Blackwood 432 - 1851.10

THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.

The emeute of Paris, which cast out the Bourbons, is the key to all the subsequent emeutes of Europe. The nations of the Continent, however differing in features and language, are one family; they have the same policy, the same habits, and the same impulses. No member of that family can be moved without communicating that motion, more or less, to the whole body; like a vast lake, into which, stagnant as it may be, a stone flung spreads the movement in circle on circle, and spreads it the more for its stagnation. But, if the great moral expanse had any inherent motion; if, like the ocean, it were impelled by a tide, the external impulse would be overpowered and lost in the regular and general urgency of Nature.

This forms one of the distinctions which mark England as differing from the Continent; in this country there is a perpetual internal movement. Open as England is to all foreign impulses, they are overpowered by the vigour of change among ourselves. She has the moral tides; constantly renewing the motion of the national mind, guided by laws hitherto scarcely revealed to man; and tending, on the whole, to the general salubrity and permanence of the national system. This preserves England from revolutions; as manly exercise preserves the human frame from disease, and from those violent struggles with which nature, from time to time, throws off the excess of disease. Thus, it is scarcely possible to conceive a revolution in England!

In the life of a single generation we have seen three revolutions in France; and those three revolutions have been of the most decisive order;—the first comprehending an overthrow of the laws, the government, and the religion—a total overwhelming of the fabric of national society, an explosion of the State from its foundations;—no simple plunder of the palace, or disrobing of the priest—no passing violence of the mob, like a thunder cloud passing over the harvest-field, and though it prostrated the crop, yet leaving the soil in its native fertility;—but a tearing up of the soil itself; an extermination of monarchy, priesthood, and law; requiring a total renewal by the survivors of the storm. The two succeeding revolutions were overthrows, not merely of governments, but of dynasties—the exiles of kings and the imprisonment and flight of cabinets—great national convulsions, which would once have involved civil war, and which, but for the timid nature and sudden ruin of those dynasties, must have involved civil war, and probably spread havoc once more through Europe. Yet England was still unshaken. She had tumults, but too trifling for alarm, and apparently for the purpose of showing to the world her innate power of resistance to profitless innovation; or for discovering to herself the depth of her unostentatious loyalty to the constitutional throne.

The French emeute of 1830 propagated its impulse through every kingdom of Europe. The power of the rabble was proved to all by the triumph of the French mob; a new generation had risen, unacquainted with the terrible sufferings of war; the strictness of the European governments had been relaxed by the long disuse of arms; the increasing influence of commercial wealth had tended to turn ministers into flatterers of the multitude; and the increasing exigencies of kings had forced them to rely for their personal resources upon the merchant and the Jew. A less obvious, yet perhaps a more effective ingredient than all other materials of overthrow, was the universal irreligion of the Continent.

Divided between Popery and Infidelity, the European mind was prepared for political tumults. Superstition degrades the understanding, and makes it incapable of reason. Infidelity, while it makes the world the only object, gives loose to the passions of the world. The one, extinguishing all inquiry, merges all truth in a brutish belief; the other, disdaining all experience, meets all truth with a frantic incredulity. The first temptation to political disturbance finds both ready. The refusal to “give to God the things that are God’s,” is inevitably followed by the refusal to “give to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.”

Superstition took the lead in revolt. In 1830, the year after the expulsion of the Bourbons, some of the Papal provinces proclaimed the reign of Liberty at hand, and disowned the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. But the Austrian army was on the alert; the troops entered the Romagna; the Legations, wholly unprepared for resistance, (though storming the Vatican in their figures of speech,) at once discovered the fruitlessness of oratory against bayonets, and licked the dust before the Austrian grenadiers.

All tyranny is cruel in proportion to its weakness: such is the history of all despotic governments. The Romagna was inundated with spies; the prisons were crowded; (and what language can describe the horrors of an Italian prison!) and with an Austrian army as the defenders of the Papal throne against its subjects, the reign of the old despotism once more was the reign over all things but the minds of the people.

In the midst of this confusion, the old man on the Roman throne, who had exhibited nothing of supremacy but its violence, suddenly died. The death of Gregory XVI. was a crisis. The presence of the Austrians had begun to be an object of alarm to the government of the Cardinals, and the desire to get rid of this dangerous defence was the key to the new line of policy adopted by Rome. This suggested the choice of a man who might influence the popular mind by giving way to the feelings of the populace; and Maria Mastai Feretti was raised to the Papal sovereignty, by the name of Pius the Ninth.

The election of a Pope has generally been a matter of intrigue among the ambassadors of the foreign powers at Rome, and especially among the Cardinals—the former intriguing to elect a tool of their Government, and the others an instrument of their own. The Popes have been generally chosen in old age, and in the decay of their faculties—the former, as affording the speedier prospect of a successor—and the latter, as throwing him more completely into the hands of his court. But, the crisis demanded an instrument of another capacity. Mastai Feretti had been educated for a military career—had subsequently chosen the priesthood—and had, we understand, even been employed in the South American missions. Thus he had lived out of the conventual routine, and had the rare fortune, for a monk, of travelling beyond the borders of Italy. His family, too, were known by some public offices, and the hope of seeing the triple crown burnished on the brow of a vigorous leader, rendered the choice popular among the crowd.

The first act was to publish an Amnesty—an act of policy as well as of mercy; for, by it, he released a large number of the partisans of his new system. The exiles also were recalled; and some of the most prominent actors in the late movements were purchased by the hope of public offices. The Pope even performed occasionally the duties of the priesthood. He one day visited a church of which the vicar was absent; he put on the robe, and read the mass. Little dexterities of this kind, to which none could object, and which all were ready to applaud, raised popular acclamation to its height, and for a few months Pio Nono was, in all lips, the model of a priest, a patriot, and a pope.

All those things might have been done by a wise sovereign; but Pio Nono exhibited his ignorance of Italian nature by not knowing where to stop. Every day now produced some memorable innovation: the press was partially emancipated—a rational measure only among a rational people; the laity shared in the magistracies which had been hitherto confined to the priesthood; and a Cabinet Council was formed, all the members of which were laymen, except the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of Public Instruction.

All those reforms, which would have been salutary among a manly people, were ruinous among a people utterly disqualified by their habits, their morals, and their religion, for liberty.

The news from Rome flew instantly to all parts of Italy. The populace everywhere demanded a constitution, and proceeded to attack the police, and sometimes to plunder the possessors of property. When the scattered soldiery resisted, the bloodshed was charged as a crime on the head of their governments. The peasantry thronged the roads, crying out for a reform, of which they could not comprehend the simplest principles. The King of Naples, in not unnatural alarm at those philosophers of the highway, attempted to exercise his authority. It was answered by rebellion. Sicily and Calabria at once armed their rioters. The mob seized upon Palermo and Messina; the politicians were on the alert; and they drew up a Jacobin constitution, which the King, helpless and hopeless, was persuaded to sign.

The Papacy was now in danger; the success of the Neapolitan rabble was a stimulus to the rabble of Rome. The Pope found the peril of toying with popular passions. He was forced to sign a constitution entitled—“a fundamental statute for the temporal government of the States of the Church.” He was virtually dethroned.

Thus the Popedom had begun the true revolutionary era. The Italian Revolution of 1846 was followed by the French Revolution of 1848. The echo of the thunder was thus louder than the thunder itself. It was reverberated from every throne of the Continent; Berlin was in the hands of a mob; Vienna was in open rebellion; Prague fought the Imperial troops; Hungary rose in arms, and fought the bloodiest campaigns since Waterloo,—till Russia entered the field with her one hundred and fifty thousand men, and extinguished the war by a truce, which will be broken at the first opportunity of bloodshed.

But, before the general spread of insurrection, Lombardy had risen in rebellion, tempted by the vauntings of Italian patriotism, by the lenity of the Austrian Government, and, above all, by the example of Rome.

The dominion of Austria in Italy consists of the provinces formerly known as the duchies of Milan and Mantua, and the territory of the late Venetian Republic. It is one of the most absurd blunders of modern republicanism, to represent those possessions as the spoil of war. On the contrary, if ancient right and regular inheritance can give a title, Austria possesses that title to the duchies of Milan and Mantua—Milan having been an Austrian fief from the year 1533, when it descended to Charles V., Emperor of Germany, by the death of its sovereign, Sforza; and Mantua having been also an Austrian fief, though governed by the Gonzagas till the reign of the last Duke Ferdinand; who, taking a hostile part in the war of the Spanish Succession, the Emperor, Joseph I., placed him under ban, and annexed his forfeited duchy to Milan.

From Charles, Milan descended to his son Philip II., and from him to the Spanish line of the House of Austria; when, by the War of the Succession, it passed to the German branch, and became a province of Austria; and so both remained, until Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1796.

The Austrian claim to the Venetian territory is later and more mixed with war, but is equally clear.

By the peace of Campoformio in 1797, Austria had been compelled to give up the duchies of Milan and Mantua, at the same time with Belgium, to the French Republic, receiving in return Venice and its territory, which were then French conquests. In the campaign of 1805, by the treaty following the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon again took possession of the Venetian territory and city, annexing them to Milan and Mantua, which, with the subsequent annexation of Modena, the Legations, and in 1808, the Papal Marches, he named the Kingdom of Italy, though not comprehending more than a third of Italy, and having only a population of six millions. It has been the curious fate of French aggression, to provide by its grasp for possession by others. In 1814, the Austrian Emperor, by the right of victory over France, claimed the duchies of Milan and Mantua, with the Venetian territory, which had been united to them, as we have seen, only by the short-sighted rapacity of Napoleon. The whole was then confirmed to the Austrian Emperor, by the treaty of Vienna, under the name of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, and annexed by Congress to the Imperial Crown of Austria. The other arrangements of Italy were also founded on their former state. Modena was restored to its Duke, the Legations and Marches were given again to the Pope; and, in general, the provinces south of the Po were placed under their former sovereigns.

Thus it is mere Italian coxcombry to talk of the Austrian possession of northern Italy as a usurpation. The Line of Charles V. have been its acknowledged masters for three hundred years—a possession as old as the reign of Elizabeth, and as thoroughly acknowledged as the possession of Ireland by the British sceptre. Irish folly may talk of the English as usurpers, and Saxons; but a right three centuries old is as indisputable as the reason of man can make it in either Ireland or Italy; and nothing but absurdity or treason in either case could call it in question.

But if it be said that those transfers of power were always resisted by the Italians, and that they merely succumbed to ill fortune in the field, nothing can be farther from the fact. From the earliest period of modern history, the Italians were the mere lookers-on in the wars which disposed of their country. The French fought the Germans, and the Germans fought the French; but Italy never fought for itself. Like Virgil’s heifer, it stood while the two bulls were lowering their horns, and tossing up the sand with their hoofs, the patient prize of the combat. When a French army entered Milan over the battalions of the German, the Italians welcomed them with an opera; when a German army entered Milan over the bodies of the French brigades, the Italians proclaimed the glories of Germany with a “Te Deum.” Then the affair was at an end; things took their regular course; the Italian returned to his macaroni, and acknowledged his master, consoling his submission by a vow of vengeance in the next generation.

Not that we would recommend a change of the national mind: the stiletto will never work a national redemption; and the bitter prejudices, womanish caprices, and narrow partialities of the Italian provincials, will never combine in one general and generous view of national independence. All the Italian’s sense of patriotism is party; all his love of liberty is love of licence; and all his religion is the denial of the right of judgment, and the practice of persecution.

The Italian republics of the Middle Ages were engaged in perpetual hostilities with each other. Milan detested Mantua, Florence flamed against Pisa. Genoa saw nothing in Venice but an enemy whose wealth would repay war. Venice saw in Genoa nothing but a rival, which she was pledged to level with the ground. Rome devoted them all to the fires of purgatory. The Peninsula was a vast hornet’s nest, in which all alike robbed the honey of others, and only employed the sting. To this hour the same spirit lives from the Alps to the Calabrias. No man on earth more despises the Neapolitan, than his fellow-subject the Sicilian. The Venetian’s contempt for the Tuscan is high and haughty: the Tuscan calls the tongue of the Venetian barbaresque, and says that his manners are suited to his tongue. How is it possible to form an Union among those scoffers? And without union, how is it possible to establish National independence?

But Austria has founded her claims to Italian supremacy on stronger grounds than even the superiority of her soldiership. There will be errors in all things human—there must be more than errors in the government of a despotism; the vices of despotism must be deepened where that government is military: yet, with all those drawbacks, the condition of Northern Italy under the Austrian government has been almost patriarchal compared to what it was before, and to what it must have continued, under the jealousies, antipathies, and ignorance of the native governments.

In the first place, it preserved those provinces from civil war. In the next, it expended immense wealth on the improvement of the country, in bridges, canals, roads, hospitals, &c. In the next, it provided schools to a remarkable extent, for the general training of the common people. In the next, it made some provision for civil liberty; and even for that most improbable of all things in Popish countries, some approach to liberty of religion.

As the great security of all, it established a firm, regular, and systematic administration of the kingdom. A governor generally residing at Milan, and frequently an archduke, ruled the whole. Under him were governors of its two grand divisions; the Lombard Provinces, and the Venetian Provinces. Those divisions were again subdivided into Delegazioni, or minor provinces, each with an officer at its head, entitled the Delegate. There are even further subdivisions, and each commune had its Podesta, or local magistrate. The Lombard provinces are nine; the Venetian provinces are eight; and the spirit of subordination, and, we believe, of justice, was thus made to penetrate to the lowest orders of the community.

The Italian governments of the middle ages had chiefly degenerated into Oligarchies; the worst form of government for the progress of nations that ever was invented by the artifice, or continued by the tyranny, of man. With exclusiveness for its principle, suspicion for its stimulus, and passion for its practice, it effectually renders the mind of a people at once crafty and cruel. In its nature feeble, it has no expedient for safety but arbitrary execution; and without any superior authority to restrain its jealousies, its perpetual policy is to crush all talent, honour, and character, which shows itself beyond the narrow circle of its conclave. It concentrates all the evils of both despotism and republicanism, and has all the remorseless sternness of the one, and all the rapid violence of the other. Universal espionage, secret trials, the consignment of the accused to dungeons for life or death in the dungeon, unacknowledged and unknown, constitute the whole compass of its theory of power.

For those wretched and desperate governments, of which, let history develop them as it will, it can never tell the ten thousand part of the misery, the fortunate accession of the Austrian government presented a system which, on the testimony of every man qualified to judge, rendered the Lombard provinces an example of agricultural prosperity, and the cities of splendour to the capitals of Europe. Since the war with France, and even in the short period between 1820 and 1834, the Austrian treasury had expended forty-two millions of livres for the Lombard provinces alone. The testimony of an intelligent French traveller (Valery, Voyages en Italie) is—“Nowhere, perhaps, on the Continent is the administration of the roads and bridges more actively and usefully carried on than in Lombardy. The whole of this part of Italy presents a solid and material prosperity; it presents the fine side of the Austrian dominion. The roads are like the walks of a garden, and they are kept in repair with the greatest care. The government, economical and parsimonious in other respects, is great and magnificent in this. The excellent state of the highroads of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom is maintained at the annual expense of 1,305,000 francs for 1518 Italian miles of road.”

But, though the habits of the empire predominate in the forms of its government, the Austrian influence, in Italy, makes considerable allowance for the natural love of freedom. The governors of the two grand divisions of Milan and Venice are each assisted by a species of parliament, consisting of landholders and deputies from the royal towns. Each minor province returns two landholders, one being noble, and the other not, as deputies, and the royal towns return one each. The Communal Councils, besides, each elect three persons, of whom the emperor selects one as deputy; those deputies are elected for six years.

Of course these provincial parliaments are not of the same rank with the British, but they have nearly the same financial duties. They settle the proportion of the taxes; they inspect the accounts of repairs of the roads and bridges, and have the superintendence of the revenues of the numerous charitable institutions. They have also a right of petition to the throne concerning the wants of the people. But, besides those parliaments, there is in every principal town of a province a council of eight, six, or four, landholders, one half of them being noble, and the other not of the nobility, whose office is to superintend the financial concerns of their respective districts. The Communes also have their own councils, and the system of commercial administration rounds the whole. Thus the inhabitants of the Lombard provinces have more influence over the collection and expenditure of the taxes, (the most important and most permanent interest of the people,) than in any other kingdom of the Continent.

We are not the panegyrists of Austria. We do not expect to see her giving liberty to the Italian dominions. We do not even believe that any Popish government ever will give liberty to its people, nor that any Popish people will ever be fit to receive liberty: the slaves of superstition must be the slaves of power. The man into whose house a priest can enter, at will, ransack his library, and tear the Bible from his hands, has no right to name the name of liberty. The man whom a priest can command to send his wife and children to the confessional, to do penance in his own person, and to abjure the right of inquiry into the most solemn of all human concerns, the truth of his religion, is already in the chain—has no claim to the sympathy of freemen—and is as incapable of civil freedom as he is of religious liberation.

But the next best government to a constitutional monarchy is a benevolent despotism. We have adverted to the conduct of Austria in its ancient Italian dominions. Let us next observe its conduct in its later provincial acquisitions. Long before the extinction of the Venetian Republic, every traveller in Italy predicted its ruin. It had been decaying for centuries. It finally fell less by the sword of France, than by its own inability to live. Already broken on the wheel, it waited only the coup-de-grace to hasten its dissolution. Its surrender to Napoleon was not conquest, but ruin; its surrender to Austria was not conquest, but restoration.

The Austrians, in 1814, found not less than 44,000 individuals, in Venice alone, dependent more or less on public charity—an enormous weight of pauperism. All the asylums, hospitals, and alms-houses, were in the deepest state of decay. Those were reinstated by the Austrian government—a poor government at all times—and then impoverished by a quarter of a century of war. Of this operation the expenses were upwards of nine millions of francs! There had also been many families of the old Venetian nobility decayed by time and casuality, and living on pensions from the Republic. The French invasion, of course, on the desperate maxim of “making war support war,” had plunged them into utter destitution. The Austrian government furnished them with the means of a decent existence. The old officials of the Republic who had retired on pensions, and who had lost everything in the war, were put again on the pension-list; and to make the public bounty at once permanent and effectual, “a committee of public benevolence” was founded under the care of the principal citizens, with the Patriarch and the Podesta at their head, to which the government contributed 100,000 livres a-year, and which now has an income of half a million. Besides those works of beneficence, the government devoted itself to the objects of decoration, the repairs of the palaces, the restoration of the state buildings, the care of the Venetian archives, and the collection of the national arts, at an expense of fifty-three millions of livres. The authorities for these statements are given in the Bolletino Statistico, and the Simplice Verita, published in 1834 and 1838.

The facts before the eyes of every man contradict the metaphorical misery. The commerce of the Republic, perishing for fifty years before the French invasion, and which by that invasion had almost disappeared, amounted in 1837 to 3000 vessels and 211,000 tons. The residence of government in Venice, with all its boards of administration and public instruments, annually distributed two millions of livres in its expenditure in the city. If it is impossible to make a Popish population industrious, or a lazy population rich—if the Italian would rather beg than work, and relieve his self-contempt by complaining of his masters, rather than gain a competence by honest toil—the remedy is as hopeless as the complaint is imaginary. The laws of nature cannot be subverted for the luxuries of a Lazzarone.

The secret of the Papal liberalism is still undeveloped; but it apparently lies in the Papal principle of universal power. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. aimed at this power by enlisting the vassal princes of Europe; but when the princes were vassals no more, the Popes bowed to the thrones, tried to obtain power by intrigue, and Jesuits and confessors took the place of legates and armies. A new era had begun, and a new source of power was to be employed. From the first French Revolution, the populace have been an element of overthrow. The two following French revolutions have made that element more conspicuous, more disciplined, and consequently more dangerous; but it is an evil acquiring strength alike with the laxity of government and the passions of the people. A mob had twice cast down the mightiest monarchy of continental Europe, and the Pope of Rome became a Liberal!

Insurrection immediately broke out in both the extremities of Italy. The Calabrias rose, and the Lombards rose. The centre, less bold but equally excited, threatened the seizure of its sovereigns, and the subversion of their government. The King of Sardinia, at the head of a well-disciplined army, and a flourishing exchequer, dazzled by the present promise of Lombard territory, and the glory of a future coronation in Rome, declared war, in the face of Austrian alliance, and rushed into the field.

In the public concerns of kingdoms, the faith of treaties is so essential to the existence of society, that probably it has never been violated without a condign and a conspicuous punishment. The French king’s breach of treaty with England in the American war cost France a revolution, and Louis his throne. The French breach of treaty with Turkey, by the invasion of Egypt, cost France a fleet, an army, and the loss of Italy in a single campaign. And within our immediate view, the Piedmontese breach of treaty with Austria, by the invasion of Lombardy, cost the king his army, his military reputation, his throne, and his death in a distant country, in a voluntary and melancholy exile.

The Papal court was now terrified, and the Papal guards were ordered to protect the Vatican from its new pupils of liberty in the streets; but the guards themselves were now Liberals. The Papal Council, next, modestly wrote to the Austrian Emperor to entreat his peaceable cession of the Austrian provinces, “and his acknowledgment of the Italian nation, each reducing its dominions within their natural limits with honourable compacts, and the blessing of heaven.”

But the Pope was still threatened by his people; and he took into his councils some of the popular favourites, chequering these councils, however, by men in his especial confidence. Thus Mamiani was placed side by side with Soglia—the tribune beside the cardinal. All was thenceforth confusion. A levy of twenty thousand men was ordered to march to the Po. But, at the next consistory, the Pope declared his reluctance to engage in hostilities with Austria. The populace clamoured, and the new Ministry resigned.

In June 1848, an “Assembly of Legislators” met in Rome. War, in the mean time, had broke out in the Milanese. An Austrian army threatened Rome. All was terror in the Court, and all fury in the streets. A new Ministry was chosen. They talked of a new code of laws, of reform, and rules of administration: they might as well have lectured on astrology. Such was the wisdom of choosing theorists to meet the perils of a state in the jaws of ruin. The Legislative Assembly met on the 15th of November; the populace crowded round the doors. The Minister, Rossi, was rash enough to pass through the hooting multitude. On some peculiarly stinging insult, he turned, with a smile of scorn; a ruffian rushed behind the unfortunate man, plunged a knife into his throat, and he expired!

That blow was struck against the Papal throne. The populace instantly took arms; the soldiery joined them; all cried out that they were betrayed. They formed in military array, and with cannon in their front, marched to the Quirinal, shouting for the downfall of the Pope, for the Roman republic, for war with Austria, and for a new Ministry!

Of the councils of that night of terror, of course, no exact detail can be given; but they were long, helpless, and distracted. The Pope is said to have appealed to the cardinals; the appeal was in vain; and the council terminated, with the vague but sufficient information to the populace, that “there should be a compliance with their demands.”

In the council, the Pope asked the commandant of the troops if they were to be relied on. His reply was, “Yes, if they are not ordered to act against the people.” The answer was decisive. The Pope, pale and confused, struck his hand against the table, exclaiming, “Then I have no resource left but to invoke the thunderbolts of God against the rebels”—and rushed out of the chamber.

Mamiani, recalled to Rome by the populace, now took the lead; the multitude were still the masters. On the night of the 24th of November, the Pope secretly fled from Rome in a carriage, with foreign arms, and, it is said, in the disguise of a valet. He took the road to Gaeta, and there remained.

Those events are worth recording, as they will yet form the essentials of history; and they are peculiarly important to England, as developing the principles of a domination, never more dangerous than when it is weak—never more haughty than when it is in the lowest depths of humiliation—and never more aggressive than when it has lost all strength, but in the folly of legislatures and the negligence of nations.

The Roman territory was now left without a government. Deputations were twice sent to supplicate the Pope’s return, but he refused. The Parliament appointed a commission or Giunta of government. This commission was the only form of power during the two months which followed. The resolution was then adopted to form a government. The people were called on to elect, by universal suffrage, in committees, a Constituent Assembly. Of the population of the Roman States, consisting of 2,000,000 souls, 343,000 voted.

On the 6th of February 1849, the representatives met in Rome; and on the 9th, after a sitting of fifteen hours, the fall of the Papal authority was decreed, and the Roman republic was declared from the Capitol!

Subsequently a triumvirate, consisting of Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini, were chosen by the Assembly, and in them the executive power was embodied.

War was now inevitable, and the triumvirs prepared actively to meet it. They collected the dispersed soldiery; they appointed the exiled General Avezzana Minister of War. They provided arms, established a cannon foundry, organised an artillery, and soon were enabled to exhibit an army of forty thousand men. But the war, which was to dethrone the supremacy of Austria, was instantly converted into a war of defence, by the unexpected intelligence of a new assailant. The republic was to be crushed by a republic; liberalism was to receive its deathblow from liberals; and the fantasies of Roman freedom were to be scattered “into thin air” by the more substantial force of faction in France.

On the 24th of April, an expedition, under the command of General Oudinot, landed at Civita Vecchia. Its motives were an enigma. It was to take part with neither the people nor the Pope; it was neither to preserve the new constitution, nor to restore the old; it was simply to look on, while the people settled the form of government. But it was to prevent the possession of Rome by any other; the simple expedient being its possession by the French arms!

But the people did not comprehend this armed peace; they shouted defiance of France as they had done of Austria. The Assembly protested “in the name of God” against this aggression by an ally. They execrated the attempt to control the freedom of a people who had but followed the example of France, and they contemptuously compared the immediate act of the French government with its declaration, “that it made no war on the liberties of nations.” To this protest General Oudinot replied by advancing his camp to the walls of Rome; the people shut the gates, and the siege began.

But the shock of armies was to be in northern Italy. The pamphlets on the subject published by the contending parties are but imperfect sources of information; but a German volume—written by one who is neither Austrian nor Piedmontese, and so far free from the partialities of either, and which has the additional testimony to its truth of being translated by Lord Ellesmere—gives a remarkably intelligent view of the campaigns of 1848 and 1849. The work is anonymous, but the author is known to be a Swiss, and a soldier.

The first demand of revolutionists, and the first movement to revolution everywhere, is “a National Guard!” In 1847, the Pope established a National Guard in Rome! The example was followed by acclamation in all the towns of the Papal States. The acclamation and the example spread to Tuscany; they then spread to Lucca. All Italy was on fire for “National Guards.” The Pope spoke of disbanding the Swiss regiments in his service, amounting to 7000 men. He was thenceforth to know no protection but “his beloved citizens.” The unlucky sovereign had now mounted the first step of the ladder of revolution.

In Lombardy there were symptoms of conspiracy, but there was no National Guard. The presence of an Austrian force, and the vigour of a regular government, prevented both the acclamation and the example. The peasantry cared little for change of masters, since they had known the grinding of the French invasions; yet they hated the high rents of their nobles. The people of the towns, in Italy the idlest of the population, were the chief malcontents. The shopkeepers, with the little trade of an uncommercial country, envied the higher orders with nothing to do. The nobility, whose lives are spent between the opera and the Corso, longed for politics and parliaments, if it were only to divert the monotony of existence. In all Popish countries, the peasant believes in the church with the blindness of ignorance; the townspeople worship the image for the sake of the festival; and the nobility attend the altar through fashion or fear of the priest, and are pupils of Loyola in the spirit of Voltaire! In this mixture of ranks, of abject belief, of vulgar assent, and of indolent infidelity, there is always enough to involve national disturbance, and to consummate universal revolution; except where the government is military, and where the soldier is uncorrupted. It was soon found that even Lombardy was unsafe, and a reinforcement of sixteen battalions was ordered for the viceroyalty.

The conspiracy advanced; and as there is always something ridiculous in the seriousness of foreigners, the Liberals of Milan issued from their club, in the Café Cava, a prohibition of smoking cigars in the streets. By this formidable measure of finance, they proposed the bankruptcy of the Austrian empire!—though their patriotism did not extend to their firesides, for within doors the liberals themselves smoked as inveterately as ever. But the prohibition produced quarrels: the Austrian soldiers, not recognising the authority of the Café Cava, still smoked their cigars, and were insulted by the mob, until two proclamations were issued by the viceroy, the Archduke Raynier, to his “diletti Milanese,” for “the sake of peace,” forbidding the soldiers to smoke. Such concessions are always the reverse of conciliation, and the “diletti Milanese” became daily more and more insulting.

But stronger measures suddenly became necessary. Charles Albert of Savoy called out a conscription of 20,000 men, and fears were entertained for his adoption of the Lega Italiana, and an attack on Lombardy. On the 19th of January, an order appeared from the Field-Marshal Radetsky, declaring “the determination of his imperial master to defend his states against every assault, whether from within or without;” adding, “The sword which I have borne for fifty-six years with honour, in so many fields of battle, is still firm in my grasp.” This proclamation produced a temporary lull. But the storm was now gathering from every point of the horizon. The French revolution of the 24th of February was answered by the rising of Vienna. On the 18th of March Milan was in open insurrection. Within six days after, Charles Albert crossed the Tessin, and the war was begun!

It has been the misfortune of Austria to rely on concession, where force was essential. This policy has always been attended with the same results. It is mistaken for royal fear, and always engenders popular arrogance. On the 18th of March it was announced to the Milanese that the Emperor Ferdinand had yielded to their demand of a “Constitution;” and, on the same day, the citizens, with the town council at their head, marched to the palace of the Governor Count O’Donnell, demanding the formation of a National Guard for the city, the dissolution of the police, and the transfer of their arms to the guard. They overpowered the piquet at the palace, and finally took O’Donnell prisoner. Radetsky now delayed no longer; he ordered the alarm-gun to be fired, and moved to the attack of the Broletto, or hall of the town council, on which the tricolor flag had been hoisted.

The city was now in arms; barricades were erected in every quarter; the windows flanking them were filled with musketeers, who kept up a heavy fire on the advance of the troops. Missiles of every kind were flung from the windows and roofs; and boiling water, and even boiling oil, was used by men and women, screaming like lunatics, and swearing destruction to the Austrians. From want of preparation, and perhaps from compassion for the frantic city, the troops made tardy progress, and the fighting had lasted six hours, when the Field-Marshal gave orders that the Broletto should be gained at any risk. The building resisted all attacks for four hours more. It was taken, with two hundred and fifty of its defenders, the rest escaping over roofs.

The night was stormy, the lanterns in the streets were extinguished, and the troops were exhausted by the fatigues of the day, and by the inclemency of the night. But at morning the attack was renewed. The populace fought fiercely—defending the entrance of every street, and manning the barricades, but less defending them in front than by the fire from the windows. Thus the insurgents were to be fought only hand to hand, and every house was a fortress. Still the troops made progress, till the Field-Marshal, probably thinking that his troops ought to be preserved for nobler contests, abandoned the interior quarters of Milan, concentrated them at some distance, and threatened Milan with a bombardment.

This retreat was magnified into a victory; the Provisional Government ordered every man from twenty to sixty to be enrolled in the National Guard, attacked and mastered one of the city gates, and announced war against the empire. The intelligence from Piedmont, and even from Switzerland, now began to be formidable. It was said that thirty thousand Swiss were in march. The army of Charles Albert was already in the field; further delay might have compromised the fate of the Austrian army; it was evident that the fate of the Austrian provinces, while Vienna was in the hands of the rebels, must depend on the conduct of the Field-Marshal’s divisions; and in order to keep up the communication with the Austrian territories, and at the same time meet the shock of the Piedmontese forces, it was resolved to retreat to the line of the Adige or the Mincio.

The Austrian troops in Italy were seventy thousand; the Field-Marshal had demanded, even before the tumults, a hundred and fifty thousand as the least force with which he could be answerable for the defence of the provinces; he now declared it “to be a terrible necessity that Milan should be abandoned.” He withdrew the garrison from the citadel, called in the regiments, which had been widely posted on the frontier, and, after sustaining a succession of attacks from the insurgents, now flushed with apparent triumph, moved in the night of the 22d, encumbered by an immense baggage-train, containing the government effects, the wounded, and the public servants, in five columns, on the way to Lodi.

The career of the able soldier by whom such services were achieved at the age of eighty-three, is singularly interesting. Born in 1766, of a distinguished Bohemian line, he began his military life in the regiment of Francis’s Cuirassiers, serving against the Turks, and against the French in the Netherlands. In that regiment he attained the rank of captain. In the famous campaign of Suwarrow in Italy, 1799, he obtained the rank of lieutenant-colonel on the general staff, a preferment which vouched for his strategical talents. In 1805 he commanded, as major-general, a cavalry brigade in the army in Italy. He fought in the campaign of Aspern and Wagram. In 1813 he acted as chief of the general staff in the “Grand Army” of invasion under Prince Schwartzenburg, a position which required not merely the qualities of a soldier, but the intelligence of the diplomatist and minister.

Promoted to the rank of general of cavalry in 1829, and appointed to the command in Italy in 1833, he devoted himself to a study of the country, as the seat of a campaign, by holding his great annual reviews in the territory between the Adige and the Mincio—the very line of country in which the mastery of the Austrian provinces must always be sustained.

During the interval from the peace of 1815 to his commission in 1829, he had employed himself in military studies, and, as their result, published “a System of Instruction for Generals and the Staff in command of troops of all classes, over all varieties of ground.” Thus, accomplished by science, trained by long service, and feeling nothing of age, but its experience, his appointment to the baton of field-marshal in 1836 placed in the highest rank of the service an officer unsurpassed by the ablest of his continental competitors. He is covered with decorations of his own sovereign and of foreign princes—not the toys and trinkets of courts, but the tributes of men who have been his comrades in the field. They have been gallantly earned, and their honours will stand the test of time.

The retreat from Milan was blazoned as the conquest of Austria. “The enemy flies from Milan,” was the language of the Milanese proclamation to the rural clergy and authorities, calling on them for the “annihilation of the remnant of those savage hordes.” But the retreat was not too early. On the same day which saw the Austrian columns moving from the gates, a proclamation appeared from the King of Sardinia to the people of Lombardy and Venice, declaring for “Italian Unity,” and announcing the advance of his army into those governments. His force was about forty-five thousand men, in a state of preparation such as no army of an Italian sovereign had exhibited for a hundred years.

Savoy and its princes form one of the most striking examples of character resulting from condition. As the key of Italy, Savoy has been compelled to have its arms constantly in readiness for action. Thus the whole long line of its princes have been compelled to be perpetually in the saddle, and among them have been some of the first warriors and diplomatists of Europe.

Commencing with Amadeus the First, son of the Count of Maurienne and Susa, and thus possessing the great pass of Mont Cenis, then almost the only one into Italy, this brave mountaineer exhibited the independence of a man who knew his power. It is recorded, that on attending the Emperor, Henry the Third, at Verona, followed by a train of his officers, the Emperor refused to admit him “with his tail.” Amadeus spiritedly refused to be admitted on this condition. The Emperor eventually complied, and Amadeus was thenceforth called “Caudatus,” the man with the tail. The phrase, which has since become so familiar to us, thus finds its origin in the eleventh century, and among the Alps.

The long succession of the princes of Savoy were almost constantly belligerent, and in every war increasing their influence and their territories. Amadeus the Sixth, in the fourteenth century, was the arbiter of Italy. Amadeus the Eighth was even elected Pope at the council of Basle, by the title of Felix V. During the Italian wars of Louis XIV. the princes of Savoy figured constantly in battle and negotiation; and when, by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Philip V. of Spain was forced to surrender Sardinia to the Emperor of Germany, by him it was given to the Duke of Savoy, who then assumed the title of King of Sardinia.

In the War of the French Revolution, the king, Charles Emmanuel, being expelled from his throne by the French, abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emmanuel, who remained in Sardinia until the fall of Napoleon in 1814.

The Prince of Carignan, the late Charles Albert, during the life of his predecessor, Charles Felix, had the character of a liberal of the newest school. His accession to the throne inevitably changed his political sensibilities, and he became a monarch, in the sense of Duke Philibert, the founder of absolute monarchy in Savoy. With a revenue of sixty-nine millions of francs from his Continental States, and nearly three millions from Sardinia, with a regular army of between fifty and sixty thousand men, the best troops of Italy, and possessing one of the most defensible countries of Europe; with a considerable navy, and with a debt of but eighty-seven millions of francs, (scarcely more than a year’s revenue,) he might have seemed beyond the caprices of fortune, if not beyond the follies of ambition. The King himself was fond of soldiership. He had served in the Spanish Invasion as a volunteer, under the Duc d’Angouleme, and was present at the storming of the Trocadero. He was tall, robust, and bold in the field. Yet his political feelings were hostile to all change. He had completely thrown off the absurdities of liberalism; he was a rigid supporter of the ancient principles of the government, a champion of the privileged, and a protector of the peasant classes. In the midst of these rational principles, and the solid prosperity of the State, the temptation of territory was thrown out to him. To unite Lombardy with his hereditary dominions was the snare; and in an hour of calamity to his country, and of ruin to himself, breaking his treaties with Austria, and assuming the foolish, feeble, and frantic resolution of overthrowing the imperial sovereignty, he invaded the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom.

At this crisis the situation of the Austrian army was perilous in the extreme. One-third of its force was composed of Italian regiments. Of those some openly passed over to the insurgents; some remained faithful, but they were daily diminishing by desertion. The Austrians were enveloped in an excited population of eighteen millions; National Guards were already arming everywhere. In this moment a decisive movement by the gallant General d’Aspre probably alone saved Verona, the most important post in all Italy. A National Guard had been formed in the city; it demanded to share the garrison duty of the citadel. The governor refused the demand; but the population were sixty thousand, already tampered with. D’Aspre on receiving this intelligence determined at once to leave Padua, where he was stationed, to its fate; marched with his whole force for Verona; disarmed the National Guard, and saved the city. Mantua, the fortress next in importance, was entered by an Austrian brigade, and thus the defensive line of the campaign was established. Marshal Radetsky transferred his headquarters to Verona in April, and published an order of the day to the troops, containing the expressive words, “On military grounds, and in my capacity as commander, I, not you, have retired before the enemy; you have not been conquered!”

At this time, in every great town of Italy, with the exception of Verona and Mantua, the tricolor had been hoisted, a revolutionary government formed, and the population summoned to arms. Such was the result of the trumpet blown from Rome! The Papal troops, at the disposal of the League, were about seven thousand Italians, including a regiment of dragoons, besides a body of Swiss—capital soldiers—amounting to upwards of four thousand men. The whole amount of the forces of the League, including bands of volunteers, acting separately, probably amounted to one hundred thousand; which the first defeat of the Austrian army might have increased to ten times the number.

An inspection of the map will show the singularly difficult nature of the country through which the Austrian army had now to make its retreat. The Po, on the right hand, forms the natural boundary of Northern Italy, as the Alps form it on the left: the country between is intersected by the spurs of the mountains, and by the great rivers flowing from them—the Tessin, the Oglio, the Mincio, and the Adige. But a march along the right, or southern bank of the Po, may turn all those positions; and the position of Venice finally outflanks them all. On the parallelogram formed by Peschiera, Verona, Legnago, and Mantua, is the battle of Northern Italy to be fought; and that battle once won, either army must conclude the campaign.

It has been already observed, that the provident eye of the Austrian Field-Marshal had made this platform his especial study: he had instructed his staff to examine all its features with especial exactness, and had aided their practical knowledge of the ground by making it the scene of his Grand Reviews, from 1832. But new difficulties soon threatened him—the Tyrol was in danger. The portion verging on Italy was revolutionised, and thus his communications with Germany might be cut off. The Marshal instantly despatched a brigade to Trent; they took possession of the castle, and paraded the town with patrols of cavalry—arrested the conspirators, chiefly consisting of nobles—disarmed the citizens—prohibited party colours—and declared that, in case of disturbance, they would set the town in flames. The only successful mode of dealing with rebels is to punish them; and the knowledge that the Austrians would not now be chicaned into concession, put an end to their disloyalty.

The first collision of the armies was on the 7th of April. Colonel Benedek, an officer already distinguished in Gallicia, surprised a patrol of Genoa dragoons, and brought his prisoners into Mantua. Charles Albert moved on the Mincio, and a column of four thousand men attacked the Austrian post at Goito, on the right bank, two leagues above Mantua. The attack was gallantly resisted by the Tyrolese Jagers, and other troops; but after an action of four hours, the Piedmontese succeeded in crossing a bridge imperfectly blown up, and the Austrians retired, with the loss of their four guns, on the glacis of Mantua. In this action the two brothers Hofer, nephews of the famous Andreas Hofer—the one a cadet, and the other a lieutenant in the Tyrolese Jagers—were unfortunately killed. The Field-Marshal immediately advanced with eighteen thousand men to give battle; but the Piedmontese stopped, to leave the main body time to advance and enter upon the true field of the campaign.

The Field-Marshal now determined to leave the line of the Mincio. The Piedmontese were daily receiving reinforcements. On the 20th, General d’Arco Ferrari, the Tuscan commander, conducted a column of five thousand men into the royal camp. This number included fifteen hundred volunteers of the best families of Florence and Sienna, a corps of students from Pisa, officered by their professors, and a corps of two hundred and fifty Neapolitans, raised by a Neapolitan enthusiast. When this man took leave of the King of Naples, he asked him, “Your majesty, what shall I say to the Lombards on the part of my king?” The reply was, “Tell them that I will come to their assistance with all my forces, and will myself fight by the side of their humblest grenadier.” His majesty appears to have soon changed his mind.

The Austrians continued to retire, and Charles Albert commenced the siege of Peschiera, and the investment of Mantua. In the mean time the Austrian Council, though the whole empire was in confusion, made the most strenuous efforts to reinforce the army in Italy; and General Nugent, with some corps of Croats, joined the Field-Marshal.

Under the general name of Croat, in Austrian military language, are included all the Borderers of the Austrian dominions, who serve as light infantry. But of the eighteen regiments of Border light infantry, eight only are of the real Croat race. This race belongs to the great Sclave family, and passed from Bohemia to their present province at a remote period. The Hungarians, on the contrary, came from the far East. In Bohemia and Moravia the German and Sclave races are mingled; in Hungary, the Magyar, the Sclave, the Wallach, and the Saxon. From Hungary, at this period, nothing was to be hoped, for the Hungarian nobility had extorted from the emperor an independent administration. They had even gone so far as to demand the government of the military frontier towards the Turkish dominions. This innovation, which would have included the subordination of Croatia, was resisted by its gallant people, who now proved a firm and loyal defence of their country, and recovered a fame obscured since the wars of Maria Theresa.

Even in the briefest narrative of this anxious period, the governor of Croatia deserves a record.

Joseph, Baron Jellachich de Buzim, was the son of a military man of rank, who had served in the French war. Educated for the army, he did not neglect the studies which accomplish man in every condition; and he has been even distinguished as a poet. His family connection with Croatia, and his character for intelligence and intrepidity, rapidly attracted notice, and he was appointed to the Viceroyalty of the province. The march of the corps of Croats to Vienna gave the first favourable turn to the fortunes of the empire, and in the trying Hungarian campaigns, the Ban of Croatia was among the foremost officers of the service, as his troops were among the bravest. On the demand of the army in Italy for reinforcement, he did not hesitate a moment, but despatched from his force those battalions which had so large a share in the ultimate victories of the campaign.

Hostilities now rapidly advanced. On the 5th of May, Charles Albert attacked the celebrated position of Rivoli, but after a heavy cannonade, was repulsed. On the 7th, the Piedmontese army, amounting to forty-five thousand men, with sixty-six guns, attacked the Austrian front on the heights of Sena, near Verona. A defeat on this point would have left Verona open to a bombardment, and might have been the ruin of the Austrian cause in Italy. The battle began at nine in the morning. The Austrians were posted in a line of villages, partly fortified. The Piedmontese fought well, but they failed in all their attacks. The Austrian fire of artillery was heavy; and at four, a movement of Radetsky precipitated the retreat of the enemy. The king was in the field, as were the Archdukes Joseph (the present emperor) and Albert, the son of the famous Archduke Charles.

The action lasted till six in the evening. The returns of the loss, on both sides, are equally unintelligible. The Piedmontese loss was returned at only 87 killed! and 659 wounded; and this in a conflict which lasted nine hours, under a perpetual cannonade. The Austrians naturally lost less than their assailants; but foreign bulletins are always a trial to English credulity.

The prospect still darkened: the emperor fled from Vienna, and took refuge in the Tyrol. News of the insurrection in Naples, and fighting in the streets, arrived. Peschiera was besieged, without the hope of being relieved; it was already famishing; horse-flesh and maize were its only provision: it had withstood forty thousand cannon shots; and for every two guns remaining on its ramparts, there was but one artilleryman! On the 30th it capitulated. Intelligence next came that Vienna was in complete possession of the populace, and a provisional government installed! This put an end to all expectation of reinforcements. It now even became a question, whether the Austrian army should not abandon the field, and take shelter in Mantua. “What a misfortune,” said a German paper, “for an army to be so commanded. What has happened justifies the warning which we gave, months ago, that the conduct of such a struggle should not be committed to a man eighty-four years of age.”

On the night of the 5th of June, only two days after the disastrous news from Vienna, that old man commenced a movement which decided the war!

The whole army suddenly moved to the attack of Vicenza; swept the plain of the enemy’s detachments; assailed the fortified heights of Monte Berico, the key of Vicenza, defended by fifteen thousand Papal troops, with Swiss and volunteers; and forced the town to a capitulation next day. This daring exploit stopped Charles Albert at once; convinced him that he could advance no farther; and changed the whole face of the campaign.

The most interesting part in the history of nations at war is the sudden ebbs and flows of fortune. The Field-Marshal had hitherto been compelled to keep a watchful eye on the Alps; for if the French army, already collected at Grenoble, had joined the Italians, there was no resource for him but to have retired from the Peninsula. But the four days’ fighting in the streets of Paris, in June, satisfied him that the French would be fully occupied at home, and relieved him of anxiety in that quarter. The next news was, that the insurrection at Prague had been crushed, and that reinforcements were sure to be despatched; the next was, that Count Latour, the minister, had actually despatched twelve thousand men to the army. In a short period, his troops, which had been reduced to forty thousand men, of whom a large proportion were in hospital, were increased to a hundred and thirty-two thousand. The cavalry were raised to upwards of eight thousand, and the artillery to two hundred and fifty pieces.

On the 22d, in the evening, the troops moved to the attack of the entire Piedmontese position. It was on a range of hills rising in successive lines of heights. The troops were stopped by a heavy storm at midnight. They halted till dawn, and on the 23d attacked and carried the whole line of the Piedmontese. On the next day Charles Albert advanced against them, made a vigorous flank movement, broke an Austrian Brigade, and fought desperately till nightfall. On the 25th the battle was resumed, the heat was intense, and the ascent of the hills was fearfully exhausting. In one of the regiments a third of the men sank on the road, and sixteen died of coup-de-soleil. Such are the toils and the horrors of war. Charles Albert fought bravely, and manœuvred ably, but he was everywhere repulsed. Fortune had deserted him. The Austrians slept on the heights which they had won. Thus ended the great battle of Costazza.

General Radetsky now gave orders for a vigorous pursuit. In one of the towns occupied by the retreating enemy, the inhabitants took part in the skirmish. In this instance we find the first military use of gun-cotton, and it appears to have excited equal surprise and alarm in the pursuers. “It was terrible,” says one of of those describers, “to hear the whistling of the ball without the detonation. No despatch could be read, because the enemy fired from their concealment at every light that showed itself. Alarms were frequent, and occasioned momentary confusion among us; it was an awful night.”

After an unsuccessful attack on the Austrian outposts, the enemy retired. Soon afterwards, a flag of truce arrived, proposing an armistice, taking the Oglio for the line of demarcation. The Austrian general demanded the Adda, the cession of the captured fortresses, and the withdrawal of the king’s troops from Venice, Modena, and Parma. Those conditions were rejected, and the royal army renewed its retreat. The command of the troops was now relinquished by the king, and given up to General Bava.

All, thenceforth, was confusion; the army began to dissolve; there was neither rest for it, nor food. Many threw themselves down by the roadside and refused to go farther. An armistice was suggested by the British minister at Turin, but the answer was decisive: “No armistice till the imperial provinces are cleared.”

The retreat should have been by the right bank of the Po; but Charles Albert, in a chivalric spirit, resolved to defend Milan. The pursuit was still continued through the defensible and intricate country which surrounds Milan. On the evening of the 4th of August, the Austrian army was at the gates of the city. In the night a council was held, which determined on the evacuation of Milan. The populace, partly in terror, and partly in rage, denounced the king as a traitor to their cause, and even fired shots at his palace. In the night of the 6th the king was conveyed from Milan under escort; the report reached the populace in the morning, and they proceeded to plunder. A deputation of the magistracy were sent to the Field-Marshal. He entered the city at the head of a column of troops by the Porta Romana; and on the 7th, an order of the day appeared, thanking the troops, and containing these words: “The imperial flag is again waving from the walls of Milan; there is no longer an enemy on Lombard ground.” This fixed the fate of the imperial provinces.

The campaign which followed in 1849 may be described in a few words. The mortified pride of Charles Albert provoked him to make preparations for a renewal of the war. He raised his army by the conscription—that terrible tool in the hands of an ambitious or an absurd government, to a hundred and forty-eight thousand men—(of whom, however, eighteen thousand were in the hospitals.) But the army had known the disasters of war, and its romance had died away. None but the orators were advocates for a contest with the mighty force of the empire. General Bava, an able and brave officer, who had conducted the retreat, was displaced, and the command was given to Chrozanowski, a Pole, who had served on the Russian staff. The Austrian force, exclusive of sick and garrisons, was about eighty thousand men.

The armistice concluded on the 20th of March. The Polish general’s order of the day was in the theatrical style of Napoleon’s bulletins. “Soldiers! the greater your vigour in advance, the speedier will be your victory, and the earlier your return, crowned with laurels!” The manlier, because the more intelligible sentiment of the Field-Marshal’s order was, “Soldiers! forward, with Turin for your watchword!”

In twenty-four hours the Austrian army was in march for the Tessin, the boundary of Piedmont and Lombardy. The decisive battle was fought at Novara, a town on the left bank of the Agogna. In the rear of the town, the ground, consisting of water-courses and walled gardens, and with substantial villas, and a slope towards the town for artillery, is favourable for defence. The sons of Charles Albert, the Dukes of Savoy and Genoa, commanded brigades, the whole force amounting to fifty thousand men, with one hundred and eleven guns.

The battle began at eleven in the morning of the 23d of March, by an attack of the Archduke Albert on a fortified post. The combat continued in a succession of attacks on the Piedmontese positions, which were stoutly defended, till four o’clock; when, all the Austrian brigades having reached the field, the Field-Marshal gave orders for a general advance of the line. The enemy now fell into disorder, and retreated. The battle was won. The Austrian army bivouacked on the field. The king, who had remained under fire during the day, was in despair. He exclaimed to General Durando, who led him away, “General, this is my last day—let me die.” Later in the evening, he called his princes and chief officers about him, and declared his determination to resign the crown to the Duke of Savoy. He then dismissed them, wrote a letter of farewell to his wife, and made his appearance at the quarters of the Austrian officer, Count Thurn, at one in the morning, under the title of a Count; and being allowed to pass the Austrian lines, (of course his person being known,) went to Nice. From Nice he went to Portugal, and remained at Oporto until he died.

Thus ended the life of a king, and thus closed the first powerful effort of that consummation of violence and folly, misery, and popular ruin, which are all included in the name of Italian Independence.

Let it not be supposed, from the tone of our observations, that we are hostile to the freedom of nations. Hostility of that order would contradict the character of our country. We have exposed only the pretences to patriotism—the love of plunder under the plea of reform, the hatred of order under the pretext of right, and the convulsion of society under the affectation of independence.

We affirm, in the most unequivocal manner, that, to be free, nations must be Protestant. The Popish religion is utterly incompatible with freedom in any nation. The slave of the altar is essentially the slave of the throne. We prove this by the fact, that no Popish country in the world has been able to preserve, or even to have a conception of, the simplest principles of civil liberty. If we are told that France is free, the obvious reply is, that though France is the least Popish of Popish countries, it still has the Conscription; it is wholly under military government; it has no Habeas Corpus; and no journalist can discuss any subject without exposing himself to Government, by giving his name. Would this be called liberty in England?

LEVANTINE RAMBLES. [3]

Egotism is a shoal upon which literary travellers are particularly apt to damage their barks. Before us are two cases in point, although of different degree. Monsieur Gerard de Nerval, a Frenchman of letters, Mr F. A. Neale, an Englishman attached to the consular service, have each written a couple of volumes concerning Syria and adjacent lands, visited at about the same period. We need hardly say that there is little resemblance between the books. The numerous points of dissimilarity between the French and English characters are never more strikingly elicited than upon the road. Set the travellers to write down their experiences, and you have the palpable exposition of the diverting contrast. In two respects, however, Messrs Neale and Nerval resemble each other. Both are very amusing; each is more or less of an egotist. The Frenchman is the more, the Englishman the less. Mr Neale’s egotism is artless and inoffensive. His book is a collection of notes made for the amusement of himself and friends, and which in course of years grew to considerable bulk. Long a resident and rambler in the country he writes about, he unites the advantages of an observant eye, an agreeable style, a happy discrimination of what is most likely to interest and prove novel to the public. His greatest fault is not to have more carefully weeded his manuscript of trivial personal incidents, quite in place in a letter to a friend, but which have no claim to the honours of type. Forgive this defect, and there is little else to pardon in a book that gives us an excellent notion of the aspect and mode of life of a country with which, considering its proximity to Europe, and the all-important events in sacred and profane history that have occurred upon its soil, we can hardly say that our acquaintance is as intimate as it ought to be. Monsieur de Nerval is a gentleman of far different pretensions from Mr Neale, whose faults are the result of literary inexperience, not of conceit or affectation. There is more of malice prepense about the Frenchman’s egotism. Quite as amusing as his English rival, he makes us laugh twice as much; but probably he would be the last man to suspect the chief motive of our mirth. Deeply sensible of the strong interest personally attaching to him, he keeps his most private feelings and proceedings constantly before the reader. Withdraw from his work all those passages in which Gerard de Nerval figures as the hero, and the corpulent octavos would shrink into pamphlets. As we read, fancy presents us with his portrait upon every page. It simpers at us out of a graceful vignette, or peeps through the fantastical wreaths of a decorative capital; draped in Oriental robes, surmounted with a Turkish head-dress, the scalp despoiled by Mahomedan razor of all its flowing honours, save one tress upon its summit, the beard trimmed in conformity with the latest fashion of Stamboul. Turn the page and behold him galloping, with drawn yataghan, and glowing with military ardour, in the suite of a prince of Lebanon, out for a foray amongst the Maronites. A little farther he languishes at the feet of the lovely daughter of a Druse Sheik, or exerts his influence—far from inconsiderable—to obtain the release of her captive parent. But however occupied, whether martially, amorously, or philanthropically, Gerard de Nerval is always before us, the principal figure upon his own canvass. He is nothing if not egotistical. As to the value and extent of his information concerning the countries he visited, it is impossible to rate them highly, since he admits that his knowledge of Arabic was for some time limited to the single word tayeb—it is good—which conveys, he says, an infinity of meanings, according to the tone of its utterance, and which he takes to be the root of the Arabic tongue. It is quite clear, from various passages of his book, that he attained no great proficiency in his oriental studies, and that for the greater portion, if not for the whole period, of his stay in the East, he was at the mercy of roguish dragomans and casual acquaintances. He began his peregrinations farther south than did Mr Neale. After an introduction, somewhat pedantic and not much to the purpose, addressed, as well as the epilogue, to a mythic Hibernian, one Timothy O’Neddy, he abruptly opens his book at Cairo, by informing us that there the women are more hermetically veiled than in any other of the Levantine towns. The ladies, it must be observed, play a most important part in the narrative of this gallant and airy Frenchman, and have supplied subordinate titles to his volumes, the first of which is called The Women of Cairo, the second The Women of Lebanon. At the Egyptian city he had projected a residence of six months, and was mortally disheartened by the dull aspect of the place when, upon the first day of his arrival, he had passed some hours in wandering, mounted on a jackass and escorted by a dragoman, through its confused labyrinth of narrow dusty streets. The dragoman, whose name is Abdallah, is a character, and deserves better than to be passed over without a paragraph. M. de Nerval, who desired to husband his travelling purse, soon began to fear that he was too magnificent an attendant for so small a personage as himself.

“It was at Alexandria,” says Abdallah’s employer, “on the deck of the Leonidas steamer, that he first appeared to me in all his glory. He came alongside in a boat of his own, with a little black to carry his long pipe, and a younger dragoman to bear him company. A flowing white tunic covered his clothes, and contrasted with the colour of his face, in which the Nubian blood tinted features borrowed from the head of some Egyptian sphynx. Doubtless he was the offspring of two mixed races. Large golden rings weighed down his ears, and his indolent gait in his long garments completed to my imagination the ideal portrait of some freedman of the lower empire.

“There were no English amongst the passengers, and Abdallah, rather vexed at this, attached himself to me for want of a better. We disembarked; he hired four asses for himself, for his suite, and for me, and took me straight to the English hotel, where they were good enough to take me in, at the rate of sixty piastres a-day; as for himself, he limited his pretensions to half that sum, out of which he undertook to keep the second dragoman and the little black. After dragging this imposing escort at my heels for a whole day, I was struck by the inutility of the second dragoman, and even of the little boy. Abdallah made no objection to dismiss his young colleague; as to the little black, he kept him at his own charges, reducing, at the same time, his own salary to twenty piastres (about five francs) a-day. Arrived at Cairo, the asses carried us straight to the English hotel on the Esbekieh Square; but I checked their ardour on learning that the charges at this hotel were the same as at the one in Alexandria.

“‘You prefer, then, to go to the Waghorn hotel in the Frank quarter?’ said honest Abdallah.

“‘I should prefer a hotel which was not English.’

“‘Well! there is Domergue’s French hotel.’

“‘Let us go to it.’

“‘Pardon me, I will accompany you thither, but I cannot remain there.’

“‘Why not?’

“‘Because it is an hotel that only charges forty piastres a-day; I cannot go to it.’

“‘But I find it quite good enough for me.’

“‘You are unknown; I belong to the town; I am accustomed to attend English gentlemen; I must keep up my rank.’

Nevertheless, I considered the price of this hotel tolerably high for a country where everything is about six times less dear than in France, and where a piastre, or five sous of our money, is a labourer’s daily wage.

“‘There is a way of arranging matters,’ said Abdallah. ‘You shall go to Domergue’s for two or three days, and I will visit you as a friend; during that time I will take a house for you in the town, and then there will be no obstacle to my remaining in your service.’

“On inquiry, I found that many Europeans take houses in Cairo if they propose remaining there any time, and, having ascertained this, I gave full powers to Abdallah.”

Whilst this most dignified of dragomans was house-hunting, M. de Nerval passed his time as well as he could at the despised French hotel, which he found very comfortable, and which is built round a square white-washed court, covered with a light trellis-work, overgrown with vines. In an upper gallery of this court, a French artist, talented and amiable, but very deaf, had established his easel and his daguerreotype, and there he studied and sketched the forms of the principal Egyptian races. He had no difficulty in obtaining models amongst the lower classes of the Cairo women, most of whom, however, were exceedingly punctilious in veiling their features, however much of their persons they might be induced to expose to the artist’s gaze. The face is the last refuge of Oriental modesty. Besides the resource of the painter’s society, M. de Nerval found a very fair table d’hôte at the hôtel Domergue, several Anglo-Indians to laugh at, a piano, and a billiard-table. He began to think he might almost as well have remained at Marseilles. Impatient to commence a more Oriental mode of life, he allowed Abdallah to conduct him to various houses that were to let. House-rent is almost nominal in Cairo. He found that he might have a palace for about three pounds a-year. Abdallah showed him several such—stately mansions many stories high, with marble-paved halls and cooling fountains, with galleries and staircases as in Genoese and Venetian palaces, with courts surrounded by columns, and gardens shaded by rare trees. An army of slaves and servants was all that was needed to make them fitting residences for a prince. The engagement of such a retinue not entering into M. de Nerval’s calculations, he was glad to take a much smaller house, with glazed windows, (there was not a pane of glass in any of the palaces,) which had recently been occupied by an Englishman. Hiring a house in Cairo is rather a complicated operation. An act was drawn up in Arabic, and paid for; presents were made to the Sheik of the quarter, to the lawyer, and to the chief of the nearest guard-house; the scribes and servants had also to be fee’d. When M. de Nerval had complied with all these forms, the Sheik handed him the key. This was a piece of wood “like a baker’s tally, at one end of which five or six nails were driven in as if at random; but there was no random in the matter: this strange key is introduced into a hole in the door, the nails correspond with little holes, invisible from without, pass through them, and raise a wooden bolt.” In possession of the key, the next thing to be done was to furnish the house. Little money and less time sufficed to accomplish this. Some cotton and cloth were bought at a bazaar, and converted, in a few hours, into divan cushions, which served as mattresses at night. A basket-maker put together a sort of bedframe of palm twigs; a little round table, some cups and pipes—and the house was furnished and fit to receive the best company in Cairo. M. de Nerval’s first visitor was an officious Jew, a breeder of silk-worms, who established himself on one of the divans, took coffee and a pipe, and undertook to prove that his host had been swindled by Abdallah and the merchant at the bazaar, and had paid twice too much for everything he had bought. The Jew was followed by the Sheik, who came early the next morning and waited in the opposite coffee-house till M. de Nerval was up. He was a venerable old man with a white beard, and was attended by his secretary and negro pipe-bearer. When he was installed upon a divan, and supplied with the inevitable pipe and coffee, he informed M. de Nerval, through the medium of Abdallah, that he had brought him back the money he had paid for the house. It was an intimation that he was not approved of as a tenant. Greatly astonished, the Frenchman asked the reason. “His morality was suspicious,” was the reply; “he had no wife or female slave.” This was quite contrary to the custom of the country. He must supply the deficiency or quit the premises. His neighbours, who were better provided, would be uneasy at the proximity of a bachelor resident. In short, he had the option given him to marry or move. For the latter he had no fancy, when he had just furnished a house that suited him well; he was averse to matrimony, and his European scruples opposed the purchase of a female slave. Doubting the Sheik’s right to compel him to decamp or conjugate, he requested the functionary to take patience for a few days whilst he consulted his friends, to do which he at once sallied forth. We need hardly inform the discerning reader that this dilemma is the peg upon which the ingenious and facetious Frenchman contrives to hang a whole volume. On his way to seek advice from his countryman the painter, he falls in with a Turk, whose acquaintance he had made on board the steamboat, confides his difficulty to him, and the conversation that ensues fills a chapter. Then, whilst rambling about with the deaf artist, he gets into an adventure with two veiled ladies, whom he follows home, and who prove to be Frenchwomen, wife and sister-in-law of a renegade French officer. But the most practical information he obtained on the knotty point of acquiring a harem was from Yusef, the Jew silk-grower, who came daily to take a pipe on his divan and improve himself in the French language. From him he ascertained that there are four ways of contracting marriage at Cairo. The first and least binding is with a Cophtic woman before a Turkish santon; a union that, in fact, amounts exactly to nothing, the contracting parties being both Christians, and the officiating priest Mahometan. Then there is the marriage before a Cophtic priest, which admits of divorce on payment of a small sum in compensation; a third sort is binding so long as the husband remains in the country; whilst the fourth (celebrated both at the Cophtic church and Franciscan convent) gives the wife a right to follow him, and is a bonâ fide and permanent union—too permanent for M. de Nerval’s taste; who, considering the other three modes as merely so many recognised forms of concubinage, ended by purchasing, for twenty-five pounds sterling, a yellow slave of Malay or Javanese origin, with a sun tatooed upon her breast and forehead, and a lance-head upon her chin, and who had a hole through her left nostril, intended to receive a nose-ring. Having made this precious acquisition, he found she had pretensions to be treated as a cadine, (lady,) and esteemed it quite below her dignity to attend to domestic matters; and, in short, the unlucky Frenchman’s ill-advised acquiescence in Eastern customs brought upon him a host of troubles and annoyances, of which he makes the most for the benefit of his readers. The whole account of the author’s Egyptian proceedings reads more like a fantastical tale, invented at leisure, than a narrative of actual events; but in a note at the end of his work he protests that all he has written down really occurred. He had reckoned on making a considerable stay at Cairo; but notwithstanding the extraordinary cheapness of that city, he soon found his purse getting very low, as a consequence of the extravagance and caprices of the yellow woman, of his disorderly mode of housekeeping, and of the inexactness and roguery of most of those with whom he had any dealings. So he was obliged to shorten his term of residence, lest he should find himself without sufficient funds to reach Syria, which was his next destination. Having resolved on departure, he offered her liberty to the slave, whose name was Zeynab, if she chose to remain at Cairo. This proposal, instead of being gratefully received, excited the indignation of the cadine. What was she to do with her liberty? She requested him to sell her again to Abd-el-Kerim, the wealthy slave-dealer from whom he had bought her. But although he had not scrupled to buy her, he could not make up his mind to take money for human flesh and blood, and began to philosophise on the strange state of a country where slaves would not accept their freedom. Meanwhile Zeynab wept at the prospect of starvation, for she could do nothing to earn her bread, and was too proud to take service. The European, by aping the Turkish manner of life, had got himself into a perfect labyrinth of embarrassments. He had changed his dress and his diet, and had taken the first step towards the formation of a harem; but he would not change his religion, nor could he divest himself of certain civilised ideas, incompatible with the conditions of his new existence. He found all the inconveniences of his ambiguous manner of life, and evidently, although he does not care to confess it, wished he had abstained from his social experiments, and had followed the example of the sober-sided English, whom he laughs at for their constancy to roast-beef, porter, and potatoes, and whom he ludicrously sketches wandering about Cairo on donkeys, with long legs nearly touching the ground, with green veils fastened to their white hats, and blue spectacles protecting their eyes, with India-rubber overcoats, long sticks to keep off suspicious Arabs, and a groom and a dragoman on their right hand and on their left. The die was cast, however; he was too compassionate to leave the gold-coloured incubus to her fate; and the upshot was, that she was allowed to follow him to Syria, causing him, upon the way, almost as many annoyances as she had occasioned him at Cairo. The voyage was accomplished on board of a Levantine vessel, the Santa Barbara, commanded by a Greek named Nicholas. This was a one-masted craft, with a black, collier-like hull, a long yard, and a single triangular sail, manned by Turks, and laden with rice. The deck was encumbered with boxes of poultry—provisions for the voyage. The little den known as the captain’s cabin, for the use of which M. de Nerval had bargained, was infested with enormous red beetles, so that he was glad to resign his claim, and to establish himself in the longboat. This was suspended before the mast, and, with the help of cotton cushions and sail-cloth awning, it was converted into a very tolerable refuge, so long as the weather continued fine. A young Armenian scribe, who composed verses, and was in quest of employment, and to whom M. de Nerval had given a passage in his boat down the Nile, had also embarked in the Santa Barbara, and supplied the place of Abdallah as an interpreter. Captain Nicholas, an easy-going, hospitable, lubberly mariner, who had been half a pirate in the time of the Greek war, invited his passenger to partake of his pillau and Cyprus wine, and confided to him all his affairs. The indolent Greek passed his time in strumming one invariable tune on an old guitar, and in playing at chess with the pilot; his nautical talents were anything but brilliant, and his compass was out of order, so that it was hardly to be wondered at that, on the third day of the voyage, when they should have sighted Syria, Syria was nowhere to be seen. There was little or no wind; now and then a puff of air filled the sail, but soon died away, and the canvass flapped idly against the mast. Captain Nicholas troubled not his head about the matter: he had his chessmen and his guitar; they sufficed to occupy his attention. The Armenian was not quite so tranquil, and that evening he communicated to his French acquaintance the cause of his uneasiness. Although but three days from port, they were running short of water. M. de Nerval could not credit this.

“‘You have no notion of the carelessness of these people,’ said the Armenian. ‘To obtain fresh water, they must have sent a boat as far as Damietta, that at the mouth of the Nile being salt; and as the town was in quarantine, they dreaded the forms—at least, that is the reason they give; but the fact is, they never thought about it.’

“‘Astonishing!’ said I; ‘and yonder is the captain, singing as if our situation were the most natural in the world;’ and I went with the Armenian to question him on the subject.

“Captain Nicholas rose and showed me the water-casks, which were entirely empty, with the exception of one, which might still contain some five or six bottles of water; then he resumed his seat upon the poop, took up his guitar, and resumed his eternal song, lolling back his head against the bulwarks.

“The next morning I awoke early, and walked forward, thinking it might be possible to discern the shores of Palestine. But in vain did I polish the glasses of my telescope; the line of sea at the extreme horizon was as sharp and unbroken as the curved blade of a Damascus sabre. It was probable we had hardly changed our place since the previous evening. I returned towards the stern of the vessel. Everybody was fast asleep, with the exception of the cabin-boy, who was copiously washing his hands and face in water which he drew from our last cask of potable liquid!”

Fortunately a light westerly breeze sprang up in the evening. The next morning, so said Nicholas, the blue peaks of Mount Carmel would be visible in the horizon. Suddenly shouts of horror and consternation were heard. “A fowl overboard!” was the cry. M. de Nerval was disposed to treat this misfortune pretty lightly. Not so the owner, a Turkish sailor, who was in despair, and with whom his messmates warmly sympathised. The fowl floated astern, making signals of distress; the Turk had to be forcibly held, to prevent him jumping overboard; and, to M. de Nerval’s astonishment and disgust, the captain, after a moment’s hesitation, ordered the vessel to be brought to. After two days’ calm, and when running short of water, this seemed a singular way of profiting by a favourable breeze. M. de Nerval hoped to accelerate matters by giving the bereaved sailor a couple of piastres, a sum for which an Arab would at any time risk his life. The man’s countenance brightened, he pocketed the coins, pulled off his clothes, jumped into the sea, swam a prodigious distance, and returned in half-an-hour, so exhausted, that he had to be lifted on board, but bringing back his chicken, which he rubbed and warmed with as much care as if it had been an only child, and which at last he had the satisfaction of seeing hop about the deck. Once more sail was made, and the ship advanced. “The devil take the hen!” quoth the exasperated Nerval, “we have lost an hour. I have plenty of fowls, and would have given him several for that one.” The Armenian explained. It was a religious, or at least a superstitious question. The sailor had been on the point of cutting his fowl’s throat, when it flew away over his left shoulder. According to Turkish belief, had it been drowned, its owner had not three days to live. M. de Nerval began to weary of ship and crew, and his weariness became anger when he discovered that one of the sailors, an elderly Turk who had great influence over the others, as being a hadji or pilgrim returned from Mecca, was endeavouring to persuade the yellow woman that a Christian had no right to own a Mahometan slave of white blood, (she was the colour of saffron.) Captain Nicholas, as a Greek Christian, had little real authority over his Turkish crew, and that little he showed himself indisposed to exercise. Some rather animated scenes ensued, which were near ending in a fight between the Frenchman and the hadji. A sort of sullen hollow truce was brought about, but M. de Nerval’s position was not very agreeable, nor perhaps quite safe, when he suddenly remembered that he had in his pocket-book a letter of recommendation to Méhmed Réchid, pasha of Acre, from a Turkish friend of his who for some time had been member of the divan at Constantinople. He himself had been acquainted with the Pasha during his abode at Paris as member of the Turkish embassy, and, as luck would have it, all this was duly set forth in the letter, which was properly indited in Arabic, and which the Armenian, after placing it on his head in token of respect, read aloud to the captain and crew. It so happened that the ship was now off Acre, where she was compelled to put in for water; and the bastinado which M. de Nerval had threatened to procure for the crew, on their arrival in that port, no longer appeared to them in the light of an empty menace. The hadji and his shipmates drew in their horns, and were all humility; the Greek master apologised for the little vigour he had shown in repressing their insolence; and as to the yellow slave—“since you are the friend of Méhmed Pasha, who shall say she is not lawfully yours; who would dare to contend against the favour of the great?” So spoke Captain Nicholas, a true modern Greek in falseness and servility. And Zeynab, who had been refractory and had called her master a giaour, was sent for a short space to keep company with the beetles in the captain’s cabin.

However delightful may be a cruise in the Levant, on board a well-found vessel and with a competent crew, it is unpleasant, and at times almost perilous, in native craft, and with the deceitful and ignorant Greek and Arab captains. Mr Neale gives a shocking picture of his discomforts in an Arab felucca, on board which he coasted from Gaza to Caipha, and again from Caipha to Sidon. By special stipulation, he and his servant were to be the sole passengers. “Allah Rassi (by my head) it shall be as you desire,” vowed the lying Reis, when entering into his agreement in presence of the quarantine authorities; but when the “only passenger” went on board, he found the little vessel crowded with men, women, and children, and passed a night of extreme discomfort and irritation. Most of his journeys were by land. Starting from Gaza, the southernmost port of Syria, he made excursions to Hebron, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, returned to Gaza, and then went northwards along the coast, branching off inland to visit Antioch, Aleppo, and other places, and concluding with a trip into Asia Minor. Some of the Syrian towns he appears to have visited repeatedly during the eight years he spent in the country, and in most of them he made some stay. To any traveller proposing to visit Syria, his book will serve as a useful itinerary. He had, over M. de Nerval, the advantage of being well acquainted with Arabic. Like him, he has a fling at the eccentricities of English tourists, and exposes the rogueries of dragomans. He gives a ludicrous account of the proceedings of these worthies at Gaza, where he passed some months. The new Lazaretto and quarantine establishment at that place form a vast edifice, situated on a plain, about three hours’ journey from the Egyptian frontier. The construction was completed in the spring of 1850, at great expense to the Turkish government. The apartments allotted to Europeans are airy and wholesome in summer, warm and comfortable in winter; the charges made are very trifling; and the term of detention is but five days, including the day of entry and that of pratique: so that, waiving the question of the expediency of quarantine against Egypt, travellers might fairly be expected to submit patiently, and with a good grace, to the brief incarceration within walls thirty feet high. And so they for the most part do. The refractory ones, almost without exception, are natives of the British isles. In 1850, the Nazir, or director of the quarantine, was Achmet Effendi, an affable Turkish gentleman who had been educated in Italy, spoke and wrote Italian fluently, was a good musician, and altogether a civilised and agreeable person, very different from the usual run of pompous pipe-smoking Syrian effendis. The medical officer was Doctor Esperon, from whose plan and under whose directions the Lazaretto had been built. These two gentlemen made heavy complaints of the trouble occasioned by the majority of their English visitors.

“Spanish grandees, Italian nobles, German barons, and Frenchmen, whose families had pedigrees more antediluvian than Noah, were wont to submit calmly to the rules and regulations of the establishment, and quitted it on an intimate footing of friendship with the authorities; but no sooner was the proximity of a caravan of Englishmen announced than every one was thrown into a state of excitement, and all the twenty soldiers, with their truculent lieutenant, were immediately drawn up in battle array. The two hundred guardians looked hot and fierce; ferocious-looking camel-drivers were pressed into the service. The Nazir twirled his huge mustachios; and the doctor, to be prepared for an emergency, had a table placed in the gateway, on which he made a diabolical display of surgical instruments. After a great deal of excitement and impatience, a little cloud of dust proclaimed the arrival of the dreaded individuals. First came a couple of guardians, with drawn swords and very hoarse voices, having been wrangling with the dragoman all the way from the outposts. Then one, or perhaps two, nondescript animals, in costumes hitherto unheard of, with sinister faces and mustachios nine inches from point to point. These were the dragomans, or interpreters, who always accompany ‘milords’ on their travels, speaking a little English, just sufficient to misunderstand what you say, and making themselves a little useful at times, in amends for which sacrifices they are exceedingly skilled in the art of fleecing or plucking their employers. After these, the milords themselves heave in sight, generally wearing large felt hats, covered with calico, the whiteness of which contrasts admirably with their own highly inflamed countenances. Once opposite the quarantine gates, a violent argument instantly ensues. The orator on these occasions is generally the dragoman, for the travellers are too weary and hot to take any active part. The first concession for which the fiery interpreter contends is, that they may be permitted to pitch their own tents in the vicinity of the quarantine, and be allowed to stroll as far as the beach (accompanied by guardians) for the sake of healthful recreation. This point is vainly combated by the authorities, who ‘show cause why’ such privileges should not be allowed them—viz., such as the wind accidentally blowing a bit of straw or a rag against some passenger, causing the said unhappy individual to be immediately arrested and incarcerated as impure. Finally, the camels on which the tents are laden are forcibly seized and dragged into the quarantine, which act settles this question eternally; but there are others to be arranged, and these are disputed step by step, and inch by inch. The first set of guardians who are placed to guard the separate apartments of the strangers are forthwith kicked out of their rooms. But the uproar that ensues when the travellers and their servants are disarmed, and their guns, pistols, and swords taken from them and lodged in the armoury—this, I was told, beggars all description. The interpreters on such occasions become maniacs; they lie on the flat of their backs, and kick and bite like monkeys, until, overcome by numbers and their injured feelings, they go into fits, and come out of them again, the very points of their mustachios hanging down in despair, and then slink about like dogs in a strange street, ‘effendi-ing’ and cringing to every one they come across.”

The riotous proceedings thus humorously described by Mr Neale were often the fault of the dragomans alone, whose employers, ignorant of any other language than English, and completely at their mercy, were unwittingly made accomplices of their turbulent and vexatious manœuvres. The helplessness of Englishmen abroad, when they get off those beaten tracks along which their language is considered the necessary accomplishment of hotel-waiters and railway-clerks, is notorious and laughable, and is not likely to diminish until a good practical knowledge of at least one foreign language is set down as an indispensable part of the most ordinary education. Both in purse and comfort, Englishmen pay dearly for their lingual deficiencies, and for the apparent stiffness and reserve which are their inevitable consequences. Travelling in the course of the year perhaps as much as all the rest of Europe put together, they are the helpless and often unsuspicious victims of guides, interpreters, valets-de-place, and innkeepers. It is notorious that in most parts of the Continent there are two tariffs—one for the English, and one for all other foreigners. The practice extends even to Syria. At Beyrout, M. de Nerval, attracted by savoury odours, walked one day into the trattoria of the Signor Battista, then the only Frank hotel-keeper in the place, which he had previously abstained from visiting, from a dread of exorbitant charges. Upon that occasion, however, he thought he would venture to try the table d’hôte, which was spread upon a terrace beneath a red and white awning. Upon an adjacent door he read the following inscription: Qui si paga 60 piastres per giorno. Sixty piastres, or fifteen francs, for every twenty-four hours’ board and lodging at a Beyrout hotel, seemed to him rather a heavy price. He took his seat, however, and ate his dinner, side by side with an English missionary, who had been on a converting expedition into the mountains, and who triumphantly exhibited to him a book full of the signatures of proselytes, one of the most brilliant of whom, a lad from the vicinity of Bagdad, he had with him in the double capacity of a servant and of a sample of his success. After dinner, on leaving the hotel, “I was surprised to have only ten piastres (two francs and a half) to pay for my meal. Signor Battista took me aside, and reproached me in a friendly manner for not having gone to stay at his hotel. I pointed to the inscription announcing sixty piastres a-day to be the price of admission, which was at the rate of eighteen hundred piastres a-month. ‘Ah! corpo di me!’ cried he, ‘that is for the English, who have a great deal of money, and are all heretics; but for the French, and other Romans, it is only five francs.’” “Beyrout,” says Mr Neale, “is a very expensive place to live in, and a very easy one to die in.” It is a most flourishing town, although an unpleasant residence. Mr Neale visited it many times during his stay in Syria, and always found it increasing in wealth, population, and dimensions. In a commercial point of view, it is the capital of Syria; it contains more European inhabitants than any other town, is the residence of the various consuls-general, and the place of adjustment of the oft-recurring disputes between the Druses and Maronites of the Lebanon. The scenery around it is beautiful. M. de Nerval was in raptures with the place. “A landscape all freshness, shade and silence; a view of the Alps taken from the bosom of a Swiss lake. Such,” he says, “is Beyrout.” Mr Neale says little about the surrounding scenery, but dwells at some length upon the creature-comforts of the place, its social resources and mercantile advantages, its hosts of fleas and mosquitoes, and horribly noisy barracks, the two greatest nuisances in the town, in whose very centre, close to the dwellings of some of the most respectable merchants, the latter are situated.

Released from quarantine, M. de Nerval engaged a lodging in the house of a Maronite family, half a league from the town. During his brief residence beneath the shadow of the yellow flag, he had taken it into his head, or rather the blundering Greek Nicholas had made him believe, that an attachment had sprung up between the young Armenian scribe and the yellow slave. With a base affectation of magnanimity, but evidently with secret delight at the prospect of getting rid of the tatooed beauty whom he had so imprudently associated with his fortunes, he declared her emancipated, and told the Armenian to marry her. The poor scribe, whose only possessions were the clothes he stood in, and the copper inkhorn suspended at his girdle, had never dreamed of falling in love—far less of marrying; and as to Zeynab, she was monstrously offended at its being supposed she could bestow a thought upon a mere raya, the servant alternately of Turks and Franks. M. de Nerval found he had been misled by the officious Greek, and by his own very imperfect knowledge of the Oriental tongues. The Maronites with whom he went to lodge strongly advised him to sell his encumbrance, and proposed to fetch a Turk who would buy her; but he could not bring himself to do this, and ended by sending her to board with a Marseilles lady who kept a school at Beyrout, and who promised to treat her kindly, and convert her to Christianity. This matter settled, M. de Nerval started for the mountains. A few days previously, a young Emir, or Christian prince of a district of Lebanon, had come to lodge in the same house with himself—had sought his acquaintance, and had asked him to go and pass a few days with him in the interior of the country; an invitation which he eagerly accepted, and which consoled him in some measure for being compelled to abandon a tour in Palestine, marked upon his itinerary.

“For the five purses,” he mournfully exclaims, “expended in the purchase of this gold-coloured daughter of the Malaccas, I could have visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Dead Sea and the Jordan! Like the prophet whom God punished, I pause upon the frontier of the Promised Land, of which I can scarcely obtain, from the mountain’s summit, a distant and dejected view. Grave people will here say that it is always wrong to act differently from everybody else, and to attempt to play the Turk, when one is but a mere Nazarene from Europe. Are they perhaps in the right?—Who knows?”

And the eccentric rambler, trying to persuade himself that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, suggests the probability of his five purses becoming the spoil of Bedouins during his journey across the desert, talks of the fatality attaching to all things Eastern, mounts a hired nag purveyed for him by the conscientious Battista, and gallops off with his friend Abou Miran, Emir of Lebanon, belonging to the most illustrious family in the district of Kesrawan, and lord of ten villages, who smiles good-humouredly at the Frenchman’s difficulty in riding Arab fashion, perched on a high saddle, with legs doubled up and brass stirrups as big as fire-shovels. “We had ridden about a league when they showed me the grotto whence had issued the famous dragon which was on the point of devouring the daughter of the King of Beyrout, when St. George pierced it with his lance. The place is held in great reverence by the Greeks, and even by the Turks, who have built a little mosque on the spot where the combat occurred.” For its afternoon meal, the cavalcade halted in the village of Bethmeria, situated on a mountain platform. Here was evidence of the constant feuds between Maronites and Druses.

“We passed a large house, whose crumbling roof and blackened beams told of a recent conflagration. The prince informed me that the Druses had set fire to the building, whilst several Maronite families were celebrating a wedding within its walls. Fortunately, the inmates had time to escape, but the strangest circumstance was that the incendiaries were inhabitants of the same village. Bethmeria contains a mixed population of about a hundred and fifty Maronites and sixty Druses, with an interval of scarcely two hundred paces between the houses of the two sects. In consequence of the aggressions of the Druses, a bloody struggle took place, and the Pasha hastened to interpose between the hostile divisions of the village a little camp of Albanians, who lived at the expense of the rival populations. We had just finished our repast, consisting of curdled milk and fruit, when the Sheik of the village returned home. After the first salutations, he began a long conversation with the prince, complaining bitterly of the presence of the Albanians, and of the general disarming that had been enforced in his district. He seemed to think that this measure should have been enforced upon the Druses only, as they had been guilty of the nocturnal attack and incendiarism. Whilst continuing our march, my guide informed me that the Maronite Christians of the province of El Garb, in which we were, had endeavoured to expel the Druses scattered through several villages, and that the latter had called to their assistance their co-religionists of the Anti-Lebanon. Hence one of those struggles which so often occur. The great strength of the Maronites is in the province of Kesrawan, situated behind Djebaïl and Tripoli, whilst the largest masses of the Druses inhabit the provinces that extend from Beyrout to St Jean d’Acre. The Sheik of Bethmeria complained to the prince that, in the recent circumstances I have spoken of, the people of Kesrawan had not stirred; but they had had no time, the Turks having set up the hue and cry with a promptitude very unusual on their part. The quarrel had occurred just at the moment of paying the miri. Pay first, said the Turks; afterwards you may fight as much as you please. It would certainly be rather difficult to collect tribute from people who were ruining themselves and cutting each other’s throats at the very moment of the harvest.”

M. de Nerval was invited to take coffee with the Turkish commandant, of whom he inquired whether he could safely visit the Druse portion of the village. “In all safety,” was the reply. “These people are very peaceable since our arrival, otherwise you would have had to fight for the one or the other—for the white cross or the white hand;” the emblems that distinguish the banners of the two parties, both having red grounds. M. de Nerval’s predilection is evidently for the Maronites, who acknowledge the spiritual authority of the Pope, and are particularly patronised by France and Austria. But he did the Druses less than justice if he anticipated other than a good reception at their hands, and soon he was compelled to admit and admire their patriarchal hospitality. He was kindly greeted as he passed, attended only by a lad, before their gardens and houses; the women brought him fresh water and new milk, and positively refused reward. He was delighted with this “more than Scottish hospitality.” At the further end of the village he sat down in the shadow of a wall. He was weary, and the sun was scorching hot.

“An old man came out of the house and pressed me to go in and rest myself. I thanked him, but declined, for it was growing late, and I feared my companions might be uneasy at my absence. Seeing that I also refused refreshment, he said I must not leave him without accepting something, and he went indoors, and fetched some little apricots and gave them me; then he insisted upon accompanying me to the end of the street. He appeared vexed to learn from Moussa that I had breakfasted with the Christian Sheik. ‘’Tis I who am the true Sheik,’ he said, ‘and I have a right to show hospitality to strangers.’ Moussa told me that this old man had been the Sheik or lord of the village in the time of the Emir Béchir; but having espoused the cause of the Egyptians, the Turkish authorities refused any longer to recognise him, and the election had fallen on a Maronite.”

The day after his arrival at the Emir’s castle—a Gothic pile with a vast internal court—M. de Nerval was presented to the ladies of the family. They were two in number, and were magnificently dressed for the occasion, with heavy girdles of jewellery, and ornaments of diamonds and rubies, a species of luxurious display carried to a great extent in Syria even amongst women of rank inferior to these.

“As to the horn which the mistress of the house balanced upon her forehead, and which made her movements resemble those of a swan, it was of chased enamel studded with turquoises; her hair flowed down upon her shoulders in tresses intermingled with clusters of sequins, according to the fashion prevalent in the Levant. The feet of these ladies, doubled up upon the divan, were stockingless, which is usual in this country, and gives to beauty an additional charm, very remote from our ideas. Women who hardly ever walk, who perform, several times a day, perfumed ablutions, and whose toes are uncramped by shoes, succeed, as may be imagined, in rendering their feet as charming as their hands. The henna dye, which reddens the nails, and the ankle-rings, rich as bracelets, complete the grace and charm of this portion of the female person, in Europe rather too much sacrificed to the glory of shoemakers.

After the first day, etiquette and display were laid aside; the ladies resumed their ordinary attire, and superintended their household, then busy gathering in the silk-harvest. Hundreds of women and children were engaged in winding off the cocoons, which hung like golden olives upon sheaves of cut branches piled together in the huts. M. de Nerval soon found himself at home in the Emir’s hospitable castle, and on friendly terms with the ladies, who asked him many questions about Europe, and spoke of several travellers who had visited them. The ideas of the Syrians concerning the state of France and other European countries are not generally very clear or correct. Mr Neale, when at Latachia, (a name of aromatic sound to smokers,) draws a lamentable picture of their geographical ignorance.

“The chart of the world,” he says, “depicted in their mind’s eye, consists of Constantinople, Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, and various remote islands, situated in the centre of a vast ocean. From these islands all Franks are presumed to come. They consider the nations of the earth to consist of the Jews, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Franks, who, according to their notions, form one empire, speak one tongue, and are of one religion. As for the different flags, they ascribe this variety solely to the conflicting tastes of the different consular agents.”

With respect to politics, the people of Lebanon have derived many contradictory ideas from their European visitors, a large proportion of whom are French Legitimists on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The feuds and divisions of the Franks can have no very strong interest for these Turk-governed Christians and Druses, engrossed as they are by their own dissensions. M. de Nerval had passed some time with his mountaineer friends, hawking, banqueting, and making excursions to convents and other objects of interest, when one evening, just as he was thinking of redescending into the plain, news came of an inroad of the Druses into the districts which had been disarmed by orders of the Pasha of Beyrout. The province of Kesrawan, which belongs to the pashalik of Tripoli, had kept its arms, and Prince Abou Miran mustered his men to march to the assistance of his co-religionists. M. de Nerval accompanied him, planning exploits which were to immortalise his name. These reduced themselves, however, to a fierce onslaught upon a cactus-hedge, which he gallantly cut in pieces with his yataghan, thus opening a passage to some Maronite horsemen who accompanied him, and who, finding no enemy, began to wreak their vengeance upon mulberry and olive trees, the chief wealth of the unfortunate Druses. The Frenchman presently discovered, to his shame and regret, that the plantations thus ravaged were part of the very village in which he had been so hospitably treated on his first arrival in the mountains. The Emir came up and checked the work of brutal destruction; the alarm proved false; the Druses were quiet and had made no incursion, and M. de Nerval was defrauded of his anticipated glory. He returned to Beyrout, and went to call on Madame Carlès, in whose care he had left the yellow slave. Zeynab was gentle and contented, but would do little or nothing. She picked up a few words of French from the children of the school, but would learn nothing useful, for fear she should be made to work, and thus degraded to the rank of a servant. Her progress towards the religion of Rome was very slow. When shown a picture of the Virgin, she reminded her instructor that it had been written, “Thou shalt not worship images.” M. de Nerval set it down as a hopeless case. Madame Carlès was still sanguine of success. The versatile traveller’s attention, however, was quickly distracted from Zeynab by the fair-haired, taperfingered daughter of a Druse Sheik, then in prison at Beyrout for refusing to recognise the Turkish government, and for non-payment of the tribute. His property had been sequestrated, and all had abandoned him except the beautiful Saléma, who boarded with Madame Carlès, and went every day to see her father. M. de Nerval, whose imagination was excited by the romantic and unusual scenes he had lately passed through, fell in love with this Arab damsel, went to visit her father, who was an akkal, a sort of sage and saint; and after much conversation, and receiving a long account of Hakem, the founder of the Druse religion, he embarked for Acre to obtain from the Pasha the pardon of his future father-in-law. For he had made up his mind to marry Saléma.

The Levantines are unable to comprehend the squirrel-like restlessness of the Franks, remarks M. de Nerval, whilst pacing to and fro the deck of the English brig on which he had taken his passage, and occasionally stumbling over the legs of a Turk or Bedouin who lay upon his mattress in the shadow of the bulwarks, and who removed his pipe from his lips to curse the clumsiness of the Christian. The English missionary was also a passenger; but M. de Nerval barely tolerates the English, and fancied that the evangelical gentleman treated him coldly because he consorted with a second-class passenger, a talkative bagman from Marseilles, who had got a curious theory, exaggerated but not unfounded, concerning the very small number of pure Turks remaining in Turkey.

“I have just come from Constantinople,” he said: “one sees nothing there but Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Marseillese. All the Turks they can find they make into cadis, ulemas, pashas, or they send them to Europe to show them. All their children die; it is a race that is becoming extinguished. People talk of the Sultan’s armies—of what do they consist? Of Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Kurds; the sailors are Greeks; only the officers are of Turkish race. You take them out to fight; they all run away at the first cannon-shot, as has often been seen—unless the English are behind them with their bayonets, as in the Syrian affair.”

In Syrian waters, and with the shattered minarets of Acre looming in the distance, a Frenchman might be excused for showing a little irritability. M. de Nerval behaves very well upon the occasion, and spares the unfortunate English, doubtless thinking he is sufficiently hard upon them in other parts of his book, especially when he excludes them from the European family, as dwellers “upon an island apart;” a separation upon which, considering the very turbulent and divided state of that family, they have certainly of late years had much reason to congratulate themselves. Fresh from the semi-feudal magnificence of the Lebanon Emir’s castle, and dreaming of the proud battlements of the Templars’ famous city, the last rampart of the crusades, M. de Nerval gazed mournfully on the heaps of ruins revealed to him by the rising sun a few hours after his arrival in the port of Acre. It may console him to learn from Mr Neale, who was there last year, that the fortifications are being rapidly repaired, and that soon there will remain but few traces of the ravages of British shot and shell. But the French traveller was too engrossed by the main object of his visit to Acre to dwell long upon such dry matters as broken battlements. He could not but feel moved, however, when at daybreak the Marseillese awoke him and showed him the morning star shining just over the village of Nazareth, only eight leagues distant. He proposed to his new acquaintance to make an excursion thither, but the matter-of-fact bagman threw cold water upon the project. “It is a pity,” he said, “that the Virgin’s house is no longer there. Of course you know that angels transported it in a single night to Loretto, near Venice. Here they show its site—that is all. It is not worth while going so far to see a thing that is no longer there.” Whilst thus damping his companion’s enthusiasm, the prosaic child of Provence made himself very useful by his knowledge of Turkish habits. On learning that M. de Nerval had known the Pasha of Acre at Paris, and had a letter of recommendation to him, which he was about to present, he advised him to resume his European dress, as likely to procure him an earlier audience. In those latitudes, the bagman was as good as a court-guide. He had known the Pasha at Constantinople, where he went by the nickname of Guezluk, or the spectacle-wearer. And he begged M. de Nerval to tell him that he had for sale a musical clock, which played airs out of numerous Italian operas, and which had birds on the top of it, who sang and flapped their wings. This was exactly the thing, he said, to delight the Turks. Duly black-coated, but retaining his Turkish tarbusch to cover his shaven head, M. de Nerval presented himself at the summer kiosk then occupied by the Pasha. His European garb drew all eyes upon him; by refusing to take off his boots at the door, he further increased his importance; his letter was taken in to the Pasha, and he was at once admitted in preference to a crowd of persons who were waiting for that honour.

“I expected a European reception, but the Pasha confined himself to making me sit down near him on a divan which extended round part of the saloon. He affected to speak only Italian, although I had heard him speak French at Paris; and, having addressed to me the customary phrase: ‘Is your kef good?’ that is to say, do you find yourself well? he ordered the chibouque and coffee to be brought to me. Some commonplace remarks composed our conversation. Then the Pasha repeated, ‘Is your kef good?’ and another cup of coffee was brought. I had been walking the streets of Acre all the morning, and had crossed the plain without falling in with anything like an eating-house; I had even refused a piece of bread and a slice of Arles sausage offered me by the Marseillese, reckoning a little on Mussulman hospitality; but who shall depend upon the friendship of the great? Our conversation continued, without the Pasha’s offering me anything more substantial than tobacco smoke and sugarless coffee. For the third time he repeated, ‘Is your kef good?’ I rose to take leave. Just then noon struck upon a clock suspended over my head, and which forthwith began to play a tune; almost immediately a second clock struck, and began a different air; a third and a fourth set off in their turn. The discordant effect may be imagined. Accustomed as I was to Turkish eccentricities, I could not understand the assemblage of so many clocks in one room. The Pasha seemed enchanted with the noise, and proud to show a European his love of progress and civilisation. The commission given to me by the Marseillese occurred to me, but the negotiation appeared so much the more difficult that the four clocks were symmetrically placed, each on one of the four sides of the apartment. Where could a fifth be put? I said nothing about it. Neither did I deem it an opportune moment to broach the business of the captive Sheik, but kept this delicate matter for another visit, when the Pasha should perhaps receive me less coldly. Alleging business in the town, I took my leave. As I passed through the court, an officer came up to me, and said that the Pasha had ordered two cavass to accompany me whithersoever I went. I did not exaggerate to myself the value of this attention, which generally amounts to a heavy bakshish to be given to each of the said attendants.”

Once more in the town, M. de Nerval, feeling ravenous, asked his guard of honour where he could get breakfast. They stared, and said it was not yet the hour, but, as he insisted, they asked him for a Spanish dollar to purchase fowls and rice, which they proposed cooking in the nearest guard-house. This appeared to him both an expensive and a complicated manner of obtaining a meal, and he went to the French Consulate; but the Consul lived on the other side of the bay, on the skirts of Mount Carmel.

“Acre, during the summer months,” says Mr Neale, “is considered the most fatal residence for Europeans on the western coast of the Mediterranean. Its fevers are so pernicious that few survive an attack for a longer space than forty-eight hours. So trivial are the causes which give rise to this malignant disease, that the smallest deviation from a temperate regimen, or the slightest exposure to heat or cold, renders one liable to an immediate attack, and, as the doctor coolly told me, ensuite vous succombez.”

To avoid which unpleasant eventuality, the European residents have country houses. Little disposed to go as far as Mount Carmel for a breakfast, M. de Nerval went to the bazaar, and hunted up the Marseillese, whom he found in the act of selling to a Greek merchant an assortment of those old warming-pan watches, now out of fashion in Europe, but which the Turks greatly prefer to the modern flat ones. With them the value of a watch is estimated by its size. The Marseillese produced the never-failing sausage, upon which, and upon unleavened bread, the only sort obtainable, the hungry Parisian made an indifferent repast. They offered some sausage to the two cavass, who refused, from a religious scruple. “Poor devils!” said the bagman, contemptuously, “they think it is pork; they do not know that Arles sausage is made of mule’s flesh.” A fact which may also be rather novel to some of the English consumers of the monster sausages sold in Italian warehouses, into many of which not a morsel of pig enters. Rendered expansive by his meal, M. de Nerval confided to the Marseillese the story of his love for the Druse maiden, and the object of his visit to Acre. The dealer in clocks and watches, who, for common sense, was worth ten of his companion, evidently thought him a fool for his pains, and, with a view to discourage his folly, told him curious anecdotes of the religious practices of certain Druse sects, practices certainly well calculated to scandalise a European. The day wore on, and when the hour of dinner approached, M. de Nerval was informed by his attendants that he was expected at the Pasha’s table. This was unexpected by him, but a matter of course—so his bagman informed him—since the Pasha had given him an escort. When he reached the kiosk the levee had long been over. Passing through the clock-room, he found the Pasha smoking, seated upon the window-ledge of the apartment beyond. The Turk rose on his approach, held out his hand, and asked him how he was, in excellent French. M. de Nerval could not conceal his surprise. “You must excuse me,” said his host, “if I received you this morning en pasha. Those worthy people who were waiting for an audience would never have forgiven me had I been wanting in etiquette with a Frangi. At Constantinople, every one would understand it; but here we are in a country town.” Méhmet Pasha had studied at the artillery school at Metz, and spoke French exceedingly well. He was amiable, affable, and courteous. He and his guest dined tête-à-tête, at a table, and seated on chairs, in the European fashion. M. de Nerval, in his passion for Orientalism, would rather have squatted on a cushion upon the floor. After dinner, instead of the introduction of dancing-girls, or some other Eastern amusement, he was taken down stairs to a billiard-room, where the Pasha made him play till one in the morning.

“I let myself be beaten as much as I could, amidst the shouts of laughter of the Pasha, who was delighted at this return to the amusements of Metz. ‘A Frenchman—a Frenchman who lets himself be beaten!’ cried he. ‘I admit,’ said I, ‘that St Jean d’Acre is not favourable to our arms; but here you fight alone, and the former Pasha of Acre had the cannons of England.’ At last we separated. They conducted me into a very large apartment, lighted by a wax-candle, fixed in an enormous candlestick, and placed upon the ground in the centre of the room. This was a return to local customs. The slaves made me a bed with cushions upon the ground; upon which they spread sheets, sewn on one side to the blankets. I was moreover accommodated with a great nightcap of yellow quilted silk, with quarters like a melon.”

Greatly diverted was the good natured Pasha on being made acquainted with his guest’s matrimonial designs, and with the countless annoyances he had brought upon his head by the imprudent purchase of a yellow slave, whom he now scrupled to send away, to sell, or to abandon to her fate. To evade these scruples, the Pasha proposed a barter: he would give him a horse for Zeynab. Even this would not do. The fate of the Druse Sheik depended more upon the governor of Beyrout than upon Méhmet Pasha, who, however, interposed his good offices, and the saintly father of Saléma was released and allowed to return to his country. He was informed, at the same time, that he owed his liberty to M. de Nerval’s intercession with the Pasha of Acre. His manner of returning thanks struck his deliverer as strange. “If you wished to be useful,” he said, “you have done but what is every man’s duty; if you had an interested motive, why should I thank you?” This was grateful and encouraging. Nevertheless, M. de Nerval accompanied the old gentleman and his daughter to their abode, a village embowered in vines and mulberry trees, within a day’s journey of Damascus. He is kind enough to suppress the history of his courtship, merely mentioning that the amiable Saléma presented him with a red tulip, and planted in her father’s garden an acacia sapling, which was to have some mysterious connection with their loves. The period of their marriage was fixed, and not very remote, when the future bridegroom was attacked by one of those Syrian fevers which, if they do not carry off the patient in less time, often last for months and even for years. In hopes of regaining his health, he went to Beyrout, which enjoys the reputation of one of the least feverish places in Syria, without on that account, according to Mr Neale, having much to boast of in the way of salubrity. It did not restore M. de Nerval, who with difficulty mustered sufficient strength to proceed, by an Austrian packet, to Smyrna and Constantinople. There he gradually recovered his health. Profiting by the opportunities for cool reflection afforded by a long convalescence, he weighed the advantages and disadvantages of his projected marriage, and finally wrote to the Sheik to declare off. A narrow escape, cheaply purchased at the price of a fever.

Whilst tracing the vagaries of this fantastical Frenchman, we have given less than his share of space to Mr Neale, whose experience of Syria is more recent, and his acquaintance with the country more general and complete. Travel in Syria is not without its perils and inconveniences, even for Englishmen, to whom the events of 1840 have secured, especially along the sea-board, a peculiar degree of civility and consideration.

“The general opinion of an English traveller,” says Mr Neale, referring particularly to the lower classes, “is, that he is either a lunatic or a magician;—a lunatic, if on closely watching his movements, they discover that he pays little attention to anything around him;—a confirmed lunatic, if he goes out sketching, and spends his time in spoiling good paper with scratches and hieroglyphics;—and a magician, when inquisitive about ruins, and given to picking up stones and shells, gathering sticks and leaves of bushes, or buying up old bits of copper, iron, and silver. In these cases he is supposed, by aid of his magical powers, to convert stones and shells into diamonds of immense price; and the leaves and sticks are charms, by looking at which he can bestow comforts upon his friends, and snakes and pestilence upon his luckless enemies. If a traveller pick up a stone, and examine it carefully, he will be sure to have at his heels a host of malapert little boys deriding him, though keeping at a very respectful distance, in deference to his magical powers. Should he, indeed, turn round suddenly, and pursue them a few steps, they fly in an agony of fear, the very veins in their naked little legs almost bursting; and they never stop to look back till they have got well amongst the crowd again, where, panting for breath, they recount to their auditors the dreadful look that devil of a Frank gave them, making fire come out of his eyes, and adders out of his mouth.”

There are places in Syria where Europeans are subject to far more serious annoyances than these. At Latachia, for instance, although it is a place of considerable intercourse with Europe, in the way both of trade and travellers, the Turkish inhabitants are furious fanatics, and have several times assembled in mobs, and attacked and maltreated European and native Christians, compelling them to seek safety in flight. Not more than three years ago, the Roman Catholic inhabitants were besieged within the walls of the Latin monastery, whilst hearing mass in its chapel, by a mob of bigoted Turks, who were escorting a renegade Christian to the mosque. At this fellow’s instigation a plan was formed to storm the convent, and put to death all its inmates. The gates were not strong enough long to resist the desperate assault made upon them; so the congregation, by means of a ladder, got through a window of the adjacent French Consulate, and through a garden to the sea-side, where they took boat for the little island of Ruad, the usual refuge of the Latachia Christians when thus molested. Satisfaction was demanded and obtained by a French man-of-war, and the ringleaders of the riot were bastinadoed and sent into exile, which checked for a while the violence of the Turks; but they are still very insolent to Christians, and Mr Neale declares he should never feel altogether secure at Latachia, “so long as many of the Ayans and Effendis are permitted to carry on their intrigues and machinations with impunity.” But for this drawback, Latachia would be one of the most desirable residences in Syria. “The environs are extremely beautiful, and abound with delicious apricot and peach trees. Mulberry plantations and vineyards are also very plentiful; and the melon and watermelon here attain great perfection. The dark-leaved pomegranate, with its deep vermilion blossoms, intertwines with its fairer neighbour, the orange-tree, and behind them rises the stately poplar, over which peeps the more stately minaret, making altogether a charming picture.” Minarets abound. This little town, of about five thousand inhabitants, “contains upwards of a dozen mosques, each endeavouring to surpass the other in the beauty of its architecture and the quaint elegance of its cupolas and minarets. The other public buildings are also fine structures, and the gardens teem with rich-scented flowers and shrubs.” Water is very scarce, and to get it pure the Latachians are compelled to send daily to a distance of six miles. The climate is excellent, and fever, so general in Syria, would there scarcely be known, but for the uncleanly ways of the people. The streets are the receptacle for skins of fruit, decayed vegetables, dead cats, rats, and dogs. The atmosphere thus generated may be imagined. In vain has the quarantine doctor endeavoured to work a reform by urgent representations to the governor of the town. “Peki,” (very good,) says that dignitary, touching the side of his turban with his hand; but that is the whole extent of his co-operation. The doctor is approved of, his wishes are acceded to, but the streets remain foul. Turkish activity seldom gets beyond peki. Once, however, some men really were set to play the scavenger. They swept all the offal into heaps at the street-crossings; and having thus stirred up the filth, and concentrated the nuisance, considered their duty done, and retired, proud of their exertions.

The tobacco commonly known in Europe as Latachia, is shipped at that port, but grown at or around the pretty little town of Gibili, a short distance to the south. The Gibili tobacco, and the Aboo Reah, or father of essences, are renowned all over the East, and esteemed the finest and most aromatic tobaccoes in the world. The fields in which they are grown are manured with goats’ dung, and more or less watered according to the strength of tobacco required. The less the water, the stronger the flavour of the weed. When gathered, the leaves are exposed for three nights to the dew, then strung together, hung up to dry, packed in bales and sent in feluccas to Latachia, where they are stored in dry warehouses until exported. The port of Latachia, which retains the town’s ancient name of Laodicea, was once of great capacity, and could contain, it is said, six hundred vessels; but time and earthquakes, warfare and neglect, have played havoc with it. Rocks and ruins have rolled into the basin; and although its surface is still spacious, its depths are treacherous; and it is not deemed safe and convenient for more than thirty vessels, averaging two hundred and fifty to three hundred tons each. The commercial importance of the town would be likely to increase considerably, were the road from Aleppo less steep and dangerous for camels, whose drivers consequently demand exorbitant rates for the carriage of goods to Latachia, and take them on much easier terms to the more northerly port of Scanderoon or Alexandretta, through which passes the whole commerce of northern Syria. Independently of the better road, Scanderoon is nearer than Latachia to Aleppo, and is its natural port; otherwise its abominable climate would alone suffice to make commercial residents prefer its rival.

“The first thing that strikes a stranger on arriving at Alexandretta is the complexion of the inhabitants, natives as well as Europeans. They have a strange unearthly yellow tinge, with deep sunken eyes and a shrivelled frame, facts which speak more than volumes for the pernicious effects of marsh miasma. Fever and ague have set their seal on every face; and with so indelible a mark, that a Scanderoon is easily distinguished in any other city, and immediately pointed out.”

The wretched aspect of these “churchyard deserters,” as an English merchant captain called them, is traceable to the most brutal Turkish folly and obstinacy. Alexandretta is encircled for miles with pestilential marshes. On approaching the port from Aleppo, an ancient Roman road, infamously out of repair, brought Mr Neale and his guide to “a very rickety old bridge, spanning a canal, filled from a small but restless spring, whose waters, (which never cease trickling,) finding no adequate outlet, have created those baneful marshes which surround the town, extending over nearly the whole plain. The canal was originally cut by Ibrahim Pasha, at the instigation of an intelligent Italian, who acted as consul for several European states, Mr Martinelli, and it still retains his name.” So long as the Egyptian viceroy was paramount in Syria, this canal was kept in good order, and duly cleansed of mud and weeds by an English machine. Then came the evacuation of Syria. Before marching away, the Egyptian soldiery destroyed the machine. The canal, which had already in great measure drained the marshes, and had proved a blessing to the feverridden population, was neglected by the Turks, is now choked up, and will soon altogether disappear. The merchants of Aleppo and the European consuls have done all in their power to get the Turkish government to resume the work of drainage. “Some soi-disant engineers were sent to form an estimate of what the cost would be: these employés, the bane of Turkey as far as useful works are concerned, estimated what ought to be their gains, and the sum frightened the authorities, who, as they always do upon like occasions, religiously concealed the estimate under the divan cushions, and there the matter rested.” In 1844, the European residents in Scanderoon got up a subscription amongst themselves, and actually began to drain. What did the Turkish authorities? Threatened the labourers with the bastinado, which effectually stopped the good work. The motive assigned was that “the Franks, when the work was completed, would probably lay claim to the recovered land!” Thus are matters managed in Syria, and thus are replenished the graveyards of Scanderoon. The self-same Turks, whose parsimony and paltry jealousy prohibit the sanitary measure so greatly needed, are martyrs to fever and ague, whilst the poor peasants, thanks to unwholesome diet, damp lodgings, and the ridiculously long and rigid fasts prescribed by the Greek church, are subject, in addition to those two maladies, to dropsy and various other diseases. The unwillingness of the local authorities to aid or even to sanction any amelioration of the wretched state of Scanderoon, arises partly from the blundering arrangement by which that port and Aleppo are in different Pashaliks. As the custom-dues are paid at Aleppo, the Pasha of Adana, under whose sway is Scanderoon, takes little interest in the welfare of a port from which he derives no revenue, great though its trade is. “The whole male population of Alexandretta are occupied in landing, weighing, and rolling to the warehouses the cargoes of Manchester bales brought by the different vessels. It is impossible to imagine a scene more bustling and discordant.” Clamorous muleteers and camel-drivers load and unload their beasts, custom-house officers and factors continually dispute, masters of merchantmen are anxious to land their goods, or eager to settle and depart; “cadaverous Italian skippers, who have been three months ‘on the berth’ for Leghorn, and have as yet about as many bales of wool on board, make frantic inquiries about their Syrian consignee’s intentions, and being pacified with stout promises, return on board, and catch fish for the crew till dinner-time.” All are busy, and all foreigners long to get away from a place where, if they stop but a day too long, they may remain for ever, tenants of a grave in its marshy and feverish soil. The loading of the camels is an especially ticklish matter, and leads to much wrath amongst the drivers. “Two bales must be found of equal weight; these are not always to be secured, and the struggle that ensues amongst the cameliers for such a couple defies description.” The Turkoman camel, a much finer animal than the Syrian, will carry, equally poised, two bales weighing together half a ton. “I have seen at times as many as one thousand camels leave Alexandretta for Aleppo in one day, bearing high aloft upon their backs two thousand Manchester iron-bound bales of twist and manufactures.” A sight to rejoice the heart of Cobden, and to reconcile even that peace-loving agitator to the bombardments and skirmishings by which so important a débouché was secured for the produce of the city of his affections. It might interest him to calculate at what rate per quarter, when a loaf of bread costs twopence at Alexandretta, (Neale’s Syria, ii. 212,) Syrian wheat might be delivered in Liverpool by way of returns for the camel-borne Manchester cottons. If it is easy to die at Scanderoon, it is certainly cheap to live there. Mutton costs twopence the pound, fresh butter less than a penny, and other articles of food are at proportionably low prices. So says Mr F. A. Neale, who must be held excellent authority, since he was long resident at Scanderoon, where he was never entirely free from ague, but passed his time swallowing quinine, and thought himself the happiest of mortals when he enjoyed three weeks of uninterrupted health.

No book of the class of Mr Neale’s ought to be issued to the public unaccompanied by a map. A small one would suffice, and it need comprise little more than the outline of the coast, the definition of boundaries, the course of large rivers and mountain ranges, and those towns and villages referred to in the text. Such means of reference and elucidation add greatly to the interest and value of a narrative of travel and description of a country. Only a minority of readers are likely to have an atlas always at hand, or to possess such great familiarity with geographical details as may render one unnecessary. Authors and publishers of books of travels are prone to expend upon lithographed landscapes and other embellishments—things glanced at for a moment, and regarded no more—money which might be laid out to the greater advantage of their readers and of themselves in the engraving of maps. We cannot make an exception to this general rule, even in favour of the two pretty sketches of Gaza and Nargheslik, which face the title-pages of Mr Neale’s agreeable volumes.

DAY-DREAMS OF AN EXILE.

India, 1851.

A VOICE FROM THE DIGGINGS. [4]

The scapegrace Michael Lambourne, fresh from the Spanish Main, made the mouths of his uncle’s guests to water by stories of lands where the precious metals grew, and might be had for the gathering; where the very pantiles were of purest gold, and the paving-stones of virgin silver. The smug mercer of Abingdon, greedily swallowing these traveller’s tales, thought contemptuously of his moderate but certain gains, and dreamed of rich argosies and of sudden wealth, amassed at will upon a gold-encumbered shore. Many are the changes since Queen Elizabeth’s day, but human nature is ever the same. Instead of the exaggerated reports of roving adventurers, a thousand newspapers trumpet authentic tidings of golden discoveries. The mine is on the farthest shore of a far distant continent; yet, whilst the marvel is still young, and the first ring of the metal still echoes in our ears, we obtain ocular confirmation of the scarcely credible intelligence. The pioneers of enterprise—those who, by accident or activity, were first upon the spot—come straggling, wealthladen, from the glittering strand. Scarcely had the first shovelful of golden sand been thrown up from the bed of the mill-stream at Coloma, when these men, favoured by chance, and well suited to the work, were toiling, delving, washing. Now they are in our streets—rich, comparatively; for less than twelve months ago they were penniless. And see, in the refiners’ windows are heaps of the precious dust, and lumps of the quartz-mingled metal. Forgetting past hardships in the excitement of success, the gold-seekers—their first-fruits safely bestowed—plan a return to El Dorado, and fire the imaginations of eager listeners by glowing accounts of a certain fortune to be made at small pains. No wonder if many snap at the bait—if husbandmen quit their plough, traders their till, publicans their taproom, and if California suddenly becomes a word of daily occurrence upon English shipping-lists. Three thousand miles nearer to the golden vein dwells the most restless, ambitious, speculative, and aggressive of civilised nations; and soon there can be no doubt that to it will fall the lion’s share of the newly-found treasure. Where hundreds sail from Europe, thousands quit the States, for California bound. By land and by sea, across the Isthmus and up the coast, or by the long and dangerous route over the Rocky Mountains, armies of energetic Yankees swarm to the placeres. Buoyant and confident, they quit their homes—many to leave their bones in the wide prairies and hungry solitudes of the Far West, others to perish of Californian fever and ague, a few, and but a few, to realise the wealth they so sanguinely anticipate.

Nearly two years ago^[5] we noticed the proceedings of a member of the adventurous mob of gold-seekers. Mr Theodore Johnson, of New York, was pretty early in the field; but even in the spring of 1849 the cream had been taken off, and he returned home disheartened, disgusted, and poorer than when he started. Since then, California has filled countless newspaper columns and scores of books in many languages. The latest of these, proceeding from an English pen, has opportunely appeared at the very moment that, from the far south, intelligence has reached us of the discovery of another gold region. Intending gold-seekers, whether in California or Australia, will find much to interest and instruct them in Mr Shaw’s eventful record.

The great majority of the emigrants to California, whether from Europe or from other parts of the globe, has been hitherto composed of needy and reckless adventurers. We trace one proof of this in the terrific amount of crime and immorality of which the new American State has been the constant scene, up to the date of the most recent advices. Mr Shaw belongs to the respectable but exceedingly limited class who contrived to pass through the ordeal with clean hands and a good conscience, enduring much suffering, but preserving an unstained reputation. As a boy, he followed the sea, and sailed for India as a midshipman in 1845, but left the service three years later, and emigrated to Adelaide. Finding no suitable occupation there, he was about to return to England, when news reached South Australia of the golden harvest then reaping in California. He was still a lad—about nineteen, as we infer from his narrative; and in the distant colony where he found himself, he had friends to advise, but none to control him. Of a sanguine spirit, and lured by the hope of fortune, he disregarded remonstrances, dangers, and uncertainties, and embarked as a steerage passenger by the clipper-built ship Mazeppa, manned by a Malay crew, and chartered for San Francisco. This was the first vessel that left South Australia for the gold regions. She took one-and-twenty passengers—five in the cabin at sixty pounds, sixteen in the steerage, who paid but twenty, and included bushmen and blacksmiths, a carpenter and a shoemaker, and some Germans.

“The steerage measured only sixteen feet square by four feet ten inches high—close packing for sixteen passengers. Our scale of provisions, however, was exceedingly liberal—far superior to any given out of English ports—and no ship-regulations were imposed upon us: each one was left to his own discretion, and the greatest good feeling and harmony prevailed on board. In the steerage we were very social; and though, being for the first time in my life thrown amongst such a rough lot, I felt somewhat embarrassed, yet, being of a flexible disposition, I soon got accustomed to my companions, and found them a very good set of fellows.”

On entering the tropics, things became rather less pleasant in the narrow crib, owing to cockroaches and other vermin, to the effluvia from the Malays, and to the visits of rats, who bit the passengers in their sleep, carrying their audacity so far as to browse upon an emigrant’s eyebrows. So the occupants of the steerage were driven to sleep upon deck. A narrow escape from a waterspout was the only incident worth noticing between the Mazeppa’s departure from Adelaide and arrival at San Diego in Lower California, where she cast anchor for a few days, and took on board more passengers—

“Yankee backwoodsmen, some of whom had travelled over the Rocky Mountains, others through Central America. One of those who had come the latter route was half crazy from drink and dissipation; he had not shaved or washed for two months, and had altogether a most repulsive appearance. The other overlanders looked equally miserable; their cadaverous features bearing marks of recent suffering; their long beard and hair clotted into knots, and their clothes and boots tattered and wayworn. The only articles they possessed were blankets, wallets, and firearms.”

The exhausting fatigues of a journey by land across the American continent are manifestly a bad prelude to labour in the diggings. Neither weariness, poverty, nor sickness could abate the indomitable national vanity of these Americans. Some of them had agreed only for a deck passage, but when the weather grew wet and squally, the inmates of the steerage were too compassionate to refuse them shelter. They requited the kindness by raising violent political discussions, and continually asserting the immeasurable inferiority of the Britishers to the free and enlightened citizens of the States. Were it only for the release from such ill-conditioned society, Mr Shaw might well rejoice when, at the beginning of September 1849, the Mazeppa dropped her anchor in the bay of San Francisco. Scarcely had she done so, when the anomalies entailed by the strange state of things in the gold regions became apparent to her passengers. The first boat that boarded her was rowed by the doctor and mate of a Sydney vessel, who were plying for hire as watermen, their usual occupations, we are left to infer, being gone in consequence of the desertion of the Sydneyman’s crew. This example, then common enough, was quickly followed by the Malays of the Mazeppa. In the course of the very first night a party of them stole the gig, and ran from the ship. The captain, as yet a novice in Californian ways, went ashore next morning, pulled by four of his men, “saying that he should pay his respects to the authorities, and bring back the deserters in irons.” Authorities, indeed, at San Francisco, and in 1849, when, even in 1851, the only real authority is exercised by a revolver-bearing rabble! The captain returned on board in a waterman’s boat, and in a towering passion, minus his four oarsmen, who had followed their comrades. The next night the ship’s boats were hauled on board, but the rest of the crew attempted to float ashore on strong planks. Some were drowned, the remainder reached the land, and the Mazeppa was left to the guardianship of captain, mate, and supercargo.

The reports of visitors from the shore had already somewhat damped the ardour of the treasure-seekers from Adelaide, when they landed at Miller’s Point. Above high-water mark the beach was strewed with quantities of baggage and merchandise, and hard by stood some three hundred fellows, unshaven and disreputable-looking, with knives in their belts, awaiting employment. It was Sunday; but nothing is sacred in California. No Sabbath stillness prevailed amidst the canvass booths and wooden frame-houses of the infant city of San Francisco. Hammers sounded on all sides, and work of every description actively went on.

“Skirting the beach was a vast collection of tents, called the ‘Happy Valley,’ since more truly designated the ‘Sickly Valley,’ where filth of all kinds and stagnant pools beset one at every stride. In these tents congregated the refuse of all nations, crowded together—eight people occupying what was only space for two. Blankets, firearms, and cooking utensils were the only worldly property they possessed. Scenes of depravity, sickness, and wretchedness shocked the moral sense as much as filth and effluvia did the nerves; and such was the state of personal insecurity, that few ‘citizens’ slept without firearms at hand.”

Of course, many fatal broils and accidents arose from the universal practice of carrying arms; but there, where law and justice were alike disregarded, a loaded revolver was the only security from personal outrage and oppression. The extraordinary activity of all, and the immense amount of business transacted, were what chiefly struck Mr Shaw during his first day’s ramble in San Francisco.

“Looking at the rude signboards inscribed in various languages, glancing at the chaos of articles exposed for sale, and listening to the various dialects spoken, the city seemed a complete Babel. Gold was evidently the mainspring of all this activity. Tables, piled with gold, were seen under tents, whence issued melodious strains of music; and the most exaggerated statements were current respecting the auriferous regions. But amid scenes of profusion and extravagance, no sign of order or comfort was perceptible, nor did any one appear happy: wan, anxious countenances, and restless, eager eyes, met you on every side. The aspect of personal neglect and discomfort, rags and squalor, combined with uneasiness, avidity, and recklessness of manner—an all-absorbing selfishness, as if each man were striving against his fellow-man—were characteristics of the gold-fever, at once repulsive and pitiable; and, notwithstanding the gold I saw on every side, a feeling of despondency crept insensibly over me.”

An allowance made to Mr Shaw by his friends, and payable in Australia, had been lost by his departure from that colony. In the uncertainty of his movements, he had not written for remittances; and here he was, in California, cast entirely on his own resources. He could not afford to despond, unless he also made up his mind to perish. He had a hard battle to fight; and although little more than a boy, he fought it like a man—with temper, pluck, and judgment. His first move was to get rid of superfluous baggage. Superfluity in California means bare necessaries anywhere else. Warehouse room was scarce and dear, and change of raiment little in vogue. As for luxuries—varnished boots, satin waistcoats, and the like—they strewed the beach. Mr Shaw realised seventy dollars by the sale of part of his kit. This done, one of his shipmates asked his assistance to retail a few barrels of spirits. A tent being unobtainable, they drove posts into the ground, nailed quilts over them, and opened their grog-store. At night his partner, who had been drinking overmuch, went to sleep with his pipe in his mouth, and set fire to the flimsy edifice. Mr Shaw extinguished the flames, and dissolved the partnership in disgust. Thenceforward, until he started for the diggings, he often passed his nights in lodging-houses. Of these there were too few for the numerous lodgers, and sheds, stables, and skittle-alleys were put in requisition. Nasty dens the very best of them were.

“The one I sometimes resorted to was about sixty feet long by twenty in width; it had no windows, and the walls, roof, and floor were formed of planks, through the seams of which the rain dripped. Along the sides were two rows of ‘bunks,’ or wooden shelves, and at the end was some boarding, serving as a bar for liquors: here the proprietor slept. From about ten till twelve at night, men flocked in with their blankets round them, for no mattress or bedding was furnished by this establishment; and a dollar being paid, your sleeping-place was pointed out to you.”

Out of consideration for the more squeamish of our readers, we abstain from transcribing Mr Shaw’s vivid account of this abominable caravanserai. On a wet night, the bunks and the floor would be crowded with lodgers of all nations—Yankees, Europeans, Chinese, South Americans—all sleeping in their clothes and boots, many smoking and chewing tobacco, and indulging in the Transatlantic practice which these two enjoyments provoke. The atmosphere was doubtless unfavourable to tranquil repose, for restless sleepers abounded, and kicks in the ribs, or on the head, were no uncommon occurrences. Sometimes, Mr Shaw relates, he awoke with the toe of a boot in his mouth; at others he was so oppressed with heat, that he was glad to rush out into the rain, to inhale fresh air at any price. When the night was fine, he much preferred a bivouac to a dollar’s worth of plank in such company, and under such unpleasant circumstances. If he was disgusted at the sleeping accommodation, he was not much better pleased at meal-times. Plenty of good eating was there in San Francisco—for those who could pay the price. Food was cheaper than it had been a few months previously; but still ten dollars were easily spent by one person, if very hungry or rather dainty, at a Californian eating-house. The table d’hôtes were more economical, varying from one to three dollars a head. Here less fault was to be found with the fare than with the manners of the guests.

“It is not uncommon to see your neighbour coolly abstract a quid from his jaw, placing it for the time being in his waistcoat pocket or hat, or sometimes beside his plate even: then commences, on all sides, a fierce attack on the eatables, and the contents of the dishes rapidly disappear. Lucky is the man who has a quick eye and a long arm; for every one helps himself indiscriminately, and attention is seldom paid to any request. The nature of the fixing (as a viand is called) is perfectly immaterial; whichever is nearest commonly has the preference; and as they generally confine themselves to one dish, it is difficult to get that from their grasp. Molasses is a favourite fixing, and eaten with almost everything.”

Ten minutes sufficed for the Americans to gorge themselves. If slower feeders were behindhand, the worse for them, for it was customary for all to rise together, and the table was cleared and replenished for a second gang of gormandisers. The “free and enlightened,” who had eaten their dinner with their knives, then picked their teeth with their forks, resumed their quids, lit cigars or pipes, and rambled off to liquor and gamble.

“In almost every part of San Francisco there are gaming-houses, chiefly spacious ‘frame-houses,’ imported from the States. The interior is hung with coloured calico, and paintings and mirrors decorate the walls. There is usually a bar at the farther end. It is very exciting to enter these Pandemoniums: loud music resounds, amidst which is heard the chinking of money; and the place is redolent of the fumes of wines, spirits, and tobacco. From the twanging of guitars, and scraping of violins, to the clashing of cymbals and banging of drums, musical sounds of all kinds attract the ear of the passer-by. In the Aguila d’Oro, a band of Ethiopian serenaders beat their banjos, rattled their bones, and shouted their melodies. In some gaming-houses, fascinating belles, theatrically dressed, take their stand at the roulettetables, purposely to allure men to play; and, there being a scarcity of the fair sex in this country, these syrens too often prove irresistible.”

In convenient and appropriate proximity to some of the principal hells was the “suicide shop,” a hardware stall, kept by a “Down-Easter,” who sold pistols, bowie-knives, and other weapons. Self-murder was no uncommon occurrence. The desperate character of a large proportion of the crowd that continually thronged the gaming-houses rendered precautions necessary for the safety of the bank of doubloons and gold eagles heaped in the centre of the tables. “In some rooms loaded revolvers garnish the table on each side of the banker; he generally, however, secretes a small one in his breast. On the slightest disturbance, his rigid countenance becomes agitated, and without inquiring into the cause of tumult, the ring of a pistol-ball commonly suppresses the confusion.” In California everything is managed by the trigger.

Mr Shaw cast in his lot with the second mate of the Mazeppa, whom he designates as Mac. Having provisioned themselves with biscuit, ham, and brandy, they embarked on board a small cutter, and sailed up the San Joachim to the new town of Stockton. Their suite consisted of two Chinese (Celestials they are called in California) and a Malay boy. Mac, who spoke Malay, had great influence over all three. Stockton, whatever it may since have become, was then a very primitive-looking place, with few wooden buildings, the stores and taverns being chiefly of canvass nailed on frames, whilst quantities of merchandise lay exposed to the weather. There was great bustle and activity: the gambling was even more extravagant than at San Francisco, and everything was awfully dear—Mac having to pay a dollar for a shave. Mr Shaw arrived just in time to witness two flagrant examples of Californian justice. An emancipated convict, from Van Diemen’s Land, had stolen some trifles from a tent. The usual punishment for such petty offences was the loss of an ear. He was condemned to death and executed within twelve hours of the commission of the theft. The prejudice is strong against emigrants from Australia, who are all set down as convicts. A young man of respectable family, from the States, had shot a German dead with a revolver, for having made some severe remarks on America. An American jury acquitted him of guilt, influenced partly by the feeling address of his counsel, who represented him as “a martyr, who endangered his life in defending the reputation of the republic,” and partly by fear of a lawless mob assembled round the hulk of a superannuated brig, in which this curious and impartial tribunal held its sittings. Stockton was evidently an undesirable abode for Britishers, who might be pistoled without redress, or hung for a petty larceny. Shouldering their “possibles,” Mr Shaw and Mac hastened to quit, with a party of twenty persons bound for the diggings.

“The company was composed mostly of Americans of different grades, two Chilians, a Frenchman, two Germans, and two Cornish miners. Our followers, the two Chinese and the Malay boy, stuck pertinaciously to us: one of them, the cook, we persuaded to return, which he very reluctantly did; the other two persisting in following us, we consented, thinking they might be useful. Mahomet, the Malay boy, carried, strapped to his back, a brass bowl for gold-washing—a utensil somewhat similar to the barber’s basin that Don Quixote mistook for Mambrino’s helmet, an appellation which it consequently bore.”

Five mules, loaded with provisions for the storekeepers at some remote diggings, accompanied the party, in charge of two guides. The first day’s march began late, and lasted but four hours. At seven in the evening they halted hard by a band of fifty Americans, who had just arrived at Stockton by the overland route. These emaciated, wayworn men were the remnant of a party of settlers from the backwoods of Illinois. A glance at the map of North America gives the best idea of the immense length of their pilgrimage to Mammon’s new shrine. “The difficulties they had encountered were indescribable—ascending and descending mountains, and crossing rivers, dogged by Indians and wild beasts. Many had died on the way; and the latter part of the track, they said, resembled the route of a retreating army: the road was strewed with abandoned goods and broken-down waggons; funereal mounds were raised by the wayside; whilst carcasses of bullocks and skeletons of men bleached in the sun.”

The next day the start was at sunrise, and until ten o’clock the road lay through woodlands. Then the party entered the plain. As far as they could see were sandhills, without a trace of vegetation; the ground, parched and fissured by the sun, glowed beneath their feet; gigantic columns of dust stalked majestically over the monotonous level. Wearily the travellers proceeded, sinking, at every step, ankle-deep in sand, their eyes inflamed and irritated by the glare and dust, with the thermometer at 120°. A scorching wind closed their pores, and excited intense and unquenchable thirst.

“Most of the party had water-kegs and bottles, which, as joint property, they carried alternately; the muleteers had skins of water for themselves and animals. Mac and I luckily had each an India-rubber bag, which contained a gallon of water, sparing us much suffering and no little peril: we drank from them very moderately, however, being uncertain when they would be again replenished.”

This abstinence was most judicious. That day they came to no water. They were promised some for the next morning, but on reaching the water-hole it was found dry. Digging was in vain; not a drop was obtainable. Terrible now was the situation of those who, relying on a supply in the morning, had expended their store during the night. “I thought of the parable of the foolish virgins, as I looked on the flushed faces and glazing eyes of the unfortunates.” But “Forward” was the word, and every man for himself. If any compassionate hearts there were amongst those who had husbanded the precious element, they had to repress their impulses, for generosity would have been suicidal; and resolution was necessary not to swallow at one eager gulp the small remaining supply. Even with occasional moistening of the lips and throat, “my vitals seemed on fire,” says Mr Shaw. Those whose improvidence had forestalled that alleviation soon began to lag behind.

“By degrees they divested themselves of their burdens and their clothes, which they left strewed on the plain. Two of them actually licked the bodies of the mules, for the sake of the animal exudations, to relieve their thirst; but a thick coating of dust prevented their deriving any beneficial effects. In vain they beseeched us to halt; our lives were at stake. One man, in his desperation, seized hold of the water-skin hanging to the mule. ‘Avast there, stranger!’ cried the muleteer, and a loaded pistol intimidated the sufferer.”

Some had recourse to brandy, which made them almost delirious. At last, in the afternoon, four remained behind; keeping together, as their last slender chance of safety from wolves and Indians. It seemed barbarous to leave them, but what could be done? The life of all depended on their speed. The Stanislaus river was the nearest water, and when they halted, at nightfall, it still was twenty miles distant. That evening, at supper, the majority finished their water, and the muleteer hinted to the fortunate minority the possibility of theirs being forcibly taken from them. Too fatigued to keep watch, they slept together in a group, rolled in their blankets, with pistol in hand and the water-bags tied to them. Their rest was broken by the howling of wolves, and still more by the imploring cries and angry exclamations of the waterless. Before daybreak some of the party were afoot, striding forward at a desperate pace. On reaching the river, “the mules were disencumbered, and, throwing down our burthens, we ran to the banks, and, without doffing our clothes, eagerly rushed into the cooling stream, mules and men indiscriminately, up to the neck.” One can imagine the luxury of such a bath, after such a journey. The river was wide but shallow, the water clear as crystal and full of salmon, the bank fringed with trees. Their bodies cooled, and their clothes washed in the current, the next impulse of the party, it might have been thought, would be to retrace their steps, with good store of water, in search of the companions they had left behind. With Arabs or Indians the expectation might be well founded, but not with gold-hunters. All the worse for stragglers if they could not keep up. Time was precious; the diggings were ahead. Forward! to gather gold!

That evening the camp was at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, whose summits rose, snow-crowned, before the wanderers. Wood and water were plentiful; a blazing fire cheered the bivouac; the mules, luxuriating in abundant herbage, recovered from the exhaustion of the previous day. On the morrow a narrow river was crossed, and the steep ascent of the mountains began. The scenery grew wild and picturesque, and there was evidence of some great convulsion of nature having occurred there. The travellers passed cataracts, ravines, and water-courses, pyramids of rocks piled on each other, and chasms of unfathomable depth. At the extremity of a beautiful valley they came to a singular tumulus, which it was proposed to open, the Germans of the party being particularly desirous of its scientific investigation; but the guides scoffed at archæology. “You will have digging enough,” said they, “when you get to the placer, without rummaging in old tombs.” So the progress was uninterrupted; and, before noon upon the following day, the promised land, its golden river and clusters of tents, were in sight.

“The ‘digging’ was in a deep valley, having an abrupt mountain acclivity eight hundred feet high on one side, and on the other a plain bounded by mountains. On the evening of our arrival we walked along the bank of the river for two miles; on each side were diggers, working at distances apart, or congregated together, according to the richness of deposit. About twenty feet is the space generally allowed to a washingmachine. The majority of diggers excavated close to the bank; others partially diverted the river’s course to get at its bed, which was considered the richest soil. At a bend of the river a company of eighty were digging a fresh channel to turn its course; on the sides of the mountain, in ‘gulches’ formed by torrents and water-courses, men were likewise at work.”

After taking a survey of the diggings—“prospecting” as it is called in miner’s phrase—Mr Shaw and his comrade Mac fixed upon a likely spot to commence operations. With the assistance of the Chinese, who was a carpenter by trade, they quickly constructed a bush hut, and slept in it the first night of their arrival. The settlement consisted of numerous tents, accommodating from six to twelve men each, and of a few larger ones, serving as stores. At one of the latter, on the following morning, the partners opened an account for provisions and implements. Prices were exorbitant. A frying-pan, a saucepan, and two tin mugs, cost twelve dollars—L.2, 8s. Four-and-thirty pounds weight of coarse provisions (biscuit, salt-junk, &c.) cost fifty dollars! In short, twenty-two pounds sterling were expended for the merest necessaries before they could begin work, which they did in the following manner:—

“Commencing within a few feet of the water’s edge, I handled a pick and spade, shovelling out the earth to Mac, whose shoulders were best able to carry a burden; he delivered the soil to the Celestial, who stood in the water shaking to and fro the rocker; he then handed the auriferous sediment to the inspection of the sharp-eyed Malay boy, who washed it in Mambrino’s helmet till nothing but pure gold dust remained. For the first few days the arduous labour very sensibly affected our limbs; but when we became more accustomed to our tools it wore off. Unremitting labour from sunrise to sunset was necessary, our very existence depending on the day’s produce. Indeed, but for the excitement, and the hope of great gain, gold digging might be pronounced the severest and most monotonous of all labour. We changed our digging occasionally, but we generally obtained sufficient gold dust to procure us the necessaries of life. Twenty-five dollars’ worth was the most we ever secured in a day, and that only on one occasion: from fifteen to eighteen dollars seemed to be the usual average of daily findings, not only with us, but with most others; and our station seemed to be considered by old hands as prolific as any other.”

This is surely a most suggestive quotation. Here are three able-bodied men and a boy toiling, from daybreak till dusk, as hard as any journeyman stone-mason or railway navigator, to earn—what? a bare subsistence. For the privilege of doing this they had performed an immense journey, undergone cruel hardships and sufferings, and risked themselves in a climate which, for part of the year at least, is most unwholesome and pernicious. No matter that the nominal amount of their gains was ten times as much as they could have obtained in Europe, by digging or other unskilled labour; in a region where junk and biscuit averaged a dollar and a half a pound, this was of little advantage. “We generally obtained sufficient gold dust to procure us the necessaries of life.” Without care for the morrow, the Celestial and the Malay might have been sure of that much by sticking to their berths as carpenter and boy on board the Mazeppa. Was it for no better than this that Mac, the second mate, had abandoned his ship, to the astonishment and disgust of the skipper, when the cargo was but half discharged? As yet, however, there were no signs of regret for the rash step taken. “Excitement and hope of great gain” kept up the hearts of the gold-diggers. In defiance of experience, they persisted, expectant of some sudden stroke of good luck. Such things had been, certainly, but only when the gold store was first developed, and afterwards at very long intervals; and the few persons who have obtained what might be considered important amounts of the precious metal in California, have done so by barter with the Indians (who at first were willing enough to work and trade for gold) rather than by their own unassisted exertions. Mr Theodore Johnson and many other writers have deposed to this. Of course, there can be no doubt that large fortunes have been and will be amassed in California, but that is done by crafty and grasping traders, and by the unscrupulous keepers of the countless gamblingtables, who squeeze from the toiling miner his hard-earned dust and ingots. “The storekeeper, or the gaming-house keeper,” says Mr Shaw, “is the ravenous shark who swallows up all. The majority of gold-finders, if they avoid the demon of the hells, are at the mercy of the ogre of the store, who crams them first and devours them afterwards.” In a pamphlet now before us—the Report on California, dated from Washington, 22d March 1850, and addressed by the United States Government Agent, T. Butler King, to the Honourable John Clayton—we find statistics of the gains of the gold-diggers confirmatory of the passages we have quoted from Mr Shaw. The first discovery of the gold took place late in May or early in June 1848; authentic intelligence of it did not reach the States till late in the autumn—too late for emigration that year. “The number of miners,” says Mr King, “was consequently limited to the population of the territory—some five hundred men from Oregon, Mexicans or other foreigners who happened to be in the country, or came into it during the summer and autumn, and the Indians, who were employed by, or sold their gold to, the whites. It is supposed there were not far from five thousand men employed in collecting gold during that season.” One thousand dollars a head is considered a low estimate of what they amassed per man upon an average. The total amount—of about a million pounds sterling—which this would make, must, however, have been unequally divided. The Indians would take trifles in exchange for their gold, and no doubt many of the whites got together important sums. At the commencement of the dry season of 1849, foreigners came pouring in from all quarters, and by the month of July it is estimated that fifteen thousand men were at work in the mines—increased to twenty thousand by the beginning of September; that is to say, during the first half of that season which permits successful search for gold in the rivers. “Very particular and extensive inquiries respecting the daily earnings and acquisitions of the miners,” says Mr King, “led to the opinion that they averaged an ounce a-day. This is believed by many to be a low estimate; but from the best information I was able to procure, I am of opinion it approaches very near actual results.” With provisions, it must be borne in mind, at worse than famine prices, a slender breakfast—as recorded by Mr Johnson, who was there during this first half of the season of 1849—costing three dollars, and other things in proportion. During the last half of the same season, the American emigration had come in by land and sea, and Mr King calculates that there were forty or fifty thousand United States citizens in California, whose average gains, owing to their inexperience in mining, did not exceed eight dollars a-day per man. This was the period of Mr Shaw’s abode in the diggings, and the estimated rate very nearly tallies with the gains of himself and companions. A comparison of his narrative with that of other Californian adventurers inclines us to think that provisions, at least of some kinds, had rather fallen in price during the latter part of the 1849 season—at least in San Francisco and its vicinity, although up at the diggings, owing to monopoly and expense of carriage, there was probably but little difference. “Where I was,” he says, “on the setting-in of the winter season, the storekeeper paid four shillings for every pound-weight of goods, these being transported on mules to the settlement. Retailing almost everything at the rate of from six to twelve shillings a pound, the storekeepers gave credit; but the digger, unless he had a continuous supply of gold, soon fell into arrears.” As a specimen of the extravagant prices paid in particular cases, he mentions the arrival from the Sandwich Islands of two casks of potatoes, “a most welcome supply, as many, from eating salt provisions, were suffering from scurvy. These potatoes had a rapid sale at four shillings a-piece, and were eaten raw, like apples!” This is a match for Mr Johnson’s story of the boxes of raisins which were sold, also as anti-scorbutics, for their weight in gold dust.

To revert, however, to Mr Shaw’s adventures. Gradually were disclosed to him the various advantages of gold digging, and he experienced the amenities of American enlightenment. “Prospecting” one morning for a likely spot, he and Mac had just pitched upon one, remote from any other diggers, when down came three Americans, and coolly took possession of the ground. “They were very indifferent about giving an explanation, merely saying that we were within their limits, and they ‘guessed we had better remove.’ As it would have been a matter of contest vi et armis, we beat a retreat.” A small thing produced a deadly encounter at the diggings. The company of eighty men, already mentioned, who had been excavating a channel to divert the river’s course, and get at its bed, where they hoped to find a great accumulation of gold, at last completed their work. The stream, dammed up, and driven into the new cutting, overflowed the banks, and flooded other people’s diggings.

“Indemnification was asked, but refused; the inundated diggers, therefore, commenced digging in the old river-bed, exclusively appropriated for those who belonged to the company; when a murderous attempt to eject them ensued: knives and picks, rifles and pistols, were freely used. The company, being strongest, were triumphant; though not before deadly wounds had been inflicted on both sides. I viewed the barbarous encounter from an eminence; at its termination, when I visited the field of battle, I was horror-struck at the sanguinary atrocities which had been committed. Some men lay with their entrails hanging out; others had their skulls smashed with the pickaxe, and bodies lopped with the axe; whilst a few lay breathing their last, seemingly unscathed, but shot to death with bullets.”

The prospect of gain should be very great, to compensate civilised men for the disgust and many disagreeables inevitable from the proximity of Americans of a certain stamp. None appreciate the better qualities of our Transatlantic cousins more highly than ourselves. It has been our good fortune to meet with Americans who would do honour to any nation. We willingly believe that such men are numerous in the United States. But we regard with aversion a class of Americans which we much fear is both large and increasing—that restless, reckless, offensive class, who lay down for others laws which they themselves disregard; who use license and exact submission; and who, themselves childishly susceptible, affect astonishment when others take umbrage at their encroachments. These are the men who fill the ranks of usurping armies, to despoil feeble neighbours; who man piratical expeditions against the possessions of an allied and friendly country; and who, when the pirates have met their deserts—as richly earned as was the fate of any freebooter and murderer who ever hung in chains on bank of Thames or West Indian key—muster by twenties of thousands in the great cities of the States, utter frantic yells for vengeance, set police and order at defiance, destroy the property of innocent traders, and drive diplomatic agents to seek safety for their lives within prison walls. To this disreputable class, and to its worst specimens, belonged, as will easily be imagined, a great majority of the American immigrants into California. Their two chief characteristics were the grossest selfishness and the most unwarrantable interference in their neighbours’ concerns. A party of these men, including two of the three who had accused Shaw and Mac of trespassing, paid them a visit, fully armed, one night after dark, as the two Englishmen, weary with the day’s work, lay smoking their pipes beneath their roof of leaves and branches. The Yankee diggers came to grumble and bully. Their pretext was, the presence of the Chinese and Malay, whom they either believed, or pretended to believe, were serfs to the others, working for their benefit.

“We assured the men that we exercised no compulsion over the blacks, who might leave us at pleasure; and, notwithstanding they had previously declared that coloured men were not privileged to work in a country intended only for American citizens, some of them were inconsistent enough to ask the Celestial and Malay to work for them for pay; but nothing would shake their allegiance to us. Some time afterwards, this feeling against the coloured races rose to a pitch of exasperation.... The mines becoming more thickly populated by Americans, these, relying on their numerical strength, commenced acts of hostility and aggression on any placer inhabited by coloured people, if it were worth appropriating, or excited their cupidity: ejectments constantly occurred, and thousands, driven from the placeres, left the country, whilst others penetrated farther into the hill ranges.”

The wet season in California is usually from November till March; but in 1849 it set in unusually early. Mr Shaw and his partner had been but three weeks at the diggings when a flood of rain descended. Their habitation was a delightful one for hot weather—a sort of sylvan bower in a clump of trees, with a park-like tract in the rear, and the bright stream about a hundred paces in front. Now the rain poured in through their bower of foliage, soaking everything in an instant. They tried to keep it off with blankets, but in vain; the weight of the torrent overwhelmed everything. They continued their search after gold. The labour had been hard at first; it now was painful and desperate.

“At mid-day it was a July heat, of an evening and morning the chill of January. In the dry season we had not minded, when in a profuse perspiration, and oppressed with heat, taking a turn in the water; but, now that the river was filling, none liked standing long up to the waist in snow-water from the mountains. When we thought of former exposures, and contemplated our present position, the terrors of ague, rheumatism, fever, dysentery, and other accompaniments of a Californian winter, occurred to our minds.”

Ominous forebodings, speedily to be fulfilled. As fast as they built up their hut, it was knocked down again, until at last they almost gave up hopes of shelter, wrapped themselves in their blankets, and cowered round the fire, the teeth of Mahomet and the Celestial chattering dismal duets. Again they tried to work, and again desisted, deterred by symptoms of sickness, which the Chinese was the first to feel. Anything more dreary and wretched than their situation, as described by Mr Shaw, can hardly be conceived. The whole country was becoming deluged; a chilly south-east wind blew through their hut, which resembled a shower-bath, and Mac, applying his nautical experience to the consideration of the Californian clouds, predicted much foul weather. In the midst of all this misery and discomfort, provisions ran low. Mr Shaw and the Malay volunteered to fetch a small supply, and, making their way through bush and swamp, at last reached the ford. This was hard by the place where the cutting had been made which had caused the desperate fight between the two parties of miners. Labour and blood had alike been fruitlessly expended; for want of due precaution, the mountain torrents had carried away the embankments. The waters at the ford were agitated and dangerous. “Mahomet looked sagaciously at the current, then, picking pebbles from the bank, sat himself down, and pitched them successively into different portions of the river, complacently watching the results: this, he told me, was his country fashion of finding out the depth of water, as, by the bubbles produced by the falling stones, the depth of water was ascertained.”

Having at length got across, “we went to our customary store, kept by a knowing ‘Down-East’ youth, whom we found seated astride on the top of a sugar cask, chewing lustily at a plug of tobacco. He was a good natured fellow, for when he saw the plight we were in, (both of us wet up to the waist, and Mahomet rueful and shivering,) he pulled from his pocket a brandy bottle, and handed it to us to drink.” Most rare generosity at the diggings! Provisions procured, they returned to the hut; but next morning Mahomet awoke with spasms, and the Celestial was very bad. Brandy there was none; the poor fellows’ funds were running low; and as the Malay’s case was urgent, Mr Shaw went to the nearest tent where spirits were. “Christian men wanted liquor,” was the reply of the humane and Christianlike Americans, “and they would be darned if they would give any to black cattle.” So Mr Shaw made another trip to the store, and then he and Mac, defying the weather, went down to dig, and were so fortunate as to get a full ounce of gold. A little encouraged by this success, Mr Shaw took his gun and walked off “in search of something suitable for an invalid.” After rambling far and finding nothing, he espied a flock of crows, clustered on the decayed carcasses of some oxen, and knocked over three. The very picking them out of the putrid mass amongst which they had fallen was a most disgusting task; but he bagged them with a shudder, and, on returning with his loathsome prize, so eager were the party to eat something that was fresh—or rather, not salt—that it was decided, nem. con., to make a supper on the crows. “They actually smelt of carrion, but were very plump; and when plucked and boiled by the Celestial, they ate much better than I anticipated.” After such a repast, no wonder that “the following day both Mac and myself experienced a shivering sensation; the Chinese and Mahomet were also worse.” Indeed, it was the wretched condition into which the two Asiatics now fell that partly detained their masters at the diggings. As to remaining there in hope of profit, Mr Shaw and his messmate were getting daily more persuaded of the fallacy of any such expectation. Hard work, frugality and economy, had as yet done little towards enriching them; and here they were, with five or six months’ rain before them, during which they would necessarily gain less and spend more. Themselves were now so poorly, and the pains in their limbs so severe, that it was all they could do to keep up the fire and dress their food. But the Malay and the Chinese were in a terrible state, and lay moaning dismally, to the consternation of the others. And all this time the party of sufferers may be said to have lived in water, for they had been refused admittance into a tent, and the roof of branches kept out no rain. “On one occasion, after an agitated sleep, the boy sprang up shrieking in a fit, and fell into the fire. Luckily his clothes were too wet to catch a light, and we pulled him out instantly; but after this occurrence we thought it prudent to bind him by the feet.” When things are at the worst they must mend, says the proverb; and certainly it were difficult to imagine anything worse than the condition of the four unfortunates in the ruined hut. But one day a man was seen coming over the hill; they hailed him, and he approached them. It was the Down-Easter from the store. That jewel of a fellow, who deserved to be put under a glass-case as an unparalleled specimen of a humane Yankee at the diggings, offered them shelter in his store. How joyfully they accepted it needs hardly to be said. Poor Mahomet could not walk; but he was by this time a mere skeleton, and easily carried. The two Englishmen were quartered in the store itself; their coloured dependants were sheltered in an adjoining tent. A German—self-dubbed a surgeon, but who in his own country had been more accustomed to dress hair than wounds—now came to see them, at the moderate rate of five dollars a visit, and insisted upon bleeding Mac, who unwisely submitted, although already extremely weak, and in greater need of nourishment than blood-letting. Mr Shaw mistrusted the quack-salver, suffered no lancet to approach his veins, and his health rapidly mended. “In the morning I took a stroll round the tents: a most ominous silence prevailed; of the busy crowds not one was to be seen at work; all was as still as an hospital. We had not been the only sufferers; sickness universally prevailed, seeming as infectious as the plague. In every tent lay sufferers in various stages of disease; out of two hundred, at least twenty had died, and not more than sixty were able to move. Those convalescent would be seen gathered together in the stores,” gambling the gold dust for which they had toiled all summer, knocking the necks off champagne bottles, devouring turtle, lobsters, and other delicacies, preserved in tins and sold at fabulous prices. Idleness and ostentation were the motives of this lavish expenditure of their hard-gotten wealth, and Mr Shaw believes “that the majority wished themselves again in the backwoods, preferring beef-broth and spruce-beer there to champagne and turtle in the diggings.” Meanwhile, the sick “lay huddled together in tents, moaning and cursing, many of them dying, with no one to attend to their spiritual or bodily wants; and I cannot but think that many died from sheer starvation or mere want of attendance.” California is the place for contrasts. In one tent revelry, gambling and drunkenness; in the next, disease, delirium, despair: a reckless life terminated by a godless death.

The monotony of the wet season at the diggings was presently varied by an exciting incident. A tent on the outskirts of the settlement was ransacked, and its two inmates speared, by a party of Indians. A dozen men assembled to follow and take vengeance, chiefly Yankee backwoodsmen, with two English hunters from Oregon for their leaders. Mr Shaw cleaned his gun and pistols, put a store of flour in his knapsack, slung his blanket, and accompanied them, in spite of the arguments of his two countrymen, who thought him physically unequal to the hardships of the expedition. On the second day they came upon the Indian camp, consisting of some thirty men and twenty women. The marauding party had just come in, and were narrating their exploits—their plunder displayed upon the ground. The Indians—who seem, for Indians, to have been extremely incautious, and to have dispensed altogether with vedettes or sentries—gathered together in a group to sup, when their repast was unpleasantly interrupted by the crack of the white men’s rifles, immediately followed by a headlong charge with pistol and bowie-knife. Five were killed by the first volley, and a number wounded, most of whom were remorselessly put to death, whilst a few were saved by the intercession of Oregon Frank and others of the more humanely disposed. One old squaw had got a bullet in her leg, but as a string of scalps was amongst her personal ornaments, she excited little compassion. “Knowing the treachery of Indians,” Mr Shaw artlessly remarks—meaning, we suppose, the possibility of an attack from the remnant of the party which he and his friends had so mercilessly decimated—“we loaded our firearms before sitting down to supper, keeping a watchful eye about us. The repast, of which we took possession, consisted of roots, venison, acorn-bread, boiled horse-chestnuts, and a dish of vermin: the former were very palatable after our fatiguing march, but the slugs and worms we declined tasting. When we first sat down, some arrows were shot with great precision into the midst of us: one stuck firm in a large piece of venison, which we were compelled to throw away for fear of the arrow being poisoned.” A forced march of sixty miles in twenty-eight hours saved them from an attack by overwhelming numbers on their way homewards, and they reached the diggings without loss. There things were gloomy enough. During their absence a man had had his ear cut off for larceny; Mac was rather worse than better; the Malay and Celestial were on the brink of the grave. The overflow of the river had flooded most of the diggings; Mr Shaw’s was completely inundated, and not a vestige remained of his hut. “As I viewed,” he says, “the desolation of all around, I thanked God that I had regained my health, and involuntarily shuddered at what might otherwise have been my fate, thinking with sadness upon the probable death of those who accompanied me hither.” It now appeared that, owing to the rainy season having set in a month earlier than usual, the provisions in store were insufficient to pass the winter. Many of the diggers had their own tents and stock of food, and they might weather it out; others had gold wherewith to buy food, so long as food there was to buy: this latter class were not secure from starvation, which would be the almost certain fate of those who had but the labour of their arms to depend upon. The friendly storekeeper intended selling off and starting; the two Oregonians were about to quit—perhaps to try the dry diggings, perhaps to return home through the mountains—and wished Mr Shaw to accompany them. He had but thirty dollars left, and his digging was under water. In this perplexity he took council with Mac, who was in stout spirits, although still an invalid. He advised a retreat to Stockton. Mr Shaw acquiesced, and as he would only have expended his slender funds, without benefit to his friend, by awaiting Mac’s convalescence, he resolved to set out alone upon the following day. As to Mahomet and the Chinaman, their case was utterly hopeless. They were dreadfully emaciated, and so delirious that they did not seem to recognise their old master and fellow-labourer when he paid them a farewell visit. With painful regret he parted from Mac, and set out upon his lonely journey across two hundred miles of wilderness. Here, as in other parts of the book, one cannot but admire the judgment and resolution of this young fellow, then not out of his teens, but who displayed, on many occasions, qualities that would do credit to a man of mature age and far greater experience.

In the midst of a storm of wind and rain, and encumbered by a heavy load, Mr Shaw took a last look at those diggings where his “golden dreams” had been so rudely dispelled, and ascended the steep mountain which commenced his laborious march. His knapsack contained “twelve yards of jerked beef, dried in strips, six pounds of biscuits, one pound of beans, and two of flour.” He was further loaded with his blankets and bag for water, his pistols, gun, and a huge bowie-knife. Road there was none; the track that there had been was obliterated by the rain; he steered his course by landmarks. The summer streamlets and mountain gullies were converted into deep and rapid rivers; cataracts roared down amongst the rocks, bringing with them avalanches of soil and trees; the whole surface of the earth was flooded. At dark he was compelled to halt, lest he should find a grave in some ravine. Establishing his bivouac beneath a tree, he at first hesitated to light a fire lest it should attract Indians; but this risk he was compelled to run, in order to deter wild beasts, for a couple of coyotes and a tiger-cat showed themselves; and although pretty well used to the howling of wolves, he could not think without trepidation of the certain results of an encounter with a grizzly bear, a monster by no means uncommon in those latitudes, and between which and the ursine specimens we have opportunities of observing in England there is as wide a difference, as between a lady’s park palfrey and the mad charger that bore Mazeppa to the desert. “Their speed being almost equal to that of a horse, notwithstanding their clumsy appearance and gait, foot-travellers have no chance with them, as they can climb a tree or gnaw the trunk away with equal facility. The most marvellous accounts of their bulk are current amongst hunters. Some of these monsters are said to be the height of a jackass, and weigh fifteen hundred pounds.” No wonder that, in hopes of scaring away carnivora of this magnitude, he lit a fire and risked his scalp. We were puzzled to think how, in the midst of the deluge he describes, he got his fire to burn. But here nature has been merciful, and there is a crumb of compensation and comfort for the drenched wayfarer in California. The gum-trees and firs of the country are his resource. However wet the weather, he has but to strip the bark from the base of one of these; the wood underneath is perfectly dry; a few resinous chips, cut out with a hatchet, are easily persuaded to flame, and these set light to the foot of the tree, which, once kindled, burns steadily and gradually, without spreading or blazing, and gives out a genial heat. Mr Shaw usually selected a tree about three feet in diameter for his watch-fire, which seems to have been just the right size to last the night, for “on awaking in the morning,” he says “agreeably surprised to find myself unmolested, the tree, being almost burnt through, fell with a crash.” To avoid the risk, otherwise imminent, of being crushed by the remains of this sylvan fireplace, it is necessary to select a tree so inclined as to be certain to fall in a contrary direction to the wind, which serves to keep up the fire and to keep the embers from the sleeper, who of course lays himself down to windward.

At about noon on his third day’s march, Mr Shaw found his progress barred by a swollen stream, nearly a quarter of a mile wide, whose current raced past at fully seven knots an hour. After patrolling its banks in quest of a shallower and narrower place, and finding none, he risked the passage. “Unbuckling the burden on my shoulders, holding it by a slender cord with one hand, my gun above my head with the other, and my knife between my teeth, I cautiously entered the water. On gaining the middle of the stream, I felt with painful anxiety the water rising higher and higher; and the current, nearly carrying me off my legs, compelled me reluctantly to use the gun as a support and sounding rod. The general depth averaged from my waist upwards to my neck; for a minute I was immersed over head, but regained a footing without sacrificing my pack, and succeeded in crossing safely.” That night, the wolves, as if aware of the unserviceable state of his firearms, were unusually clamorous and daring, and he was awakened at midnight by their abominable serenade. “From rock to rock their dismal howls were echoed, responded to in the distance by the fiendish laugh of a jackall. Casting a look around, a huge shaggy wolf stood within five yards, his eyes glaring at me like burning coals. Snatching up a firebrand, I hurled it at him, which made him turn tail and beat a rapid retreat.” By a very long march the next day he cleared the mountains and got to the Stanislaus, but not until after dark. “The moonlight was palely reflected on the silvery surface of the water, which sparkled with the leaping of salmon; the stream made a hollow murmuring sound, as it dashed over the rocky obstructions in its bed; and a grove of trees and shrubs, which overhung the edge, cast a deep shade around. As far as I could guess, it was at least three quarters of a mile in width.” Near the ford, which he made correctly, but which, owing to the increase of the waters, was hardly recognisable, a party of Indians were salmon-spearing. To the hungry traveller, long unused to better food than dry biscuit and salt beef, the idea of a slice of fresh-broiled salmon was most captivating. But although pretty well convinced, from some Spanish exclamations he overheard, that these were Mission-Indians, belonging to a friendly and Christian tribe, he thought it as prudent not to accost them, and plunged into the stream. When about half-way across, he got out of his depth, was swept away by the current, and shouted for succour. He was got ashore insensible, but was brought to life by the exertions of a hideous squaw, who kneeled upon his chest to pump the water out at his mouth. At first doubtful whether humanity or hunger had prompted his rescue, and whether he was to be fed or fed upon, he was soon relieved from the unpleasant doubt by the kindness of the poor Indians, who wrapped him in blankets and gave him salmon and maize-cake for supper. A cross tatooed upon his arm (sailor fashion) increased their regard for him, by convincing them he was a Roman Catholic; and on learning he was an Englishman, they testified extreme satisfaction. “The two leading characteristics of the Mission-Indians are Catholic zeal, and an inherent detestation of Yankees.” After leaving these hospitable savages, who were bound inland to winterquarters, Mr Shaw had to traverse the sandy plain which had been the scene of so much suffering on his march to the diggings. The weather was now cool, and he was plentifully supplied with water, so all that he had to put up with was the fatigue of walking through sand into which he sank ankle-deep at every step. Notwithstanding this disadvantage, he accomplished thirty-five miles the first day, proving himself a stout pedestrian. He passed a dead mule, laden with a pack of hosiery, and saw various skeletons, partly buried in sand-drifts; and the next morning his route took him by several recently-made graves. That evening he entered Stockton, heartily glad once more to find himself in a civilised settlement, but not without misgivings as to how he should manage to earn a living and get on to San Francisco. It was too late to hunt for his old shipmates, so he warmed his pot of coffee at a deserted fire, and then, creeping under a cart, lay down upon some rotten wood and rushes. Just as he was falling asleep, he was roused by a singular incident. A hale gigantic man of thirty, who was sleeping near him, was stung by a venomous insect peculiar to that country, whose sting he knew to be mortal.

“A convulsive tremor shook his frame, and the perspiration dropped from his brows, as he stood before a large fire with his hands clasped, exclaiming, ‘The Lord have mercy on my soul!’ Various remedies were proposed, but he shook his head: ‘No,’ said he; ‘die I must,’ and thus philosophically he resigned himself to his fate. Intelligence of this disaster had a startling effect on most of the sleepers. I, as well as others, from a morbid anxiety, watched the gradual working of the venom. The doomed man, with the equanimity of a Socrates, joined in the conversation, but kept drinking large draughts of brandy; violent spasms soon came on, and he shouted for more liquor; his features, seen by the lurid light of the fire, were horrible to contemplate; and it was not without violent struggles that he gave up the ghost.”

This melancholy event so disturbed Mr Shaw that he quitted his sleeping-place beneath the cart, and, after some prowling about, took up his quarters in a dilapidated tent, containing a forge and anvil. There he lay down under a bench, upon some iron rubbish, “arranged as comfortably as could be, for a mattress;” and there, in the morning, he was awakened by a kick in the ribs from the inhospitable smith who owned the “location,” and who overwhelmed him with foul language for intruding into his shop. “As it is useless to expostulate with surly, ill-conditioned people, I merely made a brisk exit.” In California, a man who is at all scrupulous about taking human life, and whom nature has not gifted with the thews and muscles of an athlete, or art endowed with the pugilistic science of a prize-fighter, must make up his mind to submit to occasional rough treatment. Not possessing sufficient bodily strength to pummel the brutal Vulcan who grudged him a nap upon his old iron, Mr Shaw—whose courage and resolution no one will doubt who reads his unassuming narrative, but who appears to be of active rather than of powerful frame—might, had it so pleased him, have had recourse to Colt, and sent half-a-dozen bullets in rapid succession through the vitals of his assailant. The chances are that, in the infant state, and with the provocation given, he would have escaped unpunished, unless, indeed, his quality of a Britisher had rendered him particularly obnoxious to Judge Lynch. To thrive in California, or even to hold his own—at least in the year 1849, and we have shrewd doubts about things having much mended since that date—a man must not be over-particular about defacing the image of his Maker, but prompt to revenge his own grievances, and act as judge and executioner in his own quarrel. There, ascendency and impunity are too often accorded to brutal violence and cruelty, whilst fair play is almost unknown. At San Francisco, soon after Mr Shaw’s arrival there, the influx of thousands of sick and impoverished miners, come in from the diggings to winter, caused a glut in the labour market, and large nightly meetings were held—

“Ending in furious tirades, forbidding foreigners to seek employment, or people to hire them; accusing them of being the cause of a fall in wages, and holding out deadly threats to all who dared labour under the fixed rate of payment, ten dollars a-day. These nocturnal assemblies had in them something appalling, being composed of from three hundred to a thousand cut-throats, armed with bowie-knives and firearms, and often intoxicated. The stump-orators and leading demagogues were usually notorious characters, celebrated not for mental superiority, but for their extreme democratic principles and physical powers. On one occasion, an orator, being interrupted in his harangue by certain remarks derogatory to his person, leaped off his tub into the midst of the crowd and seized the offender. Fierce was the struggle, a ring was formed, when, throwing his antagonist down, the orator jumped on him with his heavy boots! In vain were the victim’s shrieks of agony—no one ventured to interpose. The demagogue’s rage being satiated, he remounted the tub and continued his oration.”

In default of protection from the laws, surely a bowie-knife could find no more appropriate sheath than between the ribs of such a ruffian.

During Mr Shaw’s brief absence, the town of Stockton had greatly increased in size. Regular streets of wooden houses had been built; vessels were discharging cargo, steamers were puffing at the wharf, strings of mules stood in the streets, laden with goods for the interior. Dollars were plentiful, but the bakers had formed a league, and bread was six shillings a loaf. Unable to find any of his shipmates, Mr Shaw walked down to the quay in search of work. After numerous unsuccessful attempts, he obtained employment as a rough carpenter. Poor fellow! he knew little of the trade, and was discharged at night, with four dollars for his services. Next day he was hired by a sailmaker, to stitch canvass for tents. Again found inefficient, his services were dispensed with, but he received seven dollars. Then he turned cook—to a gang of carpenters who were constructing a foot-bridge. His duties were to hew wood for firing, to cook beefsteaks and damper, and boil coffee, five dollars a-day being the stipulated guerdon. His twelve masters were never satisfied: the steak was always voted tough, or the damper heavy; and seeing that some of them were determined to grumble till they got rid of him, he gave warning on the third day, and left without a character. Once more his own master, he took a stroll through the town, and visited the hospital—“a silent and sombre tenement, eighty feet long by fifteen in width, made of tarred canvass, and lighted by two slush-lamps.” The rain dripped through the roof; about thirty patients, of all countries, classes, and colours, lay on straw upon the ground, with only their blankets to cover them. Nurses there were none. Twice a-day a doctor came—such a doctor as one might expect to find in such a place. Here lay a man with a gaping wound in the abdomen, received from a bowie-knife in a drunken fray. When any died, they lay for days waiting removal—the dead amongst the living. Here Mr Shaw met one of his shipmates, a young man whom he had left at Stockton when he started for the diggings, and who had since been driven mad by disease, misfortune, and despondency. He was seated on the straw, busily untwisting the threads of his quilt. Mr Shaw hurried to the doctor, stated the respectability of the maniac’s friends, and the certainty of a handsome recompense if his health were restored, and he were conveyed on board the Mazeppa. The humane medico calculated his recovery was considerable unlikely; and as for the promised reward, why, he was too far Down-East to trust to that. The poor fellow, who then had lucid intervals, became totally deranged, and subsequently died. “Insanity, as may be supposed, is very frequent in this country, where the mind is liable to very violent shocks, caused by sudden reverses of fortune, privation, and danger.” Having expended his last dollar in bread for supper, Mr Shaw, when grievously at a loss for breakfast, was so lucky as to fall in with a party of sailors, recently paid off from the American man-of-war Ohio. They had come to Stockton in a whale-boat, intending to proceed to the diggings; but the narrative of Mr Shaw’s mishaps made them abandon their project, in which they had already begun to waver, discouraged by the sight of so many sickly disappointed miners. Several of these men-of-war’s-men were of English extraction, and one, Cockney Bill, from the “New Cut, Lambeth,” who was the leading character amongst them, made Mr Shaw heartily welcome to their mess and a seat in the whale-boat, in which, after a severe pull, they reached San Francisco. Here Mr Shaw was fortunate enough to find out the tent of a passenger by the Mazeppa, who gave him a kind welcome and the shelter he greatly needed. This was the same man who had got drunk, and set fire to the grog-store, when they first landed in California. He was now a steady fellow, and was making money by retailing spirits. Under his canvass roof, and partly by his assiduous attentions, Mr Shaw got through a bad attack of fever and ague; having recovered from which, he went out to look for work. Certainly he was just the lad to rough it, in any part of the world. Nothing came amiss to him. “My occupations were manifold,” he says—“discharging cargoes, carrying merchants’ goods, cutting roads, tent-making, vending fruit, and packing timber. Five was my usual hour of rising, and, however miserable and dark the morning, I was at the various ‘points’ in search of occupation, eager to seek, and willing to accept, any description of work. Having no settled abode, I lived according to the day’s luck, sleeping wherever chance directed.” Soon, owing to the mob of labourers and the prevailing agitation, it was not very safe for a foreigner to seek work, whilst it was decidedly dangerous to work under wages. “There was a high cliff near the rendezvous at Miller’s Point, which I carefully avoided at night, as from this ‘Tarpeian rock’ three poor fellows were hurled who had worked under wages, or were suspected of having done so. The beach below was used as a burying-ground; those who perished from want or sickness were conveyed thither. The labour of digging graves was unnecessary, the bodies being either covered at high tide with a layer of sand, or carried out to sea. When digging sand for the masons, I exhumed several bodies in various places.” He had made a contract to work for a mason for one hundred dollars a-month and his board, including sleeping-room in the forecastle of a vessel, the driest lodging he had had since he left the Mazeppa. About this time (the latter autumn of 1849) occurred one of those terrible conflagrations to which San Francisco has been so liable. Several of the principal gambling-houses and largest buildings were blazing; from a distance the appearance was that of an immense burning crater: owing to the direction of the wind, the whole city was in danger of being burned down. But the mob would not stir a finger towards extinguishing the flames, until “the rate of compensation was decided upon.” Highly characteristic is this of that greed and selfishness which are such prominent symptoms of the Californian gold-fever. Three dollars an hour was the rate of payment ultimately fixed. Water was very difficult to procure, and some of the merchants were said to have paid sixty dollars for a water-cart load. The loss was estimated at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Some of the frame-houses destroyed were three stories high, contained a hundred rooms, and paid eight thousand dollars ground-rent. The part of the town burned down being notorious for its gambling-houses, “many regarded the fire as a visitation of Providence; opposite the scene of ruin, some zealous preachers were mounted on tubs, crying ‘Woe unto Sodom and Gomorrah!’ and exhorting the people to turn from the error of their ways, and erect places of worship. Nor was this calamity without its good effects, as funds for a church were raised; many calculating men paying the subscription as they would an insurance, not to promote the salvation of souls, but in the hope of thereby saving their goods and chattels.”

His back nearly broken, and his hands cut to pieces by carrying huge blocks of coral rock, brought from the Sandwich Islands for building purposes, Mr Shaw, dreading a return of sickness, then very prevalent in San Francisco, resolved to quit “that city of sordid selfishness and heartless profligacy,” and to seek shelter for the remainder of the bad season in some remote rancho. A few hours’ walk brought him to the “Mission of Dolores.” A wing of this old convent had been converted into an inn, and was kept by a family of Yankee Mormons, in partnership with the superior. Here Mr Shaw obtained employment; and a laughable description he gives of his multifarious duties, of his bed upon a soft plank amongst the rats in the granary, of his breakfasts on brandy bitters—the favourite morning beverage of the Mormon hostess and her daughters—of his milking cows and mixing juleps, and of the gambling, cock-fighting, bullock-hunting, and other diversions of the frequenters of the tavern. His possession of a tooth-brush, and the use he made of it, were cause of great wonder to the primitive people amongst whom he now found himself. The Mormon ladies looked upon him as a superior being, and were immensely edified by his descriptions of European habits; his master treated him with confidence and consideration; and regular diet and freedom from anxiety renovated his strength, although he was still subject at intervals to a depression of spirits and weakness in the limbs peculiar to that country. His stay at the sign of the Bull’s Head, however, was shorter than he had expected, and than his employers wished. Going into San Francisco to make some purchases, the captain of the Mazeppa offered him a free cabin passage to Sydney or the Sandwich Islands—an offer with which he thankfully closed. Owing to the exorbitant price of labour, the captain, supercargo, and chief mate, had been obliged to discharge the cargo themselves. A portion of it, consisting of assortments of musical instruments, ladies’ apparel, and other commodities useless in California, had not paid charges. “As no return-freight could be obtained, the Mazeppa was going back in ballast of sand and rum—this inferior spirit, which would not pay customs’ duty, being cheaper to buy than stone ballast.” Mr Shaw proposed recruiting his health at the Sandwich Islands, and returning to the diggings in the following spring; but he afterwards changed his mind, and went on to Sydney. His account of the voyage, of his visit to the Sandwich and Navigator’s Islands, of Mr Pritchard the consul, and of the manners and customs of the Samoans, is very entertaining. From the first page to the last, his book is full of incident and interest; and although carelessly enough written upon the whole, the reader is struck at times by a sort of vivid simplicity of style, examples of which are afforded by some of our extracts. As regards California, Mr Shaw has unquestionably presented us with the black side of the picture; but we have no reason to think that he has tinted it one shade darker than the facts of the case fully warrant.

THE EXPERIMENT.

In the moral and political sciences the friends of truth seem doomed to wage an incessant warfare with the advocates of error and the patrons of delusion. In these fields of inquiry no ground seems ever to be incontestibly won, and no conquest so securely made as to defy hostile challenge. Errors that had been refuted to the satisfaction of all thinking men, and consigned to the limbo of oblivion, are prone to appear in vigorous rejuvenescence, and to demand, like the heads of the fabulous hydra, a second extermination. In physical science the progress may be slow; but, a step in advance being gained, it can neither be lost nor questioned. The law of gravitation once proved, the most daring Pyrrhonist could not deny it without raising a doubt of his sanity; and the moment Pythagoras offered his hecatomb to the gods, no geometrician could ever be asked to redemonstrate that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was equal to the squares of the sides. In morals, and the mixed science of politics, so much is the case reversed, that no one position can be held as settled beyond the chance of subsequent controversy. To repine at such a result would be ridiculous, and would imply an unpardonable ignorance of an elementary law regulating every moral and political inquiry. No evidence in favour of any one proposition in these branches of human knowledge can ever amount to scientific certainty; and, not amounting to scientific certainty, no proposition can be determined so that it may not be opened up for fresh adjudication and discussion. These, accordingly, have ever been the fields in which moonstruck speculators have delighted to disport; it being impossible to demonstrate that any experiments made in these metaphysical regions have resulted in disastrous failures.

The adoption of what, by a pleasant fiction, is called “Free Trade,” was, at the time, described by some of our wisest statesmen as “an experiment.” This was the expression used by the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Lansdowne in reference to free trade in corn; and the Earl of Aberdeen, at an agricultural meeting in Scotland, characterised it as a “problem.” The language was ominous! To “experiment” on the largest interest in the kingdom, and that which admittedly forms the very basis of national prosperity—to experiment on the capital, industry, and welfare of millions of the most loyal and best conditioned of the people—was surely a very daring enterprise in the annals of modern statesmanship. And yet there was candour in the confession. Tremendous was the “problem;” but in describing it as such, the parties implied a readiness, in the event of failure, to retrace their steps, and to retrieve the injury they had been instrumental in inflicting. But, as an “experiment,” is Free Trade to be ranged in the same category with one of those problems in morals or in politics to which allusion has been made, and which, from their very nature, never can admit of such a certain solution as to render the question at issue no longer doubtful or debatable? Assuredly not. It is certainly an experiment, the success or failure of which can be tested by its fruits. It is, in truth, an experimentum crucis, the results of which admit of ocular demonstration. It may be allowed, indeed, that the Free Trade policy is a system so vast and complex in itself, and that the influences which contribute to eliminate its results, more especially in the department of agriculture, are so many and various, and so slow and operose in developing themselves, that it would require some time to elapse ere honest but inexperienced observers could be convinced of the actual effect of the change. There can be no doubt, for instance, that the unpreparedness of the Continental nations to avail themselves of the boon bestowed on them by the British Legislature with such cosmopolitan liberality, and the diminution of human food caused by the potato failure, contributed for three years to retard the full effect of Free Trade on the agriculture of the kingdom.^[6] After the natural consequences of the change began to appear, the depreciation of agricultural produce was alleged, by the admirers of the Free Trade policy, to be temporary. This was a dishonest pleading upon the part of these gentlemen; for the avowed object of their own measure, in abolishing the Corn Laws, was permanently to cheapen agricultural produce. If it was not, they were duping the manufacturing world; and if it was, they were now deceiving the agricultural community, by asserting that the low price of corn was temporary and evanescent; and on one or other of the horns of this dilemma they impaled themselves. In such disingenuous and ambidexter see-saw it is lamentable to think that her Majesty’s ministers have largely indulged. In the Royal Speech of 1850 the Ministry talked lightly of the “complaints” of the agriculturists;

The organs of the Free Trade press took the hint, and enjoyed a brilliant season of sneering at the Bœotian stupidity and ridiculous melancholy of the “agricultural mind.” These were halcyon times for the wits; for then to call a farmer “a chawbacon,” “a clodpole,” “a horse-shoe idiot,” was enough to prove you endowed with the mens divinior. The experiment, however, proceeds;—another year passes away and contributes its quota of evidence. A host of new facts have emerged in the interval; and the truth has assumed so prominent an aspect that Lord John Russell’s courage, great as it is, begins to quail, and he feels it necessary to pitch his voice in a lower key. Accordingly, in the Queen’s Speech of 1851, he admits that “the owners and occupants of land are suffering,” to the great consternation and manifest inconvenience of the Free Trade press. To have allowed that the suffering was permanent in its nature, would have falsified predictions of his own but lately broached, and would have compelled him, at the very least, to devote the surplus revenue at his command to the relief of the agricultural suffering. He suggested, therefore, that the suffering was temporary, and incidental to the state of transition in which the agricultural interest was placed; and the other classes being prosperous, (so he thought,) he expressed his conviction that the agricultural community must soon participate in the general prosperity. The Minister has never propounded the reasons on which this conviction is based, and it may be presumptuous in us to divine what they may be. Probably he meant to imply that the prosperity of other classes would enable them to consume more bread and butcher-meat, and would thus increase the demand for the products of agriculture. According to the Free Trade writers, the nation, during the past year, has consumed from nine to ten millions of quarters of bread-stuffs more than it ever did; but it would seem that John Bull’s stomach is an abyss of measureless capacity; that his appetite is insatiable, and his powers of deglutition and digestion are unbounded. But if it were so, how would the national voracity benefit the British agriculturist, if unlimited supplies of corn and cattle, at the present prices, as is now proved, can be poured into our market? The logic of the Minister, too, seems not very conclusive or infallible. There are about eight millions in the United Kingdom directly dependent on agriculture for their support, and there may be about double that number whose prosperity is indissolubly associated with the prosperity of agriculture; and that might seem an inference somewhat more reasonable and natural than what the Prime Minister enunciated, which should suppose that the prosperous classes might ere long participate in the suffering of the agricultural community; that an epidemic so widely spread might communicate contagion to the healthy; that a disease infesting the vital function might extend itself to the extremities of the body politic. But the suffering is the concomitant of “a state of transition.” The expression is happily vague and mysterious. A state of transition from what, to what? is the question which the experimenters are bound to consider and to answer. Infallibly it is a state of transition; but a state of transition from remunerative prices to prices ruinously low—to invested capital diminished and impaired—to profits obliterated and gone—to suffering severe and enduring. But in a little while a farther change seems to take place on the mind of our statesmen, whose opinions on the agricultural depression are plainly in a state of transition, and who seem to be watching, in blank ignorance, the evolutions of their own experiment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer intimated his intention to devote part of the surplus revenue to the relief of the occupants and owners of the soil. But if the calamity was temporary and evanescent, why prescribe a cure that was only admissible in the case of the suffering being constitutional and permanent? A temporary grant might, indeed, have been warrantable; but this was not the measure meditated. To alienate surplus revenue for the purpose of meeting any ephemeral evil, under which any portion of the community may for a time be labouring, is surely the merest financial charlatanry. Very true, Sir Charles Wood withdrew his proffered boon; and for a reason so exquisitely ludicrous, that the nation for a moment was convulsed with laughter. He withdrew it because the gratitude of the agriculturists was not sufficiently intense, and because they had not proclaimed his generosity in pæans of praise sufficiently enthusiastic! But even after Sir Charles Wood’s ridiculous recalcitration, Parliament has passed two measures, trivial in themselves, but implying that the sufferings of the agriculturists are permanent, and intended to minister to them some modicum of relief.^[7] Upon the whole, we may now take it for granted, that the present Parliament at last allow that the agricultural depression is enduring—that the price of grain is permanently lowered. It is of consequence to fix and determine this position in the discussion. The manifold delusions long circulated on this subject will not now avail. The low price of grain was at one time ascribed to an abundant harvest; at another, the potato failure—the universal solvent of every agricultural anomaly—was the cause; now it was temporary and would pass away; and now it is the concomitant of a state of transition. The period for such poor drivel is gone. On the part of the Free Trade press it was essentially dishonest and uncandid; the avowed object of their policy being to cheapen the loaf, and permanently to lower the price of agricultural produce. The Free Trade writers, however, seem now unanimously to admit the permanency of the change effected on the price of grain by the Free Trade measures. The agricultural editorials of the Times are based upon this change as an admitted fact. A late writer in the Edinburgh Review, in commenting upon Sir E. Bulwer’s Letters, proceeds upon the same hypothesis. Our Free Trade pamphleteers manfully speculate upon the present low prices of grain, not only as that which is undeniable, but as what must permanently continue. “The experiment,” then, has proceeded so far as to develop one result so clearly, as to admit neither of debate nor denial. The value of grain grown in the United Kingdom is permanently reduced by the compulsion of an Act of Parliament; and the permanency of the reduction is as certain as anything can be that is dependent upon the seasons.

The permanency of the fall being admitted, there fortunately is no room for mystifying the extent of that fall. The fiars prices of grain, judicially determined every year in the several counties of Scotland, and the averages struck in the great grain markets of England, furnish unchallengeable data, whereby the amount of the fall may be certainly estimated. Without encumbering the reader with statistics, we may mention, that after a careful collation of the prices, it would seem that the prices of grain during the last two years of unmodified Free Trade have fallen about one-third, when contrasted with its average price during the twenty preceding years of Protection. In several of the counties of Scotland, which we have compared, the fall ranges from 30 to 35 per cent. In the great county of Perth, the Yorkshire of Scotland, and which may be quoted as a fair sample of the Scottish corn market, the reduction amounts to a fraction more than 33 per cent. It is unnecessary to dwell upon this part of the case, because we are not aware that the amount of the fall in the price of grain has ever been questioned. Indeed, it is scarcely possible that it could be so. It was the permanency of the reduction that the Free Trade theorists so long and so strenuously denied—thus repudiating, with reckless effrontery, the promised blessing of their own policy.

The vital question immediately arises, “Can our national agriculture withstand such a tremendous diminution of its annual income? The husbandman, from the very nature of his art, cannot be speedily ruined, but can he ultimately survive such an abstraction of his means?” The highfarming fraternity were the first to volunteer a remedy, and to solve the question. With flippant confidence they propounded their panacea as the substitute for Protection; but in what high farming consisted, not two of the teachers were agreed. One summoned the farmer to grow more corn, another enjoined him to make green crop his sheet-anchor, and the recreant knight of Netherby avows his partiality for pasturage. Bullocks were “ungrateful fellows,” but pigs would do it. Sheep on pasture were profitless, but sheep on “boards” would pay. The mysterious powers of “ammonia” promised to meet the emergency, when, lo! Porcius interposed, and converted the subtle agent into laughing-gas! One wonders how such idle puerilities, such quackish nostrums, could have deluded, even for a day, any portion of the community, however ignorant of rural affairs; and yet it is undeniable that they served to mystify the question, and to prolong for a little while the reign of delusion. The high farming prescriptions, as a remedy and compensation for the 35 per cent of loss on the value of agricultural produce, were most effectually exposed, and they have passed away as entirely as Cobbet’s crotchet about locusttrees, or the cow-cabbage mania of 1836. The high farming friends of an injured agriculture have either retired from public notice, discomfited and abashed, or are totally neglected. The sufferings of the patient are too poignant to allow him to be even amused with their fantastic recreations. The Incubrations of Mr Mechi fail even to awaken a momentary interest, and the farmer of Tiptree Hall has sunk into a Mechior insipidus. It is impossible, however, not to admire the brave enterprise and manly candour of Mr Mechi. Robbing no tenant, and experimenting at the expense of his own pocket, he is quite an experimenter to our mind, and worthy of all approbation. Were, however, his agricultural adventure to prove profitable, of which there is an entire lack of evidence, it would be utterly chimerical to suppose that Mr Mechi’s system could be introduced into the general agriculture of the country. Mr Mechi’s capital and genius are alike awanting. His schemes can only be contemplated as curious and interesting, and likely in their progress to evolve principles which, in better times, may be made available in improving the art of husbandry. In the mean time, so far from high farming being in the ascendant, we believe that the progress of good farming is arrested.

The question how the reduction in the price of grain is to be met, remains still to be answered. The current and popular answer with the Free Trade press seems now unanimously to be by a reduction of rent. It is a question, say they, that concerns the landlord alone. The incidence of the evil can affect him only. In the end he must be the sole and exclusive sufferer. This doctrine is advanced as an undeniable truth by one of the latest Free Trade pamphleteers, who has rushed into the agricultural arena with a juvenile confidence that nothing but the profoundest ignorance of the subject can explain. The writer in the Edinburgh Review speaks with more timidity and hesitation, as if aware of the result to which such a position must conduct. Sometimes he seems half inclined to deny the extent of the evil. He apparently fancies that his readers are so stupid as to forget, or so ignorant as not to know, that the price of wheat, under Free Trade, has been 40s., while under Protection it was 56s. He admits, however, although reluctantly, the necessity of a readjustment of rent. This question has been frequently discussed in our pages; but, as the received solution of the agricultural difficulty, it may be well to look at it again. The capital and fatal blunder which such writers fall into, is by supposing that the rent is the only payment which the tenant-farmers have to make. But on a grain farm he has other two payments to make, each of them equal to the rent. The usual allocation of the total farm-income is tripartite—one-third is the landlord’s rent, and the other two-thirds meets the farm expenditure, &c. But if the value of the cereal produce is reduced 30 per cent, and if the landlord is to be the sole sufferer, then the reduction of rent must be 90 per cent! Is this the readjustment of rent meditated? If it is meant that the rent should be reduced 30 per cent, and that this only is the proportion of the loss that properly falls upon the owner of the soil, then most certainly the landlord is not the only sufferer. There is still a loss of 60 per cent entailed upon the farmer and his dependants. It would be a cruel delusion, were it not utter folly, in Free Trade writers to attempt to deceive practical men on such a subject. The idea that the landlord should suffer the whole loss inflicted upon the gross annual income of the farm by Free Trade is not only visionary, but to us it would seem to be unjust. Before landlords generally can be brought to consent to sacrifice the 30 per cent even, what suffering and misery will overtake the tenant-farmers. Suppose the rent of the farm was £500, then £1500 is the gross sum to be realised from the farm. The loss entailed on each of the three parties, the landlord, the tenant, and his dependants, is £150. Suppose the landlord has relinquished his £150, the farmer has first to consider whether his profits in the past have been such as to enable him to bear an annual loss of £150; and if he is satisfied that he can meet such a defalcation, then the next question he has to dispose of is, who is to bear the loss of the other £150? Is he sure that he will be successful in lowering the wages of his ploughmen from £15 to £10—of his female workers from 9d. a-day to 6d. Will he be able to reduce the accounts of his manure-merchant, saddler, smith, wright, grocer, tailor, &c. one-third. The farmer is the paymaster; and if he cannot bring about such an equalisation of the loss as this over all the parties implicated, he will continue to be, as he has been, the great sufferer. If, indeed, there is such an agricultural phenomenon as a Free Trade farmer who says that he is able to bear the whole loss—that Protection is and was unnecessary—then that man must evidently have been coining money in the past, and must be now a Crœsus of wealth. But he convicts himself, too, of having been guilty of unfair dealing. He has been defrauding the landlord of his just share of the farm-income; and he has done that on which a curse is pronounced—he has been keeping back the hire of his labourers. He has paid them with a third less wages than they ought to have received; and before he can be rehabilitated as a witness on the question, he must disgorge his ill-gotten gains. The Free Trade press anxiously conceal the consequences of their measure to the poor from the observation of their readers; and they know the reason why. Did they venture to enter into details, the tendency of their policy to trench deeply upon the hard-won wages of honest industry would be instantly seen, and their odious confiscation would expose them to national reprobation. They content themselves with vaguely asserting that the landlord must bear the whole loss. This is the solatium which they administer to the suffering tenant; and they fancy him such an idiot, and so profoundly ignorant of his own business, as to believe them. If the owner of the soil is to be the sole sufferer, then it is certain that, in his position as a proprietor, there must be some economic anomaly. The principle would not apply to any other owner of property. If the gross income of a cotton-spinner is reduced 30 per cent, then who believes that the owner of the mill who has let the building will alone suffer? Infallibly the spinner and his workpeople will suffer a depreciation of income. If, however, the landlord is to bear the whole loss, we conceive that it would be an exaggeration of that loss to state it in every case at 90 per cent. That may be in reality the amount of the depreciation accomplished by Free Trade legislation in the gross income of the farm; but from the great improvements that have of late years been made in the culture of the soil, and from the advantages generally enjoyed by the tenant-farmer from the new manures, and from railway communication—which enables him to transport not only his grain, but his root-crops, to markets formerly inaccessible—we conceive that he is able to bear some portion of the loss. In other words, we conceive, had Parliament not forcibly lowered the price of agricultural produce, that the farmer, from the causes mentioned, would have been able to give some rise of wages to the agricultural labourer, and some rise of rent to the owner of the soil. Upon this subject, very probably, the reviewer of Sir E. L. Bulwer’s Letters may be near the mark. The landlord may ponder the following pregnant sentence:—“The necessity must then be put up with of returning to the rents, or nearly so, which he drew previous to the war, and before the successive Corn Laws which followed had enabled him to occupy, at the general expense, a higher position in society than is the lot of the landowner in other countries, or than was the lot of his own father or grandfather.”^[8] But since the period referred to by the reviewer, the rent of land has been doubled, and in many cases there has been a threefold increase. Any one may satisfy himself of this fact, as far as this part of the kingdom is concerned, by comparing the rental as given in Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland, 1796, with the rental given in the New Statistical Account, 1844.^[9] So the consummation of the experiment which the candid critic points out as awaiting the landlord, is the confiscation of half his income at the very least. The reviewer, however, forgets that at the era to which he looks back the wages of agricultural labour, and the price of the implements of husbandry, were about a third less than they are now. How, then, are the labourers and implement-makers not likewise to fall back to the condition of their fathers and grandfathers? Ah! it would be unpopular—dangerous, to mention such a contingency. The friend of the poor, the advocate of the cheap loaf, cannot afford to reveal so much of the truth! It is false to say that the Corn Laws raised the landlord’s rent at the general expense. On the contrary, they likewise greatly increased the wages, and multiplied the comforts of the industrious classes.

One of the stale and commonplace fallacies repeated usque ad nauseam by the Free Trade economists, and greatly relied on by them, is the following. Farmers, say they, are inveterate grumblers. They have always grumbled. They grumbled in 1815, when the price of wheat was 80s.;—and they give copious quotations from the evidence of practical agriculturists, taken by Parliamentary Committees, to prove their charge. The statement, and the intended inference from it, are based, however, upon an inexcusable ignorance, or a most criminal concealment of the facts. The unparalleled taxation and other expenses of the peculiar period referred to, rendered even the 80s. a poor remuneration to the home-grower. In 1815 the annual expenditure of the nation amounted to £100,000,000, while the population was only 13,000,000—the rate of contribution being thus about £7, 15s. per head. At present, the national expenditure is about £52,000,000, and the population about 20,000,000, (Census 1841)—that is, £2, 12s. per head. The truth is, with wheat at 56s., we believe that the farmer of the present day would be better able to maintain his position than the farmer of 1815 was with wheat at 80s. It is marvellous to consider what unconscionable drafts the Free Trade sophists make upon the ignorance of their readers. Abolish taxation and lower wages to the Continental rate, and the energy and enterprise of the British farmer will enable him, even with his inferior climate, to compete with the agriculturists of more favoured climes.

There is another enigma involved in the greatest experiment of modern times, requiring elucidation. The rent of land is maintained; in some cases even there is a rise of rent, it is said; and it is triumphantly added, this settles the question irrevocably, and ends the debate. This position is supported by individualising vacant farms that have been re-let at the former rents, or for which the new tenant has promised a rise of rent. This has been an admirable instrument of delusion in the hands of the Free Trade press, and we believe that many honest observers of the experiment, but totally ignorant of rural affairs, have held it as quite conclusive of the question at issue. Free Trade landlords are willing to be deluded, and they have greedily swallowed the anodyne, while the circumstance has contributed to conceal from others the true state of the case. It seems certainly inexplicable how, with the value of agricultural produce reduced thirty per cent, there can be any good reason for a rise of rent, or how, in such circumstances, the old rent even can be paid, without impairing grievously the income of the farmer and the wages of the labourer. Is it not the fact, too, that very generally landlords have been granting reductions of from ten to thirty per cent to their tenantry? Upon the theory that the rent of land is rising, this must seem a very Quixotic liberality, and argues a singular blindness to their own interests. According to the Parliamentary Returns, the estimated rental of land is £45,755,610. Mr Villiers stated, in his place in Parliament last year, on unquestionable authority, that the depreciation in the value of agricultural produce, effected by Free Trade, amounted to £91,000,000; and yet rent of land is rising! It may be remarked that it is in Scotland only that we hear of any rise of rent; and we venture to assert that only a few isolated cases of this kind in peculiar localities, each one of which is characterised by specialties of its own, can be pointed out. It is an immense leap that the Free Trade logician makes, when he concludes from such premises that the rent of land is rising generally over the kingdom. If a man is content to reason in this fashion, he may certainly be able to satisfy himself of the flourishing position of any one branch of trade, which, nevertheless, is notoriously going to rack and ruin. The duration of the lease in Scotland is generally for nineteen years. The farm may have been greatly under-rented, and it may have been greatly improved during the currency of the lease; and in such a case it is conceivable, even with present prices, that it may bear some rise of rent. This is not all. In agriculture, as in other departments of trade, there are wild speculators who will promise any rent. Whether they will pay it, remains to be seen. Most probably, too, a few farmers have been imposed upon by the fallacies of the Free Trade press. They have been confidently told that the depression was temporary, and would pass away. They may have believed the philosophers, and acted upon their doctrine. Sometimes, too, a penniless adventurer, without character or skill, gives the rise of rent, which an experienced tenant with abundant capital feels unable to offer. A new tenant was lately asked how he expected to be able to continue to pay his rent, which he had somewhat raised. His answer was prompt and full of meaning. “I do not expect to be able to pay it at present prices. There must be a sweeping reduction of rent over the country, or there must be a rise in the value of grain from some cause or other. In either event, I will share in the general benefit. If neither of these things occur, my farm being in high order, I will tide over a season or two, and then, whatever be the case with the farm, I will not be in a worse condition than I at present am.” We do not hazard these statements at random, but as the result of patient investigation. They will be found to explain the cases where there has been an alleged rise of rent; but they do not fully exhibit the present position of British agriculture. During the last nineteen years an immense amount of capital has been expended by the tenant-farmers of the nation in the permanent improvement of the soil. Since 1849, £2,500,000 of the public money has been granted for the purposes of drainage. It is impossible to ascertain accurately what money from private sources has been expended for the same purpose. We may safely state it at £1,500,000, so that £4,000,000 have been lately expended in the drainage of the soil. It would not be easy to state the exact amount of the increased value which thorough drainage gives the land; but that it adds greatly to its productive powers is undeniable. The cost of such drainage has been from £4 to £8 per imperial acre; the higher price being incurred until the cost of making tiles was reduced by improved machinery and the multiplication of tile-works. Taking the average cost of thorough drainage at £5 per acre, this, at four per cent interest, burdens the land with 4s. per acre. The £4,000,000, at the same rate, must have drained 800,000 acres; and these acres, at 4s. per acre, must give an additional annual rent of £160,000 to meet the expense of the drainage alone. If the old rent, then, is merely maintained, the four millions have evanished. They have been consumed on the altar of Free Trade. Besides, however, the fertilising effects of drainage, flowing from the altered condition of the soil, both mechanically and chemically, the soil has likewise been enriched by the application of extraneous manures. Not less than £200,000 worth of bone-dust, and £800,000 of guano, have been annually applied to it. Guano is supposed to be evanescent in its action, from its abundance of ammonia; but it contains fifteen per cent of phosphates, while bone-dust contains twenty-five per cent, and the fertilising properties of phosphates continue. The effect of these agencies, not only in themselves, but in adding to the quantity, and in developing the virtues of the ordinary farmyard manure, cannot be estimated at less than 3s. per acre; so that, unless a farm that has been so drained and so manured for years realises a rise of 7s. per acre of rent at the present date, the rent virtually has largely declined. We have only adduced two kinds of expenditure, but more might be stated whereby the value of the soil has been greatly enhanced. This is the true light in which to contemplate this specious delusion. Even if it were possible to maintain the old rent, we see what an immense amount of money has already been expended in the most extravagant experiment ever indulged in by any nation, and the folly of which continues to excite the wonder of the greatest statesmen in Europe and the western continent. We have considered only the value of soil that has lately received the advantage of thorough drainage; but in the case of old arable soils, that have not required drainage, the loss will come out more clearly and observably. Nobody now, saving, perhaps, Sir James Graham and a few more Free Trade landowners, believes that the present rents can be maintained; and the Free Trade press with one voice loudly demand from landowners a “readjustment,” which, when explained, means the loss of half their income, and degradation from their present position to the comparative poverty and barbarism of their “grandfathers.” The owners of the soil have not been more elevated by the tide of national advancement than the other classes of society: the very reverse is the case. But in the midst of an alleged national prosperity, they must retrograde to the position held by their ancestors a century ago! Will they fall, or, indeed, can they, without dragging along with them the occupants of the soil, and the millions of others immediately dependant on its cultivation?

But the Free Trade philosophers are quite disposed to sacrifice the agricultural community in one vast holocaust at the shrine of their idol, in order that their experiment may be fairly wrought out; and they give us the vaunted proof of the undoubted success of their measure, the immense importation of bread-stuffs into the kingdom, and the consumption of these by the people. The people have eaten upwards of nine million quarters of bread-stuffs more than they did before. The additional supplies are the undeniable measure of the dreadful privations they suffered in former years! The plausible sophism has been sported by Parliamentary orators, and expatiated upon by the experimenters, as an unanswerable vindication of their policy; and, with a tender care of the poor, they say that with them it is a sacred moral duty to continue to uphold a measure that for the first time has furnished the people of this country with a sufficiency of food. Most laudable and amiable would such benevolence be, were it not indulged at other people’s expense. The hypothesis is itself sufficiently startling. It implies that the industrious poor of the kingdom have hitherto been only half-fed. It implies that the labourer and the mechanic were wont to rise up from every meal hungry, with their appetite unsated, having had only half a diet. Does any sane man, not besotted with the prejudices and passions of the Free Trade experimenters, believe this? Is it only now that John Bull has had a bellyful? He never had enough to eat before, it seems; but now he is waxing fat. The idea is certainly original, and as certainly visionary. We believe that the quality of the food of the labouring poor has been changed—not its quantity. Wheaten bread is much more largely consumed over the kingdom than it was; but whether the oaten-meal cake or porridge, and the occasional dish of “flowery” potatoes, were not as nutritious and salubrious food as the imported substitutes, may admit of serious doubt. Cheap bread must be an undoubted boon to the labourer, provided he continues to be fully employed, and provided his wages are not lowered. This latter process is rapidly taking place among the agricultural labourers of England. Earl Fitzhardinge, a Free Trade peer, tells us that in his county “the wages of agricultural labourers are already lower by at least £5 per annum,” (Times, April 1851;) and it is notorious that the manufacturing capitalists, with grinding rapacity, are screwing down, bit by bit, the wages of their workpeople; so that immediately the cheap loaf will be to them a mockery, as it has been a delusion and a snare. In Scotland, saving where they are paid in kind, the agricultural labourers have as yet scarcely experienced the effects of Free Trade. It is curious, however, to observe with what stealthy steps the pressure approaches them. Very many farmers are trying to labour their land with fewer servants, or are substituting raw lads, at half wages, for the experienced ploughmen they formerly employed. We have noticed, too, during the harvest which has just closed under such auspicious circumstances, that, in many districts where it was not formerly used, the scythe has suddenly usurped the place of the sickle. Murderous has been the havoc which the unskilful workmen, unaccustomed to wield the implement, have in many instances made in the corn-fields. But thus the farmer has largely abridged his harvest expenditure—and thus, too, very many labourers have been driven from the harvest-field. To our certain knowledge, a vast number of female workers in our rural villages and hamlets have, for the first time this season, wanted employment in cutting down the corn, who formerly with their harvest earnings paid the rent of their cottages, or provided themselves with warm clothing against the inclemency of the season. Our parochial boards may probably hear more of this during the approaching winter. To postpone his own impoverishment, the agriculturist is compelled to adopt every parsimonious expedient; and nothing can be more certain than that foreign labour, in the shape of foreign produce, will eventually lower to the Continental level the wages of British labour. Reaping machines and improved implements are not necessary to effect this result. The introduction of new and improved implements, instead of diminishing, rather diverts labour into new channels; but at present, the diminution of employment arises from the straitened circumstances of the agriculturist. Before the full effects, however, of the experiment in this direction can be exhibited, more time must elapse. If, again, we descend to the unhappy class below the industrious poor, who win and eat their own bread, do we find fewer begging their bread, and fewer perishing of inanition and want? How, then, it may be asked, do we dispose of the immense importation of foreign corn? The answer to this query may be easily found by any impartial inquirer. We have only to look to the agricultural condition of Ireland for the past two years to discover almost the complete solution of the supposed difficulty. From the agricultural returns it is undeniable that nearly 250,000 acres have been thrown out of wheat cultivation in Ireland, and it is certain that in many districts of that country a large extent of acreage formerly in cultivation has been lying waste. We speak of the years 1849–50. The Edinburgh Review makes a most feeble and disingenuous attempt to deny, or rather to explain away the fact, while that sage Economist, Mr Wilson, is at the very time contending in Parliament for the undoubted existence of the phenomenon, and quotes it as a sufficient explanation of the depression under which the Irish millers are now labouring. But, in fact, the position can be demonstrated on grounds independent of the agricultural returns. Formerly agricultural produce used to be imported into Liverpool from Ireland in very large quantities; now, with the exception of live stock, the importation is trivial. Formerly Ireland used to send both flour and wheat to Glasgow; now the Glasgow market is supplied with foreign wheat from Leith—quite a new trade. Formerly large quantities of oats—to the extent, we believe, of 2,000,000 quarters annually—were shipped from the western ports of Ireland, Galway, and Limerick, for the London market. Now this trade has dwindled down almost to nothing, and London is chiefly supplied with feed-oats direct from Denmark and the Baltic. Formerly Ireland used to export largely—now that country imports as largely. With an immensely diminished population, how can this fact be otherwise explained but upon the supposition that there has been a greatly diminished cultivation? The conclusion, apart from authoritative statistics, is inevitable. The potato failure in Ireland would naturally have led to an increased cultivation of wheat; but Free Trade intervenes, and the Irish and English markets are inundated with French and American flour: and thus the Irish millers and grain-growers are depressed and impoverished. To this solution of the imagined dilemma other considerations may be added. From the extremely low price of grain, it has of late been largely used in the feeding of stock. In this way there has undoubtedly been a greatly increased consumption of grain. In the cotton manufactures a great deal of starch is required. This article used chiefly to be extracted from the potato; but the being scarce and dear, and grain plentiful and cheap, it is now manufactured from wheat. Some years ago Porter stated the quantity required for this purpose at 200,000 quarters; the quantity at present needed, we have heard estimated at 500,000 quarters. For this and similar purposes there has no doubt been a large additional employment of wheat. By means of these explanatory causes, we are enabled clearly to see how the enormous importations of foreign corn have been disposed of, without credulously fancying that the labouring poor have been eating a third more food, and that until now they have been always under-fed. But the additional supplies have been consumed, and therefore they have been needed, it is contended. These supplies, however, would not have been wholly required, had Free Trade not paralysed the agriculture of Ireland, and depopulated her shores; and even if they had, Continental nations would have abundantly supplied our wants, and paid at the same time a reasonable import duty; thus adding to our revenue, mitigating our intolerable taxation, and maintaining such a price for our home-grown corn as would have offered fair remuneration to the cultivators of our soil. The sole difference seems to be, that we have paid away to the cultivators of foreign lands, and to the enslaved serfs and degraded labourers of Continental nations, what we formerly paid to our own people.

But still the cry of the Free Trade philanthropists against what they call “a bread-tax,” is clamorously proclaimed. There never was a happier phrase to serve the ends of faction! The compendious watchword suffices for argument and proof, and appeals directly, as intended, to the angry passions of the masses. What a horrid thing, say these gentlemen, is a tax on the bread of the poor! How iniquitous, how cruel, what a sin! And, their benevolence warming, they launch out into a flood of grandiloquent indignation at all who venture to gainsay them. They write and speak as if it were a matter of high principle—a thing as sacred as the holiest article of their creed, and as soon to be abandoned. Can these men be honest? They forget, or affect to forget, that by their own one-shilling duty they are at this moment taxing the bread of the poor to the amount of some £700,000 per annum. A bread-tax, then, cannot be a question of such holy import—a matter so vital to their consciences as they represent it to be. But, in their histrionic horror of a bread-tax, they are quite callous about taxing the beer of the poor, the butter and cheese of the poor, the boots and shoes of the poor, the tea and tobacco of the poor, the knowledge of the poor! What precious morality is this, and what tender-conscienced gentlemen are these! Never in our memory was there a more hollow or unprincipled piece of cant palmed upon a great nation than this hypocritical cry about a bread-tax. In determining to hold their cheap loaf, it might become these parties to remember, what they do not now deny, that they are thereby impoverishing ten thousands of tenant-farmers and their families; that even now in many localities they are entailing deep injury on the industrious classes, which, if their policy is persevered in, will grow and extend itself until the whole rural population are environed in want and misery. In this recollection, can such kind-hearted politicians eat their “big loaf” pleasantly and with quiet consciences? In men so kind and good, it is a marvel that such a morsel has not stuck in their throat long ago. One principal object of the tax, so odiously nicknamed, was to protect the poor. It defended them against competition with the serf labour of Continental countries; and it kept them from the physical, intellectual, and moral degradation in which the toil-worn sons of labour in many other lands are so deeply sunk. It gave them employment, and it secured them “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” “To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest,” is the stereotyped dogma of the new experimental philosophy. Labour is the commodity which the workman has to sell, and it must be bought at the cheapest cost—at the Russian rate of 4½d. a-day. This is the pleasant prospect held out by the new friends of the poor to the industrious classes. The maxim is a selfish and self-destructive sophism. To buy in the cheapest market cannot be good to the seller, and selling in the dearest market cannot be good to the buyer. According to this sapient principle of commerce, the business of one half of the industrious community is to ruin the other half. It is playing at the old and pleasant game of “beggar my neighbour.” One limb of the aphorism cripples the other, and sends it forth a deformed monster of political immorality. With one class, indeed—the idle, moneyed, and non-producing class—the maxim ought to be in especial favour. It suits them precisely, and for them it has been evidently coined. They have nothing to sell, and they cleave to the first clause of the rubric, and buy in the cheapest market—a most agreeable prescription to those who think it immaterial whether the industrious classes of the nation shall be allowed to live comfortably upon the fruit of their labour. It requires remarkable courage in the Free Trade press to uphold the practical wisdom of this theorem. Do they practise it? Why should we not have our newspapers as cheap as our American cousins? Did the Times, in proof of his sincerity, volunteer to sell his journal at 3d. when the cry of a cheap press was raised? No: he saw that that would destroy his profits and his capital, and with admirable ability he exposed the fallacious clamour. Cheap newspapers, like many other cheap things, are trashy and noxious, and he demonstrated that, with the taxes and wages which he paid, he could not, without certain ruin, furnish the public with cheap editorials. It is the very case and argument of the agricultural community. With the enormous load of taxation lying on them, and the wages which they have at present to disburse, they cannot continue to grow the cheap loaf without ultimate ruin. The Times itself seems to concede this. In April last, the Times said of farmers, “If their payments and receipts continue long at the present rate, they must be utterly ruined;” and more lately (7th July) it adds, “For nearly two years and a half, agricultural prices have been below a remunerative level.”

If we had Free Trade in reality, which we cannot have without national bankruptcy and the destruction of the empire, instead of the selfish and one-sided legislation called Free Trade, skilfully contrived to impoverish the many, and to aggrandise a select few, there would have been no ground for peculiar complaint. Even if rent and wages were so reduced as to meet the present prices, it must not be forgotten, that, under the potent influence of the great experiment, an immense amount of agricultural capital has disappeared. We have seen how the drainage money has evaporated; and according to a Free Trade authority—Earl Fitzhardinge, formerly quoted—“in stocking a farm, £600 will buy about as much stock as £1000 used to do!” That is to say, the existing tenant-farmers of the nation have been plundered of two-fifths of the capital which they had invested in stock! And yet Sir J. Graham fancies that he does a fair and generous thing in refusing all reduction of rent, and in offering sixty-six of his tenants twenty days to make up their mind to displenish and depart, (See Carlisle Patriot, 12th July 1851,) two-fifths of their means being likely to disappear in the displenishing process. Sir J. Graham had a prime hand in planning the experiment. Without the consent of his tenantry, he interpolated and altered the terms of their agreement. By an Act of Parliament he lowered prices thirty per cent, and destroyed two-fifths of their invested capital; and when his tenantry, under a calamity brought about by himself, ask some relief, he coldly refuses it, and gives them twenty days to resolve whether they shall remain and undergo a gradual impoverishment, or get out of the way with their wives and children, and their goods and chattels, as far as these are recoverable. Was there ever such bitter mockery—such insulting cruelty? He tells us in a heroic ecstasy, that he has girded on his armour, and is prepared for a great “struggle”—(Times, 10th February 1851.) He has determined to be a patriot of the first water, and to defend, at all hazards, the poor man’s cheap loaf; but lo! he has determined, too, to cheapen it at the sole expense of his tenantry, and out of the pockets of his neighbours. This is the magnanimous struggle in which he has embarked; and to aid him in this he treasonably invoked the British army to rebellion, and summoned the soldiery to mutiny. We have reason for heartfelt gratitude that the renegade statesman has exhibited himself in his true colours; and that all the world now knows the value of his cheap loaf, and of his fine speeches about the labouring poor. If the Free Trade journalists are sincere in believing that the only possible remedy of agricultural distress is a reduction of rent, why have they not exposed the selfish rapacity of Sir J. Graham, and gibbeted this mock friend of the poor to the detestation of all honourable and fair-dealing Free-traders? Are they not aware that their silence suggests the suspicion that, in spite of their benevolent professions, they, too, care not for the poor, but only for themselves? Is Sir J. Graham a true type of the Free Trade landlords of the kingdom? It is a remarkable fact, when compared with Conservative and Protectionist landlords, that very few of them have conceded any relief to their suffering tenantry; and yet the former class have fewer motives on the grounds of equity and honour to grant relief. They did not, by agitation and interference, alter the terms of their tenants’ bargains, and deteriorate their property, and they are innocent of the ruin which has followed in the wake of the experiment. If Sir J. Graham is a fair representative of his class, then the Free Trade lairds have resolved, in patriotic generosity, to cheapen the loaf, but not at their own personal expense, but exclusively and altogether out of the pockets of their tenantry and neighbours. Cheap loaf, and cheaper patriotism, and happy illustration of buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest! With the progress of the experiment the ruin of the tenant-farmers will proceed with rapid acceleration. But they are not the only parties who can be demonstrated to be suffering deeply. On one section of landowners the blow has fallen with unbroken effect. We mean those who farm their own properties. They constitute a very numerous and influential class of society. They lead the way in the path of agricultural improvement, and perform many important duties to the country, such as those of parochial boards and of the magistracy; they reside on their properties, and shed oftentimes around them the amenities of hospitality, and the light of cultivated life; at least they spend their income at home, and are the friends or counsellors of their poorer neighbours. The experiment has gone straight to the vitals of this interesting class, and they feel the full measure of its evil. It might be well of any of our landed potentates, who may fancy that the complaining farmer is an impostor, to ask a landowner, who farms his own soil, the effect of Free Trade on agriculture. He should be a competent and an impartial witness. Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, in his unanswered and unanswerable Letters, states the case of the parochial clergy of England, and makes a graceful appeal on their behalf. When the next septennial commutation of their tithes is fixed, there will be a large infringement on their income, and the day of their impoverishment approaches. But the parochial clergy of Scotland were at once seized upon by the experiment, as its immediate victims, and enclosed incontinently in its remorseless gripe. It may be necessary to inform our southern readers that the parochial clergy of this part of the kingdom are almost universally paid in grain: so many quarters are allocated by the Teind Court, and these are paid, not in kind, but according to the fiars prices of grain and meal annually struck in the several counties. The consequence is, that the Scotch clergyman has in the experiment lost nearly one-third of his stipend. This seems to us an act of unmitigated confiscation. Heretofore, when Parliament, for the general good, has thought meet to effect, by statute, some great fiscal change, they have scrupulously kept inviolate the rights of existing beneficiaries. If it is determined to reduce the emolument attached to a judgeship, the salary of the incumbent judge is held sacred. Why was this principle, at the very least, not acted upon in reference to the ministers of religion? By an expensive and prolonged curriculum of education they qualified themselves for the duties of their office, and they entered on the enjoyment of its meagre emoluments on the faith of Acts of Parliament as solemn and binding, they believed, as those that keep the State from bankruptcy, and give the fundholder his annuity. There are in the Scotch Church what are called small livings. These were cases in which there was a lack of teind, and by an annual grant from the Exchequer they are made up to £150 per annum; but, under the fatal pressure of Free Trade, many stipends not in this class have sunk far below £150—so low even as £100. It is most painful to hear, as we have heard, of the penury and difficulty into which many educated men have thus been plunged. The case of the parochial clergy is clear and disencumbered, and cannot be concealed or mystified by the specious plausibilities of the Free Trade press. It is very well for the Free Trade pamphleteer to attempt to palm upon the tenant-farmer what we believe to be a pernicious delusion—namely, that the landlord must be the sole sufferer, and that a reduction of rent will completely meet his loss; or for the shallow quack to call upon him to farm high, and to take to science. These remedies at least cannot reach the case we are now considering. What is the cheap loaf to the clergyman of a parish? His glebe acres provide the household with that. The wages of his domestic servants—his contribution to the Ministers’ Widows’ Fund—his life insurance—his doctor’s bill—the expense of educating his children—his taxes, are all undiminished; and how, with an income always small, but now so grievously dilapidated, any frugality can meet the unavoidable expenditure of his position, seems inexplicable. And, to quote language as justly applicable to the clergy of Scotland as of England, “When we remember how the income of these men is for the most part devoted, the unostentatious charity which they practise, the popular education they so liberally help to elevate and diffuse—compelled, by their residence in the country, to spend what they require for their wants chiefly among the neighbouring traders—I can conceive nothing more calculated to retard the prosperity and wellbeing of the rural districts than the impoverishment of that class of gentlemen, which applies means the most moderate to services the most useful.”—(Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Letters, p. 88.)

We have pleasure in directing attention to the case of the Scotch clergy, as affected by the Free Trade experiment; and not the less so, that not a syllable of complaint has as yet been uttered by them. The cause of their silence is to us not unintelligible. Were they to publish their suffering, they know that the Free Trade journals, in one harmonious howl, would denounce them as mercenary wolves, and as the enemies of the poor—an imputation painful to every generous nature, and one which, however false, Christian ministers must have felt an anxiety to avoid, as likely to prove injurious to the success of their pastoral duties. In silence, therefore, have they suffered; and the right of a plundered party to complain is with elaborate cruelty denied them. And will the respectable gentlemen who minister to our Dissenting congregations not soon be made to feel the pressure? In rural districts, especially, can the agricultural community be expected to pay their religious instructors as they did in more prosperous times? The Scottish people have proverbially a warm regard for their clergymen, and an earnest effort will be made not to abate their offering; but the insidious drain upon their resources which Free Trade has opened must ere long extinguish their means. There is another class, too, whose meritorious labours have proved of scarcely less value to the commonwealth, who will speedily be in the fangs of the Free Trade experimenters. The parochial schoolmasters of Scotland have their salaries paid according to the average value of oatmeal. By the Act 43 Geo. III. c. 54, the average price over all Scotland is struck once every twenty-five years, and by that average they are paid. The next average for the preceding twenty-five years falls to be taken in 1856; and it appears, from an interesting report on education laid before the last meeting of the General Assembly of the National Church, that if prices continue at their present rate, the maximum salary of £34—a miserable maximum, and disgraceful to the State that doles out such a driblet of pay to its public teachers—will be reduced in 1856 to £26 sterling! And thus it appears that the religious instructors and teachers of the people of this kingdom are to be crushed under the chariot-wheels of the Juggernaut of Free Trade. We believe that there are very many men who love their country, and hate injustice, who have never yet calmly considered the effects of Free Trade which can be proved now to have taken place, and have still less contemplated the coming and future results of the experiment. If they saw that the impoverishment of the farmer, the clergyman, and the teacher, had already been certainly accomplished, they would revolt at the legalised plunder.

The evil has not reached them, and they may have been bewildered by the mendacious statistics and specious sophistry of the Free Trade press, and, with heedless indifference to the ruin of others, they conclude that the cheap loaf is an excellent thing. The lawyer’s fee and the doctor’s are as yet unimpaired, and, intact themselves, they may not have taken time to consider that they are eating their cheap loaf at the expense of the unoffending agriculturist, and to the impoverishment of the members of the two other learned professions. The sleek citizen, with his snug money income, approves of the wisdom of the cheap loaf, and marvels that there should be any difference on a question so plain. In the mean time, this may be all very well. But if the laird and the farmer, the parson and the teacher, are to be compelled to retrograde to the primitive habits and diminished income of their grandfathers, they will certainly refuse to proceed alone in the backward path. They are of too kindly a nature to think for a moment of parting with their friends. They will insist upon going arm in arm in this journey of declension with their legal and medical advisers—with the agreeable annuitants and the comfortable owners of house property. The plaintive morality and music of the old song must find a response in every bosom:—

If the cheap loaf is indispensable, then, for its production, we must have an impartial and equitable confiscation of all property and of all income. If it is a national boon, then, in the name of fair play and common justice, let the nation pay for it. But while we believe that many benevolent and just men, from sheer inconsiderateness, remain blind to the bitter fruits of Free Trade, there are some for whom even such a poor apology cannot be offered. There are many burning with a hatred, not only of what is called landlordism, but of the institutions of the country. They are wise in their generation, and they see that the experiment is insidiously but surely sapping the foundations of the empire. To the liberal laird, too, who repudiates the idea of readjustment, and who extorts from his tenant an undiminished rental, and pays to his parish minister a third less stipend, Free Trade has brought clear and unequivocal gain. The day, however, of his retribution draws near. Nor do we despair of his conversion to sound views regarding the protection due to our native industry. Sequestrated tenants, deteriorated farms, and a diminished rental, will purge his “visual orb,” and dispel the delusive mist in which he has fondly enveloped himself. We believe that he will not remain insensible to the potent influence of that text which the great master of satire has thus celebrated—

The experiment proceeds, but not without falsifying every promise held out by its authors. We have had the curiosity to re-peruse the debates in Parliament when the Corn Laws were abolished; and not only has not one of their predictions been verified, but, to the stultification of the speakers, the very reverse of every one of them has been realised. The other nations would follow our example, another golden age of reciprocity would commence, said Sir R. Peel. Our folly has only confirmed France and America in a course of equitable protection; and, by the mouths of their greatest statesmen, they have told us that we are madmen, and are “digging our own graves.” In Prussia, the government of Dantzig, looking upon Free Trade agitators apparently as enemies of the country, has lately performed summary justice on some of them, by committing them to the mercy of the minister of justice. The nation was to enjoy universal prosperity. The prices of grain would not fall, and landlords and tenants would not suffer—(Sir R. Peel, Sir J. Graham, Messrs Villiers, Milner Gibson, Cobden, and Bright.) The fulfilment of the promise is thus recorded in the Queen’s Speech of 1851: “I have to lament, however, the difficulties which are still felt by that important body among my people who are owners and occupants of soil.” And are the other industrious classes prospering? The income-tax returns, according to the Times, are the infallible test of national prosperity, and they give the lie to the alleged prosperity. Since the commencement of Free Trade, the taxable profits of the nation have decreased about one and a half millions. The labouring poor were promised more abundant employment and better wages—(Sir R. Peel, Mr Sydney Herbert, and Sir C. Wood.) The labouring poor are rushing in shiploads from the shores of their native land, as if it were infested with pestilence and plague. Infatuated men, thus to flee from prosperity! “The necessity for emigration altogether is created by the landlords and their Corn Laws,” said the Anti-Bread-Tax Circular, (No. 27, Dec. 1841.) And again, in a subsequent number: “But, apart from individual suffering, this is a subject of high and serious import to the State; it betokens a disease which threatens to end in the permanent weakness, if not destruction, of the State. We have a remarkable expression on this point in the writings of John Milton. That great man says, ‘I shall believe there cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation, (God turn the omen from us,) than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances at home, are forced, by heaps, to forsake their native country,’”—(No. 87, April 1842.) The divine Milton quoted in the Anti-Bread-Tax Circular! Horrid profanation! But the disastrous portent which “the old man eloquent” so devoutly deprecated, Free Trade has shed upon the nation. During the four years immediately preceding Free Trade, the annual average number of emigrants was 87,000, and the annual average of the last four years of Free Trade has been 271,000! Nor, since the experiment was originated, have the seers been more happy in their vaticinations. So adverse is fortune to the soothsayers, and so unpropitious the stars to the Free Trade astrologers, that they cannot now venture upon a prediction without being startled with its prompt refutation. The Industrial Exhibition in Hyde Park was to be the inaugurating festival of Free Trade, according to the Morning Chronicle; and the Times is constrained to confess that there is scarcely an article exhibited that does not enjoy the benefit of protection. Sir J. Graham quotes, as a proof of the agricultural prosperity, the thriving condition of his tenantry, and the punctual payment of his rents; and forthwith his tenantry publish their suffering to the world, and ask a reduction of rent. The time seems to have arrived when the Free Trade sages should doff the prophet’s mantle. ’Tis a pity they did not think of prefacing their prophecies as good old Tiresias did—Quid dico, aut erit aut non.

It seems undeniable, then—and indeed, according to their own confession, this is in a great measure admitted—that the planners and promoters of the experiment were originally in a state of the profoundest ignorance regarding its effects, and have been most signally mistaken regarding its results. If there is any patriotism in them, or any sense of honour, one course only is open to them—to do justice, namely, to the victims of their temerity, and to retrace their steps. To talk of a mere fiscal arrangement as unalterable, as an irrevocable finality—an arrangement, too, ruinous to agriculture and other branches of home trade—that is pauperising the educational and religious instructors of the nation, and expatriating the poor, is a ridiculous mockery, and is contradicted by all our Parliamentary history. The only measure of importance passed in last session of Parliament—the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill—was the retracing of a false step, and the correction of a grave blunder. In his speech on the bill, the Duke of Wellington, with heroic magnanimity, admitted this; and the great majority of the Liberal journals have in this matter retraced their steps, and are writing, and many of them with great power, in the teeth of the opinions and policy which they advocated in 1829.

It may be necessary to wait a little longer, that all reasonable men, who have their country’s welfare at heart, may see more fully the failure of the experiment. Our past patience has not been without its reward. The millers of England and Ireland, once enthusiastically Free Traders, have seen reason to alter their opinions. The shipowners, once greatly indifferent to the encroachments of Free Trade, have changed their mind, and have proclaimed the change in no uncertain accents at Scarborough. The glowing editorials of the great journalist of Free Trade are pointedly refuted by his income-tax returns, his trade reports, and his import tables. Intimidation, the last refuge of baffled demagogues, is now resorted to. Free Trade, it seems, cannot be trusted to the care of the present electoral body, (humiliating confession!) and the agricultural constituencies and the electors of our maritime towns are to be swamped by a new reform bill, that the experiment may proceed undisturbed. The trumpet of terror was first blown by that false knight who proposed rebellion to the British soldier, and the smaller terrorists have taken the key-note from Netherby. The Edinburgh Reviewer of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton with laughable solemnity mutters dark threats in the ears of the owners of land. Their apathetic indifference has doubtless encouraged the strain, and suggested to him that they must be men of a craven spirit. Our yeomen at least are not cowards, and suffering gives courage even to timid men.

There are venerated names which once were a tower of strength in the land. We wait for an avowal from them that an experiment, to the support of which unparalleled treachery may have originally seduced them, has totally disappointed their just expectations. With trembling anxiety we wait for their return to their natural and rightful position, for delay may be continued until retractation becomes worthless, and until character and influence are alike shipwrecked. The Newark election, and, more lately, the conduct of the Suffolk farmers rushing blindfold, in the bitterness of intolerable suffering and blighted hope, into the arms of democracy, should teach Conservative landlords a lesson which, if not bereft of reason, they will speedily improve. But there are some for whom we cannot wait. We may wait to the Greek Kalends ere the economists of the Cobden school shall be satisfied of the undeniable and intolerable suffering of the agricultural community. If the tenant-farmers of the nation fancy that these men may yet relent, and extend to them some measure of justice, they are indulging in a fond imagination. With as much hope of being heard may the sailor sue the angry surge for safety, or the bleating lamb bespeak the butcher’s pity. This class of experimenters has so mastered the weakness of humanity, that they will cut and carve upon their patient until the last drop of blood has oozed from his tortured body. For the conversion of these ardent devotees to experimental science, who will proceed until their victim drops exhausted from the operator’s table, we cannot wait. Nor can we wait for him who once told us^[10] “that the Corn Laws would never be abolished;” that, if they were, “this was the last country he would wish to inhabit;” that “despotism itself could not inflict a greater cruelty on the poor than the system of Free Trade;” and who, nevertheless, did repeal the Corn Laws, and does now inhabit the country, and did lately despotically inflict cruelty on his tenantry at Netherby. For the arch-experimenter we cannot wait. The traitorous presence would poison even the pleasure of recovered prosperity.