Part 14

This is it to serve a people, who will consent to form their estimates of their own servants, from the calculated hostility of their enemies! I believe we may boast of being the only nation in the universe, which submits to so unjust and so dangerous a domination. It unhappily forms our highest claim to originality!

Mr. Sotheby has a son a captain in the navy. This gentleman, I believe, felt the gratuitous character of Mr. Coleridge’s remarks, for he expressed himself favourably as regards Commodore Rodgers, whom he had recently fallen in with, on service. I contented myself by saying, a little drily, that he was a highly respectable man, and a very excellent officer, which, at least, had the effect to change the conversation.

When the ladies had retired, the conversation turned on Homer, whom, it is understood Mr. Sotheby is now engaged in translating. Some one remarked that Mr. Coleridge did not believe in his unity, or rather that there was any such man. This called him out, and certainly I never witnessed an exhibition as extraordinary as that which followed. It was not a discourse, but a dissertation. Scarcely any one spoke besides Mr. Coleridge, with the exception of a brief occasional remark from Mr. Sotheby, who held the contrary opinion, and I might say no one _could_ speak. At moments he was surprisingly eloquent, though a little discursive, and the whole time he appeared to be perfectly the master of his subject and of his language. As near as I could judge, he was rather more than an hour in _possession of the floor_, almost without interruption. His utterance was slow, every sentence being distinctly given, and his pronunciation accurate. There seemed to be a constant struggling between an affluence of words and an affluence of ideas, without either hesitation or repetition. His voice was strong and clear, but not pitched above the usual key of conversation. The only peculiarity about it, was a slightly observable burring of the _r_s, but scarcely more than what the language properly requires.

Once or twice, when Mr. Sotheby would attempt to say a word on his side of the question, he was permitted to utter just enough to give a leading idea, but no argument, when the reasoning was taken out of his mouth by the essayist, and continued, pro and con, with the same redundant and eloquent fluency. I was less struck by the logic than by the beauty of the language, and the poetry of the images. Of the theme, in a learned sense, I knew too little to pretend to any verbal or critical knowledge, but he naturally endeavoured to fortify his argument by the application of his principles to familiar things; and here, I think, he often failed. In fact, the exhibition was much more wonderful than convincing.

At first I was so much struck with the affluent diction of the poet, as scarcely to think of any thing else; but when I did look about me, I found every eye fastened on him. Scott sat, immoveable as a statue, with his little grey eyes looking inward and outward, and evidently considering the whole as an exhibition, rather than as an argument; though he occasionally muttered, “eloquent!” “wonderful!” “very extraordinary!” Mr. Lockhart caught my eye once, and he gave a very hearty laugh, without making the slightest noise, as if he enjoyed my astonishment. When we rose, however, he expressed his admiration of the speaker’s eloquence.

The dissertations of Mr. Coleridge cannot properly be brought in comparison with the conversation of Sir James M‘Intosh. One lectures, and the other converses. There is a vein of unpretending philosophy, and a habit of familiar analysis in the conversation of the latter, that causes you to remember the substance of what he has said, while the former, though synthetick and philosophical as a verbal critic, rather enlists the imagination than any other property of the mind. M‘Intosh is willing enough to listen, while Coleridge reminded me of a barrel to which every other man’s tongue acted as a spigot; for no sooner did the latter move, than it set his own contents in a flow.

We were still at table, when the constant raps at the door gave notice that the drawing-room was filling above. Mr. Coleridge lectured on, through it all, for half an hour longer, when Mr. Sotheby rose. The house was full of company assembled to see Scott. He walked deliberately into a maze of petticoats, and, as he had told me at Paris, let them play with his mane as much as they pleased. I had an engagement, and went to look for my hat, which, to escape the fangs of the servants, who have an inconvenient practice, here, of taking your hat out of the drawing-room while you are at dinner, I had snugly hid under a sofa. The Bishop of London was seated directly above it, and completely covered it with his petticoat. Mr. Sotheby observing that I was aiming at something there, kindly inquired what I wanted. I told him I was praying for the translation of the Bishop of London, that I might get my hat, and, marvellous as it may seem, he has already been made Archbishop of Canterbury!

Just as I was going away, one or two ladies, whom I had the honour to know, made their appearance, and I remained a moment to speak to them. You will remember that congress is just now debating the subject of the protective system. You cannot, however, know the interest that is felt on this subject here. I had a specimen of it to-night, in the conversation of these ladies, and in that of one or two more with whom the detention brought me in discourse. When the women occupy themselves with such subjects, it is fair to infer that the nation feels their magnitude. Europe generally, or the north of Europe rather, possesses a class of female politicians that is altogether unknown to us. We have party ladies, as well as England, who enter into the feelings of their male friends; who hate, abuse, and blindly admire, with the best of them; but how rare is it to find one who is capable of instructing a child in even the elementary principles of its country’s interests, duties, and rights? A part of this indifference is owing to the natural condition of America, which places her above the necessity of the ordinary apprehensions and efforts; but it would be much better were our girls kept longer at their books, before they are turned into the world to run their light-hearted career of trifling.

With one lady I had a short but a sharp discussion on political economy, to-night. She was thoroughly free trade, and this is a doctrine that I hold to be bottomed on a complete fallacy. It would be quite as easy to prove, in my opinion, that liberty can exist without government, as to show that nations can equally profit by trade, without consulting their peculiar circumstances. She asked me if trade did not consist in an exchange of equivalents. I thought not, in fact, but in an exchange of _apparent_ equivalents. I did not believe, that the Indian who sold a beaver skin for half a dollar, in the forest, which, after deducting charges, brought four or five dollars of profit in the market, obtained any thing more than an _apparent_ equivalent. He was a loser by his ignorance and his social facts, while the trader was, in the same proportion, a gainer. But free trade would permit the Indian to bring his own peltry down, and pocket the difference himself. True, as a _theory_; but life is composed of stubborn _facts_, that laugh at theories of this sort. He cannot come. Could restriction supply a remedy? Certainly; by appointing a clever agent, for instance, at a salary, to dispose of their peltry in common for them, and by excluding the traders from their territory, they might get double or treble the present prices. Their agent might cheat them. So does the trader. The buyers would go elsewhere. They cannot; the Indian has a monopoly of the article. Did I not believe free trade increased commerce, and indirectly diffused its advantages over the whole world? I made no doubt that many restrictions were absurd, and in this fact I saw all the true argument that can be adduced in favour of free trade. Let us imagine a garden filled with fine fruit, on which the owner sets a moderate price. He refuses, however, to open his gates but once a week, and half his fruit is lost in consequence. This is an abuse of restriction. Convinced of his error, he throws his gates open altogether, and bids all enter and help themselves; and to render things equal, he prohibits the use of ladders, or of climbing. A tall man enters and picks as much as he wants; but the short man at his side can reach nothing. But free trade would let him take a ladder. True, if he could carry one; but he can get none, or is too feeble. Now, knowledge, capital, practice, establishments, skill, and even natural aptitude, compose the difference in stature between nations, and the laws must provide the ladders, or the shorter will go altogether without fruit, or get it at the tall man’s prices. But competition would regulate this, as other things, and the market would settle down into a fair system of equivalents. It is easy to make this out in theory, but difficult to prove it in practice. We usually expect too much from competition, whose natural tendency, in trade, is to combination. The thousand interests of life derange the action of the most ingenious theory. The world has never yet seen a fair exchange of equivalents in traffic, and I doubt if it ever will. It is said we can’t buy more than we sell, and that the balance of trade regulates itself. This will do on paper, but it is not true in fact. We may sell too low and buy too dear. When England takes a pound of our cotton at ten cents, and sells it back again at a dollar, leaving a clear profit of fifty cents, by which her manufacturers roll in their coaches, while the planter is living from hand to mouth, we are pretty clearly doing one or the other. But let natural efforts regulate this, and do not have recourse to laws. When a strong man gets a weak one down, if the liberation of the latter depends on his natural efforts, he will never rise.

Here I bade my fair antagonist good night, as I do you.

LETTER XII.

TO WILLIAM JAY, ESQ., BEDFORD, NEW YORK.

Although I had been several times at St. Stephen’s, I never, until quite lately, got into the House of Lords. A young connexion, who happens to be travelling in Europe, and myself, have, however, just made a visit to the Hospital of Incurables. Several members of this house have offered to procure permission for me, but it has always been in a way that has rendered the civility any thing but a favour. It is a marked fault in English manners, that they extend the factitious system, by which every concession of politeness of this nature has the appearance of being, sought, to strangers.[16]

I may say the same thing of the House of Commons, into which I have had a dozen offers of admission beneath the gallery, though but once in a way that I did not feel it to be a humiliation to accept. The exception was a case of thoroughly gentlemanlike attention, and I record it with the greater satisfaction.

As I am writing with the intention to supply comparisons of national manners, I will relate a recent occurrence that took place at Paris. A party of American travellers arrived at the door of the Chamber of Deputies, and, in the absence of all other means of getting in, they took the bold measure of sending their cards to the president, with a request to be admitted, and immediately had convenient places assigned them. I do not say I would imitate this course, but it is impossible not to admire the courtesy which overlooked the mistake.

There are men who ply about the doors of the two houses of parliament, to show strangers the way into them; for it is almost as much an affair of management and bribery to get into St. Stephen’s chapel, after one is elected, as it is to get the legal return. We contracted with a man at the outer door to deliver us safe in the House of Lords, for three shillings sterling, each. The rogue carried us no farther than the first inner door, however, where he turned us over to one a step above him in dignity, coolly demanding a shilling for his pains. Our new guide carried us through a door or two more, when we reached the real vendor of places. We paid the second guide another shilling, and the stipulated price went into the hands of the regular box-office-man.

I am far from complaining of the practice of paying for these admissions, though the price is too high. Members, you will remember, can grant admissions. It is quite impossible for every one to be present, and in a town like London, the half crown may be a very healthful check, both morally and physically. The legislative body that has not the power to clear its hall, would become contemptible. The publicity of congress is only commanded through its journals, the admission of strangers being purely a matter of favour. Here the latter are present, only, by a fiction, as indeed they are sometimes absent; for frequently when ordered to withdraw, they do not budge. The same principles substantially regulate the proceedings of congress and of parliament, though there exists one difference between them, that is founded on a fundamental distinction in the governments. In congress the vote is taken openly, in parliament it is not. It is a great pity that, while we admit of this affinity in forms, we do not always perceive the essential difference that exists in substance.

You know, already, that the hall of the House of Lords is divided into three divisions—that around the throne, that which contains the peers, and that which is set apart for the public. I should think the latter, which is termed below the bar, might hold two or three hundred people, standing. There are no seats, and even the reporters are compelled to write on their knees, or to sit on the floor. Luckily for them, there is little, in general, to report.[17] There is also a small area around the fireplace which appears to be a no-man’s-land, for I heard a commoner ask a peer, lately, whether it was permitted for the members of the other house to occupy it, and the answer was an admission of ignorance, though the peer rather thought it was. The members of the commons, however, usually stand around the throne. Mr. Wortley, a gentleman I had seen in America, was standing on the steps of the throne to-night, while his father, Lord Wharncliffe, made a speech.

We found a thin house, and plenty of space below the bar. The Duke of Wellington was on the ministerial bench, and not far from him was my dinner acquaintance, the Bishop of ——, in his lawn sleeves. With the exception and that of another bishop, who entered in the course of the evening, besides the chancellor and the other officers of the house, I saw no one that was not in ordinary attire. All but the bishop and the latter wore their hats, and they wore their precious wigs. The chancellor looked like a miller with his head thrust through his wife’s petticoat. As for my bishop, he appeared fidgety and out of his place.

Lord Lansdowne and Lord Grey and Lord Holland, were all in their places, but neither said any thing but the first, who spoke for a few minutes. When we entered, I do not think there were twenty peers in their seats, though the number doubled at a later hour. These twenty were mostly clustered around the table, and their meeting strongly resembled that of an ordinary committee. The Marquis of Salisbury, a descendant of Burleigh, was on his feet when we came in, discussing some point connected with the game-laws. I doubt if his great ancestor knew half as much of the same subject. The tone was conversational and quiet, and, altogether, I never was in a public body that had so little the air of one. I could not divest myself of the idea of a _conseil de famille_, that had met to consult each other, in a familiar way, about the disposition of some of their possessions, while the members of the house who were listening, resembled the children who were excluded by their years.

Although one so seldom hears the term “my lord” in the world, it was pretty well bandied among the speakers to-night. They pronounced it “_my lurds_,” the English uniformly sounding the possessive pronoun in question more like the Italians than we do, so that it makes “mee lurds.” I was a good deal puzzled, when I first arrived here, to account for many abuses of the language, in the middling classes, and which sometimes are met with in the secondary articles of the public prints. “Think of _me_ going without a hat,” is a sentence of the sort I mean. It is intended to say, “Think of _my_ going, &c.;” but, from a confusion between the sound and the spelling, the personal pronoun is used, by illiterate people, instead of the possessive. This species of illiteracy, by the way, extends a good way up English society.

I take it, the polite way of pronouncing this word is by a sort of elision—as m’horse, m’dog, m’gun, and that _my_ horse, _my_ dog, _my_ gun, the usual American mode, and _me_ horse, _me_ dog, _me_ gun, the English counterpart, are equally wrong; the first by an offensive egotism, and the last from offensive ignorance. I think more noble peers, however, said “_me_ lurds,” than “m’lurds,” though the formal tone of public speaking is seldom favourable to simple or accurate pronunciation. It usually plays the deuce with prosody, unless one has a naturally easy elocution. The French, in this respect, have the advantage of us, their language having no emphatic syllables. A Frenchman will often talk an hour without a true argument or a false quantity.

Lord Salisbury appeared to have a knowledge of his subject, which, in itself, was scarcely worthy to occupy the time of the peers of Great Britain. I do not mean that game is altogether beneath one’s notice, and still less that the moral enormities to which the English game-laws have given birth, do not require a remedy; but that local authority ought to exist to regulate all such minor interests; first, on account of their relative insignificance, and, secondly, because the reasoning that may apply to one county, may not fitly apply to another.

You may perhaps be ignorant that, by the actual law, game cannot be sold at all in England. My wife was ill lately, and I desired our landlady to send and get her a bird or two, but the good woman held up her hands and declared it was impossible, as there was a fine of fifty pounds for buying or selling game. The law is evaded, however, hares, it is said, passing from hand to hand constantly in London, under the name of _lions_!

I remember once, in travelling on our frontiers, to have received an apology from an inn-keeper, for not having any thing fit to eat, because he had only venison, wild pigeons, and brook trout. I asked him what he wanted better. He did not know, “but the gentleman had quite likely been used to pork!” Absurd as all this seems, I remember, after serving a season on the great lakes, to have _asked_ for boiled pork and turnips, as a treat. Our physical enjoyments are mere matters of habit, while the intellectual, alone, are based on a rock. The worst tendency we have at home, is manifested by a rapacity for money, which, when obtained, is to be spent in little besides eating and drinking.

A Lord Carnarvon said a few words, and Lord Wharncliffe made a speech, but it was all in the same conversational tone. The peers do not address the chancellor in speaking, but their own body; hence the constant recurrence of the words “my lurds.” The chancellor does not occupy a seat at one end of the area, like a speaker, but he is placed on his woolsack, considerably advanced towards the table.

I should have been at a loss to know the members, but for a plain tradesman-like looking man at my elbow, who appeared to be familiar with the house, and who was there to show the lions to a country friend. I was much amused by this person’s observations, which were a strange medley of habitual English deference for rank and natural criticism. “There,” said he, “that is Lord L——, and he looks just like a journeyman carpenter.” His friend, however, was too much awe-struck to relish this familiarity.

I was a little disappointed with the _physique_ of the peers, who are, by no means, a particularly favourable specimen of the English gentlemen, in this respect. Perhaps I have never seen enough of them together to form a correct opinion. A Lord A——, whom I met at Paris, told me that his father had taken the trouble to count the pig-tails in the House of Lords, at the trial of the late queen, and that he found they considerably exceeded a hundred. I was aware this body was somewhat behind the age in certain essentials, but I did not know, until then, that this peculiarity extended to that precise portion of the head.

The peers of Great Britain, considered as a political body, are usurpers in the worst sense of the word. The authority they wield, and the power by which it is maintained, are the results neither of frank conquest, nor of legally delegated trusts, but of insidious innovations effected under the fraudulent pretences of succouring liberty. They were the principal, and, at that time, the natural agents of the nation, in rescuing it from the tyranny of the Stuarts, and profiting by their position, they have gradually perverted the institutions to their own aggrandisement and benefit. This is substantially the history of all aristocracies, which commence by curbing the power of despots, and end by substituting their own.

There exists a radical fault in the theory of the British government, which supposes three estates, possessed of equal legislative authority. Such a condition of the body politic is a moral impossibility. Two would infallibly combine to depose the other, and then they would quarrel which was to reap the fruits of victory. The very manner in which the popular rights were originally obtained in England, go to prove that nothing of the sort entered into the composition of the government at the commencement. Boroughs were created by royal charters. Even the peers were emanations of the royal will, and, much as might be expected, the creatures of the king’s pleasure.