to labour as a periodicalist for the wants of the day that is passing over him. But perhaps the best solace for the dissatisfaction which would thus wreak itself on mere circumstances, is that which Johnson himself supplies. 'To reach below his own aim,' says the moralist, 'is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little.' But to labour and be forgotten is the common lot; and why should a literary man be more disposed to repine because his productions perish after serving a temporary purpose, than the gardener or farmer, whose vocation it is to supply the people with their daily food? If the provisions furnished, whether for mind or body, be wholesome, and if they serve their purpose, the producers must learn to be content, even should they serve the purpose only once, and but for a day. The danger of over-cropping, and of consequent exhaustion, is, of course, another and more serious matter; and of this the mind of the periodicalist is at least as much in danger as either field or garden when unskilfully wrought. But mere rest, which in course of time restores the exhausted earth, is often not equally efficient in restoring the exhausted mind; nor does mere rest, even were it a specific in the case, lie within the reach of the periodic writer. It is often the luxury for which he pants, but which he cannot command. One of the surest specifics in the case is, the specific of working just a little more,--of working for the work's sake, whether at poem or history, or in the prosecution of some science, or in some antiquarian pursuit. There is an exquisite passage in one of the essays of Washington Irving, in which he compares the great authors--Shakespeare, for instance--who seem proof against the mutability of language, to 'gigantic trees, that we see sometimes on the banks of a stream, which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighbouring plant to perpetuity.' And such is the service rendered by some pervading pursuit of an intellectual character, prosecuted for its own sake, to the intellect of the journalist. It is the necessity imposed upon him of taking up subject after subject in the desultory, disconnected form in which they chance to arise, and then, after throwing together a few hastily collected thoughts upon each, of dismissing them from his mind, that induces first a habit of superficiality, and finally leaves him exhausted; and the counteractive course open to him is just to take up some subject on which the thinking of to-day may assist him in the thinking of to-morrow, and on which he may be as well informed and profound as his native capacity permits. All our really superior newspaper editors have pursued this course--more, however, we are disposed to think, from the bent of their nature than from the necessities of their profession; and the poetical volume of Mr. Smibert shows that he too has his engrossing pursuit. We recommend his little work to our readers, as one in which they will find much to interest and amuse. We have left ourselves little room for quotation; but the following stanzas, striking, both from their beauty and from the curious fact which they embody, may be regarded as no unfair specimen of the whole:--

THE VOICE OF WOE.

'The language of passion, and more peculiarly that of grief,
is ever nearly the same.'

An Indian chief went forth to fight,
And bravely met the foe:
His eye was keen--his step was light--
His arm was unsurpassed in might;
But on him fell the gloom of night--
An arrow laid him low.
His widow sang with simple tongue,
When none could hear or see,
_Ay, cheray me!_

A Moorish maiden knelt beside
Her dying lover's bed:
She bade him stay to bless his bride;
She called him oft her lord, her pride;
But mortals must their doom abide--
The warrior's spirit fled.
With simple tongue the sad one sung,
When none could hear or see,
_Ay, di me!_

An English matron mourned her son,
The only son she bore:
Afar from her his course was run--
He perished as the fight was done--
He perished when the fight was won--
Upon a foreign shore.
With simple tongue the mother sung,
When none could hear or see,
_Ah, dear me!_

A Highland maiden saw
A brother's body borne
From where, from country, king, and law,
He went his gallant sword to draw;
But swept within destruction's maw,
From her had he been torn.
She sat and sung with simple tongue,
When none could hear or see,
_Oh, hon-a-ree!_

An infant in untimely hour
Died in a Lowland cot:
The parents own'd the hand of power
That bids the storm be still or lour;
They grieved because the cup was sour,
And yet they murmured not.
They only sung with simple tongue,
When none could hear or see,
_Ah, wae's me!_

_July 26, 1851._

'ANNUS MIRABILIS.'

We have now reached the close of the most wonderful year the world ever saw. None of our readers can be unacquainted with the poem in which Dryden celebrated the marvels of the year 1666,--certainly an extraordinary twelvemonth, though the English poet, only partially acquainted with the events which rendered it so remarkable, restricts himself, in his long series of vigorous quatrains, to the description of the two naval battles with the Dutch which its summer witnessed, and of the great fire of London which rendered its autumn so remarkable.

He might also have told that it was a year of great fear and expectation among both Christians and Jews. The Jews held that their Messiah was to come that year; and, in answer of the expectation, the impostor Sabbatei Levi appeared to delude and disappoint the hopes of that unhappy nation. There was an opinion nearly equally general in the Roman Catholic world, that it would usher in the Antichrist of New Testament prophecy; while among English Protestants it was very extensively believed that it was to witness the end of the world and the final judgment. It was remarkable, too, as the year in which oppression first compelled the Scotch Presbyterians of the reign of Charles II. to assume the attitude of armed resistance, and as forming, in the estimate of Burnet and other intelligent Protestants, the fifth great crisis of the Reformed religion in Europe. And such were the wonders of the _Annus_ _Mirabilis_ of Dryden: two bloody naval engagements; a great fire; the appearance of a false Messiah; a widely-spread fear that the end of the world and the coming of Antichrist were at hand; the revolt from their allegiance to the reigning monarch of a sorely oppressed body of Christians, maddened by persecution; and a perilous crisis in the general history of Protestantism.

The year now at its close has been beyond comparison more remarkable. In the earlier twelvemonth, no real change took place in the existing state of things. Its striking events resembled merely the phenomena of a mid-winter storm in Greenland, where, over a frozen ocean, moveless in the hurricane as a floor of rock or of iron, the hail beats, and the thick whirling snows descend, and, high above head, the flashings of aurora borealis lend their many-coloured hues of mystery to the horrors of the tempest. Its transactions, picturesque rather than important, wholly failed to affect the framework of society. That floor of ice which sealed down the wide ocean of opinion retained all its mid-winter solidity, and furnished foundations as firm as before for the old despotic monarchies and the blood-stained persecuting churches. But how immensely different the events of the year now at an end! Its tempests have been, not those of a Greenland winter, but of a Greenland spring: the depths of society have been stirred to the dark bottom, where all slimy and monstrous things lie hid, and, under the irresistible upheavings of the ground-swell, the ice has broken up; and amid the wide weltering of a stormy sea, cumbered with the broken ruins of ancient tyrannies, civil and ecclesiastical, the eye can scarce rest upon a single spot on which to base a better order of things. The 'foundations are removed.' A time of great trouble has come suddenly upon the kingdoms of Europe--a time of 'famines, and pestilences, and fearful sights, and great signs from heaven;' 'signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring.'

The extreme stillness of the calm by which this wide-roaring tempest has been preceded, forms one of not the least extraordinary circumstances which impart to it character and effect. In the _Vision of Don Roderick_, the fated monarch is described as pausing for a time amid the deep silence of a vast hall, pannelled and floored with black marble, and sentinelled by two gigantic figures of rigid bronze that stand moveless against the farther wall. The one, bearing a scythe and sand-glass, is the old giant Time; the other, armed with an iron mace, is the grim angel of Destiny. Not a sound or motion escapes them. In that dim apartment nothing stirs save the sands in the glass, and the inflexible look of the stern mace-bearing sentinel marks how they ebb. The last grains are at length moving downwards--they sink, they disappear; and now, raising his ponderous mace, he dashes into fragments the marble wall: a scene of savage warfare gleams livid through the opening, and the wide vault re-echoes to the hollow tread of armies, the shrill notes of warlike trumpets, the rude clash of arms, and the wild shouts of battle. And such, during the last few years, has been the stillness of the preliminary pause, and such was the abrupt opening, when the predestined hour at length arrived, of those clamorous scenes of revolution and war which impart so remarkable a character to the year gone by. A twelvemonth has not yet passed since history seemed to want incident. Time and Destiny watched as statue-like sentinels in a quiet hall, walled round by the old rigid conventionalities, and human sagacity failed to see aught beyond them; the present so resembled the past, that it seemed over-boldness to anticipate a different complexion for the future. But, amid the unbreathing stillness, the appointed hour arrived. The rigid marble curtain of the old conventionalities was struck asunder by the iron mace of Destiny; and the silence was straightway broken by a roar as if of many waters, by the wrathful shouts of armed millions--the thunderings of cannon, blent with the rattle of musketry--the wild shrieks of dismay and suffering--the wailings of sorrow and terror--the shouts of triumph and exultation--the despairing cry of sinking dynasties, and the crash of falling thrones. And with what strange rapidity the visions have since flitted along the opened chasm!

A royal proclamation forbids in Paris a political banquet; four short days elapse, and France is proclaimed a Republic, and Louis Philippe and his Ministers have fled. Britain at once recognises the Provisional Government; but what are the great despotisms of the Continent to do? Six days more pass, and the Canton of Neufchatel declares itself independent of Prussia. In a few days after, the Duke of Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha grants to his subjects a representative constitution, freedom of the press, and trial by jury; the King of Hanover has also to yield, and the King of Bavaria abdicates. These, however, are comparatively small matters. But still the flame spreads. There is a successful insurrection at Vienna, the very stronghold of despotism in central Europe; and the Prime Minister, Metternich, the grim personification of the old policy, is compelled to resign. Then follows an equally successful insurrection at Berlin; Milan, Vicenza, and Padua are also in open insurrection. Venice is proclaimed a Republic. Holstein declares itself independent of Denmark, Hungary of Austria, Sicily of Naples. Prague and Cracow have also their formidable outbreaks. Austria and Prussia proclaim new constitutions. Secondary revolutionary movements in both Paris and Vienna are put down by the military. There are bloody battles fought between the Austrians and the Piedmontese on the one hand, and the Germans and the Danes on the other; and, in a state of profound peace, the people of a British port hear from their shores the boom of the hostile cannon. The Emperor of Austria abdicates his throne, the Pope flees his dominions, and a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte is elected President of France. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the ebullitions of the revolutionary element serve but to demonstrate its own weakness. In both England and Scotland, the moral and physical force of the country--in reality but one--arrays itself on the side of good order and the established institutions. A few policemen put down, without the assistance of the military, the long-threatened rebellion in Ireland; and the Sovereign Lady of the empire, after journeying among her subjects, attended by a retinue which only a few ages ago would have been deemed slender for a Scotch chieftain or one of the lesser nobility, and without a single soldier to protect her, and needing no such protection, spends her few weeks of autumn leisure in a solitary Highland valley,--a thousand times more secure in the affections of a devoted and loyal people than any other European monarch could have been in the midst of an army of an hundred thousand men. Such are some of the wonderful events which have set their stamp on the year now at its close.

We regard the old state of things as gone for ever. The foundations have broken up on which the ancient despotisms were founded. It would seem as if 'the stone cut out without hands' had fallen during the past year on the feet of the great image, and ground down into worthless rubbish the 'iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold.' And 'the wind,' though not yet risen to its height, seems fast rising, which will sweep them all away, 'like the chaff of the summer thrashing-floor;' so that 'there shall be no place found for them.' But while we can entertain no hope for the old decrepit despotisms, we cannot see in the infidel liberalism--alike unwise and immoral--by which they are in the course of being supplanted, other than a disorganizing element, out of which no settled order of things can possibly arise. It takes the character, not of a reforming principle destined to bless, but of an instrument of punishment, with which vengeance is to be taken for the crimes and errors of the past; and, so far at least, a time when we need expect to witness but the struggles of the two principles--the old and the new--as they act and react against each other, stronger and weaker by turns, as they disgust and alienate by their atrocities in their hour of power such of the more moderate classes as had taken part with them in their hour of weakness. It is the grand error of our leading statesmen, that they fail to appreciate the real character of the crisis, and would fain deal with the consequent existing difficulties in that petty style of diplomatic manoeuvre with which it was their wont to meet the comparatively light demands of the past. It would seem as if we had arrived at a stage in the world's history in which statesmanship after this style is to be tolerated no longer. How instructive, for instance, the mode in which, for the present at least, an all-governing Providence has terminated the negotiations of this country with the Pope! Contrary to the wishes and principles of the sound-hearted portion of the British people, our leading statesmen open up by statute their diplomatic relations with the Pope, palpably with the desire of governing Ireland through the influence of that utterly corrupt religion which has made that unhappy island the miserable lazar-house that it is; and, lo! Providence strikes down the ghostly potentate, and virtually, for the present, divests him of that 'property qualification' in virtue of which the relation can alone be maintained. But not less infatuated than our statesmen, and even less excusably so, are those men--professedly religious and Protestant, but of narrow views and weak understandings--who can identify the cause of Christ with the old tottering despotisms and the soul-destroying policy of princes such as the late Emperor of Austria, and of ministers such as Metternich. It would not greatly surprise us to see Protestants of this high Tory stamp, who have been zealous against Popery all their lives long, taking part in the 'lament of the merchants and mariners' over the perished Babylon, when they find that the representatives of the Roman Emperors must fall with the Roman See. There are two wild beasts, like those which Daniel saw in vision, contending together in fierce warfare,--the old Babylonish beast, horrid with the blood of saints, and its cruel executioner--the monster of Atheistic Liberalism; but Christ has identified His cause with neither. No reprieve from the prince awaits the condemned culprit; and with the disreputable and savage executioner he will hold no intercourse. Destruction, from which there is no escape, awaits equally on both.

We began with a reference to Dryden's _Year of Wonders:_ we conclude with an anecdote regarding that year, connected with the history of one of the most eminent judges and best men England ever produced. It needs no application, showing as it does, with equal simplicity and force, how and on what principle the terrors of years such as the '_Annus Mirabilis_' of the seventeenth century, or the '_Annus Mirabilis_' of our own, may be encountered with the greatest safety and the truest dignity. We quote from Bishop Burnet's _Life of Sir Matthew Hale_:--

'He' (Sir Matthew), says the Bishop, 'had a generous and noble idea of God in his mind; and this he found, above all other considerations, preserve his quiet. And, indeed, that was so well established in him, that no accidents, how sudden soever, were observed to discompose him, of which an eminent man of that profession gave me this instance:--In the year 1666 an opinion did run through the nation that the end of the world would come that year. This, whether set on by astrologers, or advanced by those who thought it might have some relation to the number of the beast in the Revelation, or promoted by men of ill designs to disturb the public peace, had spread mightily among the people; and Judge Hale going that year the Western Circuit, it happened that, as he was on the bench at the assizes, a most terrible storm fell out very unexpectedly, accompanied with such flashes of lightning and claps of thunder, that the like will hardly fall out in an age; upon which a whisper ran through the crowd, "that now was the world to end, and the day of judgment to begin." And at this there followed a general consternation in the whole assembly, and all men forgot the business they were met about, and betook themselves to their prayers. This, added to the horror raised by the storm, looked very dismal, insomuch that my author--a man of no ordinary resolution and firmness of mind--confessed it made a great impression on himself. But he told me "that he did observe the judge was not a whit affected, and was going on with the business of the court in his ordinary manner;" from which he made this conclusion: "that his thoughts were so well fixed, that he believed, if the world had been really to end, it would have given him no considerable disturbance!'"

_December 30, 1848._

EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION ON COLONIZATION.

It is well that there should exist amongst the evangelistic churches at least a desire for union. We do not think they will ever be welded into one without much heat and many blows. Popery, with mayhap Infidelity for its assistant, will have first to blow up the coals and ply the hammer; but it is at least something that the various pieces of the broken and shivered Church catholic should be coming into contact, drawn together as if by some strong attractive influence, and that there should be so many attempts made to fit into each other, though with but indifferent success, the rough-edged inflexible fragments. It is much that the attractive influence should exist. Among the many inventions of modern times, a singularly ingenious one has been brought to bear on the smelting of iron. A powerful magnetic current is made to pass in one direction through the furnace, which imparts to each metallic particle a loadstone-like affinity for all the others; and no sooner has the heat set them free, than, instead of sinking, as in the old process, through the molten stony mass to the bottom, solely in effect of their superior gravity--a tedious, and in some degree uncertain process--they at once get into motion in the line of the current, and unite, in less than half the ordinary time under any other circumstances, into a homogeneous, coherent mass. May we not indulge the expectation of similar results from the magnetic current of attraction, if we may so speak, which has so decidedly begun to flow through the evangelistic churches? True, so long as the little bits remain unmolten, however excellent their quality, they but clash and jangle together, if moved by the influence at all; but should the furnace come to be seven times heated, it will scarce fail to give unity of motion and a prompt coherency to all the genuine metal, however minute, in its present state, the particles into which it is separated, or however stubborn the stony matrices which dissociate these from the other particles, one in their origin and nature, that lie locked up in the sullen fragments around.

Never perhaps was there a time when the great disadvantages of disunion were so pressed in a practical form on the notice of the churches as at the present. It formed the complaint of one of our better English writers considerably more than a century ago, that we had religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another. At that time, however, sects, to employ one of Bacon's striking phrases, 'had not so grown to equality' as now; and storms in the moral world, as in the natural 'at the equinoxia,' when night and day are equal, are commonly greatest, adds the philosopher, 'when things do grow to equality.' The unestablished Protestant denominations formed in the times of Queen Anne a mere feeble moiety, that could raise no efficient voice against the established religion; and Popery, newly thrust under feet, after a formidable struggle, that threatened to overturn the constitution of the country, had no voice at all. Matters are very different now: things have grown to an equality; night and day, as 'at the equinoxia,' have become nearly equal; and society can scarce take one step for the general benefit, without experiencing, as a thwarting and arresting influence, the effects of religious difference. Do we regret that the Government of a country such as ours should be practically irreligious in its character? Alas! were every Government functionary in the empire a thoroughly religious man, Government could not act otherwise than it does in not a few instances, just in consequence of our religious differences. Are there millions of the people sinking into brutality and ignorance, and do our rulers originate a scheme of education in their behalf?--our religious differences straightway step in to arrest and cripple the design. Are there whole districts of country subjected to famine, and are we roused, both as Britons and as Christians, to contribute of our substance for their relief?--our religious differences immediately interfere; and a Church greatly more identified by membership with the sufferers than any other, has to fight a hard battle ere she can be permitted to co-operate in the general cause. Is there a ragged-school scheme originated in the capital, to rescue the neglected perishing young among us from out the very jaws of destruction?--forthwith rival institutions start up, on the ground of religious differences, to dwarf one another into inefficiency, like starveling shrubs in a nursery run wild; and projected exertions in the cause of degraded and suffering humanity degenerate into an attack on a benevolent Presbyterian minister, who refuses to accept, from conscientious motives, of a directorship in a Popish institution. This is surely a sad state of things,--a state grown very general, and which threatens to become more so; and in a due sense of the weakness for all good which it creates, and of the palpable state of disorganization and decomposition favourable to the growth of every species of evil, physical and moral, which it induces, we recognise at least one of the causes of the general desire for union. To no one circumstance has Rome owed more of its success than to the divisions of the Protestant Church; and great as that success has been in our own country, where, as 'at the equinoxia,' day and night are fast 'growing to equality,' it is but slight compared with what she has experienced in America and the colonies. It is a serious consideration in an age like the present, in which the country looks to emigration for relief from the pressure of a superabundant population, that religion has suffered more in the colonies from its sectarian divisions, than from every other cause put together.

The way in which the mischief comes to be done is easily conceivable. The Protestant emigrants of the country quit it always, with regard to their churchmanship, as a mere undisciplined rabble. The Episcopalian sets sail in the same vessel, and for the same scene of labour, as the Independent--the Free Churchman with the Baptist--the Methodist with the Original Seceder--the Voluntary with the Establishment-man; and they squat down together on contiguous lots, amid the solitude of the forest. Were they all of one communion, there might be scarce any break created in their old habits of church-going and religious instruction. The community, considerable as a whole, though very inconsiderable in its parts when broken up into denominational septs, would have its minister of religion from its first settlement, or almost so; and, from the rapid increase which takes place in all new colonies in congenial countries and climates, the charge of such a minister would be soon a very important one, and adequate to the full development of the energies of a superior man.

But alas for the numerous denominational septs! Years must elapse, in some instances many years, ere--few and scattered, and necessarily deprived of every advantage of the territorial system--they can procure for themselves religious teachers: they fall gradually, in the interim, out of religious habits, or there rises among them a generation in which these were never formed; and when at length a sept does procure a teacher, generally, from the comparative fewness of their numbers, the extent of district over which they are spread, and the lukewarmness induced among them by their years of deprivation--circumstances which make the charge of such a people no very desirable one to a man who can procure aught better, and which have some effect also in rendering their choice in such matters not very discriminating--he is frequently of a character little suited to profit them. They succeed too often in procuring not missionaries, nor men such as the ministers of higher standing, that divide the word to the congregations of the mother country, but the country's mere remainder preachers, who, having failed in making their way into a living at home, seek unwillingly a bit of bread in the unbroken ground of the colonies. The circumstances of Popery as a colonizing religion are in all respects immensely more favourable. For every practical purpose, it is one and united: it is furnished with an army of clergy admirably organized, and set peculiarly loose for movement at the will of the general ecclesiastical body by their law of celibacy. It possesses in prolific Ireland a vast propelling heart, if we may so speak, ever working in sending out the blood of a singularly bigoted Romanism to every quarter of the world. It has already begun to influence the elections of the United States; and should the Papal superstition be destined to live so long, and should its membership continue to increase at the present ratio, there will be as many Papists a century hence in the great valley of the Mississippi, and the tracts adjacent, as are at present in all Europe. In no field in the present day has Rome more decidedly the advantage than in that of colonization; and it is surely a serious consideration that it should owe its successes in such large measure to the divisions of Protestantism.