A manuscript note on the front flyleaf and title-page of [Henry More’s] Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica, and Anima Magica Abscondita, by Alazonomastix Philalethes, 1650.
THIS is an exquisite specimen of university Wit and Manners in 1650—or rather of that style which is sure to prevail among Cælibates and in works destined for the exclusive Reading of Cælibates, whether Young—or old—Bachelors! gri[ping] even to emetical.
I fear that the same Remark will apply no less to the other Sex in Harems, Nunneries and English Girls-Boarding Schools. Each sex is necessary to even the special Virtues of the other. Man (whether male or female) was not made to live alone.
S. T. C.
MS.
Men are not more generous than women. Men desire the happiness of women apart from themselves, chiefly, if not only, when and where it would be an imputation upon a woman’s affections for her to be happy; and women, on their part, seldom cordially carry their wish for their husband’s happiness and enjoyment beyond the threshold. Whether it is that women have a passion for nursing, or from whatever cause, they invariably discourage all attempts to seek for health itself, beyond their own abode. When balloons, or these new roads upon which they say it will be possible to travel fifteen miles an hour, for a day together, shall become the common mode of travelling, women will become more locomotive;—the health of all classes will be materially benefitted. Women will then spend less time in attiring themselves—will invent some more simple head gear, or dispense with it altogether.
Thousands of women, attached to their husbands by the most endearing ties, and who would deplore their death for months, would oppose a separation for a few weeks in search of health, or assent so reluctantly, and with so much dissatisfaction, as to deprive the remedy of all value—rather make it an evil. I speak of affectionate natures and of the various, but always selfish, guises of self will.
Caresses and endearment on this side of sickening fondness, and affectionate interest in all that concerns himself, from a wife freely chosen, are what every man loves, whether he be communicative or reserved, staid or sanguine. But affection, where it exists, will always prompt or discover its own most appropriate manifestation. All men, even the most surly, are influenced by affection, even when little fitted to excite it. I could have been happy with a servant girl had she only in sincerity of heart responded to my affection.
Allsop.
The education of the Germans gave them strength and stature, and their strength was preserved by the remarkable continence that so peculiarly and honorably distinguished them; ‘but there,’ says Tacitus, ‘no one laughs at vice, nor is it called the fashion to corrupt and be corrupted.’ They looked upon women as their equals and companions, and whoever wished for the love of a woman, first made himself worthy of her esteem. They deemed them favoured by the gods, and we find frequent mention of Prophetesses attending upon their armies. Nor is this wonderful, for they constantly employed themselves either in war or hunting. They left the study of simples and the art of healing to the women; and the art was as mysterious as the occasion was frequent. The women were respected, and therefore they became respectable.
It has been observed, ‘that the refinements of life corrupt, while they polish, the intercourse of the sexes;’ and the rude poverty of Germany has been assigned as one cause of the German continence. If refinement consist in ‘luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles’, we may agree with Gibbon, that they at once present temptation and opportunity to frailty: but that only can with propriety be styled refinement, which, by strengthening the intellect, purifies the manners. All else enervates and depraves. If a mind skilled in the routine of etiquette, and the nothingness of politesse, and a body enfeebled by the delicate languor of fashion, constitute refinement, I must turn to contemplate the dignity of woman in the tent of a barbarian.
‘But (says the historian) heroines of such a cast may claim our admiration; but they were most assuredly neither lovely, nor very susceptible of love. Whilst they affected to emulate the stern virtues of man, they must have resigned that attractive softness in which principally consists the charm and weakness of woman.’ Of this I must say with Mary Woolstonecraft, ‘that it is the philosophy of sensuality’. The women of Germany were the free and equal companions of their husbands: they were treated by them with esteem and confidence, and consulted on every occasion of importance. What, then, is this love which woman loses by becoming respectable?
Essays on His Own Times.
I sometimes think I shall write a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands. If such a book were well written, I cannot doubt but that its results would be most salutary. I am inclined to think that both men and women err in their conduct and demeanour towards each other, quite as much from ignorance and unconsciousness of what is displeasing, as from selfishness or disregard. But to the execution of such a work, or rather such works (for A New Duty of Man is quite as much required, and this must be written by an affectionate and right-minded woman), the present sickly delicacy, the over-delicacy (and therefore essential indelicacy) of the present taste would be opposed. To be of any use it should be a plain treatise, the results of experience, and should be given to all newly married couples by their parents, not in the form of admonition, but rather as containing much important information which they can no where else obtain.
Allsop.
Marriage has, as you say, no natural relation to love. Marriage belongs to society; it is a social contract. It should not merely include the conditions of esteem and friendship, it should be the ratification of their manifestation. Still I do not know how it can be replaced; that belongs to the future, and it is a question which the future only can solve. I however quite agree that we can now, better than at any former time, say what will not, what cannot be.
Allsop.
On the subject of parental authority in respect of marriage, I observed that we too often in such cases had the Daughters in view rather than the Sons, and I contended, that after a certain Age and a certain fair time for consideration, a Son or Daughter retaining the same conviction became morally free Agents. For that there was this difference between Law and Morality: in Law I may have a Right which it is not my Duty to exercise, which it may be me Duty NOT to exercise, but in Morality my Rights grow out of my Duties, and are bounded, i.e. determined by them. Prove it a Parent’s Duty to refuse his consent, and you will have proved his Right so to do.
MS.
Southey in The Doctor quotes Thomas Fuller on daughters, as being in a family ‘silent strings’ sending no sound to posterity, but ‘losing their own surnames in their matches’.
Coleridge comments: This evil in genealogy the French and Germans endeavour, if not to prevent yet in part to remedy, by affixing the maiden or paternal to the married Name—thus: Frances Patteson, née Coleridge. Catherine Pappenheissen, gebohrne Von Axen, an heraldic usage worthy of adoption in England, where the disruption of the married Daughter from her parent Stock, and absorption into the name and family of the Husband, is not to be praised. It is a discontinuity in descents—and a Nothingizing of the Female.
MS.
I have shown in the Biographia Literaria the great evil of too entire domestication. My after-experience would confirm, nay even extend, this. I incline to think that, unless the husband is abroad the whole day, and therefore only a partaker of his wife’s social parties, that in the choice of their associates they should be independent. To exclude all that a woman or a man might wish to exclude from his or her help-mate’s society, might leave the rest of little value, and lead to mutual discomfort. The Turkish method is good: they have no difference of opinion in that fine country; but, as our own habits and customs are different, we should seek to make arrangements in harmony with them; and this I think may be accomplished. Why insist upon a married pair—paired not matched—agreeing in the choice of their visitors. The less the independence of married people, especially that of man, is trenched upon, the better chance of happiness for both. Are there any men to whom the wife has a dislike? why should she be annoyed with their presence? Are there women amongst his wife’s acquaintance who to him are ungenial, why force them upon the husband’s distaste or dislike. I have known permanent aversions, and, what is the same thing, permanent alienations proceed from this cause, all which might have been avoided by each of the parties simply agreeing to see their own friends without the presence or intervention of the other. In the one case the range of the more kindly sympathies may appear to be circumscribed, in the other, dislike is quickly ripened into aversion.
Allsop.
Throughout all Nature we find evidences of a Will and a Reason, and the Will is deeper than Reason. It can no more be called above Reason than you would describe the Tap-root of an Oak as above the Trunk; and it can as little oppose or contradict Reason, as the Foot-sole can go contrary to the Limb—or than the Stuff or matter can contradict the Form. The Stuff is presupposed in order to the Form. Now Will is the Stuff and Reason the Form. In every creature, the Will appears in Reason and by Reason—it acts in the form of Reason. But likewise in every creature the Will shews itself, i.e. the Will manifests itself as Will. That same Principle which we had seen in the Reason as the power and reality of Reason, makes itself known as a real Power, remaining underneath all that is resolvable into Reason, as the Bason water of a Fountain is seen distinct from the salient watry column, in which it rises, shapes, and blossoms. Hence it is, that in every product of Nature from Comet and Coral up to Man and Woman there is that which can be understood, and a somewhat that cannot be understood—some things, arrangements, relations, that can be reduced to a Law, accounted for and on which we may calculate, and a somewhat that cannot be accounted [for] or even described intelligibly, because it has its source in that which is deeper than Intelligence, and which lies underneath all assignable Reasons and Causes, as their common Ground.
Take two lovely and interesting Faces—Mrs. Gillman’s for instance, and Mrs Aders’s (and to my notion there are few finer ones). You will find no difficulty in stating this and that feature, proportion, shade of color, in which the two faces differ, and by which you might enable a Stranger to distinguish the one from the other. But will you allow, that these contain the whole difference, or that these taken in conjunction with the points common to both faces, would give you the whole impression of either face, either singly or comparatively? Would the Sum total of all the describable or even visible differences produce in you that sense of the individual character of either face, which the Face itself gave you? Certainly not.
Now from this uncommon Metaphysics, there may be drawn a sound common-sense and practical moral. Laugh, if you please, at oddities that are contrary to Reason, and condemn Caprices that are the eruptions of a feverish Selfishness: for both are results and symptoms of a want of Will—of a will too scanty to rise, too imbecile to shape itself into forms of Reason. To respect the free-agency of our Neighbor is a duty of common Honesty. It is his Castle, the strong-hold retreat when field and forest have changed their owner. Nay, it is his Treasure-vault, sunk into the foundations of the House, and holds the Title-deeds of his Humanity. In the code of conscience it is aggravated Burglary to break into it. But a noble mind will do more than abstain from doing wrong. We should impose on ourselves a higher Rule. Reverence the Individuality of those you live among. Laugh if you like at Oddities, that are contrary to Reason, and condemn Caprices, that are most often no better than eruptions of a feverous Selfishness. For these are the results and symptoms of a want of Will, Marks of a Will too scanty and lifeless to spring up and shape itself in the forms of Reason. But then be sure that what you call Odd and Capricious may not be a Peculiarity connected with the individuality of the Person’s Being and Character—and unintelligible to you, because its source lies deeper than Intelligence.
Reverence the Individuality of your friend! It is the religion of a delicate Soul—and to ensure or facilitate the performance of the duty, it is no unimportant part of moral discretion to provide for this in every plan of co-habitation or of Intimacy next to domestic Familiarity, in the original sense of the word. To the eye of the World your Establishment may appear a concentric Circle— 
with many circumferential lines but only one center. But in itself it must be a [union of crossed out] close neighborhood of centers within a swelling outline formed by the segments of the outer circles. And the scheme then only promises success, when room is allowed for every point to have a small circumference of its own, so that the contraction to which each must consent in order to give space for the others, shall yet in no instance bring the circumferential line so close to the center for any radii [not?] to be describable in the interspaces.
Even to two Lovers on the point of becoming Man and Wife I would say—would you wish that year after year your wedding should every day commence anew? Agree beforehand, nay, if in the fullness of your love, and oneheartedness it should require invention and contrivance, yet invent, contrive that there shall be some points, some things respecting which you are to continue single. Be assured that these exceptions will strengthen the rule—and that this abstinence, these interposed Fasts of Sympathy are more favorable to its longevity—a fortiori in all looser ties.
MS.
If you suffer your conduct to be actuated (be it more or less) by a feeling or belief which you cannot avow—first of all, remember that a little self-complacency in your own shrewdness and observation (as shown in the nod of the head, and the ‘I saw what was going on’) may make the grounds of this belief appear far stronger and more plausible to yourself, than you could make them appear to an indifferent person, much more to the party on the opposite side. Secondly, such feeling or belief being neither known or suspected by the other party, and you not having reckoned it among the reasons that actuated you, can you wonder that the reasons which you do avow, should be thought insufficient to account of it, and your conduct therefore be felt as strange and unkind?
Another common error I have noticed in disagreements between Friends: especially where there are three Parties, each [composing crossed out] including a family—say, A. B. and C. C. conceives himself slighted or unkindly used by A, and appeals to the common Friend, B. whether B. if it were his own case, would not have felt himself wronged. B. asks himself the question, and his Heart answers it in the affirmative. Now the error to be avoided in this instance consists in confounding two very different things—‘If it were my own case, I should feel, and (I daresay) act so and so’—and ‘It not being my own case, I yet ought to feel so and so’. Now the former may be very true, and yet the latter be altogether false and contrary to your duty. Do you reason thus: Were this my case, as it is C.’s I should feel as C. feels; but it is not my case, and it is for that reason, that C. appeals to me as to a dispassionate Arbiter and Adviser. Therefore I ought not to feel as C. does; but to soften matters, and not to judge by the mere Right and Wrong of the Point but by its comparative importance or triflingness. ‘Treat it as a Tiff of temper, and pass it over. If it should prove, as I daresay it will, a mere Tiff, it is not to be thought of with such an old friend as A.—and the less you resent or retort his unkindness, the more he will feel it himself. But if it should be more than temper, it will soon shew itself in other things: and you may safely wait till then—for this is one of the very few cases, in which Procrastination is virtuous.’
MS.
Hatred of superiority is not, alas! confined to the ignorant. The best informed are most subject to jealousy, and to unfair representations of new views and doctrines.
Allsop.
We have just read in a provincial paper a list of the petty culprits who had received sentence at a County Sessions—We do not mention names: for our remarks apply to the laws, and not to the individuals who exercised their discretion within the bounds permitted by them. In this list we see one man imprisoned twelve months for stealing a sack of coals; a young woman, for stealing six loaves, sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and to be whipped; and three other females for petty thefts, one to six, and the others to three months’ imprisonment, and to be whipped; while a man and a woman, convicted of having long kept an infamous brothel in a country town, were sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, and to be fined one SHILLING.
Now let any thinking head and feeling heart consider the nature and consequences of the offence last mentioned. Think of such a house in such a place, as a small swamp, whose pestilential vapours extend as far as the remotest habitation of those who attend its weekly markets. Think of the early corruption and heart-hardening of the apprentices and other youths of the town and vicinity; of the recruits for prostitution raised from the servant maids, and other still more unprotected females; of the diseases, sapping manhood, and alas! so often carried into families, and re-appearing in the second and third generation in the form of scrofula, consumption, and mania!—and then weigh in the balance of reason a hundred petty thefts with the guilt of this one crime! We well know, that laws cannot be proportioned to the moral guilt of actions, but must take in, as a most important guide, the difficulty and necessity of prevention; but we likewise know, that laws can never outrage the proportions established by the conscience without either baffling themselves or degrading the public morals.
This, however, is not all that pained us. We were in hopes, that with the progressive refinement and increased tenderness of private and domestic feelings (in which we are doubtless superior to our ancestors, whatever the average of virtue may be), this unmanly practice of scourging females had gradually become obsolete, and placed among the Inusitata of the law dictionary. It is not only the female herself, who yet, if not already a miscreant, must needs (to use a far softer phrase than our feelings would prompt) be grievously injured in the first sources and primary impulses of female worth—for, who will deny, that the infamy which would attend a young woman from having been stripped naked under the lash of a townsman, would be incomparably greater, and have burnt deeper in, than what would accrue from her having been detected in stealing half a dozen loaves? We are not shocked for the female only, but for the inflictor, and at the unmanliness of the punishment itself. Good God! how is it possible, that man, born of woman, could go through the office? O never let it be forgotten either by the framers or dispensers of criminal law, that the stimulus of shame, like some powerful medicines, if administered in too large a dose, becomes a deadly narcotic poison to the moral patient! Never let it be forgotten, that every human being bears in himself that indelible something which belongs equally to the whole species, as well as that particular modification of it which individualizes him; that the woman is still woman, and however she may have debased herself, yet that we should still shew some respect, still feel some reverence, if not for her sake, yet in awe of that Being, who saw good to stamp in her his own image, and forbade it ever, in this life at least, to be utterly erased.
Essays on His Own Times.
Barbarism 
[as distinguished from] Savage State is the Effect or Result of Moral Corruption, False Religion, Priestcraft and Despotism, whether it be the Despotism of one, of few, or of the Many, i.e. whether it be a monarchical, an aristocratical or a democratical Despotism. It (Barbarism, I mean) consists in the absence of the means of National and individual Progression by the accumulation of Knowledge and Experience from age to age, and of the disposition thereto—Letters, Books, Printing, Men of Learning, Men of Science, Artists;* Schools for the different Ranks of Society, and the oppotunities of moral education and religious instruction for all in all ranks, and last but not least the equality of Women to men in social and domestic Life, and the unconditional sovereignty of Law over individual Will, these are the characters of a State that is both civilized and cultivated, when they are all found, and are organized by mutual inter-dependence into a System of Society. But where only the six first, which I have marked off by a; and * are found, as in Russia, for instance, such a Nation or Empire does not cease to be in a state of Barbarism, tho’ it may be partially civilized. Nay, a Nation may be in a state of Civility or Civilization throughout, as China seems to be; and yet if the Characters mentioned after the; * are wanting, viz. the development of the 3 principles, by which Human Nature is distinguished from the Brute, and which therefore ought to be developed in all men alike,—I. the Rational, the Moral, and the Religious Principles; 2. Respect and reverential Tenderness toward Women, [and crossed out] or the equal rights, reciprocal Benefits, and mutual Dependence of the Sexes; 3, the exclusive Sovereignty of Law, so that every Individual at the age of reason has a sphere for the exercise of his Free-agency, into which no other Individual is permitted to intrude in all points necessary to his Well-being and Progressive Improvement as a responsible Creature destined for a State after Death—where these three, I say, are wanting in a Nation, let it be as civilized as Taylors, Milliners, Friseurs, Dancing-Masters, Drill-Serjeants, Cooks, Upholsterers &c. can make it, that Nation is still in a state of Barbarism, tho’ the Inhabitants may be civilized Barbarians.
Whatever state is improgressive, so that any regular and constituent Portion of that state (the class of Tillers of the Earth, or the class of Artisans, for instance) remain on the same Grade of Knowledge, Morality and social Comfort in the year 1800 that their Forefathers were in the year 800—much more if this is the case with all classes—that state is Barbarian.…
MS.
Reflect on an original Social Contract, as an incident, or historical and its gross improbability, not to say impossibility, will stare you in the Face. But an ever-originating Social Contract is an Idea, which exists and works continually and efficaciously in the Moral Being of every free Citizen, tho’ in the greater number unconsciously or with a dim and confused consciousness. And what a Power it is! As the vital power compared with the mechanic, as a Father compared with a Moulder in wax or clay, such is the Power of Ideas compared with the Influence of Conceptions and Notions! S. T. C.
MS.
Mendelssohn writes in his Jerusalem, that if religious people disturb the peace, they should be punished for their deeds, not for their opinions.
Coleridge comments: But is not the propagation of principles Subversive of Society itself an Act? Are there none but manual notions? I am convinced that no Theory of Toleration is possible; but that the Practice must depend on Expedience and Humanity. S. T. C.
MS.
Strength may be met with strength; the power of inflicting pain may be baffled by the pride of endurance; the eye of rage may be answered by the stare of defiance, or the downcast look of dark and revengeful resolve; and with all this there is an outward and determined object to which the mind can attach its passions and purposes, and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation of the senses. But who dares struggle with an invisible combatant? with an enemy which exists and makes us know its existence—but where it is, we ask in vain. No space contains it—time promises no control over it—it has no ear for my threats—it has no substance, that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable—it commands and cannot be commanded—it acts and is insusceptible of my re-action—the more I strive to subdue it, the more am I compelled to think of it—and the more I think of it, the more do I find it to possess a reality out of myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination; that all, but the most abandoned men, acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are pledged to support it; and yet that for me its power is the same with that of my own permanent self, and that all the choice, which is permitted to me, consists in having it for my guardian angel or my avenging fiend! This is the spirit of law! the lute of Amphion, the harp of Orpheus! This is the true necessity, which compels man into the social state, now and always, by a still-beginning, never-ceasing, force of moral cohesion.
Thus is man to be governed, and thus only can he be governed.
Friend.
But ask of Italy, and Sicily whether a bad and wicked constitution may not prevent Freedom and all the virtues of Free Men! I respect the Negative Pull-down and Clear-away Principle as little as Steffens. But it does appear to me a strange objection to one who calls aloud for the removal of a river [?] of pestilence or a fever-marsh, that he aims at nothing positive. A nation, that wants to have a weight taken off, and is striving up against it, proves in the very effort the existence of elastic power, einer Federkraft.
To hear Steffens talk, one would imagine that by some preestablished harmony, some new refinement of predestination, a boorly soul was born a Boor—and that all calm and lofty souls entered into the foetuses of future Serene Highnesses.
Oh fie! fie! What other Equality but that which Steffens himself demands, p. 217, 1. 15, do the German patriots require—the equality of power to develop powers, subject to no other checks than the necessity of unequal possessions brings with it. These God knows! are numerous enough and powerful enough—without any wanton additions on the part of the Laws and Governments. In short, I do not know what or whom Steffens is combatting. A Peasant does not wish to be a Lord—no, nor perhaps does he wish to be a Parson or a Doctor, but he would have the soul of a Slave if he did not desire that there should be a possibility of his children or Grand-children becoming such.
MS.
Tetens, in his Philosophische Versuche, in the chapter XIV on human perfectibility argues that there can be despotism enough in ‘free states’, and conversely, freedom enough under an absolute monarchy.
Coleridge comments: If by Monarchies here be meant the union of the legislative and executive supremacy in one only person, this being a mortal and not an angel, I say with regret, and contrary to my custom write it with Ink, that is a Slave’s Sentiment. For political ‘true Freedom’ consists not merely in the enjoyment but in such security of the enjoyment of equal Laws, as human Wisdom can plan and adopt, and human Courage and Patriotism realize. This may be defective; no absolute security may be possible; but the greatest possible has been procured, and what is still more, man has done his Duty. This is the creed of a Freeman, all else is cowardly and slothful Selfishness—a ‘what have I to do with Posterity? What has Posterity done for me?’ Augustus+Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, still better, the Antonines+Caracalla &c!
Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former, we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women have as good a right to vote as men.
Table Talk.
There is observable among the many a false and bastard sensibility that prompts them to remove those evils and those evils alone, which by hideous spectacle or clamorous outcry are present to their senses, and disturb their selfish enjoyments. Other miseries, though equally certain and far more horrible, they not only do not endeavour to remedy—they support, they fatten on them. Provided the dunghill be not before their parlour window, they are well content to know that it exists, and that it is the hot-bed of their pestilent luxuries.—To this grievous failing we must attribute the frequency of wars, and the continuance of the Slave-trade. The merchant finds no argument against it in his ledger: the citizen at the crowded feast is not nauseated by the stench and filth of the slave-vessel—the fine lady’s nerves are not shattered by the shrieks! She sips a beverage sweetened with human blood, even while she is weeping over the refined sorrows of Werther or of Clementina. Sensibility is not benevolence. Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently prevents it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness. Our own sorrows, like the Princes of Hell in Milton’s Pandemonium, sit enthroned ‘bulky and vast’: while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are crowded, an innumerable multitude, into some dark corner of the heart. There is one criterion by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere sensibility—benevolence impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial.
Essays On His Own Times.
Wherein am I made worse by my ennobled neighbour? Do the childish titles of aristocracy detract from my domestic comforts, or prevent my intellectual acquisitions? But those institutions of society which should condemn me to the necessity of twelve hours’ daily toil, would make my soul a slave, and sink the rational being in the mere animal. It is a mockery of our fellow creatures’ wrongs to call them equal in rights, when by the bitter compulsion of their wants we make them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart, or dignify the understanding. Let us not say that this is the work of time—that it is impracticable at present, unless we each in our individual capacities do strenuously and perseveringly endeavour to diffuse among our domestics those comforts and that illumination which far beyond all political ordinances are the true equalizers of men.
We turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of thinking and disinterested patriots. These are the men who have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their self-interest, by the long-continued cultivation of that moral taste which derives our most exquisite pleasures from the contemplation of possible perfection, and proportionate pain from the perception of existing depravation. Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never pause. Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other; as they advance the scene still opens upon them, and they press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around them. Calmness and energy mark all their actions. Convinced that vice originates not in the man, but in the surrounding circumstances; not in the heart, but in the understanding; he is hopeless concerning no one—to correct a vice or generate a virtuous conduct he pollutes not his hands with the scourge of coercion; but by endeavouring to alter the circumstances would remove, or by strengthening the intellect, disarms, the temptation.
Essays On His Own Times.
A Tyrant is only a monstrous Phantasm up-streaming from the grave and corruption of the huddled corses of the self-murdered Virtue and inner freedom of the People, i.e. the Majority of the Citizens of the State.
MS.
What a world of Love and Bee-like Loyalty and Heart-adherence did the Stuarts trick and tyrannize away!
MS.
It is security which distinguishes liberty from a virtuous despotism: and this security never exists unless when the legislative power is in the hands of those, whose worldly self-interests manifestly preponderate in favour of the incorrupt use of it. It has indeed been affirmed, that we are secure with the wealthy: since in impoverishing their country they must injure themselves most of all, and that their wealth lifts them above the reach of temptation. We might quote in answer every page of the history of England for these last hundred years: but supposing the assertion not to have been confuted by facts, we yet deny the probability of it. For first, the taxes are not levied in equal proportions, so that without directly injuring himself a legislator may vote away the pittance of the poor: secondly, where the actual, efficient, independent legislators are so few, and the revenues of government so immense, the administration can always put into a great man’s pocket incalculably more than they take from his estate: thirdly, his wealth so far from lifting him above temptation exposes him to it. A man of large fortune lives in a splendour and luxury, which long habit makes him consider essential to happiness. He has perhaps a number of children, all of whom share his affection equally. He wishes that all his children should continue to live in the style in which they have been brought up, but by the law of primogeniture the eldest only will possess the means of so doing. Hence, he seeks fortunes for the rest in the enormous patronage of the crown. A man of moderate wealth is not exposed to this temptation. His rank does not make industry disgraceful, and by industry all his children may be as well off as their father. Besides (though we would not dispeople St. Stephen’s by such an exclusion-bill, as was passed in the days of Cromwell) yet while gaming is so much the rage, no man can be safely called wealthy, or supposed to be armed against temptation. Thus the actual possessors of power are few, and independent of the people: which is despotism. And the manners of the great are depraved, the sources of corruption incalculable, and consequently the temptations to private and public wickedness numerous and mighty: all which unite in precluding the probability of its proving a virtuous Despotism.
Essays on His Own Times.
When I first heard from Stewart of the Courier that Buonaparte had declared that the interests of small states must always succumb to great ones, I said, “Thank God! he has sealed his fate: from this moment his fall is certain.”
Allsop.
Except that it is convenient for Buonaparte to have eighty places of a thousand a year each at his disposal, we remain wholly in the dark concerning the intention, or possible utility of this new conservative [constitution]. It makes the whole of the political machine, and it can suspend its operations. Other occupation it has none. Like the god of the mechanic materialists, it has no other attributes but those of creation and miracle. The people have no promise or security that it will possess wisdom, talent, or integrity, and no appeal if it possess them not.
It were wasting our readers’ attention to direct it particularly to the other branches of the legislature, the hundred tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and the three hundred legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent. What a ludicrous Purgatory for three hundred Frenchmen! The shamelessness of calling that a legislature which can neither propose nor reason, and whose acts are annullable ad arbitrium, can only be equalled by the exquisite absurdity involved in the very notion of splitting the intellectual faculties, and subdividing the business of thought, almost as curiously as that of a pin manufactory. However, all these different law-manufacturers are well salaried; yet not so as to place them out of the temptation of corruption. Even the chief consul must find it necessary to bribe high to secure his re-election, by influence, by promises, and not improbably by taking the pay of foreign governments. Indeed, never was a government framed which lay so open to corruption, both in itself, and from external powers! There exists no appearance of a preventive, in a nominal legislature, for which no property is requisite, in which no talent can be exerted, and where no popularity can be gained. The whole constitution betrays a rooted contempt of the people, and a distrust of human virtue in general, yet leaves to none, whom it invests with power, any of those common assistants to well doing which the most virtuous man does not profess to deem useless. It has indeed divisions and sub-divisions even to superfluity; but how, under any circumstances these could be a check on each other, or on the consulate, no where appears. It is indeed mere fraud and mockery. Checks and counterpoises can only be produced by real diversity of interests, of interests existing independent of legislative functions; but these chambers are all alike filled with the creatures of the dictator, by him chosen, feeding on his stipends, and acting under his controul. But it cannot last: for to what body of men or species of interest can it appeal for love or protection? Property, talent, popular spirit, the prejudices of the royalist, the priest, and the jacobin, are all injured, insulted, trodden under foot by it. And what are idle promises of individual liberty in a constitution which recognises in the chief consul the right of suspending it ad arbitrium, and which does not recognise in the nation that which is worth a thousand tribunates, that without which no nation can be free or happy under the wisest government, the LIBERTY OF THE PRESS?
Essays On His Own Times.
No individual, Sir, or handful of individuals, whether a regent, a general, or a junta, can be the representative of a public cause in a season of peril and uncertainty—Least of all a general. It is unnatural for individuals to sustain any higher character than that of public functionaries, each in his own department the executor of the national will. As an individual, his character will, however reason and justice may object to this criterion, be affected by the event of his measures, and therefore if he appears as the sole outward representative of the cause, as its visible fountain-head, and yet at the same time the responsible agent in the measures for its protection and promotion, the cause will inevitably be confounded with the measures; and as these will be judged of according to the event, so will the cause likewise. But where there exists a parliament, a congress, or a cortes, the things which are most subject to the caprice of fortune, and the accidents of treason or incapacity, as military expeditions, battles, sieges, &c. are referred to the responsible individuals; while the public body elected by the public will, and the representative of the public cause, remaining distinct from the particular measures, remains aloof from the influence of their results. Nay, the existence of such a body, preserves or recalls the public mind from despondency by presenting always an object of hope to which the people turn for the remedy of calamity and the punishment of misconduct.
During the American war, there was a period of universal consternation; the militia broke up and retired each man to his home, and Washington was almost abandoned. Had there not been a congress, to which the people had delegated the power of the state, whose right to be obeyed their consciences compelled them to admit, a congress whom they had already accustomed themselves to obey; or if that congress had then deserted its post, little would the influences of Washington’s own character have availed in dispelling the panic, or rallying the Americans once more round the standard of independence. The same fortune which suspended his success could have paralysed his authority; those whom he could not induce to remain with their colours, while they were yet embodied under him as their general, he could never have brought back again from their separate homes and hiding-places, as an individual citizen. Washington would probably have perished as the ring-leader of a rebellion, and thousands, who afterwards fought and conquered under the auspices of the ASSEMBLED FATHERS OF THE LAND, thousands, whom he, as servant of the congress, himself afterwards led on to victories, would have anxiously detached their names from him and from the cause, by early submission and compensatory acts of loyalty.
It is not possible, Sir, that any small number of individuals should possess equal means of inspiring the general enthusiasm, of guiding the public opinion, of counteracting the proclamations of the enemy, or the insidious reports of its agents, of rousing, informing, and undeceiving the people, which a large body of representatives will possess, both collectively and as individuals, having each his own sphere of additional influence.
Why need I add the facility which a national assembly affords to the disclosure of great talents, the stimulus it supplies to their exertion, and the opportunity it gives to stirring spirits of reconciling ambition with patriotism and with virtue? or why mention, that their very debates, becoming of necessity the topic of general conversation, and the constant incitement and nourishment of public curiosity, will at length blend the interests of the state with the feelings and concerns of private life, and give the country a place at each domestic fireside? Suffice it to say, Sir, that it is with a national assembly as it is with the common air of heaven. If it be corrupted, it is the sorest visitation of offended Providence: if its equipoise be suddenly and violently destroyed, its tempests are terrifying, and every man has a tale to tell of their fury; but they are purifying likewise, and of that few men think! But in its ordinary and natural state, Sir, it is food to our food, and life to our life: and the very inequalities of its temperature, and the struggles to preserve or restore its balance, are the breezes that fill the sails of the country, and speed the vessel onward in its voyage of industry, or its chase of glory and of vengeance.
Essays on His Own Times.
In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing, that is to say,—the landed, the shopkeeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand.
Undoubtedly it is a great evil that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own?
Table Talk.
I am afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the truth. The mere extension of the franchise is not the evil; I should be glad to see it greatly extended;—there is no harm in that per se; the mischief is that the franchise is nominally extended, but to such classes, and in such a manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and discontenting of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results.
Table Talk.
Under the title, ‘The Thoughts of an Honest Tory, of 1821’, Coleridge transcribed the following:
‘You have here my free Thoughts. I have this peculiarity in my temper, that I am more affected and angry at the Vices and Evil Practices of my own Party, than of the contrary, and I hold myself more obliged to declare against them. And I cannot but think there never was such ground as there is at this time. We used to complain of the Methods and Arts of the Whigs. And we are now combating them with more infamous Weapons than they ever, in my Memory, used against us. We are lamenting the profaneness of others. What greater profaneness is there than to be wicked [in defence of Religion crossed out] for the Church; and to shew our regard for the Church by suffering it to be degraded, I will not say, into a tool of State-policy, but into a play-thing of Passion, a means of announcing and gratifying the personal antipathy and vindictive feelings of an Individual? And what seems a fate upon us, our Wit is dwindled with our Honesty, and our Sense has forsaken us together with our Plain-dealing. I profess to you, I can hardly meet with any one thing writ on our side during the late and present struggle, but what is either noisomely dull, or inhumanly abusive; what is enough to make either the Man very sick or the Christian very melancholy. God help a cause that is supported by such methods!
Thoughts of an Honest Tory of 1710’.
He comments: Were a wise man asked, why he valued History beyond a well-written Romance, the Anabasis, Hellenics, &c. of Xenophon to the Cyropaedia of the same Author, or the Relations of Thuanus to the Argenis of Barclay, he would find himself at a loss to assign any other cause but this: that History, as entitled to the casting Vote in the strife of probabilities, affords an antidote to the delusive influence of the Present on the affections and judgements of men, a standard of admeasurement for supposed Interests, by demonstrating as the one Central Fact, in which all the Lines of Experience meet, the dependence of national Welfare on the fidelity, with which the state has adhered to Principles against the temptations of apparent temporary expedience. I should think the battle half won, were I sure that the very word Principles would be understood.
MS.
But if a readiness to act on mere presumptions of Theory be the error, that most easily besets thinking minds, a blind Faith in false analogies of the Past is often a still worse snare to the unthinking, who are too willing to consider what they chuse to call Experience as a cheap Substitute for the necessity of Thought altogether.
MS.
The ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been), agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit, a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances, without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the Revolution, but remained Tories as before.
I have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on Whiggism, from Dryden’s Achitophel (Shaftesbury), the first Whig, (for, with Dr. Johnson’s leave, the devil is no such cattle) down to ——, who, I trust, in God’s mercy to the interests of peace, union, and liberty in this nation, will be the last. In it I would take the last years of Queen Anne’s reign as the zenith, or palmy state, of Whiggism in its divinest avatar of common sense, or of the understanding, vigorously exerted in the right direction on the right and proper objects of the understanding; and would then trace the rise, the occasion, the progress, and the necessary degeneration of the Whig spirit of compromise, even down to the profound ineptitudes of their party in these days. A clever fellow might make something of this hint. How Asgill would have done it!
Table Talk.
Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. I quite calculate on my being one day or other holden in worse repute by many Christians than the Unitarians and open infidels. It must be undergone by every one who loves the truth for its own sake beyond all other things.
Table Talk.
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives, is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!
Table Talk
But on the supposition that by a perpetual continuance of the war, or by a restoration of despotism, or by any other means, we could be and remain the monopolists of the commerce of Europe, is it quite ascertained, that it would be a real national advantage? Is it quite certain, that the condition and morals of the lower and more numerous classes would not be progressively deteriorated? Is it quite certain, that it would not give such a superiority to the moneyed interest of the country over the landed, as might be fatal to our constitution? Has not the hereditary possession of landed estate been proved, by experience, to generate dispositions equally favourable to loyalty and established freedom? Has not the same experience proved that the moneyed men are far more malleable materials? that ministers find more and more easy ways of obliging them, and that they are more willing to go with a minister through evil and good? Our commerce has been, it is said, nearly trebled since the war; is the nation at large the happier? Have the schemes of internal navigation, and of rendering waste lands useful, proceeded with their former energy? Or have not loans and other ministerial job-work created injurious and perhaps vicious objects for moneyed speculations?—And what mean these Committees for the labouring poor? These numerous soupestablishments? These charities so kindly and industriously set on foot through the whole kingdom? All these are highly honourable to the rich of this country! But are they equally honourable to the nation at large?—Is that a genuine prosperity, in which healthy labourers are commonly styled ‘the labouring poor’, and industrious manufacturers obliged to be fed, like Roman clients, or Neapolitan Lazzaroni? It was well said of revolutions,
In principatu commutando civium
Nil praeter domini nomen mutant pauperes.
And other goodly names, besides that of Liberty, have had still worse effects.
Finally, commerce is the blessing and pride of this country. It is necessary, as a stimulus to the agriculture which sustains, and as the support of the navy which defends, us; but let us not forget that commerce is still no otherwise valuable than as the means to an end, and ought not itself to become the end, to which nobler and more inherent blessings are to be forced into subserviency.
Essays on His Own Times.
L’Estrange translates from the French of Thevenot: The Turks shave their heads, and think it strange that the Francks suffer their Hair to grow; for they say that the Devil nestles in it; so that they are not subject to that filth and nastiness which breed among our Hair, if we be not careful to comb it well.
Coleridge comments: This is worth the notice of a Writer who should wish to give the History of the Progress of Civilization.—This was written about 160 years from the present Date, 1814. England at that time even, had advanced beyond all other nations, as may be proved by the Disgust manifested by the English at the Lousiness of the Scotch who came with James I. Yet even now Portugal, Naples, Sicily, are little better.
MS.
Those who argue that England may safely depend upon a supply of foreign corn, if it grow none or an insufficient quantity of its own, forget that they are subjugating the necessaries of life itself to the mere luxuries or comforts of society. Is it not certain that the price of corn abroad will be raised upon us as soon as it is once known that we must buy?—and when that fact is known, in what sort of a situation shall we be? Besides this, the argument supposes that agriculture is not a positive good to the nation, taken in and by itself, as a mode of existence for the people, which supposition is false and pernicious; and if we are to become a great horde of manufacturers, shall we not, even more than at present, excite the ill will of all the manufacturers of other nations? It has been already shown, in evidence which is before all the world, that some of our manufacturers have acted upon the accursed principle of deliberately injuring foreign manufactures, if they can, even to the ultimate disgrace of the country and loss to themselves.
Table Talk.
There exists in England a gentlemanly character, a gentlemanly feeling, very different even from that, which is the most like it, the character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of Europe. This feeling probably originated, in the fortunate circumstance, that the titles of our English nobility follow the law of their property, and are inherited by the eldest sons only. From this source, under the influences of our constitution and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in different modifications through the whole country. The uniformity of our dress among all classes above that of the day labourer, while it has authorized all classes to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same time inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly, the most commonly received attribute of which character is a certain generosity in trifles. On the other hand, the encroachments of the lower classes on the higher, occasioned and favoured by this resemblance in exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have rendered each class more reserved and jealous in their general communion, and far more than our climate, or natural temper, have caused that haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanor, which is so generally complained of among foreigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the value of this gentlemanly feeling: I respect it under all its forms and varieties, from the House of Commons to the gentlemen in the one shilling gallery. It is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but it is a wretched substitute for it. Its worth, as a moral good, is by no means in proportion to its value, as a social advantage. These observations are not irrelevant: for to the want of reflection, that this diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of our moral excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar to England; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and uncharitable to expect the same consequences, where the same causes have not existed to produce them: and, lastly, to our proneness to regard the absence of this character (which, as I have before said, does, for the greater part, and, in the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or national worth; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large portion of that conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of countries conquered or appropriated by Great Britain, doubtful whether the various solid advantages which they derived from our protection and just government were not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings and prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanor of the English as individuals.
Friend.
I must say I cannot see much in Captain B. Hall’s account of the Americans, but weaknesses—some of which make me like the Yankees all the better. How much more amiable is the American fidgettiness and anxiety about the opinion of other nations, and especially of the English, than the John Bullism, which affects to despise the sentiments of the rest of the world.
Table Talk.
I deeply regret the anti-American articles of some of the leading reviews. The Americans regard what is said of them in England a thousand times more than they do any thing said of them in any other country. The Americans are excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never forgive or forget any slight or abuse. It would be better for them if they were a trifle thicker-skinned.
The last American war was to us only something to talk of read about; but to the Americans it was the cause of misery in their own homes.
I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood,—identity in these makes men of one country.
Table Talk.
It required all the frenzy and all the stupidity of Madness and Ideotcy conjoined [in ‘our miserable Ministry’] to have separated the American States from us. Good Heavens! read the history of that war! But more of this at some future time. I am deeply convinced that as soon as a Colony can maintain itself, the Mother Country ought to make it an equal, true, integral part of herself and give to it all the privileges, it could enjoy as an independent State. That we do not do so, arises entirely from mistaken views on the Subject of Revenue.… Americans ought to have been as independent as Members of the B[ritish] Emp[ire], as they now are. They are now members of a department, which is a component part of a State, which is a component part of an Empire: and even so ought they to have been, and so they might have been tho’ there had been no disjunction from G[reat] Britain.
MS.
The possible destiny of the United States of America,—as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen,—stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.
Table Talk.
If any modification of the Union takes place, I trust it will be a total divorce a vinculo matrimonii. I am sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. Let us have no silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the union.
I am deliberately of opinion, that England, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with Ireland. My only difficulty is as to the Protestants, to whom we owe protection. But I cannot forget that the Protestants themselves have greatly aided in accelerating the present horrible state of things, by using that as a remedy and a reward which should have been to them an opportunity.
If the Protestant Church in Ireland is removed, of course the Romish Church must be established in its place. There can be no resisting it in common reason.
__________________________
How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man—but one really great man,—who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! But truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly perisheth. See how triumphant in debate and in action O’Connell is! Why? Because he asserts a broad principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. Our ministers—true Whigs in that,—have faith in nothing but expedients de die in diem. Indeed, what principles of government can they have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this and that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in pique at a parliamentary defeat?
__________________________
I sometimes think it just possible that the Dissenters may once more be animated by a wiser and nobler spirit, and see their dearest interest in the church of England as the bulwark and glory of Protestantism, as they did at the Revolution. But I doubt their being able to resist the low factious malignity to the church, which has characterized them as a body for so many years.
Table Talk.
What a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo, and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian politics.
Table Talk.
Well-fermented wine carried into a place where new wine is ferment [ing], will ferment afresh. English in France.
MS.
Göttingen had been a considerable town long before George the Second made it a university—So early as 1475 there was calculated to be 800 Master Manufacturers of Cloth and Stuffs. Before the year 1400 it had been admitted into the Hanseatic League, and remained in it till the year 1572. But both town and manufactory received injuries in the famous Thirty Years War, from which it has never recovered. A Sovereign Prince in order to establish a University in his Dominions must receive the imperial Privilege: this privilege George the IInd received from the Emperor Charles VIth; Jan. 13th 1733. The university commenced in October 1731 and having been presented with complete rights of Jurisdiction distinct from the civil power and dependent only on the Government, it was solemnly consecrated 17th Sept. 1737. From the name of its founder it is called The Georgia Augusta University; and the King of England is always the Rector Magnificentissimus.
The Prorector is elected annually from out of the ordinary Professors—or rather they take it by turns. During this office he is an Imperial Count Palatine, and as such has the right (I quote from the charter) ‘to nominate notaries and laureate Poets, to legitimate Bastards, restore their honour to the Infamous’, &c &c.…
A Professor is one who has received from the Government and University that especial Degree—which authorizes him to teach publicly in the particular department or faculty, of which he is a professor. The ordinary Professors, (Professores Ordinarii) are not only authorized to read lectures, but are salaried by the Government to do so. Since the founding of this University it has had a succession of the most eminent men in Germany as its ordinary Professors—among which the names of Mosheim, Gesner, Haller, Michaelis, Pütter, Kästner, Heyne, Letz or Less, Blumenbach, Lichtenburg, Planck, Eichhorn, Meiners and Jacobi are as well known to the Literati throughout Europe, as to their own countrymen.
The Professors are divided into four Faculties,—the theological, consisting of 3 and sometimes 4 members, 2 The Jurists, of 4 members, The Medicinists of 3 and the Philosophers of 8—sum total 18 or 19. These are the Professors ordinarii—the number of those who can teach but are not appointed to do so, is in each faculty indefinite. The Professores ordinarii of the first faculty in all processions &c wear a black robe, of the second a light Scarlet, of the third a deep Red—and the Philosophers march in Purple—with drum, fife and trumpet too! too! too!
… [Unfinished, and page torn.]
MS.
FRENCH, ENGLISH, GERMAN AND SCOTCH
I have been in the habit of considering the qualities of intellect, the comparative eminence in which characterizes individuals and even countries, under four kinds—GENIUS, TALENT, SENSE, and CLEVERNESS. The first I use in the sense of most general acceptance, as the faculty which adds to the existing stock of power and knowledge by new views, new combinations; (by discoveries not accidental but anticipated, or resulting from anticipation1). In short, I define GENIUS, as originality in intellectual construction: the moral accompaniment, and actuating principle of which consists, perhaps, in the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.
By TALENT, on the other hand, I mean the comparative facility of acquiring, arranging, and applying the stock furnished by others and already existing in books or other conservatories of intellect.
By SENSE I understand that just balance of the faculties which is to the judgment what health is to the body. The mind seems to act en masse by a synthetic rather than an analytic process: even as the outward senses, from which the metaphor is taken, perceive immediately, each as it were by a peculiar tact or intuition, without any consciousness of the mechanism by which the perception is realized. This is often exemplified in well-bred, unaffected, and innocent women. I know a lady, on whose judgment, from constant experience of its rectitude, I could rely almost as on an oracle. But when she has sometimes proceeded to a detail of the grounds and reasons for her opinion, then, led by similar experience, I have been tempted to interrupt her with—‘I will take your advice,’ or, ‘I shall act on your opinion: for I am sure you are in the right. But as to the fors and becauses, leave them to me to find out.’ The general accompaniment of Sense is a disposition to avoid extremes, whether in theory or in practice, with a desire to remain in sympathy with the general mind of the age or country, and a feeling of the necessity and utility of compromise. If Genius be the initiative, and Talent the administrative, Sense is the conservative, branch in the intellectual republic.
By CLEVERNESS (which I dare not with Dr. Johnson call a low word, while there is a sense to be expressed which it alone expresses) I mean a comparative readiness in the invention and use of means, for the realizing of objects and ideas—often of such ideas, which the man of genius only could have originated, and which the clever man perhaps neither fully comprehends nor adequately appreciates, even at the moment that he is prompting or executing the machinery of their accomplishment. In short, Cleverness is a sort of genius for instrumentality. It is the brain in the hand. In literature Cleverness is more frequently accompanied by wit, Genius and Sense by humour.
If I take the three great countries of Europe, in respect of intellectual character, namely, Germany, England, and France, I should characterize them thus—premising only that in the first line of the first two tables I mean to imply that Genius, rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances equally numerous; (not, therefore, contra-distinguishing either from the other, but both from the third country. We can scarcely avoid considering a Cervantes and Calderon as in some sort characteristic of the nation which produced them. In the last war we felt it in the hope, which the recollection of these names inspired. But yet it cannot, equally with the qualities placed as second and third in each table, be called a national characteristic; though, in the appropriation of these likewise, we refer exclusively to the intellectual portion of each country1).
GERMANY. |
ENGLAND. |
FRANCE. |
GENIUS, |
GENIUS, |
CLEVERNESS, |
TALENT, |
SENSE, |
TALENT, |
FANCY.* |
HUMOUR. |
WIT. |
So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the qualities manifest themselves intellectually.
GERMANY. |
ENGLAND. |
FRANCE. |
IDEA, or LAW |
LAW discovered, |
THEORY invented, anticipated, |
TOTALITY, |
SELECTION, |
PARTICULARITY, |
DISTINCTNESS. |
CLEARNESS. |
PALPABILITY. |
Lastly, we might exhibit the same qualities in their moral, religious, and political manifestations: in the cosmopolitism of Germany, the contemptuous nationality of the Englishman, and the ostentatious and boastful nationality of the Frenchman. The craving of sympathy marks the German: inward pride the Englishman: vanity the Frenchman. So again, enthusiasm, visionariness seems the tendency of the German: zeal, zealotry of the English; fanaticism of the French. But the thoughtful reader will find these and many other characteristic points contained in, and deducible from the relations which the mind of the three countries bears to TIME.
GERMANY. |
ENGLAND. |
FRANCE. |
PAST and FUTURE. |
PAST and PRESENT. |
THE PRESENT. |
A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, however, to the period since the union) as a dull Frenchman and a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid exceptions of Hume, Robertson, Smollett, Reid, Thompson (if this last instance be not objected to as favouring of geographical pedantry, that truly amiable man and genuine poet having been born but a few furlongs from the English border), Dugald Stewart, Burns, Walter Scott, Hogg and Campbell—not to mention the very numerous physicians and prominent dissenting ministers, born or bred beyond the Tweed—I hesitate in recording so wild an opinion, which derives its plausibility, chiefly from the circumstance so honourable to our northern sister, that Scotchmen generally have more, and a more learned, education than the same ranks in other countries, below the first class; but in part likewise, from the common mistake of confounding the general character of an emigrant, whose objects are in one place and his best affections in another, with the particular character of a Scotchman: to which we may add, perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial literature, fostered undoubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scotland, and of which therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but is far from being a solitary, instance.
Friend.
Monday Night, 20 Decr 1830.
Mem. A Society for opposing National Antipathies, and the discouragement of all writings (ex.gr. Quarterly Review) tending to kindle or feed hostile and contemptuous feelings between the Members of the same Christendom and for the promotion of mutual Love, esteem and instruction. The maxim of the Society to be—It is impossible, that any Nation in that state of advancement, in which France, N. America and G. Britain exist, can have any true interest which is not the interest of the other and of the whole civilized world. Likewise, that the better time will come, when a different Government will no longer be supposed to constitute or imply a different Nation or Country—but Laws, Manners, Religion and Language. And further, that the three first are all tending to become more and more one and the same throughout Christendom, with no greater or more essential differences than now prevail in different Districts of the same Country, not so great as the differences between different Counties of England were in the reign of Elizabeth. And even with Language it will be as with Money: there will be a Gold and Silver, that however stamped, will pass according to its weight in all countries, tho’ each nation will retain paper and the baser metals for their every day marketing.
Likewise, a British and Foreign Human Society of Science and Literature, whose Duty it would be to watch over, record, and make known Works and Discoveries, where ever published, and as soon as published to form a center [sic] of Correspondence for the Man of Genius and Science in all countries &c. With such a Society it would not have been possible for the French to have so successfully and systematically palmed the labors and discoveries of Sweden, Denmark and Germany as their own new Lights.
Their Proceedings would form a Review or Magazine. But no mere Review-Editor or Publisher can be equal to the functions of a respectable Society. I see at present no reason why this latter should not be one with the former—or one of Bureaus. The Human Society for the Defence, Extension and Advancement of the Humanities—i.e. of whatever being common to cultivated Man, and the ground-work and precondition of his rights and duties, as the Member of a particular State, contra-distinguish Man from the [irrational crossed out] Animals and in Man himself his human from his animal Nature. Vide J. H. Green’s concluding Lectures of his great course of philosophical Zoology, Zoography and Zoogony.
MS.
The sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it. What can an English minister abroad really want but an honest and bold heart, a love for his country and the ten commandments? Your art diplomatic is stuff—no truly great man now would negotiate upon any such shallow principles.
Table Talk.
The nature of a government, considered simply and in itself, is no argument either for or against the possibility of peace with it. Let the Emperor of Russia be as wise, as righteous, as heroic a monarch as our minister has chosen to paint him, still, however, no Englishman but would shudder at the Russian form of government, if it were introduced into England. Yet, who is mad enough to deem this an objection against our alliance with the Emperor of Russia? The French tolerate atheism and deism; the Emperor of China tolerates both, and idolatry to boot—and yet we send flattering embassies to him. We have made treaties with the Arch-pirate of Algiers, and with the Delai Lama of Thibet. And why? Because we have nothing to do with the wickedness or absurdity of a government, except as far as they are dangerous to ourselves. What are the present principles of the French government? Those of a military oligarchy, equally abhorred by every party in this country, and concerning the propagation of which it were idiotcy to entertain any alarm. It were a paradox too bold even for ministerial sophistry, that Jacobinism in England is to be destroyed by making war on a government which is itself exerting a tyranny to destroy it in France. The truth is, that whatever nomenclature the French Executive may adopt, France itself has fallen back into its ancient character of an ambitious, intriguing military power; and its ambition is to be guarded against by this country equally under a monarchy as a republic. But ambition forms no reason against fair negotiations for peace, which, if once concluded, would be found the securest provision against it.
Essays On His Own Times.
The French have broken treaties; we, therefore, can make no treaties with the French. But did not all our allies, at the commencement of the war, enter into solemn treaties not to lay down arms but by mutual consent? And did they not all break this treaty? What is the whole history of modern Europe, but a succession of wars, originating in broken treaties? It is absurd to apply that against a treaty of peace with one country, which does not apply against even a treaty of alliance with all other countries; and yet, as Mr. Fox well observed, the moral character of our friends and fellow labourers is assuredly of more importance to us than that of those whom we wish only not to be our enemies. Let any man mention any act of folly, treachery, or oppression in the French Republic, and we pledge ourselves to find a fellow to it in our own allies, or in the history of the line of princes, upon the restoration of whom an honourable peace is now made to depend. To us the turn of the debate on Monday is matter of hope and exultation. The harangues of the ministers were absolute confessions of weakness. Long and tedious details of French aggressions, which, if they had been as fair and accurate as they were false and partial, would still prove nothing; violent personalities on Bonaparte, and as violent panegyrics on the superior science, talents, and humanity of the conqueror of Warsaw and Ismail; and the old delusive calculations about French resources, calculations always accompanied by prophecies, which prophecies have been always, even to a laughable degree, falsified: these formed the substance and contents of the ministerial orations. More than one half of Mr. Pitt’s speech was consumed in the old re-repeated tale of the origin of the war. This can be nothing more than an appeal to passion. For let us suppose for a moment, that we and not the French were the aggressors, the unprovoked aggressors; that they were innocent, and we guilty—yet how would this affect the subject of peace? Is any man so contemptibly ignorant of the rules and first foundations of State morality, as to affirm that because our Ministers had entered into a war knavishly, that therefore the people were bound in honour or honesty to conclude a peace ruinously? The interest of nations, the true interest, is and ought to be the sole guide in national concerns; and all besides is puerile declamation, only serviceable as covering a defeat, and preventing the appearance of an absolute rout, such as would have been implied in silence. What two nations were ever at war, and did not obstinately charge the aggression, each on the other? Has not this been matter of course since the time that the introduction of the Christian religion has made the governors of mankind afraid to state conquest or glory as their motives? And to adduce this as a political reason against the propriety of concluding a peace, or even of entering on a negotiation!
Essays On His Own Times.
The Crusades were as favourable in their effects, as they were honourable in their causes. Then first did Europe feel, and become conscious of the blessing of a common religion, and of civil institutions, differing only as the branches of one family, ‘qualis decet esse sororum’. The warriors brought back from the holy land imaginations highly excited, minds enlarged by the contemplation of a scenery and of customs so new to them, and manners polished beyond the experience of former ages. A new aera commenced in the world; a new sun rose on our social habits, on the tone of governments, and on the nature of our literature. The monkish legend and obsolete miracle gave way to Knights, and Giants, and Genii; and enthusiasm and imagination, mutually feeding each other, were brought to act on the side of gentleness and public justice. Unless therefore it shall be admitted, that Suwarrow and his Russians have returned home poets and gentlemen; or that our Bond-street officers have been transmuted, by the alchemy of our expeditions, into the chaste, gentle, and sober knights of ancient chivalry; let us call the present war anything: ONLY NOT A CRUSADE.
These Crusades were likewise the parents of all the freedom which now exists in Europe. The pecuniary distresses of the monarchs and nobles compelled them to part with many and various privileges; the anarchy, which prevailed during their absence, procured to the lower classes many others. Commerce was diverted from the Venetian and Genoese monopolisers; and there began to arise in all countries, but more especially in England, that greatest blessing and ornament of human nature, an important and respectable middle class. The monarch became more an officer, and less a person; the nobility were seen gradually to draw nearer to the class of the people; and long before the first dawn of religious reformation, the poetic genius imported from the last had prepared the way for it, by continued and successful satires on the absurdities and crimes of the Priesthood. Unless therefore it be admitted that the direct object of the present war is to lay the foundations of a greater freedom than we before enjoyed; unless it be admitted, that it has tended to prevent commerce from being a monopoly of one nation; unless it be granted, that it, viz. this present war, spite of the assessed and income taxes, is peculiarly favourable to the increase and permanence of a middle class; that it militates against all attachment to kings as persons, and nobles as privileged classes; and to the Roman Catholic superstitions, as absurdities; unless all this be conceded by the friends of Freedom let them call the present war any thing: ONLY NOT A CRUSADE.
Essays On His Own Times.
In former wars the victims of ambition had crowded to the standard from the influence of national antipathies; but this powerful stimulant has been so unceasingly applied, as to have well nigh produced an exhaustion. What remains? Hunger. Over a recruiting place in this city I have seen pieces of beef hung up to attract the half-famished mechanic. It has been said that government though not the best preceptor of virtue procures us security from the attack of the lower orders.—Alas! why should the lower orders attack us, but because they are brutalized by ignorance and rendered desperate by want? And does government remove this ignorance by education? And does not government increase their want by taxes?—Taxes rendered necessary by those national assassinations called wars, and by that worst corruption and perjury, which a reverend moralist has justified under the soft title of ‘secret influence!’ The poor infant born in an English or Irish hovel breathes indeed the air and partakes of the light of Heaven; but of its other bounties he is disinherited. The powers of intellect are given him in vain: to make him work like a brute beast he is kept as ignorant as a brute beast. It is not possible that this despised and oppressed man should behold the rich and idle, without malignant envy. And if in the bitter cravings of hunger the dark tide of passions should swell, and the poor wretch rush from despair into guilt, then the government indeed assumes the right of punishment though it had neglected the duty of instruction, and hangs the victim for crimes, to which its own wide-wasting follies and its own most sinful omissions had supplied the cause and the temptation. And yet how often have the fierce bigots of despotism told me, that the poor are not to be pitied, however great their necessities: for if they be out of employ, the king wants men! They may be shipped off to the slaughter-house abroad, if they wish to escape a prison at home!—Fools! to commit robberies and get hung, when they might fight for their king and country,—yea, and have sixpence a day into the bargain!
Essays On His Own Times.
Poor-laws are the inevitable accompaniments of an extensive commerce and a manufacturing system. In Scotland, they did without them, till Glasgow and Paisley became great manufacturing places, and then people said, ‘We must subscribe for the poor, or else we shall have poor-laws.’ That is to say, they enacted for themselves a poor-law in order to avoid having a poor-law enacted for them. It is absurd to talk of Queen Elizabeth’s act as creating the poor-laws of this country. The poor-rates are the consideration paid by, or on behalf of, capitalists for having labour at demand. It is the price, and nothing else. The hardship consists in the agricultural interest having to pay an undue proportion of the rates; for although, perhaps, in the end, the land becomes more valuable, yet, at the first, the landowners have to bear all the brunt. I think there ought to be a fixed revolving period for the equalization of rates.
Table Talk.
I sincerely wish to preserve a decent quiet on Sunday. I would prohibit compulsory labour, and put down operas, theatres, etc., for this plain reason—that if the rich be allowed to play, the poor will be forced, or, what comes to the same thing, will be induced, to work. I am not for a Paris Sunday. But to stop coaches, and let the gentleman’s carriage run, is monstrous.
Table Talk,
REMARKS … ON SIR ROBERT PEEL’S BILL
In drawing up the following considerations, which we now respectfully submit to you, we have been most anxious to avoid every unnecessary encroachment on your time and attention. For this reason we offer no reply to the assertion hazarded by the opponents of Sir R. Peel’s Bill, that Children from six to sixteen years of age, who are kept at work, standing, from thirteen to fifteen hours in the twenty-four, in a heated and polluted atmosphere, are healthier and happier than those who are employed in trades where the said grievances do not exist; and in a still greater degree ‘better off’, than Children who remain at home, or follow their fathers into the fields. It appears superfluous to confute a statement, the truth of which would imply one or the other of two things. Either all the opinions, concerning the laws of animal life, which have been hitherto received by mankind as undoubted truths, must be false: or else there is a continued interference of a miraculous power suspending and counteracting those laws, in mark of God’s especial favour toward the Cotton Factories. In fact, some of our opponents themselves seem disposed to abandon their own assertions. If, however, any reply be required, it has been already given in the numerous testimonials in proof of the very contrary, from the most respectable medical men, clergymen, disinterested visitors of the Sunday Schools, and other residents of the town and neighbourhood of Manchester. These, whose veracity as witnesses none dare impeach, whose competence as judges, the interested only will have the hardihood to question, have attested the actual existence of certain facts, with a force and minuteness which would have sufficed to establish the same, had they been improbable—how much more then of the facts, on which the present measure is grounded! Facts, which on the first hearing of the circumstances, under which the children are placed, would be foretold as the inevitable results of such circumstances without hesitation and previous to any testimony.
Of a far more formidable character (if not in themselves, yet on account of the impression, they appear to have made) are the objections to the measure, drawn from the impropriety of legislative interference with free labour; from the danger of beginning a course of innovation, without any certainty at what point it may stop, and thus of encouraging an endless succession of claims; from the inadequacy of the measures proposed to the removal of the evil, while by attracting attention to the same, and by the excitement of hopes that are incompatible with the present state of society, and with the indispensable conditions of a commercial and manufacturing nation, they are calculated to increase discontent in a greater degree than they can be expected to palliate the grievance; and lastly that what can be done toward the removal of the evil can be best brought about by the master manufacturers themselves, as the individuals, and that from the humane spirit of this enlightened age, and the consequent growth and increasing influence of an enlightened self-interest, we may rest assured, that the said individuals will gradually more and more attempt to do what they alone can do effectually.
In these four objections, we apprehend, the whole strength of our opponents’ reasonings is comprised; and we flatter ourselves that we have not detracted from their full force in the above recapitulation. Now in reply to the first, namely, the impropriety of legislative interference with free labour, we might fairly enquire on what grounds is this impropriety presumed? Certainly not on past experience, or the practice of the British Constitution; the Statute Books are (perhaps too much) crowded with proofs to the contrary. The first institution, by law, of Apprenticeships was an interference with free labour, and still more so the various clauses that regulate the time, privileges, etc., of the individuals, in many cases controlling the power of masters, as well as the employment of the free labour of adults, however skilful, who had not been previously bound to the trade. The recent regulations of the labour to be required from the apprentices are still more unfavourable to the presumption. For these regulations do in many instances directly interfere with the free labour of the journeymen employed with the apprentices. Whether this is desirable or no, is not the question. Yet we live in an age the events of which may pardonably suggest the recollection that the states and countries which have been most prosperous in trade and commerce, and at the same time most remarkable for the industry, morality and public spirit of the inhabitants, as Great Britain, Holland, the Hanseatic and other free towns of Germany, have been governed and regulated by a system of law and policy in almost direct opposition to the so-called Physiocratic Principles of more modern Political Economists. The result of their adoption in France under all the revolutionary schemes, but with more especial predilection under the last Government, does not tend to weaken any doubts which our historic recollections may have excited.
But if this objection to interference in free labour can derive no sanction from the practice of the Legislature, still less can it appeal to the principles and spirit of the British Constitution: and pardon us, if we add, God forbid, that it should! Only under a military despotism, entitled to dispense with it at all times for its own purposes, could such a principle be even partially realized; and then only when it was the object of the Government to reduce all classes to insignificance but those of soldiers and agriculturists. The principle of all constitutional law is to make the claims of each as much as possible compatible with the claims of all, as individuals, and with those of the commonweal as a whole; and out of this adjustment the claims of the individual first become Rights. Every Canal Bill proves that there is no species of property which the legislature does not possess and exercise the right of controlling and hmiting, as soon as the right of the individuals is shown to be disproportionately injurious to the community. But that the contra bonos mores, the subversion of morals, is deemed in our laws a public injury, it would be superfluous to demonstrate.
But free Labour!—in what sense, not utterly sophistical, can the labour of children, extorted from the want of their parents, ‘their poverty, but not their will, consenting’, be called free? A numerous body of these very parents are among the petitioners for the measure though at the foreseen diminution of their profits. In what fair sense then can this be called free Labour? The argument comes to this point. Has it or has it not been proved that the common results of the present system of labour in the Cotton Factories is disease of the most painful and wasting kinds, and too often a premature death? This, we repeat, has been fully proved. Would that the opponents of the measure were confined to those who still pretend to doubt the truth of the facts. We are anxious to avoid every invidious remark; but we dare not on so awful a subject soften truth down into falsehood. It is our duty to declare aloud, that if the labour were indeed free, the employer would purchase, and the labourer sell, what the former has no right to buy, and the latter no right to dispose of: namely, the labourer’s health, life and well-being. These belong not to himself alone, but to his friends, to his parents, to his King, to his Country, and to God. If the labour were indeed free, the contract would approach, on the one side, too near to suicide, on the other to manslaughter. The objection therefore would far better suit those who maintain the existence of rights, self-originated and independent of duties, than English subjects who pretend to no rights that do not refer to some duty as their origin and true foundation.
But the main ground of opposition to the Bill, it is said, rests on its interference with the labour of the adults, which cannot go on without that of the Children. But it has been shown, by a reference to the acts regulating the employment of apprentices, which acts forbid the period of their labour to exceed a limited time, that this objection has been laid before Parliament already, and over-ruled as invalid. And at whose request, and in behalf of whom is it again brought forward? Is it that of the adults themselves? So far from it, these very adults are among the most earnest petitioners that the Bill should pass. Their hearts, their prayers, their convictions derived from their own daily experience, are all with us. No small number of the petitioners are themselves parents of the children. Their profits therefore are exposed to a double diminution. Yet they are prepared, they are eager to incur this risk, rather than continue eyewitnesses of the children’s sufferings during the latter hours of their daily labour, rather than have to watch their decay and forebode their too probable perdition, VOLENTI NULLA FIT INJURIA. The adults solicit a boon: and is the very contrary to be forced upon them as a benefit? Are the objectors certain that these clients of their own making are at all ambitious for the privilege of having their labour protected against all legislative protection?
To the second objection there needs no better reply than that of Sir Robert Peel, the more than mere disinterested originator of the Bill in question. What are these claims, with an endless succession of which you threaten us, as the consequence of conceding the present? If they are equally just, if the grievances that justify them are as heavy, and if the proposed remedy be attended with no greater inconvenience, in God’s name let them be conceded! And if they are not such, the passing of the present Bill can form no precedent. To this plain and manly argument we can add nothing. But we may properly carry on the question. From what quarters are these apprehended claims to proceed? What trades are there in which children from six to sixteen years of age are kept at work, standing, from thirteen to fifteen hours, in a foul air artificially heated? But we ask in vain. Here as elsewhere we are left in the dark, menaced by generalities to which each man’s fancy is to assign ‘a local habitation and a name’.
This our reply to the second objection is equally valid as applied to the third—namely, that the proposed plan is a mere palliative better calculated to excite discontent in the sufferers, than to effect any considerable diminution of the evil. This plea has been, we repeat, confuted for the greater part by anticipation. It deserves however some distinct notice as being one of the approved means of reconciling indolence and selfishness with the warmest pretensions not only to humanity but to sensibility. But we feel convinced that the objectors themselves would shrink back from so weak and wicked a doctrine, as:—that we are to do nothing of what we can, because we cannot do all that we would wish. Who, we would ask, are to be the judges whether the proposed measures will or will not be a serious diminution of the sufferings and evils complained of? Whether it will or will not be received as a boon from their highest earthly guardian, for which the receivers not only are bound, but are disposed, to be most grateful? Surely, either the sufferers or their parents and nearest relatives. But the latter are among the most earnest petitioners for this Bill: and if the tender age of the former precludes, or would throw suspicion on, any petition from themselves, we have here too as in the intrepid assertions of their superior health and happiness, a safe appeal to common sense. Who does not know that in a journey too long for the traveller’s strength, it is the last few miles that torment him by fatigue and injure him by exhaustion? Must not the anticipation of the recurrence weigh on his spirits at every recommencement of the same task? Must not the sufferings, which the close of the day are sure to bring with it, cast a gloom over the morning and noon? Suppose him suddenly informed that his journey was shortened by a fourth of the length. Will he not move forward with a brisk step like a man renovated? But this, though a fair illustration, is a tame and most inadequate analogy. The traveller still enjoys the pure air, is refreshed by the breezes, amused by the succession of objects, every change of the muscles called into action is a species of repose, and the very activity itself tends in some measure to suspend the consciousness and counteract the effects of the action. Substitute a child employed on tasks the most opposite to all its natural instincts, were it only from their improgressive and wearying uniformity—in a heated stifling impure atmosphere, fevered by noise and glare, both limbs and spirits outwearied—and that, at the tenth hour, he has still three, four, or five hours more to look forward to. Will he, will the poor little sufferer, be brought to believe that these hours are mere trifles—or the privilege of going home not worth his thanks? Generalities are apt to deceive us. Individualise the sufferings which it is the object of this Bill to remedy, follow up the detail in some one case with a human sympathy, and the deception vanishes.
But we hasten to the fourth and last objection, namely, that the reform of all these grievances may be safely trusted in these enlightened times to the good sense and humanity of the masters themselves. This is, doubtless, highly flattering to the present age, and still more so to that which is to follow. It is, however, sufficient for us to have proved that it remains a mere assertion, and that up to this very hour the asserted increase of humane feeling and enlightened self-interest has produced no such effects as are here so confidently promised, have exerted no adequate counteraction to the keen stimulants of immediate profit, and the benumbing influences of custom and example. Nay, it is notorious that within the last twenty years the time and quantum of the labour extorted from the children has been increasing. The growth of the sciences among the few, and the consequent increase of the conveniences of life among the people at large, are, however, far from necessarily implying an enlightened age in that sense which alone applies to the case in question. There are few who are not enlightened enough to understand their duties, few but must wink hard not to see the path laid out for them. Something else is wanted here, the warmth to impel, and not the knowledge to guide. The age had been complimented with the epithets of enlightened, humane, etc., years before the abolition of the Slave Trade. And was that Trade abolished at last by the increasing humanity, the enlightened self-interest, of the slave owners? As far as the parties immediately interested are concerned, dare our Legislators even now trust to these influences? The Bills passed and the one now before the House, concerning the Slave Trade, are the best reply.
Anxiously have we wished to avoid every invidious remark. But we should be treacherous to the measure, of which we are the earnest, though humble, advocates, if we left wholly unnoticed the singular coincidence between the present Bill and that for the abolition of the Slave Trade, in the order and progress of the arguments adopted by the opponents of each. The defence of the Slave Trade, exactly as the attempted defence of the system of the Cotton Factories, began with the bold declaration that the Negro Slaves were happy and contented: nay, that they were far better off in every respect than the labouring poor and the peasantry in England. This, however, was found to be too strong a dose, and even before this assertion was overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary, it was felt to be dangerous. It was, indeed, fully equivalent to the assertion that the peasantry, and the labouring classes of Great Britain, i.e., the majority of its inhabitants, were worse off than Negro Slaves, a position suited only to the sowers of sedition and the advocates for insurrection. This having been abandoned, the defenders rested their argument on the impropriety and inefficiency of all legislative interference with the freedom of Commerce. The Legislature had nothing to do with traders but to levy the duties, and then grant their only request—‘Let us alone’. And truly in the instance of the Slave Trade this objection was very far from being groundless, in respect to the apprehended inefficiency of such interference. So strong, indeed, was it, that little less than the united power of all the governments of the Christian World was and is requisite to remove it. But praise be to God, who never fails to supply what is wanting to us, as long as we are earnest in doing our best, the Powers of the Christian World have united. But let it not be forgotten that this union never could have taken place had the British Legislature yielded to apprehension. The two remaining objections to the present Bill were urged repeatedly in the very same words in support of the Slave Trade; and we conclude this Address, for the length of which we must seek our best apologist in the reader’s own humanity, with the observation, that the argument founded on the danger of establishing a precedent for other claims is so far realised, that we, in the present instance, are appealing to a precedent instead of making one; and that every argument of any force, which the opponents of the Bill have urged against it, has been declared invalid, as applied to the continuance of any system admitted to be cruel and unjust, and solemnly negatived by the British Parliament, in the glorious precedent of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
In conclusion we take leave to subscribe ourselves,
SINCERE FRIENDS OF INDUSTRY,
TO THE MUTUAL ADVANTAGE OF
MASTER AND LABOURER.
London, 18th April, 1818.1
THE GROUNDS OF SIR ROBERT PEEl’S BILL VINDICATED BY S. T. COLERIDGE
It has been objected to Sir Robert Peel’s Bill that its grounds are not borne out by the evidence before the Select Committee in 1816. In reply, we refer, first, to the examination of the most eminent medical authorities, Dr. Baillie, Mr. Ashley Cooper, Dr. Pemberton, Mr. A. Carlisle, Dr. Tuthill, and Sir Gilbert Blane, gentlemen unconnected with the Factories and of course not examined concerning the truth of the facts, but as to the probable results on the supposition of the truth. Now the warmest friends of suffering humanity could not have wished for opinions more decisive, more consistent with each other, or in more perfect coincidence with the positive testimony adduced in support of the Bill. It was affirmed by them all, that whatever exceptions might arise from particular strength of constitution, yet according to all their experience and in conformity with all the laws of animal life, universally received by the profession at large, the general results of the employment of children, in the manner stated to them, must be greatly and radically detrimental to their health: that the consequences to be expected would be—stinted growth, debility, rickets, scrofula, mesenteric obstructions, in short, all the various diseases that arise from impaired digestion and pulmonary derangement, in many; but diminished vigor and the seeds of future ill-health in a great majority, of the children exposed daily to such influences during such a number of hours. Evidence more decisive, more satisfactory in itself, or more respectable from the characters of the gentlemen examined, it would be difficult to imagine and suspicious to require. What then remained but to prove, first, that the circumstances had been faithfully stated to them; and next, that the actual results did in every respect verify the opinions delivered on that supposition? Now as to the first point, the opposers of the Bill have themselves furnished the proof. It is found in their own evidence. We need refer to no other testimony than their own admissions. (See the collected testimonies of more than forty Master Spinners, delivered before the Select Committee, in pages 374 and 375, of the printed evidence.) It is scarcely necessary to add that the grievances are not likely to have been exaggerated in these admissions. But in proof of the second point, viz., the actual state of the children resulting from the time and circumstances of their employment, we refer (see pages 286, 287) to the decisive testimony, the full and circumstantial statements, of Mr. Simmons, the senior surgeon of the Manchester Infirmary, and who had been then surgeon of that institution for five and twenty years. We refer also to the accurate and minute information contained in the answers of Mr. Kinder Wood, likewise a medical practitioner, whose examination will be found in the printed evidence, pages 191-208. Both these attest what they have themselves seen, speak to facts into which they have themselves examined, record the results of long and careful observation: and does a shade of suspicion rest on their characters as men or as professional men, on their competence as observers, or on their veracity as witnesses? By all, who know them, the very question would scarcely be tolerated. And does not their evidence bear out the utmost that has been stated in behalf of the necessity of the Bill? But there is other and more extensive evidence (weightier there scarcely can be), now before the House and officially in its possession. We can refer to at least twenty Petitions, containing the most solemn attestations as to the existence of the facts, and to the kind and degree of the sufferings resulting from them, the greater number from the adult labourers themselves, many of whom are parents or relatives of the children, and the remainder from persons not otherwise interested in the Bill, than as having before their eyes the afflicting proofs of its expediency. With especial confidence we refer to the Petition from more than seventeen hundred of the principal inhabitants of the towns and neighbourhood of Manchester and Salford, among whom are found seven magistrates, nine physicians, twenty-one surgeons, and twenty clergymen, seventeen of whom are of the Established Church. In the list of medical gentlemen who undersigned it we find the names of Dr. Bardsley, senior physician of the Manchester Infirmary, who has been a physician of the same for twenty-seven years; Mr. Simmons, senior surgeon, who has in like manner been a surgeon there for twenty-seven years; Dr. Winstanley, a physician of the Infirmary ten years; Dr. Ward a surgeon of the same for fourteen years; Mr. Hamilton, a surgeon of the same for twenty-seven years; Mr. Thorpe, ditto, fourteen years; Dr. Hull, who has practised in Manchester upwards of twenty years; Mr. Wood, as a surgeon, twenty-eight years; Mr. Bout-flower and Mr. Bellott, each twenty-five years; and Mr. G. Tomlinson, for thirty years! All these, in common with the other highly respectable residents of the same and other professions whose names we are prevented from noticing by their number alone, bear solemn testimony to the existence and extent of ‘the sufferings, which they feelingly deplore’. They attest the ‘fatally injurious consequences’ of the present system, especially to the delicate frame and strength of the children; and finally declare their conviction that ‘from the generality of the practice and the natural competitions of the trade, such evils cannot be removed without the aid of legislative authority.
We have purposely abstained from referring to any evidence not officially before Parliament, nor can we bring ourselves to believe that for an impartial judgment any additional evidence can be necessary. For what, it may be asked, can be opposed to that which is already in the possession of the House, so far as the Facts themselves are concerned? What efficient counterweight can there be to the testimonies in affirmation of the grounds of the Bill; whether the numbers, the respectability, or the disinterestedness, of the witnesses, their competence to distinguish, or their opportunities of knowing, the truth, should be brought into comparison? In reply to this natural question it is sufficient to say that the evidence on the contrary side is almost exclusively that of the Master Spinners themselves or their dependents!
We disclaim everything that borders on an invidious or personal reflection; but with regard to the assertions of men interested (or rather who believe themselves interested) in bringing about the failure of the measure in question, we have to observe that there is a wide difference between the sensation of positiveness which is the ordinary growth of passion from prejudice and imagined self-interest, and the sense of certainty which is the result and reward of tranquil and disinterested examination. A man must be strangely inexperienced in the history of his own heart, who is not aware that we as often unconsciously deceive ourselves as we (intentionally or otherwise) deceive our neighbours. In suspecting the accuracy of statements made under the strongest predilections of (supposed) self-interest, we do not necessarily impeach the veracity of the staters. We are far from wishing to accuse them of insincerity, of a conscious intention to assert falsehood or suppress truth: but we do wish to impress the necessity of being on our guard in receiving the testimony of men (as for instance, of Master Spinners in the present question) on a point in which they can only be regarded as witnesses in their own cause. For as their own cause do our opponents appear to consider every attempt to frustrate the measure. In their own cause do they come forward as witnesses. Now in proof that such testimony ought not to be received without caution, that it requires to be looked into, we again refer to the printed evidence, pages 374 and 375. Here we find it observed by Mr. Sandford, a delegate from the Master Spinners of Manchester, and himself a Master Spinner, that in more than forty factories there is, in each, one hour at least in the day allowed ‘for Meals out of the Mill’. Now in the Minutes of the Committee, it is on evidence that in one* of these very factories enumerated by Mr. Sandford, namely Messrs. Birley and Hornby’s, there is but one day in the week on which children regularly go home to their dinners, being detained on the other five to clean the machinery. It also appears on the same Minutes, that no time is allowed for the breakfast or the afternoon meals, which must be taken while the work is going on: as if the food earned by the toil were to be made a part of the toil.
Of these factories Mr. Sanford gave in a scale under a variety of heads. And in this scale it is affirmed that out of the whole number (with the exception of one, from which no report had been received), that is, out of Eleven Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-five Persons employed, there were at that period only Forty Persons sick; and that Thirty-six only of the Eleven Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-five had died in the course of the last twelve months: that is, little more than THREE IN A THOUSAND!!—And this in Cotton Factories! A strange result, and such as might well justify the exclamation of the great medical authorities examined; if so, it is very extraordinary! An expression of surprise (might we not say, almost of incredulity) which will appear highly natural when it is considered that in no age or country is there recorded anything like so small a proportion of deaths, even under the most favourable circumstances. To such assertions the astonishment of those who live in the neighbourhood of cotton factories supersedes the necessity of a verbal answer which could not indeed be satisfactory without becoming invidious. Instead of it we content ourselves with the following general remarks on the fallacy—we had almost said, the disingenuity—of all such statements respecting the health of the Children. First, these statements respect only the Children actually at work in the factories at the time the statements were made: whereas common sense would require that they should comprehend the whole number of those who had worked in the factories during some given period, noticing the sickly and diseased, who had been discharged, and the Children who had been taken in their place. This is about as fair as it would be to decide on the healthiness of a Surinam Swamp by the number of slaves alive at any one moment, without distinguishing the new importations and without striking the balance between those who had perished and those who had stood the seasoning—or the dangers to which a regiment in active service had been exposed, by the existing numbers on the muster roll, without any reference to the numbers that had been killed off and filled up by fresh recruits. Secondly, the deleterious effects of the time, etc., of the labour in the Cotton Factories, consist for the greater part in a slow, insensible, undermining of the constitution. The diseases to which the Children are most liable are such as presuppose a long preceding period of decaying inward strength, the outward signs of which evade the notice of a chance spectator.
As to the other arguments circulated by the opponents of the Bill as—that men after working eleven or twelve hours in the day are to be deemed idle during the remaining hours—that in consequence of this idleness they must necessarily rush into riot and profligacy—that the diminution in their wages, from the limitation of their hours of labour, instead of checking these vicious propensities, will only hurry them into the perpetration of crimes in order to procure the means of gratifying them; which is equivalent to the assertion that all labourers whose daily work does not exceed twelve hours, their meal hours included, must be idle and profligate; (for strange to say, such are the assertions in a pamphlet just published by the opponents of the Bill)—these we regard as outrages on human nature and mere struggles of conscious weakness. But against these, and against all former attempts to justify the employment of Children from thirteen to fifteen hours in the day, under the most deleterious influences, and who are thus, in contradiction of all the instincts of nature, compelled ‘to attend early in the morning and continue their toil till late at night’—we make our confident appeal to Conscience and to Common Sense.
S. T. Coleridge.
London, 24th April, 1818.
One of the ominous characteristics of this reforming age, the Custom of addressing ‘The Poor, as a permanent Class, assumed to consist ordinarily of the same individuals. Just as in Jamaica I might address myself to ‘the Negros’. Now if this have a sound foundation in the fact, it assuredly marks a most deplorable State of Society. The Ideal of a Government is that which under the existing circumstances most effectually affords Security to the Possessors, Facility to the Acquirers, and Hope to all. Poverty, whatever can justify the designation of ‘the Poor’ ought to be a transitional state—a state to which no man ought to admit himself to belong, tho’ he may find himself in it because he is passing thro’ it, in the effort to leave it. Poor men we must always have, till the Redemption is fulfilled, but The Poor, as consisting of the same Individuals! O this is a sore accusation against any society! And to address an Individual as having his interest merged in his character as one of the Poor, his abiding interest! O as well ought you to appeal to an individual with an eruption from Cold as one of the Scabby faced, without reference to his Being, as in Health! The Poor can have, ought to have, one interest only—viz. to cease to be poor. But to call the man who by labor maintains himself under human conditions and comforts, who by labor procures himself what is needful for him and his essential affections a Pauper—to designate the sum total of such Laborers the Poor! O if this be not a foul misuse of words, if there be a ground in fact for it, it is in the same proportion a dire impeachment of both Church and State, such as would warrant a Revolution. For that Country must have a canker at the Core.
How does the case stand? I believe thus. There is enough of truth to furnish a too plausible pretext for the language and far too little to justify it. O when will the Tories, the so called Conservative Party, learn to address their country, their neigh-bors, tenants, dependants, &c. instead of addressing each other, and convincing the already convinced! Alas! the vanity engendered in our Gentry, even in our landed Gentry, by the Newspaper Press, and the lust of having their names mentioned! Men of estate and family are thus bribed by their desire to be puffed in the Papers to become accomplices in a conspiracy against all estate, all family, whatever has the nature of permanence, and of reason, instead of chance, passion, appetite, the Mob, and the To Day!!
MS.
In every state, not wholly barbarous, a philosophy, good or bad, there must be. However slightingly it may be the fashion to talk of speculation and theory, as opposed (sillily and nonsensically opposed) to practice, it would not be difficult to prove, that such as is the existing spirit of speculation, during any given period, such will be the spirit and tone of the religion, legislation, and morals, nay, even of the fine arts, the manners, and the fashions. Nor is this the less true, because the great majority of men live like bats, but in twilight, and know and feel the philosophy of their age only by its reflections and refractions.
Essays On His Own Times.
Take from History its impertinences and it differs from the Pilgrim’s Progress only in the co-incidences of the Proper Names with those of the Parish Registers of the particular Time and Country.
MS.
It contains the history of the rise and progress of an evil the most pernicious, if only because the most criminal, that ever degraded human nature. The history of a war of more than two centuries, waged by men against human nature; a war too carried on, not by ignorance and barbarism against knowledge and civilization; not by half-famished multitudes against a race blessed with all the arts of life, and softened and effeminated by luxury; but, as some strange nondescript in iniquity, waged by unprovoked strength against uninjuring helplessness, and with all the powers which long periods of security and equal law had enabled the assailants to develop,—in order to make barbarism more barbarous, and to add to the want of political freedom the most dreadful and debasing personal suffering. Thus, all the effects and influences of freedom were employed to enslave; the gifts of knowledge to prevent the possibility of illumination; and powers, which could not have existed but in consequence of morality and religion, to perpetuate the sensual vices, and to ward off the emancipating blow of Christianity; and, as if this were not enough, positive laws were added by the best and freest nation of Christendom, and powers entrusted to the basest part of its population, for purposes which would almost necessarily make the best men become the worst.
Nor are the effects of this strange war less marvellous than its nature. It is a war in which the victors fall lower than the vanquished; in which the oppressors are more truly objects of pity than the oppressed; while, to the nation which had most extensively pursued and most solemnly authorized it, it was an eating ulcer into the very vitals of its main resources as to defence, and a slow poison acting on that constitution which was the offspring, and has continued to be the protection, of its freedom and prosperity. In short, the present work is the history of one great calamity,—one long continuous crime, involving every possible definition of evil: for it combined the wildest physical suffering with the most atrocious moral depravity....
… The author commences his history by an eloquent and dramatic representation of the evils belonging to the slave trade, with respect to the Africans, in its three principal stages. First, on the continent of Africa; secondly, in the middle passage; thirdly, in the West Indies and the adjoining colonies. This is followed by a well reasoned and affecting counterpart of the evil, in the grievous effects of this trade on those who are employed in carrying it on. First, on the masters and men of the slave ships; next, on the factors and those employed in purchasing or seizing the unhappy victims; and, lastly, on the planters and owners of slaves, and on the countries in general in which slavery is established. We have, indeed, always been of opinion, that too little stress has been laid on this part of the subject. The sufferings of the Africans were calculated, no doubt to make a more rapid and violent impression on the imaginations and bodily sympathies of men; but the dreadful depravity that of necessity was produced by it on the immediate agents of the injustice; the almost universal corruption of manners which at the present day startles reflecting travellers on passing from the Northern States of America into those in which slavery obtains; and the further influence of such corruption on the morals of countries that are in habits of constant commercial intercourse, and who speak the same language; these, though not susceptible of colours equally glaring, do yet form a more extensive evil,—an evil more certain, and of a more measurable kind. These are evil in the form of guilt; evil in its most absolute and most appropriate sense; that sense to which the sublimest teachers of moral wisdom, Plato, Zeno, Leibnitz, have confined the appellation; and which, therefore, on a well disciplined spirit, will make an impression deeper than could have been left by mere agony of body, or even anguish of mind; in proportion as vice is more hateful than pain, eternity more awful than time. To this may be added, the fatal effects on national morals, from the public admission of principles professedly incompatible with justice, and from the implied disavowal of any obligation paramount to that of immediate expediency, compared with which even state-hypocrisy may not have been without its good effects. Those who estimate all measures, institutions and events, exclusively by their palpable and immediate effects, are little qualified to trace, and less inclined to believe, the ceaseless agency of those subtler causes to which the philosopher attributes the deterioration of national character. Yet history will vouch for us, if we affirm, that no government ever avowedly acted on immoral principles (as, for instance, the Prussian, since the accession of their Frederic the unique, as the Germans style him, and the court of France from the administration of Richelieu), without inducing a proportional degradation in the virtue and dignity of the individuals who form the mass of the nation…
A majority of the [British] cabinet, it is believed, were hostile to the abolition; but the nation, throughout city, town, and village, was only not unanimous: and though the almost weekly explosion of new events, all of them more or less directly affecting the interests of Great Britain, drew away their attention, or deadened their zeal, for a time, as to this great subject, yet is was only necessary to proclaim the same facts anew, and the same zeal was rekindled, the same sense of duty felt and expressed by all classes. In France, on the contrary, the most eminent characters were deeply interested for a little moment in the abolition; but the people throughout France were either ignorant of the horrors of the trade, or unaffected by them. This is that which constitutes the true, the fundamental strength of our empire. Great Britain is indeed a living body politic: the chain of interests extends in unbroken links from the great city to the far extremities of the empire; and thoughts and feelings are conducted by it with the rapidity of an electric charge. At the commencement of the Revolution, a temporary enthusiasm seems indeed to have shed one and the same spirit on the great majority of the French people; but (wanting both the continuous gradation of ranks which exists in our landed property, and that unbroken connexion of interests produced by insular situation; our national debt; our established commercial preeminence; and that unbounded confidence between man and man, which is the consequence of these) the enthusiasm was transient; and the first victorious soldier, who dared act the traitor, gave proof to all Europe, that France had indeed an immense populace, but not a people; Plebem, non populum. The republican legislators had laboured, by a variety of evolutions and schemes of arrangement, to give to the people the means of acting on, and influencing, the conduct of their governors. But conventional statutes, neither harmonizing with old customs, nor arising out of the state and circumstances of the country, could weave only a rope of sand: they could not supply that true link of interests, which law may protect and encourage, but which individuals must have previously created. London is the chief city of Great Britain; Paris a vast city in France. London is the true heart of the empire. No pulse beats there, which is not corresponded to proportionally through the whole circulation. Paris is a wen; and the existence of such an excrescence was not the least powerful cause of the failure of every effort to give France a free constitution.
We have heard indeed, the prosperity of America declared by Lord Sidmouth, when he was Minister of State, to be an awful warning to Great Britain, never hereafter to colonize a new country. Merciful Heaven! that the brethen of our ancestors should have founded a mighty empire, indefinite in its increase,—an empire, which retains and is spreading all that constitutes ‘Country’ in a wise man’s feelings, viz. the same laws, the same customs, the same religion, and above all the same language; that, in short, to have been the mother of prosperous empires, is to be a warning to Great Britain! And whence this dread? Because, forsooth, our eldest born, when of age, had set up for himself; and not only preserving, but, in an almost incalculable proportion, increasing the advantages of former reciprocal intercourse, had saved us the expense and anxiety of defending, and the embarrassment of governing a country three thousand miles distant! That this separation was at length effected by violence, and the horrors of a civil war, is to be attributed solely to the ignorance and corruption of the many, and the perilous bigotry of a few.…
The Africans are more versatile, more easily modified than perhaps any other known race. A few years of strict honesty and humane attention to their interests, affections, and prejudices, would abolish the memory of the past, or cause it to be remembered only as a fair contrast. The Legislature of Great Britain having once decreed that no territorial conquest shall be made in Africa, this law having been made public there, and enforced by correspondent conduct on the part of our mercantile agents, there would be less difficulty in buying up the tributes hitherto levied by the African chieftains on the great rivers, than William Penn found in purchasing the more important possession of Pennsylvania from the American Indians. Permission would in time be gained to raise commercial magazines, so armed and manned, as should be found necessary for the security of our countrymen. Privileges, both useful and flattering, should be held forth to such of the African tribes as would settle round each of these forts: still higher honours should be given to the individuals among such settlers as should have learnt our language, and acquired our arts of manufacture or cultivation. Thus, each fort, instead of being, as hitherto, a magazine of death and depravity, would finally become a centre of civilization, with diverging lines, the circumference of which would join or pass through similar circles. The intercourse with every part of Africa would not only be rendered secure in relation to the natives, but, from their friendly dispositions, rendered less dangerous to the health of European adventurers, no longer compelled to remain unsheltered, exposed to the vertical sun by day, or the destructive dews of the night. How valuable the productions of Africa already known are, may be learnt by consulting either Mr Clarkson’s work on the Impolicy, or the volumes now before us, (vol. II, p. 14, &c.) or the Evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons. That these bear but a small proportion, both in number or value, to what would be hereafter discovered in consequence of our being masters of the great rivers, is most probable: and we are certain, that if African industry were awakened, few indeed are the articles necessary for our manufactures or consumption, which might not be raised in Africa, and come to us more cheaply, including the first cost and the freightage, than from any other part of the world.
Africa holds out no temptations, either to conquest or individual rapacity. The timid statesman will have to contemplate no independent American republic in its germ: the philosopher no future East Indian empire, to render peace short and insecure, and war more costly and anxious. It cannot be denied that the superstitions of the Africans will occasion great difficulties and embarrassments; but, by a systematic repression of all religious proselytism, except indeed that most effective instrument of conversion, the Christian conduct of our agents; by a prudent and affectionate attention to the wishes and comforts of the chieftains, and the Mandingo priests; and by sedulous endeavours to enlighten them as men; this obstacle might gradually be removed,—at all events greatly lessened. Every individual employed in the different forts or settlements, should act under the conviction, that knowledge and civilization must, in the first instance, form the foundation, not the superstructure, of Christianity.
The African character is strikingly contrasted with that of the North American Indians; and the facility with which the Africans are impressed, the rapidity with which they take the colours of surrounding objects, oftentimes place them in a degrading light, as men, but are most auspicious symptoms of what they may hereafter become, as citizens. A crowd of slaves shouting in triumph at the proclamation of the reestablishment of slavery, (we allude to Villaret’s letter,) or fighting with desperate fury against their own countrymen, who had escaped from a common tyrant, will not indeed bear a comparison, in moral dignity, with the stern, unbending warriors of the interior of North America; and yet present far better data of hope, regarded prospectively, and as the materials of a future nation. The American Indians are savages: the Africans (to speak classically) barbarians. Of the civilization of savages, we know no certain instance, the actual origin of Mexico and Peru, the only cases that have any claim at all to be adduced, not having been preserved even by the rudest tradition. But of the progress from barbarism to civilization, through its various stages, the history of every nation gives a more or less distinct example, in proportion to our opportunity of tracing it backward.
This distinction between the savage and barbarous state, which is indeed fruitful in consequences, bears upon the present question in one important point, the willingness, we mean, with which barbarous tribes adopt, as it were at command, the changes in laws or religion, dictated to them by their leaders. Let no alarming zeal be betrayed: rather let the initiation into Christianity be held up as a distinction,—as a favour to be bestowed; and it need not be doubted that natural curiosity will prompt the chieftains, and most intelligent of the African tribes, to inquire into the particulars of a religion professed by a race confessedly so superior to them, and that the sense of this superiority will act as a powerful motive toward their adoption of it. At all events, a long trial has been given to injustice and cruelty: surely justice and benevolence may claim, that one experiment should be made of their influence, and in their favour.
Edinburgh Review, July 1808.