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Chapter V - AbilityPart II
Part II
Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his father, who had made
the catalogue of the stars of the northern hemisphere, expatriated himself for
years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern heaven,
came home, and redacted it in eight years more; - a work whose value does not
begin until thirty years have elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages
of the highest import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic expeditions year
after year, in search of Sir John Franklin, until, at last, they have threaded
their way through polar pack and Behring`s Straits, and solved the
geographical problem. Lord Elgin, at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the
Greek remains, set up his scaffoldings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five
years` labor to collect them, got his marbles on shipboard. The ship struck a
rock, and went to the bottom. He had them all fished up, by divers, at a vast
expense, and brought to London: not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and Canova,
and all good heads in all the world, were to be his applauders. In the same
spirit were the excavation and research by Sir Charles Fellowes, for the
Xanthian monument; and of Layard, for his Nineveh sculptures.
The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended
into every man`s mind, though he live in Van Dieman`s Land or Capetown.
Faithful performance of what is undertaken to be performed, they honor in
themselves, and exact in others, as certificate of equality with themselves.
The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day. The
commercial relations of the world are so intimately drawn to London, that
every dollar on earth contributes to the strength of the English government.
And if all the wealth in the planet should perish by war or deluge, they know
themselves competent to replace it.
They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-going qualities;
their descent from Odin`s smiths, by their hereditary skill in working in
iron; their British birth, by husbandry and immense wheat harvests; and
justified their occupancy of the centre of habitable land, by their supreme
ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, builded, forged, spun, and
woven. They have made the island a thoroughfare; and London a shop, a law -
court, a record-office, and scientific bureau, inviting to strangers; a
sanctuary to refugees of every political and religious opinion; and such a
city, that almost every active man, in any nation, finds himself, at one time
or other, forced to visit it.
In every path of practical activity, they have gone even with the best.
There is no secret of war, in which they have not shown mastery. The steam -
chamber of Watt, the locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts,
perform the labor of the world. There is no department of literature, of
science, or of useful art, in which they have not produced a first-rate
book. It is England, whose opinion is waited for on the merit of a new
invention, an improved science. And in the complications of the trade and
politics of their vast empire, they have been equal to every exigency, with
counsel and with conduct. Is it their luck, or is it in the chambers of their
brain, - it is their commercial advantage, that whatever light appears in
better method or happy invention, breaks out in their race. They are a family
to which a destiny attaches, and the Banshee has sworn that a male heir shall
never be wanting. They have a wealth of men to fill important posts, and the
vigilance of party criticism insures the selection of a competent person.
A proof of the energy of the British people, is the highly artificial
construction of the whole fabric. The climate and geography, I said, were
factitious, as if the hands of man had arranged the conditions. The same
character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon said, "Rome was a state not
subject to paradoxes;" but England subsists by antagonisms and contradictions.
The foundations of its greatness are the rolling waves; and, from first to
last, it is a museum of anomalies. This foggy and rainy country furnishes the
world with astronomical observations. Its short rivers do not afford water -
power, but the land shakes under the thunder of the mills. There is no gold
mine of any importance, but there is more gold in England than in all other
countries. It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the wines of
all countries are in its docks. The French Comte de Lauraguais said, "No fruit
ripens in England but a baked apple;" but oranges and pine-apples are as
cheap in London as in the Mediterranean. The Mark-Lane Express or the Custom
House Returns bear out to the letter the vaunt of Pope,
"Let India boast her palms, nor envy we
The weeping amber nor the spicy tree,
While, by our oaks those precious loads are borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn."
The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of artificial
breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and cows and horses to order,
and breeds in which everything was omitted but what is economical. The cow is
sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his sirloin. Stall-feeding makes sperm-mills
of the cattle, and converts the stable to a chemical factory. The rivers,
lakes, and ponds, too much fished, or obstructed by factories, are
artificially filled with the eggs of salmon, turbot, and herring.
Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are unhealthy
and too barren to pay rent. By cylindrical tiles, and guttapercha tubes, five
millions of acres of bad land have been drained and put on equality with the
best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate too, which was already
believed to have become milder and drier by the enormous consumption of coal,
is so far reached by this new action, that fogs and storms are said to
disappear. In due course, all England will be drained, and rise a second time
out of the waters. The latest step was to call in the aid of steam to
agriculture. Steam is almost an Englishman. I do not know but they will send
him to Parliament next, to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans,
and now he must pump, grind, dig, and plough for the farmer. The markets
created by the manufacturing population have erected agriculture into a great
thriving and spending industry. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to
the value of the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than the
natural resources. No man can afford to walk, when the parliamentary-train
carries him for a penny a mile. Gas-burners are cheaper than daylight in
numberless floors in the cities. All the houses in London buy their water. The
English trade does not exist for the exportation of native products, but on
its manufactures, or the making well everything which is ill made elsewhere.
They make ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the
Chinese, beads for the Indian, laces for the Flemings, telescopes for
astronomers, cannons for kings.
The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and Italy to be
placed within the reach of every manufacturing population. They caused to be
translated from foreign languages and illustrated by elaborate drawings, the
most approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. They have ransacked Italy to
find new forms, to add a grace to the products of their looms, their
potteries, and their foundries.^3
[Footnote 3: See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66. New York, 1853.]
The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social system. Their law
is a network of fictions. Their property, a scrip or certificate of right to
interest on money that no man ever saw. Their social classes are made by
statute. Their ratios of power and representation are historical and legal.
The last Reform bill took away political power from a mound, a ruin, and a
stone-wall, whilst Birmingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the wars
of Europe, had no representative. Purity in the elective Parliament is secured
by the purchase of seats.^4 Foreign power is kept by armed colonies; power at
home, by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better than the free
laborer; the thief better than the pauper; and the transported felon better
than the one under imprisonment. The crimes are factitious, as smuggling,
poaching, non-conformity, heresy, and treason. Better, they say in England,
kill a man than a hare. The sovereignty of the seas is maintained by the
impressment of seamen. "The impressment of seamen," said Lord Eldon, "is the
life of our navy." Solvency is maintained by means of the national debt, on
the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?" For the
administration of justice, Sir Samuel Romilly`s expedient for clearing the
arrears of business in Chancery, was, the Chancellor`s staying away entirely
from his court. Their system of education is factitious. The Universities
galvanize dead languages into a semblance of life. Their church is artificial.
The manners and customs of society are artificial; - made up men with made up
manners; - and thus, the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose
existence is a work of art; - a cold, barren, almost arctic isle, being made
the most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land in the whole earth.
[Footnote 4: Sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that the only
independent mode of entering Parliament was to buy a seat, and he bought
Horsham.]
Man in England submits to be a product of political economy. On a bleak
moor, a mill is built, a banking-house is opened, and men come in, as water
in a sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham
button. The rapid doubling of the population dates from Watt`s steam-engine.
A landlord, who owns a province, says, "The tenantry are unprofitable; let me
have sheep." He unroofs the houses, and ships the population to America. The
nation is accustomed to the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim
of their economists, "that the greater part in value of the wealth now
existing in England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve
months." Meantime three or four days` rain will reduce hundreds to starving in
London.
One secret of their power is their mutual good understanding. Not only
good minds are born among them, but, all the people have good minds. Every
nation has yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes, only one.
But the intellectual organization of the English admits a communicableness of
knowledge and ideas among them all. An electric touch by any of their national
ideas, melts them into one family, and brings the hoards of power which their
individuality is always hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the smallness
of the country, or is it the pride and affection of race, - they have
solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each other.
Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more lasting than the
cloth. They embrace their cause with more tenacity than their life. Though not
military, yet every common subject by the poll is fit to make a soldier of.
These private reserved mute family-men can adopt a public end with all their
heat, and this strength of affection makes the romance of their heroes. The
difference of rank does not divide the national heart. The Danish poet
Ohlenschlager complains that who writes in Danish writes to two hundred
readers. In Germany, there is one speech for the learned, and another for the
masses, to that extent that, it is said, no sentiment or phrase from the works
of any great German writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But in
England, the language of the noble is the language of the poor. In Parliament,
in pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers rise to thought and passion, the
language becomes idiomatic; the people in the street best understand the best
words. And their language seems drawn from the Bible, the common law, and the
works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns, and Scott.
The island has produced two or three of the greatest men that ever existed,
but they were not solitary in their own time. Men quickly embodied what Newton
found out, in Greenwich observatories, and practical navigation. The boys know
all that Hutton knew of strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood -
vessels; and these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what is
invented or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, or in art, or in
literature, and antiquities. A great ability, not amassed on a few giants, but
poured into the general mind, so that each of them could at a pinch stand in
the shoes of the other; and they are more bound in character, than differenced
in ability or in rank. The laborer is a possible lord. The lord is a possible
basket-maker. Every man carries the English system in his brain, knows what
is confided to him, and does therein the best he can. The chancellor carries
England on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith on his
hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon; the postilion cracks his whip for
England, and the sailor times his oars to "God save the King!" The very felons
have their pride in each other`s English stanchness. In politics and in war,
they hold together as by hooks of steel. The charm in Nelson`s history is the
unselfish greatness; the assurance of being supported to the uttermost by
those whom he supports to the uttermost. Whilst they are some ages ahead of
the rest of the world in the art of living; whilst in some directions they do
not represent the modern spirit, but constitute it, - this vanguard of
civility and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lock-step, foot
after foot, file after file of heroes, ten thousand deep.
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