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Chapter XVIII - ResultChapter XVIII - Result
Chapter XVIII - Result
England is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal framework, it is an
old pile built in different ages, with repairs, additions, and makeshifts; but
you see the poor best you have got. London is the epi,ome of our times, and
the Rome of to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed Teutons, they stand in
solid phalanx foursquare to the points of compass; they constitute the modern
world, they have earned their vantage-ground, and held it through ages of
adverse possession. They are well marked and differing from other leading
races. England is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not so public in
its bias; private life is its place of honor. Truth in private life, untruth
in public, marks these home-loving men. Their political conduct is not
decided by general views, but by internal intrigues and personal and family
interest. They cannot readily see beyond England. The history of Rome and
Greece, when written by their scholars, degenerates into English party
pamphlets. They cannot see beyond England, nor in England can they transcend
the interests of the governing classes. "English principles" mean a primary
regard to the interests of property. England, Scotland, and Ireland combine to
check the colonies. England and Scotland combine to check Irish manufactures
and trade. England rallies at home to check Scotland. In England, the strong
classes check the weaker. In the home population of near thirty millions,
there are but one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, punishes
education. Down to a late day, marriages performed by dissenters were illegal.
A bitter class-legislation gives power to those who are rich enough to buy a
law. The game-laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism incrusts and clogs
the state, and in hard times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was
diluted. Multitudes lived miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware. In cities,
the children are trained to beg, until they shall be old enough to rob. Men
and women were convicted to poisoning scores of children for burial fees. In
Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums
were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form. During the Australian
emigration, multitudes were rejected by the commissioners as being too
emaciated for useful colonists. During the Russian war, few of those that
offered as recruits were found up to the medical standard, though it had been
reduced.
The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and lavish of money, has
not often been generous or just. It has a principal regard to the interest of
trade, checked however by the aristocratic bias of the ambassador, which
usually puts him in sympathy with the continental Courts. It sanctioned the
partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parga, Greece, Turkey, Rome,
and Hungary.
Some public regards they have. They have abolished slavery in the West
Indies, and put an end to human sacrifices in the East. At home they have a
certain statute hospitality. England keeps open doors, as a trading country
must, to all nations. It is one of their fixed ideas, and wrathfully supported
by their laws in unbroken sequence for a thousand years. In Magna Charta it
was ordained that all "merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out
and come into England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as by
water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed customs, without any evil toll,
except in time of war, or when they shall be of any nation at war with us." It
is a statute and obliged hospitality, and peremptorily maintained. But this
shop-rule had one magnificent effect. It extends its cold unalterable
courtesy to political exiles of every opinion, and is a fact which might give
additional light to that portion of the planet seen from the farthest star.
But this perfunctory hospitality puts no sweetness into their unaccommodating
manners, no check on that puissant nationality which makes their existence
incompatible with all that is not English.
What we must say about a nation is a superficial dealing with symptoms.
We cannot go deep enough into the biography of the spirit who never throws
himself entire into one hero, but delegates his energy in parts or spasms to
vicious and defective individuals. But the wealth of the source is seen in the
plenitude of English nature. What variety of power and talent; what facility
and plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a
proud chivalry is indicated in "Collins` Peerage," through eight hundred
years! What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness! What courage in
war, what sinew in labor, what cunning workmen, what inventors and engineers,
what seamen and pilots, what clerks and scholars! No one man and no few men
can represent them. It is a people of myriad personalities. Their many -
headedness is owing to the advantageous position of the middle class, who are
always the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of their
aesthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are many-nationed:
their colonization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and their speech
seems destined to be the universal language of men. I have noted the reserve
of power in the English temperament. In the island, they never let out all the
length of all the reins, their is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy
of will or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the time of Mahomet, or like
that which intoxicated France in 1789. But who would see the uncoiling of that
tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow
the swarms which, pouring now for two hundred years from the British islands,
have sailed, and rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates, mainly
following the belt of empire, the temperate zones, carrying the Saxon seed,
with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought, - acquiring
under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows, - to the
conquest of the globe. Their colonial policy, obeying the necessities of a
vast empire, has become liberal. Canada and Australia have been contented with
substantial independence. They are expiating the wrongs of India, by benefits;
first, in works for the irrigation of the peninsula, and roads and telegraphs;
and secondly, in the instruction of the people, to qualify them for self -
government, when the British power shall be finally called home.
Their mind is in a state of arrested development, - a divine cripple like
Vulcan; a blind savant like Huber and Sanderson. They do not occupy themselves
on matters of general and lasting import, but on a corporeal civilization, on
goods that perish in the using. But they read with good intent, and what they
learn they incarnate. The English mind turns every abstraction it can receive
into a portable utensil, or a working institution. Such is their tenacity, and
such their practical turn, that they hold all they gain. Hence we say that
only the English race can be trusted with freedom, - freedom which is double -
edged and dangerous to any but the wise and robust. The English designate the
kingdoms emulous of free institutions, as the sentimental nations. Their
culture is not an outside varnish, but is thorough and secular in families and
the race. They are oppressive with their temperament, and all the more that
they are refined I have sometimes seen them walk with my countrymen when I was
forced to allow them every advantage, and their companions seemed bags of
bones.
There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought, sleepy routine, and
a tortoise`s instinct to hold hard to the ground with his claws, lest he
should be thrown on his back. There is a drag of inertia which resists reform
in every shape; - law-reform, army-reform, extension of suffrage, Jewish
franchise, Catholic emancipation, - the abolition of slavery, of impressment,
penal code, and entails. They praise this drag, under the formula that it is
the excellence of the British constitution, that no law can anticipate the
public opinion. These poor tortoises must hold hard, for they feel no wings
sprouting at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their heart, and
waits a happier hour. It hides in their study will. "Will," said the old
philosophy, "is the measure of power," and personality is the token of this
race. Quid vult valde vult. What they do they do with a will. You cannot
account for their success by their Christianity, commerce, charter, common
law, Parliament, or letters, but by the contumacious sharp-tongued energy of
English naturel, with a poise impossible to disturb, which makes all these its
instruments. They are slow and reticent, and are like a dull good horse which
lets every nag pass him, but with whip and spur will run down every racer in
the field. They are right in their feeling, though wrong in their speculation.
The feudal system survives in the steep inequality of property and
privilege, in the limited franchise, in the social barriers which confine
patronage and promotion to a caste, and still more in the submissive ideas
pervading these people. The fagging of the schools is repeated in the social
classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to those below him in the social scale,
as he looks for none from those above him: any forbearance from his superiors
surprises him, and they suffer in his good opinion. But the feudal system can
be seen with less pain on large historical grounds. It was pleaded in
mitigation of the rotten borough, that it worked well, that substantial
justice was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan, Romilly,
or whatever national man, were by this means sent to Parliament, when their
return by large constituencies would have been doubtful. So now we say that
the right measures of England are the men it bred; that it has yielded more
able men in five hundred years than any other nation; and, though we must not
play Providence, and balance the chances of producing ten great men against
the comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospectively we may strike the
balance, and prefer one Alfred, one Shakespeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one
Raleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats.
The American system is more democratic, more humane; yet the American
people do not yield better or more able men, or more inventions or books or
benefits, than the English. Congress is not wiser or better than Parliament.
France has abolished its suffocating old regime, but is not recently marked by
any more wisdom or virtue.
The power of performance has not been exceeded, - the creation of value.
The English have given importance to individuals, a principal end and fruit of
every society. Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and is
guarded in the indulgence of his whim. "Magna Charta," said Rushworth, "is
such a fellow that he will have no sovereign." By this general activity, and
by this sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hundred years evolved
the principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages, and
bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it will
be remembered as an island famous for immortal laws, for the announcements of
original right which make the stone tables of liberty.
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