Chapter XVIII: Part 18

In a very fine pond, not far from the house and close by the road, there are some little artificial islands, upon one of which I observed an arbutus loaded with its beautiful fruit (quite ripe), even more thickly than any one I ever saw even in America. There were, on the side of the pond, a most numerous and beautiful collection of water-fowl, foreign as well as domestic. I never saw so great a variety of water-fowl collected together in my life. They had been ejected from the water by the frost, and were sitting apparently in a state of great dejection: but this circumstance has brought them into a comparatively small compass; and we facing our horses about, sat and looked at them, at the pond, at the grass, at the house, till we were tired of admiring. Everything here is in the neatest and most beautiful state. Endless herds of deer, of all the varieties of colours; and, what adds greatly to your pleasure in such a case, you see comfortable retreats prepared for them in different parts of the woods. When we came to what we thought the end of the park, the gate-keeper told us that we should find other walls to pass through. We now entered upon woods, we then came to another wall, and there we entered upon farms to our right and to our left. At last we came to a third wall, and the gate in that let us out into the turnpike road. The gate-keeper here told us, that the whole enclosure was _nine miles round_; and this, after all, forms, probably, not a quarter part of what this nobleman possesses. And is it wrong that one man should possess so much? By no means; but in my opinion it is wrong that a system should exist which compels this man to have his estate taken away from him unless he throw the junior branches of his family for maintenance upon the public.

Lord Egremont bears an excellent character. Everything that I have ever heard of him makes me believe that he is worthy of this princely estate. But I cannot forget that his two brothers, who are now very old men, have had, from their infancy, enormous revenues in sinecure places in the West Indies, while the general property and labour of England is taxed to maintain those West Indies in their state of dependence upon England; and I cannot forget that the burden of these sinecures are amongst the grievances of which the West Indians justly complain. True, the taxing system has taken from the family of Wyndham, during the lives of these two gentlemen, as much, and even more, than what that family has gained by those sinecures; but then let it be recollected, that it is not the helpless people of England who have been the cause of this system. It is not the fault of those who receive 7_d._ a day. It is the fault of the family of Wyndham and of such persons; and, if they have chosen to suffer the Jews and jobbers to take away so large a part of their income, it is not fair for them to come to the people at large to make up for the loss.

Thus it has gone on. The great masses of property have, in general, been able to take care of themselves: but the little masses have melted away like butter before the sun. The little gentry have had not even any disposition to resist. They merit their fate most justly. They have vied with each other in endeavours to ingratiate themselves with power, and to obtain compensation for their losses. The big fishes have had no feeling for them; have seen them sink with a sneer, rather than with compassion; but, at last, the cormorant threatens even themselves; and they are struggling with might and main for their own preservation. They everywhere "most liberally" take the Stock-jobber or the Jew by the hand, though they hate him mortally at the same time for his power to outdo them on the sideboard, on the table, and in the equipage. They seem to think nothing of the extinguishment of the small fry; they hug themselves in the thought that they escape; and yet, at times, their minds misgive them, and they tremble for their own fate. The country people really gain by the change; for the small gentry have been rendered, by their miseries, so niggardly and so cruel, that it is quite a blessing, in a village, to see a rich Jew or Jobber come to supplant them. They come, too, with far less cunning than the half-broken gentry. Cunning as the Stock-Jobber is in Change Alley, I defy him to be cunning enough for the country people, brought to their present state of duplicity by a series of cruelties which no pen can adequately describe. The Stock-Jobber goes from London with the _cant of humanity_ upon his lips, at any rate; whereas the half-broken Squire takes not the least pains to disguise the hardness of his heart.

It is impossible for any just man to regret the sweeping away of this base race of Squires; but the sweeping of them away is produced by causes that have a wider extent. These causes reach the good as well as the bad: all are involved alike: like the pestilence, this horrible system is no respecter of persons; and decay and beggary mark the whole face of the _country_.

North Chapel is a little town in the Weald of Sussex where there were formerly post-chaises kept; but where there are none kept now. And here is another complete revolution. In almost every country town the post-chaise houses have been lessened in number, and those that remain have become comparatively solitary and mean. The guests at inns are not now gentlemen, but _bumpers_, who, from being called (at the inns) "riders," became "travellers," and are now "commercial gentlemen," who go about in _gigs_, instead of on horseback, and who are in such numbers as to occupy a great part of the room in all the inns, in every part of the country. There are, probably, twenty thousand of them always out, who may perhaps have, on an average throughout the year, three or four thousand "ladies" travelling with them. The expense of this can be little short of fifteen millions a year, all to be paid by the country-people who consume the goods, and a large part of it to be drawn up to the Wen.

From North Chapel we came to Chiddingfold, which is in the Weald of Surrey; that is to say, the country of oak-timber. Between these two places there are a couple of pieces of that famous commodity, called "Government property." It seems that these places, which have extensive buildings on them, were for the purpose of making gunpowder. Like most other of these enterprises, they have been given up, after a time, and so the ground and all the buildings, and the monstrous fences, erected at enormous expense, have been sold. They were sold, it seems, some time ago, in lots, with the intention of being pulled down and carried away, though they are now nearly new, and built in the most solid, substantial, and expensive manner; brick walls eighteen inches through, and the buildings covered with lead and slate. It appears that they have been purchased by a Mr. Stovell, a Sussex banker; but for some reason or other, though the purchase was made long ago, "Government" still holds the possession; and, what is more, it keeps people there to take care of the premises. It would be curious to have a complete history of these pretty establishments at Chiddingford; but this is a sort of history that we shall never be treated with until there be somebody in Parliament to rummage things to the bottom. It would be very easy to call for a specific account of the cost of these establishments, and also of the quantity of powder made at them. I should not be at all surprised, if the concern, all taken together, brought the powder to a hundred times the price at which similar powder could have been purchased.

When we came through Chiddingfold, the people were just going to church; and we saw a carriage and pair conveying an old gentleman and some ladies to the churchyard steps. Upon inquiry, we found that this was Lord Winterton, whose name, they told us, was Turnour. I thought I had heard of all the Lords, first or last; but, if I had ever heard of this one before, I had forgotten him. He lives down in the Weald, between the gunpowder establishments and Horsham, and has the reputation of being a harmless, good sort of man, and that being the case I was sorry to see that he appeared to be greatly afflicted with the gout, being obliged to be helped up the steps by a stout man. However, it is as broad, perhaps, as it is long: a man is not to have all the enjoyments of making the gout, and the enjoyments of abstinence too: that would not be fair play; and I dare say that Lord Winterton is just enough to be content with the consequences of his enjoyments.

This Chiddingfold is a very pretty place. There is a very pretty and extensive green opposite the church; and we were at the proper time of the day to perceive that the modern system of education had by no means overlooked this little village. We saw _the schools_ marching towards the church in military order. Two of them passed us on our road. The boys looked very hard at us, and I saluted them with "There's brave boys, you'll all be parsons or lawyers or doctors." Another school seemed to be in a less happy state. The scholars were too much in uniform to have had their clothes purchased by their parents; and they looked, besides, as if a little more victuals and a little less education would have done as well. There were about twenty of them without one single tinge of red in their whole twenty faces. In short I never saw more deplorable looking objects since I was born. And can it be of any use to expend money in this sort of way upon poor creatures that have not half a bellyful of food? We had not breakfasted when we passed them. We felt, at that moment, what hunger was. We had some bits of bread and meat in our pockets, however; and these, which, were merely intended as stay-stomachs, amounted, I dare say, to the allowance of any half-dozen of these poor boys for the day. I could, with all my heart, have pulled the victuals out of my pocket and given it to them; but I did not like to do that which would have interrupted the march, and might have been construed into a sort of insult. To quiet my conscience, however, I gave a poor man that I met soon afterwards sixpence, under pretence of rewarding him for telling me the way to Thursley, which I knew as well as he, and which I had determined, in my own mind, not to follow.

We had now come on the Turnpike road from my Lord Egremont's Park to Chiddingfold. I had made two or three attempts to get out of it, and to bear away to the north-west, to get through the oak-woods to Thursley; but I was constantly prevented by being told that the road which I wished to take would lead me to Haslemere. If you talk to ostlers, or landlords, or post-boys; or, indeed, to almost anybody else, they mean by a _road_ a _turnpike road_; and they positively will not talk to you about any other. Now, just after quitting Chiddingfold, Thursley lies over fine woods and coppices, in a north-west direction, or thereabouts; and the Turnpike road, which goes from Petworth to Godalming, goes in a north-north-east direction. I was resolved, be the consequences what they might, not to follow the Turnpike road one single inch further; for I had not above three miles or thereabouts to get to Thursley, through the woods; and I had, perhaps, six miles at least to get to it the other way; but the great thing was to see the interior of these woods; to see the stems of the trees, as well as the tops of them. I saw a lane opening in the right direction; I saw indeed, that my horses must go up to their knees in clay; but I resolved to enter and go along that lane, and long before the end of my journey I found myself most amply compensated for the toil that I was about to encounter. But talk of toil! It was the horse that had the toil; and I had nothing to do but to sit upon his back, turn my head from side to side and admire the fine trees in every direction. Little bits of fields and meadows here and there, shaded all over, or nearly all over, by the surrounding trees. Here and there a labourer's house buried in the woods. We had drawn out our luncheons and eaten them while the horses took us through the clay; but I stopped at a little house, and asked the woman, who looked very clean and nice, whether she would let us dine with her. She said "Yes," with all her heart, but that she had no place to put our horses in, and that her dinner would not be ready for an hour, when she expected her husband home from church. She said they had a bit of bacon and a pudding and some cabbage; but that she had not much bread in the house. She had only one child, and that was not very old, so we left her, quite convinced that my old observation is true, that people in the woodland countries are best off, and that it is absolutely impossible to reduce them to that state of starvation in which they are in the corn-growing part of the kingdom. Here is that great blessing, abundance of fuel at all times of the year, and particularly in the winter.

We came on for about a mile further in these clayey lanes, when we renewed our inquiries as to our course, as our road now seemed to point towards Godalming again. I asked a man how I should get to Thursley? He pointed to some fir-trees upon a hill, told me I must go by them, and that there was no other way. "Where then," said I, "is Thursley?" He pointed with his hand, and said, "Right over those woods; but there is no road there, and it is impossible for you to get through those woods." "Thank you," said I; "but through those woods we mean to go." Just at the border of the woods I saw a cottage. There must be some way to that cottage; and we soon found a gate that let us into a field, across which we went to this cottage. We there found an old man and a young one. Upon inquiry we found that it was _possible_ to get through these woods. Richard gave the old man threepence to buy a pint of beer, and I gave the young one a shilling to pilot us through the woods. These were oak-woods with underwood beneath; and there was a little stream of water running down the middle of the woods, the annual and long overflowings of which has formed a meadow sometimes a rod wide, and sometimes twenty rods wide, while the bed of the stream itself was the most serpentine that can possibly be imagined, describing, in many places, nearly a complete circle, going round for many rods together, and coming within a rod or two of a point that it had passed before. I stopped the man several times, to sit and admire this beautiful spot, shaded in great part by lofty and wide-spreading oak trees. We had to cross this brook several times, over bridges that the owner had erected for the convenience of the fox-hunters. At last, we came into an ash-coppice, which had been planted in regular rows, at about four feet distances, which had been once cut, and which was now in the state of six years' growth. A road through it, made for the fox-hunters, was as straight as a line, and of so great a length, that, on entering it, the farther end appeared not to be a foot wide. Upon seeing this, I asked the man whom these coppices belonged to, and he told me to Squire Leech, at Lea. My surprise ceased, but my admiration did not.

A piece of ordinary coppice ground, close adjoining this, and with no timber in it, and upon just the same soil (if there had been such a piece), would, at ten years' growth, be worth, at present prices, from five to seven pounds the acre. This coppice, at ten years' growth, will be worth twenty pounds the acre; and, at the next cutting, when the stems will send out so many more shoots, it will be worth thirty pounds the acre. I did not ask the question when I afterwards saw Mr. Leech, but, I dare say, the ground was trenched before it was planted; but what is that expense when compared with the great, the permanent profit of such an undertaking? And, above all things, what a convenient species of property does a man here create. Here are no tenants' rack, no anxiety about crops and seasons; the rust and the mildew never come here; a man knows what he has got, and he knows that nothing short of an earthquake can take it from him, unless, indeed, by attempting to vie with the stock-jobber in the expense of living, he enable the stock-jobber to come and perform the office of the earthquake. Mr. Leech's father planted, I think it was, forty acres of such coppice in the same manner; and, at the same time, he _sowed the ground with acorns_. The acorns have become oak trees, and have begun and made great progress in diminishing the value of the ash, which have now to contend against the shade and the roots of the oak. For present profit, and, indeed, for permanent profit, it would be judicious to grub up the oak; but the owner has determined otherwise. He cannot endure the idea of destroying an oak wood.

If such be the profit of planting ash, what would be the profit of planting locust, even for poles or stakes? The locust would outgrow the ash, as we have seen in the case of Mr. Gunter's plantation, more than three to one. I am satisfied that it will do this upon any soil, if you give the trees fifteen years to grow in; and, in short, that the locusts will be trees when the ash are merely poles, if both are left to grow up in single stems. If in coppice, the locust will make as good poles; I mean as large and as long poles in six years, as the ash will in ten years: to say nothing of the superior durability of the locust. I have seen locusts, at Mr. Knowles's, at Thursley, sufficient for a hop-pole, for an ordinary hop-pole, with only five years' growth in them, and leaving the last year's growth to be cut off, leaving the top of the pole three-quarters of an inch through. There is nothing that we have ever heard of, of the timber kind, equal to this in point of quickness of growth. In parts of the county where hop-poles are not wanted, espalier stakes, wood for small fencing, hedge stakes, hurdle stakes, fold-shores, as the people call them, are always wanted; and is it not better to have a thing that will last twenty years, than a thing that will last only three? I know of no English underwood which gives a hedge stake to last even _two years_. I should think that a very profitable way of employing the locust would be this. Plant a coppice, the plants two feet apart. Thus planted, the trees will protect one another against the wind. Keep the side shoots pruned off. At the end of six years, the coppice, if well planted and managed, will be, at the very least, twenty feet high to the tips of the trees. Not if the grass and weeds are suffered to grow up to draw all the moisture up out of the ground, to keep the air from the young plants, and to intercept the gentle rains and the dews; but trenched ground, planted carefully, and kept clean; and always bearing in mind that hares and rabbits and young locust trees will never live together; for the hares and rabbits will not only bite them off, but will gnaw them down to the ground, and, when they have done that, will scratch away the ground to gnaw into the very root. A gentleman bought some locust trees of me last year, and brought me a dismal account in the summer of their being all dead; but I have since found that they were all eaten up by the hares. He saw some of my refuse; some of those which were too bad to send to him, which were a great deal higher than his head. His ground was as good as mine, according to his account; but I had no hares to fight against; or else mine would have been all dead too.

I say, then, that a locust plantation, in pretty good land, well managed, would be twenty feet high in six years; suppose it, however, to be only fifteen, there would be, at the bottom, wood to make two locust PINS for ship-building; two locust pins at the bottom of each tree. Two at the very least; and here would be twenty-two thousand locust pins to the acre, probably enough for the building of a seventy-four gun ship. These pins are about eighteen inches long, and, perhaps, an inch and half through; and there is this surprising quality in the wood of the locust, that it is just as hard and as durable at five or six years' growth as it is at fifty years' growth. Of which I can produce an abundance of instances. The _stake_ which I brought home from America, and which is now at Fleet-street, had stood as a stake for about eight and twenty years, as certified to me by Judge Mitchell, of North Hampstead in Long Island, who gave me the stake, and who said to me at the time, "Now are you really going to take that crooked miserable stick to England!" Now it is pretty well known, at least, I have been so informed, that our Government have sent to America in consequence of my writings about the locust, to endeavour to get locust pins for the navy. I have been informed that they have been told that the American Government has bought them all up. Be this as it may, I know that a waggon load of these pins is, in America itself, equal in value to a waggon load of barrels of the finest flour. This being undeniable, and the fact being undeniable that we can grow locust pins here, that I can take a seed to-day, and say that it shall produce two pins in seven years' time, will it not become an article of heavy accusation against the Government if they neglect even one day to set about tearing up their infernal Scotch firs and larches in Wolmer Forest and elsewhere, and putting locust trees in their stead, in order, first to provide this excellent material for ship-building; and next to have some fine plantations in the Holt Forest, Wolmer Forest, the New Forest, the Forest of Dean, and elsewhere, the only possible argument against doing which being, that I may possibly take a ride round amongst their plantations, and that it may be everlastingly recorded that it was I who was the cause of the Government's adopting this wise and beneficial measure?

I am disposed to believe, however, that the Government will not be brutish enough, obstinately to reject the advice given to them on this head, it being observed, however, that I wish to have no hand in their proceedings, directly or indirectly. I can sell all the trees that I have for sale to other customers. Let them look out for themselves; and as to any reports that their creatures may make upon the subjects I shall be able to produce proofs enough that such reports, if unfavourable, are false. I wrote, in a Register from Long Island, that I could if I would tell insolent Castlereagh, who was for making Englishmen dig holes one day and fill them up the next, how he might _profitably put something into those holes_, but that I would not tell him as long as the Borough-mongers should be in the state in which they then were. They are no longer in that state, I thank God. There has been no positive law to alter their state, but it is manifest that there must be such law before it be long. Events are working together to make the country worth living in, which, for the great body of the people, is at present hardly the case. Above all things in the world, it is the duty of every man, who has it in his power, to do what he can to promote the creation of materials for the building of ships in the best manner; and it is now a fact of perfect notoriety, that, with regard to the building of ships, it cannot be done in the best manner without the assistance of this sort of wood.

I have seen a specimen of the locust wood used in the making of furniture. I saw it in the posts of a bed-stead; and any thing more handsome I never saw in my life. I had used it myself in the making of rules; but I never saw it in this shape before. It admits of a polish nearly as fine as that of box. It is a bright and beautiful yellow. And in bedsteads, for instance, it would last for ever, and would not become loose at the joints, like oak and other perishable wood; because, like the live oak and the red cedar, no worm or insect ever preys upon it. There is no fear of the quantity being too great. It would take a century to make as many plantations as are absolutely wanted in England. It would be a prodigious creation of real and solid wealth. Not such a creation as that of paper money, which only takes the dinner from one man and gives it to another, which only gives an unnatural swell to a city or a watering place by beggaring a thousand villages; but it would be a creation of money's worth things. Let any man go and look at a farmhouse that was built a hundred years ago. He will find it, though very well built with stone or brick, actually falling to pieces, unless very frequently repaired, owing entirely to the rotten wood in the window-sills, the door-sills, the plates, the pins, the door frames, the window frames, and all those parts of the beams, the joists, and the rafters, that come in contact with the rain or the moisture. The two parts of a park pailing which give way first, are, the parts of the post that meet the ground, and the pins which hold the rails to the post. Both these rot long before the pailing rots. Now, all this is avoided by the use of locust as sills, as joists, as posts, as frames, and as pins. Many a roof has come down merely from the rotting of the pins. The best of spine oak is generally chosen for these pins. But after a time, the air gets into the pin-hole. The pin rots from the moist air, it gives way, the wind shakes the roof, and down it comes, or it swags, the wet gets in, and the house is rotten. In ships, the pins are the first things that give way. Many a ship would last twenty years after it is broken up, if put together with locust pins. I am aware that some readers will become tired of this subject; and, nothing but my conviction of its being of the very first importance to the whole kingdom could make me thus dwell upon it.

We got to Thursley after our beautiful ride through Mr. Leech's coppices, and the weather being pretty cold, we found ourselves most happily situated here by the side of an _American fire-place_, making extremely comfortable a room which was formerly amongst the most uncomfortable in the world. This is another of what the malignant parsons call Cobbett's Quackeries. But my real opinion is that the whole body of them, all put together, have never, since they were born, conferred so much benefit upon the country, as I have conferred upon it by introducing this fire-place. Mr. Judson of Kensington, who is the manufacturer of them, tells me that he has a great demand, which gives me much pleasure; but really, coming to conscience, no man ought to sit by one of these fire-places that does not go the full length with me both in politics and religion. It is not fair for them to enjoy the warmth without subscribing to the doctrines of the giver of the warmth. However, as I have nothing to do with Mr. Judson's affair, either as to the profit or the loss, he must sell the fire-places to whomsoever he pleases.

_Kensington, Sunday, 20th Nov._

Coming to Godalming on Friday, where business kept us that night, we had to experience at the inn the want of our American fire-place. A large and long room to sit in, with a miserable thing called a screen to keep the wind from our backs, with a smoke in the room half an hour after the fire was lighted, we, consuming a full bushel of coals in order to keep us warm, were not half so well off as we should have been in the same room, and without any screen, and with two gallons of coals, if we had our American fire-place. I gave the landlord my advice upon the subject, and he said he would go and look at the fire-place at Mr. Knowles's. That was precisely one of those rooms which stand in absolute need of such a fire-place. It is, I should think, five-and-thirty, or forty feet long, and pretty nearly twenty feet wide. I could sooner dine with a labouring man upon his allowance of bread, such as I have mentioned above, than I would, in winter time, dine in that room upon turbot and sirloin of beef. An American fire-place, with a good fire in it, would make every part of that room pleasant to dine in in the coldest day in winter. I saw a public-house drinking-room, where the owner has tortured his invention to get a little warmth for his guests, where he fetches his coals in a waggon from a distance of twenty miles or thereabouts, and where he consumes these coals by the bushel, to effect that which he cannot effect at all, and which he might effect completely with about a fourth part of the coals.

It looked like rain on Saturday morning, we therefore sent our horses on from Godalming to Ripley, and took a post-chaise to convey us after them. Being shut up in the post-chaise did not prevent me from taking a look at a little snug house stuck under the hill on the road side, just opposite the old chapel on St. Catherine's-hill, which house was not there when I was a boy. I found that this house is now occupied by the family Molyneux, for ages the owners of Losely Park, on the out-skirts of which estate this house stands. The house at Losely is of great antiquity, and had, or perhaps has, attached to it the great manors of Godalming and Chiddingfold. I believe that Sir Thomas More lived at Losely, or, at any rate, that the Molyneuxes are, in some degree, descended from him. The estate is, I fancy, theirs yet; but here they are, in this little house, while one Gunning (an East Indian, I believe) occupies the house of their ancestors. At Send, or Sutton, where Mr. Webb Weston inhabited, there is a Baron somebody, with a De before his name. The name is German or Dutch, I believe. How the Baron came there I know not; but as I have read his name amongst the _Justices of the Peace_ for the county of Surrey, he must have been born in England, or the law has been violated in making him a Justice of the Peace, seeing that no person not born a subject of the king, and a subject in this country too, can lawfully hold a commission under the crown, either civil or military. Nor is it lawful for any man born abroad of Scotch or Irish parents, to hold such commission under the crown, though such commissions have been held, and are held, by persons who are neither natural-born subjects of the king, nor born of English parents abroad. It should also be known and borne in mind by the people, that it is unlawful to grant any pension from the crown to any foreigner whatever. And no naturalization act can take away this disability. Yet the Whigs, as they call themselves, granted such pensions during the short time that they were in power.

When we got to Ripley, we found the day very fine, and we got upon our horses and rode home to dinner, after an absence of just one month, agreeably to our original intention, having seen a great deal of the country, having had a great deal of sport, and having, I trust, laid in a stock of health for the winter, sufficient to enable us to withstand the suffocation of this smoking and stinking Wen.

But Richard and I have done something else, besides ride, and hunt, and course, and stare about us, during this month. He was eleven years old last March, and it was now time for him to begin to know something about letters and figures. He has learned to work in the garden, and having been a good deal in the country, knows a great deal about farming affairs. He can ride anything of a horse, and over anything that a horse will go over. So expert at hunting, that his first teacher, Mr. Budd, gave the hounds up to his management in the field; but now he begins to talk about nothing but _fox-hunting_! That is a dangerous thing. When he and I went from home, I had business at Reigate. It was a very wet morning, and we went off long before daylight in a post-chaise, intending to have our horses brought after us. He began to talk in anticipation of the sport he was going to have, and was very inquisitive as to the probability of our meeting with fox-hounds, which gave me occasion to address him thus: "Fox-hunting is a very fine thing, and very proper for people to be engaged in, and it is very desirable to be able to ride well and to be in at the death; but that is not ALL; that is not everything. Any fool can ride a horse, and draw a cover; any groom or any stable-fellow, who is as ignorant as the horse, can do these things; but all gentlemen that go a fox-hunting [I hope God will forgive me for the lie] are scholars, Richard. It is not the riding, nor the scarlet coats, that make them gentlemen; it is their scholarship." What he thought I do not know; for he sat as mute as a fish, and I could not see his countenance. "So," said I, "you must now begin to learn something, and you must begin with arithmetic." He had learned from mere play, to read, being first set to work of his own accord, to find out what was said about Thurtell, when all the world was talking and reading about Thurtell. This had induced us to give him Robinson Crusoe; and that had made him a passable reader. Then he had scrawled down letters and words upon paper, and had written letters to me, in the strangest way imaginable. His knowledge of figures he had acquired from the necessity of knowing the several numbers upon the barrels of seeds brought from America, and the numbers upon the doors of houses. So that I had pretty nearly a blank sheet of paper to begin upon; and I have always held it to be stupidity to the last degree to attempt to put book-learning into children who are too young to reason with.

I began with a pretty long lecture on the utility of arithmetic; the absolute necessity of it, in order for us to make out our accounts of the trees and seeds that we should have to sell in the winter, and the utter impossibility of our getting paid for our pains unless we were able to make out our accounts, which accounts could not be made out unless we understood something about arithmetic. Having thus made him understand the utility of the thing, and given him a very strong instance in the case of our nursery affairs, I proceeded to explain to him the meaning of the word arithmetic, the power of figures, according to the place they occupied. I then, for it was still dark, taught him to add a few figures together, I naming the figures one after another, while he, at the mention of each new figure said the amount, and if incorrectly, he was corrected by me. When we had got a sum of about 24, I said now there is another line of figures on the left of this, and therefore you are to put down the 4 and carry 2. "What is _carrying_?" said he. I then explained to him the _why_ and the _wherefore_ of this, and he perfectly understood me at once. We then did several other little sums; and, by the time we got to Sutton, it becoming daylight, I took a pencil and set him a little sum upon paper, which, after making a mistake or two, he did very well. By the time we got to Reigate he had done several more, and at last, a pretty long one, with very few errors. We had business all day, and thought no more of our scholarship until we went to bed, and then we did, in our post-chaise fashion, a great many lines in arithmetic before we went to sleep. Thus we went on mixing our riding and hunting with our arithmetic, until we quitted Godalming, when he did a sum very nicely in _multiplication of money_, falling a little short of what I had laid out, which was to make him learn the four rules in whole numbers first, and then in money, before I got home.

Friends' houses are not so good as inns for executing a project like this; because you cannot very well be by yourself; and we slept but four nights at inns during our absence. So that we have actually stolen the time to accomplish this job, and Richard's Journal records that he was more than fifteen days out of the thirty-one coursing or hunting. Nothing struck me more than the facility, the perfect readiness with which he at once performed addition of money. There is a _pence table_ which boys usually learn, and during the learning of which they usually get no small number of thumps. This table I found it wholly unnecessary to set him. I had written it for him in one of the leaves of his journal book. But, upon looking at it, he said, "I don't want this, because, you know, I have nothing to do but to _divide by twelve_." That is right, said I, you are a clever fellow, Dick; and I shut up the book.

Now, when there is so much talk about education, let me ask how many pounds it generally costs parents to have a boy taught this much of arithmetic; how much time it costs also; and, which is a far more serious consideration, how much mortification, and very often how much loss of health, it costs the poor scolded broken-hearted child, who becomes dunder-headed and dull for all his life-time, merely because that has been imposed upon him as a task which he ought to regard as an object of pleasant pursuit. I never even once desired him to stay a moment from any other thing that he had a mind to go at. I just wrote the sums down upon paper, laid them upon the table, and left him to tackle them when he pleased. In the case of the multiplication-table, the learning of which is something of a job, and which it is absolutely necessary to learn perfectly, I advised him to go up into his bed-room and read it twenty times over out loud every morning before he went a hunting, and ten times over every night after he came back, till it all came as pat upon his lips as the names of persons that he knew. He did this, and at the end of about a week he was ready to set on upon multiplication. It is the irksomeness of the thing which is the great bar to learning of every sort. I took care not to suffer irksomeness to seize his mind for a moment, and the consequence was that which I have described. I wish clearly to be understood as ascribing nothing to extraordinary _natural_ ability. There are, as I have often said, as many _sorts_ of men as there are of dogs; but I do not pretend to be of any peculiarly excellent sort, and I have never discovered any indications of it. There are, to be sure, sorts that are naturally stupid; but, the generality of men are not so; and I believe that every boy of the same age, equally healthy, and brought up in the same manner, would (unless of one of the stupid kinds) learn in just the same sort of way; but not if begun to be thumped at five or six years old, when the poor little things have no idea of the utility of anything; who are hardly sensible beings, and have but just understanding enough to know that it will hurt them if they jump down a chalk pit. I am sure, from thousands of instances that have come under my own eyes, that to begin to teach children book-learning before they are capable of reasoning, is the sure and certain way to enfeeble their minds for life; and, if they have natural genius, to cramp, if not totally to destroy that genius.

I think I shall be tempted to mould into a little book these lessons of arithmetic given to Richard. I think that a boy of sense, and of age equal to that of my scholar, would derive great profit from such a little book. It would not be equal to my verbal explanations, especially accompanied with the other parts of my conduct towards my scholar; but at any rate, it would be plain; it would be what a boy could understand; it would encourage him by giving him a glimpse at the reasons for what he was doing: it would contain principles; and the difference between principles and rules is this, that the former are persuasions and the latter are commands. There is a great deal of difference between carrying 2 for such and such a reason, and carrying 2 because you _must_ carry 2. You see boys that can cover reams of paper with figures, and do it with perfect correctness too; and at the same time, can give you not a single reason for any part of what they have done. Now this is really doing very little. The rule is soon forgotten, and then all is forgotten. It would be the same with a lawyer that understood none of the principles of law. As far as he could find and remember cases exactly similar in all their parts to the case which he might have to manage, he would be as profound a lawyer as any in the world; but if there was the slightest difference between his case and the cases he had found upon record, there would be an end of his law.

Some people will say, here is a monstrous deal of vanity and egotism; and if they will tell me, how such a story is to be told without exposing a man to this imputation, I will adopt their mode another time. I get nothing by telling the story. I should get full as much by keeping it to myself; but it may be useful to others, and therefore I tell it. Nothing is so dangerous as supposing that you have eight wonders of the world. I have no pretensions to any such possession. I look upon my boy as being like other boys in general. Their fathers can teach arithmetic as well as I; and if they have not a mind to pursue my method, they must pursue their own. Let them apply to the outside of the head and to the back, if they like; let them bargain for thumps and the birch rod; it is their affair and not mine. I never yet saw in my house a child that was _afraid_; that was in any fear whatever; that was ever for a moment under any sort of apprehension, on account of the learning of anything; and I never in my life gave a command, an order, a request, or even advice, to look into any book; and I am quite satisfied that the way to make children dunces, to make them detest books, and justify that detestation, is to tease them and bother them upon the subject.

As to the _age_ at which children ought to begin to be taught, it is very curious, that, while I was at a friend's house during my ride, I looked into, by mere accident, a little child's abridgment of the History of England: a little thing about twice as big as a crown-piece. Even into this abridgment the historian had introduced the circumstance of Alfred's father, who, "through a _mistaken notion_ of kindness to his son, had suffered him to live to the age of twelve years without any attempt being made to give him education." How came this writer to know that it was a _mistaken notion_? Ought he not rather, when he looked at the result, when he considered the astonishing knowledge and great deeds of Alfred--ought he not to have hesitated before he thus criticised the notions of the father? It appears from the result that the notions of the father were perfectly correct; and I am satisfied, that if they had begun to thump the head of Alfred when he was a child, we should not at this day have heard talk of Alfred the Great.

* * * * *

Great apologies are due to the OLD LADY from me, on account of my apparent inattention towards her, during her recent, or rather, I may say, her present, fit of that tormenting disorder which, as I observed before, comes upon her by _spells_. Dr. M'CULLOCH may say what he pleases about her being "_wi' bairn_." I say it's the wet gripes; and I saw a poor old mare down in Hampshire in just the same way; but God forbid the catastrophe should be the same, for they shot poor old Ball for the hounds. This disorder comes by spells. It sometimes seems as if it were altogether going off; the pulse rises, and the appetite returns. By-and-by a fresh grumbling begins to take place in the bowels. These are followed by acute pains; the patient becomes tremulous; the pulse begins to fall, and the most gloomy apprehensions begin again to be entertained. At every spell the pulse does not cease falling till it becomes lower than it was brought to by the preceding spell; and thus, spell after spell, finally produces the natural result.

It is useless at present to say much about the equivocating and blundering of the newspapers, relative to the cause of the fall. They are very shy, extremely cautious; become wonderfully _wary_, with regard to this subject. They do not know what to make of it. They all remember, that I told them that their prosperity was delusive; that it would soon come to an end, while they were telling me of the falsification of all my predictions. I told them the Small-note Bill had only given a _respite_. I told them that the foreign loans, and the shares, and all the astonishing enterprises, arose purely out of the Small-note Bill; and that a short time would see the Small-note Bill driving the gold out of the country, and bring us back to another restriction, OR, to wheat at four shillings a bushel. They remember that I told them all this; and now, some of them begin to _regard me as the principal cause of the present embarrassments_! This is pretty work indeed! What! I! The poor deluded creature, whose predictions were all falsified, who knew nothing at all about such matters, who was a perfect pedlar in political economy, who was "a conceited and obstinate old dotard," as that polite and enlightened paper, the _Morning Herald_, called me: is it possible that such a poor miserable creature can have had the power to produce effects so prodigious? Yet this really appears to be the opinion of one, at least, of these Mr. Brougham's best possible public instructors. The _Public Ledger_, of the 16th of November, has the following passage:--

"It is fully ascertained that the Country Banking Establishments in England have latterly been compelled to limit their paper circulation, for the writings of Mr. COBBETT are widely circulated in the Agricultural districts, and they have been so successful as to induce the _Boobies_ to call for gold in place of country paper, a circumstance which has _produced a greater effect on the currency than any exportation of the precious metals_ to the Continent, either of Europe or America, could have done, although it too must have contributed to render money for a season scarce."

And, so, the "_boobies_" call for gold instead of country bank-notes! Bless the "_boobies_"! I wish they would do it to a greater extent, which they would, if they were not so dependent as they are upon the ragmen. But, does the _Public Ledger_ think that those unfortunate creatures who suffered the other day at Plymouth, would have been "_boobies_," if they had gone and got sovereigns before the banks broke? This brother of the broad sheet should act justly and fairly as I do. He should ascribe these demands for gold to Mr. Jones of Bristol and not to me. Mr. Jones taught the "boobies" that they might have gold for asking for, or send the ragmen to jail. It is Mr. Jones, therefore, that they should blame, and not me. But, seriously speaking, what a mess, what a pickle, what a horrible mess, must the thing be in, if any man, or any thousand of men, or any hundred thousand of men, can change the value of money, unhinge all contracts and all engagements, and plunge the pecuniary affairs of a nation into confusion? I have been often accused of wishing to be thought the cleverest man in the country; but surely it is no vanity (for vanity means unjust pretension) for me to think myself the cleverest man in the country, if I can of my own head, and at my own pleasure, produce effects like these. Truth, however, and fair dealing with my readers, call upon me to disclaim so haughty a pretension. I have no such power as this public instructor ascribes to me. Greater causes are at work to produce such effects; causes wholly uncontrollable by me, and, what is more, wholly uncontrollable in the long run by the Government itself, though heartily co-operating with the bank directors. These united can do nothing to arrest the progress of events. Peel's Bill produced the horrible distresses of 1822; the part repeal of that bill produced a respite, that respite is now about to expire; and neither Government nor bank, nor both joined together, can prevent the ultimate consequences. They may postpone them for a little; but mark, every postponement will render the catastrophe the more dreadful.