Letter XVII.—To Michael Hedgehog, Hong-Kong.
Dear Brother,—You’ll be glad to hear that at last Ministers have remembered there’s such a man in the world as Sir Henry Pottinger. The Queen has sent her compliments to Parliament, commanding a pension for him. We’ve given him £1500 a year for life; to my mind a shabby sum. La! Michael, only think how those six clerks of Chancery Lane, with their thousands a year—the chaps who had nothing to do but to play tricks with what they call equity—only think of them retired with a pension, every one of ’em living like a pot-bellied mouse in a ripe Stilton! How they must turn up their noses at poor Sir Henry! He has opened, I may say, a new world, for rivers of gold to flow out of it into the banks of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow—I can’t tell where. And he gets £1500 a year! I think we gave something more than that to Lord Keane for blowing up a pair of gates. But then folks turn a better penny upon war than peace. Blood and fire, and misery of all kinds, are more profitable than treaties of trade, no matter how glorious. The sword—the bloodier the better, too—weighs down the goose-quill; however, Sir Henry has a reward of some sort, and I’m heartily glad of it. May he live a hundred years—and his heart be as green as laurel when his head’s as white as cotton!!
But I’m coming to another part of the business. Sir J. C. Hobhouse, who, after all, has not lost his speech, as was for a long time supposed, lifted up his voice for Sir Henry. What do you think he said? “If he” (Sir Henry, mind) “were refused the reward now asked, the result would be this: he was only a lieutenant-colonel, although he had the brevet of major-general, and he would be obliged to leave England; he could not live here.” At this the House cheered, and I’m afraid, Mike, Hobhouse spoke the truth. As I’m an honest cabman who never takes less than his fare, if I didn’t blush like a poppy when I read this. Why, what a shabby, mean, outside set of folks we must be! Supposing Sir Henry had not got this pension—supposing that, wanting to stay in England, he had lived in a smallish house, had not given grand parties, but, content with the thoughts of the great things he had done, he had jogged on plainly and humbly, would folks have looked down upon him? Would the hicky do-nothings, born to their tens of thousands a year, have forgotten all about the Chinese peace and ransom, and tremendous trade opened by Sir Henry, unless they saw him in a crack carriage, and knew that he lived in a first-rate mansion? Wouldn’t it have been enough for them to know that a great and good head—one of the heads that rule the world, though the world won’t acknowledge it, at least until the aforesaid head may be rolled about by boys in the churchyard—that such a head had all its laurels about it, even though sometimes it went under a cotton umbrella? Wouldn’t they have acknowledged this? No, Michael; no, no, no! The great man, in the eyes of our English world, would have been lost in the smallness of his income.
Pull down Apsley House, deprive the Duke of Wellington of his fortune, let him for three months be seen as a general living at a club upon nothing but his half-pay, and it’s my belief that in three months after that some folks would more than doubt whether he ever won Waterloo. I once read of a Roman who was called from his turnips to save his country. What a small fellow he’d have seemed among us! We never could have understood a hero upon turnips alone. No; with us Cincinnatus must have had a fine leg of Southdown to his vegetables, butter and capers, and above all things, a silver fork. I’m called for a fare, so yours in haste,
Juniper Hedgehog.
P.S.—I don’t know whether you’ll care much about the news at Hong-Kong, but we shall have a tidy hay season.