 | A sketch of old England |  |
LETTER XVIII.
This country has, beyond doubt, a greater proportion of
people without the necessaries of life, or the means of honestly
acquiring them, than any other I have ever visited. I do not
know that they are more positively poor, but they certainly
are so comparatively. A large portion of the labouring class
here possess more actual property, than the same class of people
in Italy, Spain, and Portugal; but they require more, because
their taxes are far greater and their habits are different.
In the south of Europe, the people live on grapes, chestnuts,
olives, and other fruits that are plenty and cheap; at night they
can sleep under a tree, or under the canopy of heaven; they
neither want thick clothing nor constant fires in winter; nor is
it necessary they should have a warm and weather-tight house
over their heads. But the labouring Englishman, until of late
years, was accustomed to meat sometimes, and always to bread,
cheese, and beer, in a reasonable quantity. Now, it is otherwise
with him. He inhabits too a climate humid at all times,
and cold in winter, and cannot sleep in the air, or in an open
hovel, without the risk, if not the certainty, of ruining his
health. It is these and other considerations, that make his
actual situation far worse than the peasant or the labourer in
the south of Europe, although his actual comforts may appear
superior to theirs. Indeed, it cannot be denied, and it is certainly
not in triumph, but sorrow, that I am compelled to
state, that the poor of this country are now, at this moment,
more wretched, and more numerous, than any where on the
continent of Europe—I believe I may say in the whole world.
It is not uncommon to see in the country towns, thirty, forty,
and fifty people, consisting of stout, hearty labourers, their
wives and children, applying at one time for admission into
the parish poor-houses. It is neither laziness nor improvidence,
that has brought them to this; but the want of employment,
and the exactions of the government and the clergy, which
actually drive them into the poor-house for a refuge. If there
ever were a noble nation sacrificed to the abuses of power; the
extravagance of its rulers; and the patchwork system of expedients,
and desperation, it is this nation of Englishmen, who, in the
course of their history, have equalled the Romans in patriotism,
the Greeks in literature, and the Americans in defending their
rights against the encroachments of power. But poverty and
dependence, the offspring of financial swindling and misapplied
resources, have undermined the noble foundation of the national
character, and the superstructure seems crumbling and corroding
fast away.
This abject poverty is the secret of almost all their mobs,
crimes, and apparently ridiculous inconsistencies, that go near
to deprive them of our sympathy. That they murmur at the
government is because they want bread; that they rise in
mobs, is not that the spirit of Radicalism, but the spirit of
suffering, impels them to violence. That their crimes every
day multiply, and the restraints of a severe penal code become
more and more insufficient to prevent their transgressions, is,
in a great measure, owing to their miserable situation, which
makes a prison no longer terrible; transportation an object of
hope rather than fear; and death itself an alternative hardly
to be dreaded. The other day, a fellow, being sentenced to
fourteen years' transportation, cried out, “God bless your
honour, it's just what I wanted.”
It is indeed impossible to conceive the capricious unheard of
extravagance of the rich, which actually seems to keep pace
with the increasing miseries of the poor. Every where, except
among a very few of the old-fashioned nobility and gentry, I
see the most wasteful follies, the most unbounded love, nay,
passion, for expensive pageantry and vulgar ostentation. If a
lady of fashion give a party, nothing will satisfy her, unless
fruits equally tasteless and expensive are served up with a profusion
equally senseless and absurd; and she would be miserable
for life, if the number and the cost of each were not
advertised in all the fashionable newspapers. The particulars
of her dress, the quantity of diamonds, and the net value of
the lady as she stood in her shoes, must also be published, in
the style of a vender of quack-medicines, while every thing,
which real good breeding and well constituted gentility would
avoid and despise, is said and done, to make her equals envy,
her inferiors despair, and the hungry multitude become more
fully aware of their misery by comparison. It often makes
me smile even in the bitterness of my feelings, to hear the lady
of the gala simpering out, “Two guineas a-piece,” when asked
the price of such peaches as the pigs run away from in New
England.
This extravagance is held by the adepts in political economy
Catalani receive a few thousand guineas for singing “God
shave the king,” as she always pronounces it, at galas and
concerts, it is all for the good of the people of England, because
she goes and spends the money in France or Italy, or
invests it in the English funds, where the people have the
pleasure of paying the interest. The great sums in fact, thus
squandered away by the extravagance of the court and nobility,
never return to the tenantry, from whom they are originally
derived. That portion which does return is so long in
coming, that poverty too often gets the start of it. But the
greatest part goes to foreigners, without circulating at all
among the community. Flatterers, dancers, singers, pimps
— and a thousand useless, or worse than useless, people,
share the spoil of prodigality, and carry the greatest part out
of the country. It is only those immediately about the court,
or who can gain the patronage of some court sycophant, that
partake of this expenditure, or receive any benefit from it,
either directly or indirectly. England at this moment, and
most especially London, exhibits a striking proof, how little
the boundless prodigality of a court and nobility can contribute
to the real comfort of the community at large. There is
more extravagance and more misery in London, than in any
other city of the world.
In every country, which has been settled long enough to
exhibit the invariable course of all earthly communities from
rudeness to order, from order to refinement, from refinement to
luxury, and from luxury to ruin, it has always happened, that
the example has been first set among the higher orders. To
them we may trace elegance and refinement, and from them is
derived that example of profligate, luxurious sensuality, which
corrupts the lower orders, and at length ends in the downfall
of states and empires. When therefore the Quarterly Review,
and the other stern advocates of despotism, talk of the ignorance,
corruption, and wickedness of the lower orders, instead
of deriving all this from Paine's works, Cobbett's tracts, and
Carlile's and Hone's pamphlets, they should tell the honest
truth, that it is the example of the higher orders, that has descended
to a people, already fitted by their poverty to adopt
the worst models. To a people prepared by education and
example, precept and habit, to look up to princes and nobles;
the fashion which is set them by these is more powerful and
efficacious, than the best moral codes, and the most orthodox
exhortations, enforced by abundance of societies for the bettering
of mankind.
I do not think it is refining too much, to state, as one of the
of these cases are presented to the public in the newspapers.
Almost every one of these has a column, and sometimes two,
of reports of cases at the police-offices, for the gratification
of their readers. If, as is very frequently the case, there be
any thing odd or ridiculous in the culprit, or the offence, or the
mode of examination, it never fails to be made still more so by
the witty reporter, who involves the whole affair, magistrate
and all, in fun and frolic. A crime is thus presented to the
reader as a mere joke, an excellent subject for the wit of the
justice, and the amusement of the public. It is divested of
all its turpitude and atrocity, and instead of a serious offence
to society, appears as a subject for jest and laughter. It is to
be remembered, that the principal reading of the lower orders
is confined to newspapers, and that the most interesting subjects
of vulgar curiosity are the records of crimes and punishments.
Now, if courts of justice and culprits are thus made
to furnish subjects of merriment, and crimes become the objects
of joke and ribaldry, it is very easy to be conceived, that those
whose morality is not well fortified, will very likely yield to
the seduction of such pleasant recreation.
If my preceding observations be correct, you will perceive, that
it is scarcely possible there should not be a more than ordinary
degree of turpitude, a greater portion of crime here, than is to
be found among contemporary nations. In France, where the
people are comparatively comfortable, and where the king and
nobility have before them an awful example of the consequences
of despising the just resentment of millions of human
beings, crimes are diminishing every day. In this country, on
the contrary, where the king and nobility seem to have forgotten
that they only escaped a similar lesson by the breadth of
a hair, crimes are every day increasing. They are gradually
ascending into the more respectable classes, and descending to
the meridian of childhood. In my occasional attendance at
the Old Bailey, Hatton Garden, Bow Street, Guildhall, and
other places where the police officers hold their state, I have
frequently been shocked to see men and women, evidently well
educated, and whose manners bore testimony to their former
respectability, arraigned for crimes, not the effect of sudden
passion or instantaneous impulse, but of reflection and plan;
during the organization of which the crime and its probable
consequences must have been looked steadily in the face.
Such instances are not, however, frequent; but occurring even
rarely, they point to a state of morals verging towards the last
stage of corruption, or to a state of society, in which the
usual.
My principal object in writing this long letter was to point
out to you the inevitable consequences of a vast disproportion
of wealth, and enormous public burthens, that press the people
down to the dust; of those artificial distinctions of rank, which,
being hereditary, require neither moral nor intellectual superiority
to preserve them, and become in the end a warrant for
the indulgence of every wanton and capricious impulse of folly
or vice. This inequality of wealth, and these hereditary distinctions
of rank, enable the possessors to despise the suffrages
of mankind; to insult their poverty with a display of wasteful
extravagance; and to corrupt their morals by examples of
vicious indulgence. These enormous public burthens, the inattention
of the well-beneficed clergy to almost every thing
but the collection of tithes, together with the profligate extravagance
of the rich and nobility, have, all combined, gone near
to ruin one of the finest and noblest nations under the sun.
That they are not thoroughly corrupted and debased is a proof
of the excellent materials of which the national character was
composed, At the time, or perhaps just before, our ancestors
came to Plymouth, England might have challenged the world
for inflexible integrity, diffused intelligence, and noble patriotism;
nor was there a country in existence where the principles
of civil liberty were more cherished or better understood.
Every day, and every country I visit, add to my affection
for my home, and my attachment to a republican form of government.
I am more and more convinced of its intrinsic
superiority over all others, in diffusing a general and equal happiness
over all; in preventing the permanent and lasting accumulation
of wealth, which enables one class of men to tread
on the necks of another from generation to generation; and in
destroying that hereditary and low-lived feeling of inferiority,
which debases the mass of the people, and cows the master
spirit of manhood. It is not those who are best paid, or who
wear the most diamonds, that are the greatest men. My Lord
Londonderry, with his thousands and tens of thousands a year,
will never be put on a level with Franklin, in his plain snuffcoloured
coat; nor will Prince Esterhazy, whose diamonds
made Sir Walter Scott's mouth water, ever reach the level of
the simple majesty of Washington, in his black velvet suit.
The very admiration which is bestowed upon such idle pageantry,
not only by the people, but by the most exalted statesmen,
and warriors, and divines; the manner in which it is
puffed, not only in newspapers, but in productions that affect
to be literary, all together furnish the most unequivocal proof
character. So far, therefore, from being ashamed that our
government and its officers cannot afford this effeminate trumpery,
we should be proud of it, as a proof that the people are
well governed, since their earnings are not wasted in boundless
extravagance and childish parade.
| A sketch of old England | |