![Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 3 [of 3] cover](/books/content/36810/OEBPS/3771752932553494746_36810-cover.png)
‘I was going to say,’ said Buxton, ‘until interrupted in this unmannerly manner, you are enthusiasts, I am not. I doubt the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. It has done good in its time, I admit. It was the thought of the Messiah that was to come that nerved the heart of the Jew as he sat by the waters of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion. Paul and the Apostles expected the new heaven and the new earth before they laid down their lives as martyrs for their inspiring faith. Upheld by the same living hope, tender and delicate maidens have gone to the grave exulting, and have glorified God at the stake or in the dungeon or on the scaffold. “The end of all things is at hand,” is ever the cry of the churches. It was that of Luther in his day, and is that of the Evangelicals in ours, who, if an earthquake destroys a town, or a deluge sweeps over the land, or the cholera breaks out in the East, or there are wars and rumours of wars, tell us these are the dread signs to mark the coming of the Son of Man with His saints to judge the earth. I feel rather inclined to believe with old Swedenborg that that day is past. The talk of a Millennium makes me sick. It is a delusion and a sham. Such men as Dr. Cumming, with their long array of dates and their wild dreams of the fulfilment of prophecy, make men like myself sceptics. It is clear to us that the odds, at any rate, are against the Christian.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘But this is a business scheme. We are not in search of the Millennium.’
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND.
For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and so am I.
London is not a place to live in in winter; there is, unfortunately, no place in England that is. People talk of the weather. They cannot help themselves. In his old age Dr. Johnson wrote, ‘I am now reduced to think and am at last content to talk of the weather.’ That was a sign that the Doctor at last had fallen low. As Burney writes: ‘There was no information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful than for that which concerned the weather.’ If any one of his intimate companions told him it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm; he would stop them by saying: ‘O-oh, O-oh! You are telling me of that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience or enjoy in quiet elementary changes either for the better or the worse, as they are never secrets.’ Nevertheless, the state of the weather continues in all circles an unfailing theme. Bad weather affects the spirits by depressing them, fine raises them. We are attuned to every action of the outer atmosphere. Our suicides in November are known all the world over. It is scarcely possible to be cheerful on a dull, cold, raw, foggy day. I wonder people who can afford to go away and have no pressing claims at home do not rush off to the Riviera in search of its blue sky, its summer suns, its wealth of flowers, its richer life for the delicate, or the infirm or old.
‘We must get out of England,’ said Wentworth to his wife, one dull wintry morn, when the raw cold seemed to fill every apartment in the house, and the outlook into the busy street only revealed half-starved figures in all their wretchedness. ‘We must get out of England, and the sooner the better.’
‘Yes, I’ve long been thinking so; but the question is, where to go. We have got to think of other people besides ourselves, and of other affairs than our own. But with our tastes and habits we can live cheaply anywhere, and I have no wish to go where we shall meet a lot of idle rich people only seeking to guard themselves from the English winter and spending life in frivolous indulgence. Let us take the question seriously.’
‘That is just what I am trying to do,’ was the reply. ‘We are not too old for a grand experiment.’
‘But are you prepared to give up journalism?’
‘Yes, I am. I see a new spirit abroad, one which I detest.’
But one thing remained to Wentworth of the teaching of his early years: a love of Liberal principles; an enthusiasm for humanity; a deep yearning for the mental and moral elevation of the people—ideas deeply cherished in the Nonconformist families of the past generation. In every home the struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. The agitation went from one chapel to another. A line of communication was thus established, wrote William Hazlitt, whose father was a Unitarian minister in Shropshire, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fires, unquenchable like the fires in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of Troy. It was from such centres came the soldiers who were to win the people’s victories in spite of the nominees of Tory lords and rotten borough-mongers, of pensioners and place-men, of time-serving priests and fawning courtiers who then ruled the land, and who fattened on the taxes wrung from an unrepresented and oppressed and a discontented—and a justly discontented—nation. Young hearts burned within them as they listened to Liberal orators, or read the speeches of such men as Henry Brougham or Dan O’Connell, or studied Liberal newspapers; and they longed for the time when they, too, should gird on the shield and buckler and do battle for the Right. In vain timid ministers and aged deacons uttered warning voices and shook their heads at the new spirit which was abroad, quoted Scripture about obeying them that have rule over you, hinted at the danger to spirituality of life and feeling by mixing in the rough warfare of the political world. As well might they scream to the stormy blast. The current was too strong: they had to swim with it or be drowned. It was a grand time of awakening. The world has seen nothing like it since. To Wentworth it was a baptism, the effect of which was never to pass away. Buxton, as usual, continued his morning smoke.
‘Hear me,’ said Wentworth, as Rose rushed out of the room, declaring that she knew all he had to say. Wentworth continued: ‘As long as I can remember, the “condition of England question,” as Carlyle called it, or, as we term it, in more sensational phraseology, “the bitter cry of the outcast,” has afforded painful matter of reflection to the statesman, the philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine. It is always coming to the front, and it will always be coming to the front, even if you hang all the bad landlords and jerry-builders, get rid of the bloated capitalist, and divide the estates of the aristocracy and the millions of the capitalists among the poor of the East-end. The working classes are not to be confounded with the men and women who herd like beasts in the wretched dens of the east. Underneath the lowest of them there is a conservative residuum whom it is impossible to get rid of, whose condition it is appalling to contemplate. They are the men who won’t work; who won’t go where work is to be had; who come to London when they should never have left their country home; who sell their manhood for a pot of beer: casuals who, born in a poor-house or a prison, children of shame from the first, mostly spend their lives alternately tramping the streets and in the workhouse or the gaol. As London increases in population, so do they. We have seen such men offered fair work by hundreds, but they prefer filth and laziness, with the chance of an appeal to the humane. “Pull down the rookery,” and the rooks won’t fly away. Burn all the fever and vice laden dens of the outcast, and there he is still, a disgrace and shame—not so much, as sensational writers pretend, to our civilization and religion as to our common manhood. Ever since we have known anything of the churches—whether Established or Free—it seems to us that they have aimed as much at the temporal as the spiritual improvement of the outcast. We have yet to learn that it is a disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with God’s law, that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may be—that if you lose your chance, another will take it—that it is too late to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he that will not work shall not eat—those who forget this, who idle away the precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast, where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
‘It amuses us, or would, were not the subject so awful—for it may be taken as a sober truth that outside the bottomless pit there is no such utter damnation as is to be found among the outcast—to find clever writers talking of the constant neglect of the last hundred years, and to ponder over the remedies. It is now the fashion to recommend better houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is so much taken from the deserving. Every benefit you confer on the pauper is at the expense of the honest, respectable poor, who have a prior claim. Against State action the argument is still stronger. In the first place, the State cannot deal honestly and fairly by the people. What it does is ill done, and at double expense. The people who pay the taxes are often as badly off as those for whose benefit they are spent. A slight addition to the taxation of a wealthy peer or capitalist will not deprive him of a single luxury, but it may send a small, struggling tradesman into the Gazette. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and it is easy to perceive that a time may come when our heavy taxation may cripple us in our trade with foreign competitors, when they will supply the markets, on which we have hitherto depended, when, in fact, we shall have little left to us but our National Debt.’
‘Go on,’ said Buxton. ‘You are getting rather prosy, but if it relieves your feelings, pray proceed.’
‘Well, then,’ said Wentworth, ‘I will. A gentleman sends me a scheme of a cooperative home colony, which will give the settlers three good meals a day, a house, a full suit of clothing every year, education for their children, and an allotment of half an acre of land, which shall be entirely at the disposal of the head of the family so long as he makes a good use of it and renders proper service during the regular working hours. For the purchase of fuel or tea and coffee, and such things as cannot be grown in this climate, the director will sell in the public market any surplus produce such as eggs, butter and poultry, far too much of which we get from abroad. One-sixth of the harvest and other produce will be sold to pay the salaries of director and foremen. A farm of three hundred and forty acres in the Isle of Sheppey, for instance, can be had if it be deemed desirable. If we get a population of five hundred on it, fifty acres of wheat will supply the settlement with all the bread that can be eaten there. If the cows were stall-fed, one hundred acres of land would keep over a hundred head of cattle, and such a herd would supply all the requisite milk, cheese, butter, beef and hides every year in abundant quantities. Flax could be cultivated and linen woven. A flock of sheep could be tended on the estate sufficient to yield five pounds of wool every year per head of the population. There would be no expense for manure, as the settlement would provide it all. Are you weary?’ said Wentworth.
‘Not particularly. Pray proceed. But why not try it—why not begin a scheme of the kind at once?’
‘All we have to do is to get the people back to the land. By the establishment of such home colonies work will be offered in rural districts to men and women who would otherwise be driven into our great cities to increase the pauperism which threatens our whole social edifice. The scheme, if carried out, will encourage habits of industry and thrift—unlike the work given in our workhouses, which demoralizes and degrades the recipients; it will help the societies instituted to distribute charity, as it will offer strong men and women healthy labour rather than doles, which they are ashamed to accept, which they do not ask for, and which, when taken, have a tendency to break down that spirit of independence and self-reliance which lies at the foundation of all decent manhood; and lastly, and this is an immense benefit, it would prevent land now in cultivation from becoming a desert. It seems to me this of itself is no common recommendation of the plan, when farmers are giving up farming, and their farms either allowed to run to waste or farmed by the landlords at a heavy loss. Our great Free Traders never dreamt of this when they got Parliament and the people to destroy Protection, yet such are the facts we have to face.’
‘And yet there are people who believe in Cobden still,’ said Buxton.
‘I knew him well,’ said Wentworth, ‘and a better man never lived. He was right in the main, though his enthusiasm led him astray, and no wonder. Let me, in the language of Goldsmith remind you—
‘“How wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.”’
Buxton laughed when Wentworth had finished his rhapsody. Buxton was given to laughter. He was not a man who took life very seriously. Perhaps he would have done better had he done so as far as his own personal interests were concerned. As Swift said of Arbuthnot, it might be said of him, that he knew his art better than his trade.
‘Wait a moment,’ he said, as he rushed out of the room to his own den, whence he returned with an old faded handbill, which was as follows:
SPENCE’S PLAN
for Parochial Partnerships in the Land
is the only effectual remedy for the
distress and oppressions of the people.
The Landholders are not Proprietors-in-Chief;
they are but the Stewards of the Public,
for the Land is the People’s Farm.
The expenses of the Government do not cause the
misery that
surrounds us, but the enormous exactings of those
Unjust Stewards,
Landed monopoly is indeed equally contrary
to the benign
Spirit of Christianity, and destructive of
the Independence and Morality of Mankind.
‘The Profit of the Earth is for all.’
Yet how deplorably destitute are the great mass of the
People!
Nor is it possible for their situations to
be radically amended but
by the establishment of a system
founded on the immutable bases of
Nature and Justice.
Experience demonstrates its necessity, and the
Rights of Manhood
require it for their presentation.To obtain this important object by extending the knowledge of the above system, the Society of Spencean Philanthropies has been established. Further information of its principles may be obtained by attending any of its sectional meetings, where subjects are discussed calculated to enlighten the human understanding; and where, also, the regulations of the society may be procured, containing a complete development of the Spencean system. Every individual is admitted free of expense who will conduct himself with decorum.
‘I never heard of Spence,’ said Wentworth.
‘Of course not,’ said Buxton. ‘In these days of boasted progress we know nothing of what has been. Radicals always ignore the past. You really need a little enlightenment. Shall I enlighten you?’
‘By all means.’
‘It was in 1775 Mr. Spence began his public career. Like most original thinkers, he commenced in the country. His political opinions were first pronounced in the form of a lecture read before the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775, and printed immediately afterwards, from which time, he says, he went on continually publishing them in some shape or other. They are fully explained in his “Constitution of Spensonia: a Country in Fairy Land Situated Somewhere between Utopia and Oceana.” According to his scheme, the land belongs to the people, and individuals should rent the land from their respective parishes, the rent constituting the national revenue, and the surplus, after all expenses were paid, was to be divided equally amongst all the parishioners. The larger estates were to be let for one-and-twenty years, and at the expiration of that term relet by public auction, the smaller ones by the year, and the larger ones sub-divided according to the increase of population. The legislative power was to be vested in an annual Parliament elected by universal suffrage, women voting as well as men. The executive was to be in the hands of a council of twenty-five, half of which was to be renewed annually. Every fifth day there was to be a Sabbatical rest, not a Sabbath, for no provision was made for public worship, and in the new world no mention was to be made of parsons, though the constitution was to be proclaimed in a more or less religious form. At the end of the pamphlet, as it was published, was an epilogue, intimating the flight of poverty and misery from this lower world, and there was an appeal:
‘“Let us all join heart and hand
Through every town and city,
Of every age and every sex,
Young men and maidens pretty,
To haste this golden age’s reign
On every hill and valley,
Then Paradise shall greet our eyes
Through every street and alley.”’
‘Ah,’ said Wentworth, ‘I see there is nothing new under the sun.’
‘But the taxes?’ said Buxton. He continued: ‘This scheme was published long before the French Revolution broke out. Up in the north there had risen a solitary and original thinker who advocated female voting, universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and had got hold of the idea—which has led many of our modern apostles to fame and fortune—that the land lay at the root of the Condition of England question, that all private property in land must be destroyed, and that it must be done at once.
‘Spence, then, was, to use the cant of the present day, a Progressist. To him belongs the honour of having first presented the land question in all its bearings to the general public. What was his reward?—a Government prosecution with a fine of £20 and a year’s imprisonment at Shrewsbury. Well might a nobleman, as Wilberforce tells us, show him the picture of crucified Christ, and bid him mark the end of a Reformer.
‘One cause of Spence’s failure is obvious—he tried to do too much. “When I began to study,” says he, “I found everything erected on certain unalterable principles. I found every art and science a perfect whole. Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I reduced to order; the one by a new alphabet, the other by a new constitution.” Of what he called his natural or philosophical orthography we know but little, save that one of his works was printed in it. Had he aimed at less he would have accomplished more. He was no vulgar demagogue; that trade was not a paying one when Spence proclaimed himself “the unpaid advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam.” “This, gentlemen,” he exclaimed when on his trial—he was too poor to retain attorney or counsel for his defence—“this, gentlemen, is the Rights of Man; and upon this Book of Nature have I built my commonwealth, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” He added, as well he might: “I solemnly avow that what I have written and published has been done with as good a conscience and as much philanthropy as ever possessed the heart of any prophet-philosopher or apostle that ever existed.”
‘It was all in vain. The Government of the day feared the result of his teaching. Had he set up for a philosopher and clothed his ideas in mystic language, perhaps he might have been overlooked; but he published what he called “Pig’s Meat” for the people, and that made him dangerous. He had no friends and became an easy prey. He was poor, he stood alone, and was generally held to be little better than a lunatic; even the professed friends of liberty kept aloof from him. Well might be exclaim, as he did before his judges, “Perhaps, my lords, I have entertained too high an opinion of human nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful clients.” After his trial and imprisonment Spence became an itinerant vendor of books and pamphlets, chiefly his own works, which he carried about in a vehicle constructed for the purpose. He died somewhere about 1812, while Britons were hard at work on sea and in every land in Europe setting right public matters according to their fashion—paying foreigners to fight for their own independence, singing all the while that they never would be slaves.’
‘We are wiser now,’ said Wentworth.
‘Perhaps,’ was the cynical reply. ‘You are everlastingly talking,’ he continued, ‘of an outcast London; but, after all, it is on outcast London that the chief blame of its misery lies. Let us have an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at once, in outcast London, where boys and girls become fathers and mothers before they are out of their teens, and when they have no chance of earning a living, and know not and care not for the little ones they bring into the world. In respectable London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most brutal selfishness. Men and women can’t complain if they reap what they have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in which it is done in outcast London is a crime. To bring a baby into the world to lead a diseased and wretched life where it can never get a mouthful of wholesome food, a ray of sunlight, a particle of fresh air, to curse a young life that God meant to be so full of bliss, is a crime so awful that we can see no fitting punishment. To improve outcast London the first thing is to stop the supply. There is no remedy if reckless pauperism is to be allowed to grow rampant in our midst.
‘One word more,’ said Wentworth. ‘Suppose we think more of the decent poor, and less of the outcast. Suppose we give the respectable working man as much sympathy as we give his good-for-nothing brother. Suppose we take the sober operative as much by the hand as we do the inebriate. Suppose we act on the idea that industry is honourable, and that the men who live by it are men to be honoured; that the world with all its blessings is for the worker, whether he tills the soil or ploughs the deep, whether he builds the loftiest viaduct or burrows in the deepest mine.’
CHAPTER XXXII.
CONSULTATION.
They were sitting one morning at breakfast—that pleasantest of meals, unless you have to be up at an unusually early hour to catch the train and be off to London. Modern life is not such an improvement on that of the past as we are apt to fancy. The breakfast was the one meal at which people could meet and discuss matters—private, local, political, literary, or religious, in an informal way. We have no pleasant breakfast in these more ostentatious days, when society is too large to admit of friendship; but it seems to me that in my younger days we got a good deal more pleasure out of life. No wonder, then, that we sigh for the good old times, and long for their revival; that we have Queen Anne furniture, and houses built in what is called the Elizabethan style, and an effort to do away with the rail, and to revive the far-famed coaches with four horses which were the delight of the nation in the Georgian days.
I can call well to mind the time when I held the coachman of a certain Royal Mail, which made its appearance in our benighted village about breakfast-time, to have been one of the most eminent men of the day, and felt at least a foot taller when, as was his wont, he gave me, boy as I was, a friendly nod of recognition. As to seeing the horses changed, that was a scene I would not have missed on any account. How we all stood admiring as the panting steeds, which had galloped gloriously their stage, were led sweating away, and the fresh team, with cloths on, and their hoofs newly-cleaned, and everything about them bright and shiny, took the vacant places! What a pleasure it was to see them as they stood pawing the ground, impatient to be off! How glad we were when the coachman, as he climbed up into his lofty seat, and gathered up the reins in his capacious hand, gave the signal, ‘Let ’em go!’ How beautiful it was to us lads to see the coach bound off like a thing of life, while the guard blew a farewell flourish on his horn, and the horses settled down steadily to their work after a playful flourish or two!
Woe is me! I, and other miserable sinners like unto me, come to town through tunnels, and over the tops of houses, or along cuttings in which one gets an unlovely view of the backs of dirty houses and slovenly yards, in a closely-packed railway carriage, where we can neither talk, nor hear, nor read, and grow nervous as the engine screams and shrieks on all occasions, while the railway porters close the doors with a bang sufficient to send one into a fit. Life in our railway age is hard for us all.
Wentworth and his wife were at breakfast, as I have said. London had been disturbed by rumours as to the claim to the titles and estates of the deceased Baronet. Newspapers were not so full of twaddle as they are now; that spawn of the press, the newspaper interviewer, had not as yet sprung into existence. But still then, as now, there was a great deal of unmeaning gossip that did manage to find its way into the columns of the weekly and daily journals. It has ever been so. Apparently, it seems as if it ever will be so. The fashion originated in the servants’ hall. ‘A chambermaid to a lady of my acquaintance,’ writes Dean Swift, ‘when talking with one of her fellow-servants, said: “I hear it is all over London already that I am going to leave my lady.”’ In this respect she resembled the footman who, being newly married, desired his comrade to tell him freely ‘what the town really thought of it.’ From the servants’ hall the habit spread to Grub Street, and thence to the West-End, to become the leading feature in journals only written for men, or gentlemen, or ladies, as circumstances required. We laugh at the old divine who wrote a threepenny pamphlet against France, and who, being in the country, hearing of a French privateer hovering along the coast, fled to town and told his friends that they need not wonder at his haste, which he accounted for from the fact that the King of France, having got intelligence of his whereabouts, had sent a privateer on purpose to carry him away. How ridiculous was good Dr. Gee, Prebendary of Westminster, who wrote a small paper against Popery! Being ordered to travel on the Continent for his health, he disguised his person and assumed another name, as he fancied he would be murdered, or put into the Inquisition. But are we less ridiculous, or rather has not that ridiculous exaggeration of the personal, which is the foundation of newspaper twaddle, become more of a nuisance than ever?
Again, we all of us think too much of money and money-making. Is it not time that we utter a word of warning in the matter? It is inconvenient to have no money, most of us know by practical experience; but the possession of much of it is not after all a guarantee of respectability of character, or individual capacity. We call ourselves a Christian people, we profess to be actuated by Christian principles. The Master was a poor man—a carpenter’s son—His disciples were poor men. If any class are particularly referred to in the New Testament as far from the kingdom, they are the rich. All modern society is based on the opposite idea. We give the rich man the chief place in the synagogue. The society journals delight to do him honour. He has even made church-going the fashion. This is no age of poor geniuses. Our artists, our poets or teachers are all of the well-to-do. A Burns, or a Bloomfield, would be thought nothing of in our time. The modern woman is impossible in a poor community. When a lady writer is described in our magazines and newspapers, the writer dwells at painful length on the costliness of her surroundings; her dresses, her parties, the expensiveness of her furniture, and the signs of wealth she everywhere displays. The millions—how they toil and how miserably they live! The rich—what an idle life they lead! And then think of the way in which that wealth, which is often a curse to them, is obtained! Far away indeed is the new heaven and the new earth in which dwelleth righteousness; infamous as are the means by which the wealth we envy and admire is obtained, how ready we are to do homage to its possessor, poor as he may be in spirit, and unclean and unlovely in his life! Wentworth saw, as we all do, this unsatisfactory side of all human affairs. The time had come, he thought, for an effort for something better, for a state in which the wealth earned by the labourer should be more equitably distributed. There was a divine order in life, he believed, which had been lost sight of, and forgotten, and the result was unmitigated poverty and wretchedness. For this society was responsible, and especially its rulers, who had increased the sufferings of the poor, who had trampled on the weak, who had played into the hands of the rich and the strong; he did not believe, as some of our modern lights do, that the masses were always right and the classes always wrong. It seemed to him that there were good and bad amongst them all, that circumstances were such, that there was little hope of change for the better. Circumstances were too strong for the individual to conquer. Take intemperance, for instance, the main cause of England’s wretchedness; how is it possible to grapple with that in society, where intoxicating drink is deemed, in most circles, a daily necessity of life?
‘You must form new social conditions,’ said Buxton as he entered: ‘I have just left,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine. We were fellow students. He was the leader in all the classes, and graduated with high honours. He took his doctor’s degree and then became a clergyman, acquired great popularity, was the means of drawing together a large congregation, became one of the ornaments of the temperance platform, was for awhile a power in Exeter Hall, had everything that heart could wish, a charming wife, a comfortable income, a large family; and now he has become a sot and a drunkard, and I see no hope for him as long as he lives. I can only believe that he was born with a hereditary taint—and that after fighting against it all his life, it has broken out at last and proved his master.’
‘Then you think drunkenness is a disease, and that a man is not responsible for it?’
‘In many cases I do, and I smile when I hear the parson denounce him as guilty of a heinous sin, or the judge brand him as a criminal offender. Examine the drunkard’s body after death, and you see in the stomach, in the liver, in the heart and brain signs of a diseased condition. At the same time, I am ready to admit that there are many who drink out of mere cussedness or who are so wretched that they take to it for temporary relief; or who just drink because they live in a drunken set, and like to do as others around them do. Whatever the immorality, the vice, or the sin of drunkenness, in a very large number of cases the drunkard is more to be pitied than blamed, as the subject of disease. If you get him to take the pledge, the chances are that he will break it, and that the last state of that man will be worse than the first.’
‘Ah! that helps me to what I have been long thinking of,’ replied Wentworth.
‘What is that—a community planted where no drink can be had? That is all very well; but while you are about it, you may as well go a step further. There are other hereditary diseases besides drunkenness: why permit them? Man is an animal,’ said Buxton. ‘I am, of course, speaking only from a medical point of view. What do we do with animals? Why, we stamp out the disease, and thus we get a new generation. It is thus we battle with lung disease in bullocks, swine fever and glandered horses. We must stamp out disease in men and women as we stamp it out of other animals.’
‘And then pay compensation to the owner. That would be rather a costly matter.’
‘No; I would put it the other way. Take, for instance, a consumptive couple in humble life. They marry early. The mother has a large family. The father dies of consumption before he has reached middle age, after being in a hospital for months, supported at the public expense, and he leaves his children, if they live, to be supported by the parish. If there is to be compensation, it is not the State that ought to be asked to pay it. If drink be one cause of poverty, surely hereditary disease is another. In a perfect community neither should be allowed to exist. Think of such awful things as epilepsy and insanity, and cancer and scrofula, none of which science can cure! Why not ask society to stamp them out? It is downright wickedness to allow them to be propagated in our midst.’
‘Public opinion would never consent to that.’
‘No,’ replied Buxton; ‘I am quite aware of that; but I would create a public opinion that would regard such marriages with horror, and then they would gradually become rare. Men and women have duties to society, and have to think of something else than the gratification of selfish passion or mere animal instinct. It is thus hereditary disease may disappear, and the nation be all the stronger and happier and richer. I know there are good people who look upon such afflictions as the result of the Lord’s chastening hand, and as they bury wife, or husband, or son, or daughter, learn to kiss the rod—as they call it—and to thank the Lord that He thus is weaning them from the world, and preparing them for a better world, whither they tell us their loved ones are already gone. I have no sympathy with that state of mind. It seems to me almost blasphemous, as the bereavements they rejoice in for their supposed sanctifying effects are simply the natural result of their own folly and imprudence and disregard of natural law. In the days of ignorance how did we treat the insane? Why, they were regarded as victims of Divine wrath, and the priest was called in—and of course well paid—to exorcise the evil spirit. That we do not do so now is a proof that we are a little wiser than our fathers—that, in fact, we are not quite such thundering fools; but we have a good deal yet to learn, nevertheless.’
‘The fact is,’ said Wentworth, ‘a man must learn to deny himself for the public good. Rather a difficult task that. If the victim of hereditary disease refuses to marry and have children, hereditary disease will die out. Is not that asking too much of human nature?’
‘There we must appeal to the law for the protection of the general public. The community is of more importance than the individual.’
‘But there is no law that cannot be evaded.’
‘Exactly so. Laws against drunkenness are constantly broken, but they have a beneficial effect nevertheless. A prohibitory liquor law goes too far. To act on the idea that a glass of claret, or beer, or cider does mischief to anyone is absurd. Walter Mapes was right when he wrote in praise of drink. As the old monk writes—
‘“A glass of wine amazingly enliveneth one’s internals.”’
‘You are right there,’ replied Wentworth. ‘Last summer I was at a seaside watering-place. There had been a regatta there, and I had written a description of it for our paper. In a day or two after the event was celebrated by a grand dinner at the leading hotel, to which I was invited. Unfortunately, on the day of the dinner I was desperately ill. My head was splitting; my skin was as tough as the hide of a rhinoceros; I ached in every limb. I went to the medical men of the district; there were two of them in partnership. No. 1 made me believe that I was in a bad way; No. 2 made me out worse. “Could I go to the dinner?” I asked. “By no means,” was the reply. “Take this medicine, go home and go to bed, and we will come and see you in the morning.” Ill as I was, I went to the dinner. It was a very jovial one, and I sat drinking champagne till late. I went home, slept like a top, and woke up as well as I ever was in my life. The next morning the doctor came. “Ah,” he said, “I see you look all the better for my medicine.” I said, “I did not take a drop of your medicine. I went to the dinner, drank champagne all night, and it was that which cured me.” “Very strange that,” said the doctor. “The very things we think poison have often quite a contrary effect.” My own opinion is that if I had taken the medicine I should have been ill for a week at least. I don’t take wine as a daily drink, because I can’t afford it, for one reason, and for another because I believe, taken daily, it has a mischievous effect. But there are times when it does good, and life is not so joyous that we can afford to dispense entirely with the pleasant stimulus of wine. I would not prevent its manufacture. No society has ever existed without the winecup for its feasts and holidays. I would not put down the liquor traffic. I would only shut up the drink shops. It is they that cause the drunkenness which does so much mischief, and there is no need for their existence at all.
‘But let us hear what her ladyship has to say,’ said Buxton.
‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
‘A regenerated State.’
‘Ah, there is need for it,’ she said. ‘But how are you to get it? That is the question.’
‘Oh, nothing is easier. Buy a farm in Essex and form there a model society.’
‘With a cheap train to take your people to London in an hour or two? That will never do.’
‘Well, then, let us go to Canada and plant our Utopia there.’
‘And fail, as others have done,’ said she.
‘But we shall take picked men and women, and with them we cannot fail.’
‘But they are not immortal.’
‘Happily,’ said Buxton, ‘none of us are that. We’ve all got to die and make room for the new generation.’
‘And can you answer for the new generation?’ asked Rose, ‘that they will remain shut up in your Utopia to labour, not each for himself, but for mutual benefit; that they will conform to your ideas as regards drinking and matrimony; that no selfish passion will run riot; that no serpent will come into that paradise to tempt another Eve; that the new Adam will be wiser than the old one?’
‘Why, I thought you were in favour of the idea,’ said her husband.
‘But I am a woman.’
‘And therefore have a full right to change your opinion,’ added Buxton.
‘Of course, there must be some failures. It is by them we learn how to succeed,’ replied Wentworth. ‘We learn from the failure of past organizations the way to form better and more successful ones. Are there not successful Shaker settlements in America?’
‘You make me laugh,’ said the lady.
‘This is no laughing matter. We are very much in earnest.’
‘Well, if you are in earnest, let me have the selection of the candidates for the new society.’
‘Very good; but I am afraid you will only pass the good-looking ones, and forget the old time-honoured maxim that “handsome is as handsome does.”’
‘A maxim I laugh to scorn.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘Well, you want healthy men and women, don’t you? And good looks are only to be found with physical health. It is by over-eating and over-drinking and over-working that you get a diseased and ugly race. Go to our east coast seaside resorts and see what fine men and women there are there. Contrast them with the operatives of the mine and factory. They scarcely seem to belong to the same race. A good-looking girl is happier than a plain one. You men are all for good looks. A fine physical organization indicates something more desirable. Nor do I blame them. “The soul is form, and doth the body make.” The homage we pay to beauty in man or woman is but rational. What made Alcibiades a power in Athens but his good looks? Did not Jew and Greek alike agree in doing honour to Adonis? The outward form indicates the inner disposition. If men are to have a brighter world we must people it with brighter people. But I think on the whole you had better stop where you are. Society in one way does improve. Progress is slow—but institutions are hard to remove, bad habits harder still. Why go out into the wilderness to teach people to be content with an agricultural life? Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Better to bear the ills we have than fly to those we know not of.’
‘Your ladyship is poetical!’
‘Not a bit of it—only practical, as we women always are when you men are up in the clouds. I believe, as soon as the peasant has got back to the hind, we shall have a new era for England, I believe the agricultural labourer who is helped to emigrate to Canada can better his condition at once. But I am not an agricultural labourer. I have no wish to pass my days in milking cows and rearing poultry; I have no wish to pass my days thousands of miles away from London, or Paris, or Rome. Am I not the heir of all the ages underneath the sun? I am for stopping at home and doing all the good I can. I do not feel called upon to dress like a guy, as the Shaker women do; nor do I see how you can make any settlement that can last. It may succeed for a time, if the conditions are favourable, and you select the men and women whom you take out. But as the old ones die off and the young people grow up there will be all sorts of difficulties. Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge had similar dreams. It was fortunate for them and the world that they were unable to carry them out. They did much better work at home. As long as human nature remains what it is we must build on the old lines.’
‘How then, would you regenerate society?’
‘By the regeneration of the individual. What is society but a collection of men? Save the man and the mass are saved. Buxton believes in science; Wentworth, you believe in politics. Well, both are means to an end; but more is required.’
‘And that is?’
‘Christ in the heart.’
‘Rather an exploded idea in these enlightened times. Why, you take us back to the dark ages!’ said Buxton.
‘Dark ages, indeed! At any rate they were ages of faith—when men believed in God, and did mighty works. Alas! we have no such men now.’
‘And why not?’
‘Because this is the age of material organization, of mechanical progress, of the exaltation of the mass over the individual, of an artificial equality; an age that has lost faith, an age of despair, when the rich man cries “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;” when the statesman recklessly legislates, believing “After me the deluge;” when the people “feed on lies.” “The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness apprehendeth it not.”’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Wentworth, ‘I feel inclined to make a start in Canada. Rose, I know, will come after a little pressing; and if you will come with us, I have a friend who has placed some land at my disposal. I have found some men and women of the right stamp who are ready to emigrate. They live in unhealthy homes, they have bad food, and are diseased in consequence. They are surrounded by evil companions, and that leads them into crime. Man is, to a certain extent, the creature of circumstance.
‘Yes, that is too true,’ replied Buxton; ‘but what do you propose as the remedy?’
‘Well, that is what I am coming to. Remove the pauper, place him in a new world, and with better surroundings, and he will become a better man. My friend is quite prepared to do so; he is ready to help the poor to emigrate to the colonies or America.’
‘But if the colonies or America will not have them, what are you to do? They may object—in fact, they do object to the poor of this country being thrown destitute and helpless on their shores.’
‘That is true; but my friend is resolved to send out only deserving men and women whose characters will be carefully inquired into, and to send them out under competent guides. He proposes to buy a large estate in some eligible part of the world, where land is cheap, where the climate is healthy, and where all that is wanted to develop the fruits of the earth, and to ensure health and happiness to the people, is human labour. Of course, he does not propose to deal with the masses; but he has an idea, that if he makes an attempt and it succeeds, other wealthy and benevolent men will follow his example, and thus the amount of crime, and misery, and poverty in England may be diminished.’
‘But why not try such a scheme in England?’
‘The expense is too great; the rates and taxes are too heavy, and the difficulties created by land-laws and lawyers are too great. Besides, there would always be the danger of the men breaking away in sudden fits of ill-humour and discontent, and getting back to their old bad habits and evil companionship. They must leave all the evils of the old world behind them and start clear. You will come with us, Buxton?’
‘With all my heart,’ was the reply.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE FINAL RESOLVE.
The following letter was addressed to her protégé in Liverpool by Rose immediately after the consultation already described:
‘My dear Boy,
‘Wentworth and I have formed a scheme for the future in which we hope you will unite.
‘We propose to establish a co-operative self-supporting community on the other side of the Atlantic.
‘Old England is played out. It may be that there is a new England to arise out of the ashes of the old, but it seems rather that—like Rome, and Athens, and Tyre, and India, and Babylon, and Corinth, and Carthage—its glory has passed away. The democracy will rule the land, and that means the separation of Ireland and England, the ruin of the landlords and of the capitalists, who in their turn will be sacrificed to the popular demand for a theoretical right. A member of Parliament will simply have to be the mouthpiece of his constituents; he will be imposed on them, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, by an assembly of wealthy, ambitions men, prepared to do anything to retain their hold of power.
‘Parliament or the State will have to interfere between fools and the results of their folly. The wretch who gets drunk and starves his wife and children will have to be taken under the care of the State. The lazy loafer, who cannot and will not work, will have to be maintained by the community. There is to be no coercion and no compulsion, and everybody is to be allowed to drive to the devil in the way most convenient. Economic law is to be set aside to gratify the demands of the people who want to be known as patriots, and who will thus put into men’s heads ideas they would never have dreamed of. Probably a fierce Communism will ravage the land, and by destroying the wealthy increase tenfold the hardships of the poor. It is because England has been the reverse of all this—because it has been the land of men who have preferred to do their duty rather than talk of their rights; who have gained with the strong arm and the manly heart victory over the earth and all it holds, that England has been the home of as noble a race—mixed, as it may be, of Celts and Saxons—as ever sailed the ocean or ploughed the land.
‘What has England now to fall back on but a rapidly-exhausting coal supply, an overwhelming debt, establishments—civil, and naval, and military—preposterous in good times, wicked now when our trade is declining everywhere, and the number daily increases of people who have no work to do? Shutting their eyes to all the dangers of the situation, we see the State split up into two parties—the one in possession of power clinging to it at whatever cost of principle or consistency, and the outs equally ready to pay the same price to get in.
‘And then we have a Church which is a sort of half-way house to Rome, and a conventional form of worship by thousands who call themselves Christians, but are really heathen at heart; and hence a growing class of men who delight to call themselves Atheists, and who fancy that they are more enlightened than other men because they refuse to bow the knee to a supreme Being. We are weary of all this. On the other side of the Rocky Mountains, where the Pacific, with its warm wind, sweeps up the slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, we have secured a large tract of country, with mines, and fertile valleys, and rivers abounding with fish. The region is romantic. The country is fertile, and it is far from the Old World, with its sin, its sorrow, its difficulty of living, and its corroding care. There, freed from the icy conventionalisms of the Old World, we shall lead happy and useful lives—all engaged in remunerative labour that shall leave abundant time for the cultivation of the mental powers, and where none will be exhausted by overwork, either of body or of mind. And we hope you will join our party.’