BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD'S
Edinburgh
MAGAZINE.

VOL. LXV.

JANUARY—JUNE, 1849.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH;
AND
37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
1849.

BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXCIX. JANUARY, 1849. Vol. LXV.

CONTENTS.

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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXCIX. JANUARY, 1849. Vol. LXV.

THE YEAR OF REVOLUTIONS.

"No great state," says Hannibal, "can long remain quiet: if it ceases to have enemies abroad, it will find them at home—as powerful bodies resist all external attacks, but are wasted away by their own internal strength."[1] What a commentary on the words of the Carthaginian hero does the last year—The Year of Revolutions,—afford! What enthusiasm has it witnessed, what efforts engendered, what illusions dispelled, what misery produced! How bitterly have nations, as well as individuals, within its short bounds, learned wisdom by suffering—how many lessons has experience taught—how much agony has wickedness brought in its train. Among the foremost in all the periods of history, this memorable year will ever stand forth, a subject of undying interest to succeeding generations, a lasting beacon to mankind amidst the folly or insanity of future times. To it the young and the ardent will for ever turn, for the most singular scenes of social strife, the most thrilling incidents of private suffering: to it the aged will point as the most striking warning of the desperate effects of general delusion, the most unanswerable demonstration of the moral government of the world.

That God will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children was proclaimed to the Israelites amidst the thunders of Mount Sinai, and has been felt by every succeeding generation of men. But it is not now upon the third or the fourth generation that the punishment of transgression falls—it is felt in its full bitterness by the transgressors themselves. The extension of knowledge, the diffusion of education, the art of printing, the increased rapidity of travelling, the long duration of peace in consequence of the exhaustion of former wars, have so accelerated the march of events, that what was slowly effected in former times, daring several successive generations, by the gradual development of national passions, is now at once brought to maturity by the fervent spirit which is generally awakened, and the vehement passions which are everywhere brought into action.

Everything now goes on at the gallop. There is a railway speed in the stirring of the mind, not less than in the movement of the bodies of men. The social and political passions have acquired such intensity, and been so widely diffused, that their inevitable results are almost immediately produced. The period of seed-time and harvest has become as short in political as it is in agricultural labour. A single year brings its appropriate fruits to maturity in the moral as in the physical world. Eighty years elapsed in Rome from the time when the political passions were first stirred by Tiberius Gracchus, before its unruly citizens were finally subdued by the art, or decimated by the cruelty of Octavius. England underwent six years of civil war and suffering, before the ambition and madness of the Long Parliament were expelled by the purge of Pride, or crushed by the sword of Cromwell: twelve years elapsed between the convocation of the States-general in 1789, and the extinction of the license of the French Revolution by the arm of Napoleon. But, on this occasion, in one year, all, in the meantime at least, has been accomplished. Ere the leaves, which unfolded in spring amidst the overthrow of thrones, and the transports of revolutionists over the world, had fallen in autumn, the passions which had convulsed mankind were crushed for the time, and the triumphs of democracy were arrested. A terrible reaction had set in; experience of suffering had done its work; and swift as the shades of night before the rays of the ascending sun, had disappeared the ferment of revolution before the aroused indignation of the uncorrupted part of mankind. The same passions may again arise; the same delusions again spread, as sin springs up afresh in successive generations of men; but we know the result. They will, like the ways of the unrighteous, be again crushed.

So rapid was the succession of revolutions, when the tempest assailed the world last spring, that no human power seemed capable of arresting it; and the thoughtful looked on in mournful and impotent silence, as they would have done on the decay of nature or the ruin of the world. The Pope began the career of innovation: decrees of change issued from the Vatican; and men beheld with amazement the prodigy of the Supreme Pontiff—the head of the unchangeable Church—standing forth as the leader of political reform. Naples quickly caught the flame: a Sicilian revolution threatened to sever one-half of their dominions from the Neapolitan Bourbon; and internal revolt seemed to render his authority merely nominal in his own metropolis. Paris, the cradle in every age of new ideas, and the centre of revolutionary action, next felt the shock: a reform banquet was prepared as the signal for assembling the democratic forces; the national guard, as usual, failed at the decisive moment: the King of the Barricades quailed before the power which had created him; the Orleans dynasty was overthrown, and France delivered over to the dreams of the Socialists and the ferocity of the Red Republicans. Prussia soon shared the madness: the population of Berlin, all trained to arms, according to the custom of that country, rose against the government; the king had not energy enough to permit his faithful troops to act with the vigour requisite to uphold the throne against such assailants, and the monarchy of Frederick the Great was overthrown. Austria, even, could not withstand the contagion: neither its proud nobility, nor its light-hearted sensual people, nor its colossal army, nor its centuries of glory, could maintain the throne in its moment of peril. The Emperor was weak, the citizens of Vienna were infatuated; and an insurrection, headed by the boys at the university and the haberdashers' apprentices in the streets, overturned the imperial government, and drove the Emperor to seek refuge in the Tyrol. All Germany caught the flame: the dreams of a few hot-headed enthusiasts and professors seemed to prevail alike over the dictates of wisdom and the lessons of experience; and, amidst the transports of millions the chimera or German unity seemed about to be realised by the sacrifice of all its means of independence. The balance of power in Europe appeared irrevocably destroyed by the breaking up of its central and most important powers,—and England, in the midst of the general ruin, seemed rocking to its foundation. The Chartists were in raptures, the Irish rebels in ecstasy: threatening meetings were held in every town in Great Britain; armed clubs were organised in the whole south and west of Ireland; revolution was openly talked of in both islands, and the close of harvest announced as the time when the British empire was to be broken up, and Anglian and Hibernian republics established, in close alliance with the great parent democracy in France. Amidst such extraordinary and unprecedented convulsions, it was with difficulty that a few courageous or far-seeing minds preserved their equilibrium; and even those who were least disposed to despair of the fortunes of the species, could see no end to the succession of disasters with which the world was menaced but in a great exertion of the renovating powers of nature, similar to that predicted, in a similar catastrophe, for the material world, by the imagination of the poet.

"Roll on, ye stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time!
Near and more near your beaming cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach.
Flowers of the sky! ye, too, to Fate must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field;
Star after star, from heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush;
Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,
And Dark, and Night, and Chaos, mingle all;
Till, o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same."[2]

But the destiny of man, not less than that of the material world, is balanced action and reaction, not restoration from ruin. Order is preserved in a way which the imagination of the poet could not have conceived. Even in the brief space which has elapsed since the convulsions began in Italy in January last, the reality and ceaseless action of the preserving laws of nature have been demonstrated. The balance is preserved in social life by contending passions and interests, as in the physical world by opposite forces, under circumstances when, to all human appearance, remedy is impossible and hope extinguished. The orbit of nations is traced out by the Wisdom of Providence not less clearly than that of the planets; there are centripetal and centrifugal forces in the moral as well as in the material world. As much as the vehement passions, the selfish desires, the inexperienced zeal, the expanding energy, the rapacious indigence, the mingled virtues and vices of man, lead at stated periods to the explosions of revolution,—do the desire of tranquillity, the interests of property, the horror at cruelty, the lessons of experience, the force of religion, the bitterness of suffering, reinduce the desire of order, and restore the influence of its organ, government. If we contemplate the awful force of the expansive powers which, issuing from the great mass of central heat, find vent in the fiery channels of the volcano, and have so often rent asunder the solid crust of the earth, we may well tremble to think that we stand suspended, as it were, over such an abyss, and that at no great distance beneath our feet the elements of universal conflagration are to be found.[3] But, strong as are the expansive powers of nature, the coercive are still stronger. The ocean exists to bridle with its weight the fiery gulf; the arch of the earth has been solidly constructed by its Divine architect; and the only traces we now discover, in most parts of this globe, of the yet raging war of the elements, are the twisted strata, which mark, as it were, the former writhings of matter in the terrible grasp of its tormentors, or the splintered pinnacles of mountains, which add beauty to the landscape, or the smiling plains, which bring happiness to the abodes of man. It is the same in the moral world. Action and reaction are the law of mind as well as matter, and the equilibrium of social life is preserved by the opposite tendency of the interests which are brought into collision, and the counter-acting force of the passions which are successively awakened by the very convulsions which seem to menace society with dissolution.

A year has not elapsed since the revolutionary earthquake began to heave in Italy, since the volcano burst forth in Paris; and how marvellous is the change which already has taken place in the state of Europe! The star of Austria, at first defeated, and apparently about to be extinguished in Italy, is again in the ascendant. Refluent from the Mincio to the Ticino, her armies have again entered Milan,—the revolutionary usurpation of Charles Emanuel has been checked almost as soon as it commenced; and the revolutionary rabble of Lombardy and Tuscany has fled, as it was wont, before the bayonets of Germany. Radetzky has extinguished revolution in northern Italy. If it still lingers in the south of the peninsula, it is only because the strange and tortuous policy of France and England has interfered to arrest the victorious arms of Naples on the Sicilian shores. Paris has been the theatre of a dreadful struggle, blood has flowed in torrents in its streets, slaughter unheard-of stained its pavements, but order has in the end prevailed over anarchy. A dynasty has been subverted, but the Red Republicans have been defeated, more generals have perished in a conflict of three days than at Waterloo; but the Faubourg St Antoine has been subdued, the socialists have been overthrown, the state of siege has been proclaimed; and, amidst universal suffering, anguish, and woe, with three hundred thousand persons out of employment in Paris, and a deficit of £20,000,000 in the income of the year, the dreams of equality have disappeared in the reality of military despotism. It is immaterial whether the head of the government is called a president, a dictator, or an emperor—whether the civic crown is worn by a Napoleon or a Cavaignac—in either case the ascendant of the army is established, and France, after a brief struggle for a constitutional monarchy, has terminated, like ancient Rome, in an elective military despotism.

Frankfort has been disgraced by frightful atrocities. The chief seat of German unity and freedom has been stained by cruelties which find a parallel only in the inhuman usages of the American savages; but the terrible lesson has not been read in vain. It produced a reaction over the world; it opened the eyes of men to the real tendency and abominable iniquity of the votaries of revolution in Germany; and to the sufferings of the martyrs of revolutionary tortures on the banks of the Maine, the subsequent overthrow of anarchy in Vienna and Berlin is in a great degree to be ascribed. They roused the vacillating cabinets of Austria and Prussia—they sharpened the swords of Windischgratz and Jellachich—they nerved the souls and strengthened the arms of Brandenberg and Wrangel—they awakened anew the chord of honour and loyalty in the Fatherland. The national airs have been again heard in Berlin; Vienna has been regained after a desperate conflict; the state of siege has been proclaimed in both capitals; and order re-established in both monarchies, amidst an amount of private suffering and general misery—the necessary result of revolutions—which absolutely sickens the heart to contemplate. England has emerged comparatively unscathed from the strife; her time-honoured institutions have been preserved, her monarchy saved amidst the crash of nations. Queen Victoria is still upon the throne; our mixed constitution is intact; the dreams of the Chartists have been dispelled; the rebellion of the Irish rendered ridiculous; the loyalty of the great body of the people in Great Britain made manifest. The period of immediate danger is over; for the attack of the populace is like the spring of a wild beast—if the first onset fails, the savage animal slinks away into its den. General suffering indeed prevails, industry languishes, credit is all but destroyed, a woful deficiency of exports has taken place—but that is the inevitable result of popular commotions; and we are suffering, in part at least, under the effects of the insanity of nations less free and more inexperienced than ourselves. Though last, not least in the political lessons of this marvellous year, the papal government has been subverted—a second Rienzi has appeared in Rome; and the Supreme Pontiff, who began the movement, now a fugitive from his dominions, has exhibited a memorable warning to future ages, of the peril of commencing reforms in high places, and the impossibility of reconciling the Roman Catholic religion with political innovation.

But let it not be imagined that, because the immediate danger is over, and because military power has, after a fierce struggle, prevailed in the principal capitals of Europe, that therefore the ultimate peril is past, and that men have only to sit down, under the shadow of their fig-tree, to cultivate the arts and enjoy the blessings of peace. Such is not the destiny of man in any, least of all in a revolutionary age. We are rather on the verge of an era similar to that deplored by the poet:—

"Bella per Emathios plusquam civilia campos,
Jusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque potentem
In sua victrici conversum viscera dextrâ;
Cognatasque acies; et rupto fœdera regni
Certatum totis concussi viribus orbis,
In commune nefas."[4]

Who can tell the immeasurable extent of misery and wretchedness, of destruction of property among the rich, and ruin of industry among the poor, that must take place before the fierce passions, now so generally awakened, are allayed—before the visions of a virtuous republic by Lamartine, or the dreams of communism by Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin, or the insane ideas of the Frankfort enthusiasts have ceased to move mankind? The fire they have let loose will burn fiercely for centuries; it will alter the destiny of nations for ages; it will neither be quenched, like ordinary flames, by water, nor subdued, like the Greek fire, by vinegar: blood alone will extinguish its fury. The coming convulsions may well be prefigured from the past, as they have been recently drawn by the hand of a master:—"All around us, the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations; governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages, have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. The proudest capitals of western Europe have streamed with civil blood. All evil passions—the thirst of gain and the thirst of vengeance—the antipathy of class to class, of race to race—have broken loose from the control of divine and human laws. Fear and anxiety have clouded the faces, and depressed the hearts of millions; trade has been suspended, and industry paralysed; the rich have become poor, and the poor poorer. Doctrines hostile to all sciences, to all arts, to all industry, to all domestic charity—doctrines which, if carried into effect, would in thirty years undo all that thirty centuries have done for mankind, and would make the fairest provinces of France or Germany as savage as Guiana or Patagonia—have been avowed from the tribune, and defended by the sword. Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians, compared with whom the barbarians who marched under Attila or Alboin were enlightened and humane. The truest friends of the people have with deep sorrow owned, that interests more precious than any political privileges were in jeopardy, and that it might be necessary to sacrifice even liberty to save civilisation."[5]

It is now just a year since Mr Cobden announced, to an admiring and believing audience at Manchester, that the age of warfare had ceased; that the contests of nations had passed, like the age of the mastodon and the mammoth; that the steam-engine had caused the arms to drop from her hands, and the interests of free trade extinguished the rivalries of nations; and that nothing now remained but to sell our ships of war, disband our troops, cut twenty millions off our taxation, and set ourselves unanimously to the great work of cheapening everything, and underselling foreign competitors in the market of the world. Scarcely were the words spoken, when conflicts more dire, battles more bloody, dissensions more inextinguishable than had ever arisen from the rivalry of kings, or the ambition of ministers, broke out in almost every country of Europe. The social supplanted the national passions. Within the bosom of society itself, the volcano had burst forth. It was no longer general that was matched against general, as in the wars of Marlborough, nor nation that rose up against nation, as in those of Napoleon. The desire of robbery, the love of dominion, the lust of conquest, the passion for plunder, were directed to domestic acquisitions. Human iniquity reappeared in worse, because less suspected and more delusive colours. Robbery assumed the guise of philanthropy; spoliation was attempted, under colour of law; plunder was systematically set about, by means of legislative enactments. Revolution resumed its old policy—that of rousing the passions by the language of virtue, and directing them to the purposes of vice. The original devil was expelled; but straightway he returned with seven other devils, and the last state of the man was worse than the first. Society was armed against itself; the devastating passions burned in its own bosom; class rose against class, race against race, interest against interest. Capital fancied its interest was to be promoted by grinding down labour; labour, that its rights extended to the spoliation of capital. A more attractive object than the reduction of a city, or the conquest of a province, was presented to indigent cupidity. Easier conquests than over rival industry were anticipated by moneyed selfishness. The spoliation of the rich at their own door—the division of the property of which they were jealous, became the dream of popular ambition; the beating down of their own labourers by free-trade, the forcible reduction of prices by a contraction of the currency—the great object of the commercial aristocracy. War reassumed its pristine ferocity. In the nineteenth century, the ruthless maxim—Væ victis! became the war-cry on both sides in the terrible civil war which burst forth in an age of general philanthropy. It may be conceived what passions must have been awakened, what terrors inspired, what indignation aroused by such projects. But though we have seen the commencement of the era of social conflicts, is there any man now alive who is likely to see its end?

Experience has now completely demonstrated the wisdom of the Allied powers, who placed the lawful monarchs of France on the throne in 1815, and the enormous error of the liberal party in France, which conspired with the republicans to overthrow the Bourbon dynasty in 1830. That fatal step has bequeathed a host of evils to Europe: it has loosened the authority of government in all countries; it has put the very existence of freedom in peril by the enormity of the calamities which it has brought in its train. All parties in France are now agreed that the period of the Restoration was the happiest, and the least corrupted, that has been known since the first Revolution. The republicans of the present day tell us, with a sigh, that the average budgets of the three last years of Charles X. were 900,000,000 francs, (£36,000,000;) that the expenditure was raised by Louis Philippe at once to 1500,000,000 francs, (£60,000,000;) and that under the Republic it will exceed 1800,000,000 francs, (£72,000,000.) There can be no doubt of the fact; and there can be as little, that if the Red Republicans had succeeded in the insurrection of June last, the annual expenditure would have increased to £100,000,000—or rather, a universal spoliation of property would have ensued. Louis Blanc has given the world, in his powerful historical work, a graphic picture of the universal corruption, selfishness, and immorality, in public and private life, which pervaded France during the reign of Louis Philippe.[6] Though drawn by the hand of a partisan, there can be no doubt that the picture is too faithful in most of its details, and exhibits an awful proof of the effects of a successful revolution. But the misery which Louis Blanc has so ably depicted, the corruptions he has brought to light, under the revolutionary monarchy, have been multiplied fourfold by those which have prevailed during the last year in the republic established by Louis Blanc, himself!

Paris, ever since the suppression of the great insurrection in June last, has been in such a state, that it is the most utter mockery to call it freedom. In truth, it is nothing but the most unmitigated military despotism. A huge statue of liberty is placed in the National Assembly; but at every six paces bayonets are to be seen, to remind the bystanders of the rule of the sword. "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," meet the eye at every turn in the streets; but the Champs Elysées, the Place de Grève, the Carrousel, and Place Vendôme, are crowded with soldiers; and the Champ de Mars is white with tents, to cover part of the 40,000 regular troops which form the ordinary garrison of Paris. Universal freedom of discussion has been proclaimed by the constitution; but dozens of journals have been suppressed by the authority of the dictator; and imprisonment notoriously hangs over the head of every one who indulges in the freedom of discussion, which in England and America is universal. The state of siege has been raised, after having continued four months; but the military preparations for another siege continue with unabated vigour on both sides. The constitution has been adopted by a great majority in the Assembly; but the forts are all armed, and prepared to rain down the tempest of death on the devoted city. Universal suffrage is established; but menacing crowds are in the streets, threatening any one who votes against their favourite candidates. The Faubourg St Antoine, during the late election, was in a frightful state of agitation; infantry, cavalry, and artillery, were traversing the streets in all directions; and conflicts not less bloody than those of June last were anticipated in the struggle for the presidency, and prevented only by the presence of ninety thousand soldiers in the capital: a force greater than that which fought on either side at Austerlitz or Jena. It is evident that republican institutions, in such a state of society, are a mere name; and that supreme despotic power is really invested in France, as in ancient Rome under the emperors, in the nominee of a victorious body of soldiery. The Prætorian guards will dispose of the French as they did of the Roman diadem; and ere long, gratuities to the troops will perhaps be the passport to power in Paris, as they were in the Eternal City.

Nor have the social evils, which in France have followed in the wake of successful revolution, been less deplorable than the entire destruction of the rights of freemen and security of property which has ensued. To show that this statement is not overcharged, we extract from a noted liberal journal of Paris, La Reforme, of November 17, 1848, the following statement:—

"Property, manufactures, and commerce are utterly destroyed in Paris. Of the population of that great city, the capital of France, there are 300,000 individuals wanting the necessaries of life. One half at least of those earned from 3f. to 5f. a day previous to the revolution, and occupied a number of houses in the faubourgs. The proprietors of those houses receiving no rent, and having taxes and other charges to pay, are reduced to nearly as deep distress as their tenants. In the centre of Paris, the same distress exists under another form. The large and sumptuous apartments of the fashionable quarters were occupied before the revolution by wealthy proprietors, or by persons holding lucrative employments in the public offices, or by extensive manufacturers, but nearly all those have disappeared, and the few who remain have insisted upon such a reduction of rent that the proprietor does not receive one-half of the amount to which he is entitled. Should a proprietor of house property endeavour to raise a sum of money by a first mortgage, to defray his most urgent expenses, he finds it impossible to do so, even at a most exorbitant rate of interest. Those who possess ready money refuse to part with it, either through fear, or because they expect to purchase house property when it must be sold at 50 per cent less than the value."—La Reforme, November 17, 1848.

It is certainly a most remarkable thing, in the history of the aberrations of the human mind, that a system of policy which has produced, and is producing, such disastrous results—and, above all, which is inflicting such deadly and irreparable wounds on the interests of the poor, and the cause of freedom throughout the world—should have been, during the last eighteen years, the object of unceasing eulogy by the liberal party on both sides of the Channel; and that the present disastrous state of affairs, both in this country and on the Continent, is nothing more than the natural and inevitable result of the principles that party has everywhere laboured to establish. The revolution of 1830 was hailed with enthusiasm in this country by the whole liberal party: the Irish are not more enamoured now of the revolution of 1848, than the Whigs were, eighteen years ago, of that of 1830. The liberal government of England did all in their power to spread far and wide the glorious example. Flanders was attacked—an English fleet and French army besieged Antwerp; and, by a coalition of the two powers, a revolutionary throne was established in Belgium, and the king of the Netherlands prevented from re-establishing the kingdom guaranteed to him by all the powers of Europe. The Quadruple Alliance was formed to revolutionise Spain and Portugal; a sanguinary civil war was nourished for long in both kingdoms; and at length, after years of frightful warfare, the legitimate monarch, and legal order of succession, were set aside in both countries; queens were put on the thrones of both instead of kings, and England enjoyed the satisfaction, for the diffusion of her revolutionary propagandism, of destroying the securities provided for the liberties of Europe by the treaty of Utrecht, and preparing a Spanish princess for the hand of a Bourbon prince.

Not content with this memorable and politic step, and even after the recent disasters of France were actually before their eyes, our rulers were so enamoured of revolutions, that they could not refrain from encouraging it in every small state within their reach. Lord Palmerston counseled the Pope, in a too celebrated letter, to plunge into the career which has terminated so fatally for himself and for Italy. Admiral Parker long prevented the Neapolitan force from embarking for Sicily, to do there what Lord Hardinge was nearly at the same time sent to do in Ireland. We beheld the Imperial standards with complacency driven behind the Mincio; but no sooner did Radetzky disperse the revolutionary army, and advance to Milan, than British and French diplomacy interfered to arrest his march, and save their revolutionary protégé, the King of Piedmont, from the chastisement which his perfidious attack on Austria in the moment of her distress merited. The Ministerial journals are never weary of referring to the revolutions on the Continent as the cause of all the distress which has prevailed in England, since they broke out in last spring: they forget that it was England herself which first unfurled the standard of revolution, and that, if we are suffering under its effects, it is under the effects of our own measures and policy.

Strange and unaccountable as this perverted and diseased state of opinion, in a large part of the people of this country, undoubtedly is, it is easily explained when the state of society, and the channel into which political contests have run, are taken into consideration. In truth, our present errors are the direct consequence of our former wisdom; our present weakness, of our former strength; our present misery, of our former prosperity.

In the feudal ages, and over the whole Asiatic world at the present time, the contests of parties are carried on for individuals. No change of national policy, or of the system of internal government, is contemplated on either side. It is for one prince or another prince, for one sultaun or another sultaun, that men draw their swords. "Under which King, Bezonian?—speak or die!" is there the watch-word of all civil conflict. It was the same in this country during the feudal ages, and down to a very recent period. No man in the civil wars between Stephen and Henry II., or of the Plantagenet princes, or in the wars of the Roses, contemplated or desired any change of government or policy in the conflict in which they were engaged. The one party struck for the Red, the other for the White Rose. Great civil and social interests were at issue in the conflict; but the people cared little or nothing for these. The contest between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians was a great feud between two clans which divided the state; and the attachment to their chiefs was the blind devotion of the Highlanders to the Pretender.

The Reformation, which first brought the dearest objects of thought and interest home to all classes, made a great change in this respect, and substituted in large proportion general questions for the adherence to particular men, or fidelity to particular families. Still, however, the old and natural instinct of the human race to attach themselves to men, not things, continued, in a great degree, to influence the minds of the people, and as many buckled on their armour for the man as the cause. The old Cavaliers, who periled life and lands in defence of Charles I., were as much influenced by attachment to the dignified monarch, who is immortalised in the canvass of Vandyke, as by the feelings of hereditary loyalty; and the iron bands which overthrew their ranks at Marston Moor, were as devoted to Cromwell as the tenth legion to Cæsar, or the Old Guard to Napoleon. In truth, such individual influences are so strongly founded in human nature, that they will continue to the end of the world, from whatever cause a contest may have arisen, as soon as it has continued for a certain time, and will always stand forth in prominent importance when a social has turned into a military conflict, and the perils and animosities of war have endeared their leaders to the soldiers on either side. The Vendeans soon became devoted to Henri Larochjaquelein, the Republicans to Napoleon; and in our own times, the great social conflict of the nineteenth century has been determined by the fidelity of the Austrian soldiers to Radetzky, of the French to Cavaignac, of the German to Windischgratz.

But in the British empire, for a century past, it has been thoroughly understood, by men of sense of all parties, that a change of dynasty is out of the question, and that there is no reform worth contending for in the state, which is not to be effected by the means which the constitution itself has provided. This conviction, long impressed upon the nation, and interwoven as it were with the very framework of the British mind, having come to coincide with the passions incident to party divisions in a free state, has in process of time produced the strange and tortuous policy which, for above a quarter of a century, has now been followed in this country by the government, and lauded to the skies by the whole liberal party on the Continent. Deprived of the watchwords of men, the parties have come to assume those of things. Organic or social change have become the war-cry of faction, instead of change of dynasty. The nation is no longer drenched with blood by armies fighting for the Red or the White Rose, by parties striving for the mastery between the Stuart and Hanover families, but it was not less thoroughly divided by the cry of "The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill," at one time, and that of "Free-trade and cheap corn" at another. Social change, alterations of policy, have thus come to be the great objects which divide the nation; and, as it is ever the policy of Opposition to represent the conduct of Government as erroneous, it follows, as a necessary consequence, that the main efforts of the party opposed to administration always have been, since the suppression of the Rebellion in 1745, to effect, when in opposition, a change in general opinion, and, when in power, to carry that change into effect by a change of policy. The old law of nature is still in operation. Action and reaction rule mankind; and in the efforts of parties mutually to supplant each other in power, a foundation is laid for an entire change of policy at stated periods, and an alteration, as great as from night to day, in the opinions and policy of the ruling party in the same state at different times.

The old policy of England—that policy under which, in the words of Macaulay, "The authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never known before; under which form, the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; under which our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; under which her opulence and martial glory grew together; under which, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit, fruitful of marvels which, to the statesmen of any former age, would have appeared incredible; under which a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance; under which Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at length united to England, not mere by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties of interest and affection; under which, in America, the British colonies rapidly became far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro added to the dominions of Charles V.; under which, in Asia, British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid, and more durable, than that of Alexander,"[7]—was not the policy of any particular party or section of the community, and thence its long duration and unexampled success.

It was not introduced—it grew. Like the old constitution, of which it was the emanation, it arose from the wants and necessities of all classes of men during a long series of ages. It was first proclaimed in energetic terms by the vigour of Cromwell; the cry of the national representatives for markets to native industry, of the merchants, for protection to their ships, produced the Navigation Laws, and laid the foundation of the colonial empire of England. Amidst all his insouciance and folly in the drawing-room of the Duchess of Portsmouth, and the boudoirs of the Duchess of Cleveland, it was steadily pursued by Charles II. James II. did not lose sight of this same system, amidst all his infatuation and cruelty; when directing the campaign of Jeffreys in the west, he was as steadily bent on upholding and extending the navy as when, amidst the thunders of war, he combated de Ruyter and van Tromp on the coast of Holland. William III., Anne, and the Georges, pursued the same system. It directed the policy of Somers and Godolphin; it ruled the diplomacy of Walpole and Chatham; it guided the measures of Bute and North; it directed the genius of Pitt and Fox. It was for it that Marlborough conquered, and Wolfe fell; that Blake combated, and Hawke destroyed; that Nelson launched the thunderbolt of war, and Wellington carried the British standard to Madrid and Paris.

It was the peculiar structure of the English constitution, during this century and a half of prosperity and glory, that produced so remarkable a uniformity in the objects of the national policy. These objects were pursued alike by the Republicans and the Royalists; by the Roundheads and the Cavaliers; by the Whigs, during the seventy years of their rule that followed the Revolution, and the Tories, during the sixty years that succeeded the accession of George III. The policy was that of protection to all the national interests, whether landed, commercial, colonial, or manufacturing. Under this system they all grew and prospered, alike and abreast, in the marvellous manner which the pencil of Macaulay has sketched in the opening of his History. It was hard to say whether agriculture, manufactures, colonies, or shipping throve and prospered most during that unique period. The world had never seen anything like it before: it is doubtful if it will ever see anything like it again. Under its shelter, the various interests of the empire were knit together in so close a manner, that they not only all grew and prospered together, but it was universally felt that their interests were entirely dependent on each other. The toast "The plough, the loom, and the sail," was drunk with as much enthusiasm in the farmers' club as in the merchant's saloon. As varied as the interests with which they were charged, the policy of government was yet perfectly steady in following out one principle—the protection of the productive classes, whether by land or water, whether at home or abroad.

The legislature represented and embodied all these interests, and carried out this policy. It gave them a stability and consistency which had never been seen in the world before. Nominally the representatives of certain towns and counties in the British islands, the House of Commons gradually became really the representatives of the varied interests of the whole British empire. The nomination boroughs afforded an inlet alike to native talent and foreign interests. Gatton and Old Sarum, or similar close boroughs, afforded an entrance to the legislature, not only to the genius of Pitt and Fox, of Burke and Sheridan, but to the wealth of Jamaica, the rising energy of Canada, the aged civilisation of Hindostan. Experienced protection reconciled all interests to a government under which all prospered; mutual dependence made all sensible of the necessity of common unanimity. The statute-book and national treaties, from the Revolution in 1688 to the close of the war with Napoleon in 1815, exhibit the most decisive proof of the working of these varied, but not conflicting interests, in the national councils. If you contemplate the general protection afforded to agriculture and the landed interest, you would imagine the House of Commons had been entirely composed of squires. If you examine the innumerable enactments, fiscal and prohibitory, for the protection of manufactures, you would suppose it had been entirely under the government of manufacturers. If you contemplate the steady protection invariably given to the mercantile navy, you would suppose it had been chiefly directed by shipowners. If you cast your eyes on the protection constantly given by discriminating fiscal duties to colonial industry, and the vast efforts made, both by sea and land, in the field and in the cabinet, to encourage and extend our colonial dependencies, you would conclude, not only that they were represented, but that their representatives had a majority in the legislature.

The reason of this prodigy was, that all interests had, in the course of ages, and the silent effects of time, worked their way into the legislature, and all enjoyed in fair proportion a reasonable influence on government. Human wisdom could no more ab ante have framed such a system, than it could have framed the British constitution. By accident, or rather the good providence of God, it grew up from the wants of men during a series of generations; and its effects appeared in this, that—except in the cases of the American war, where unfortunate circumstances produced a departure from the system; of the Irish Celts, whom it seems impracticable to amalgamate with Saxon institutions; and of the Scottish Highlanders, whom chivalrous honour for a short period alienated from the established government—unanimity unprecedented during the whole period pervaded the British empire. All foreign colonies were desirous to be admitted into the great protecting confederacy; the French and Dutch planters in secret prayed for the defeat of their defenders when the standard of St George approached their shores. The Hindoos, with heroic constancy, alike in prosperous and adverse fortune, maintained their fidelity: Canada stood firm during the most dangerous crisis of our history; and the flame of loyalty burned as steadily on the banks of the St Lawrence, on the mountains of Jamaica, and on the shores of the Ganges, as in the crowded emporiums of London, or the smiling fields of Yorkshire.

But there is a limit imposed by nature to all earthly things. The growth of empires is restrained, after they have reached a certain stature, by laws as certain as those which arrest that of individuals. If a state does not find the causes of its ruin in foreign disaster, it will inevitably find it in internal opinion. This arises so naturally and evidently from the constitution of the human mind, that it may be regarded as a fixed law of nature in all countries where intellectual activity has been called forth, and as one of the most powerful agents in the government, by supreme Wisdom, of human affairs. This principle is to be found in the tendency of original thought to differ from the current opinion with which it is surrounded, and of party ambition to decry the system of those by whom it is excluded from power.

Universally it will be found that the greatest exertions of human intellect have been made in direct opposition to the current of general opinion; and that public thought in one age is in general but the echo of solitary meditation in that which has preceded it. Illustrations of this crowd on the reflecting mind from every period of history. The instances of Luther standing forth alone to shake down, Samson-like, the pillar of the corrupted Romish faith; of Bacon's opening, amid all the despotism of the Aristotelian philosophy, his inductive philosophy; of Galileo maintaining the motion of the earth even when surrounded by the terrors of the Italian Inquisition; of Copernicus asserting the true system of the heavens in opposition to the belief of two thousand years; of Malthus bringing forward the paradox of the danger of human increase in opposition to the previous general opinion of mankind; of Voltaire combating alone the giant power of the Roman Catholic hierarchy; of Rousseau running a course against the whole ideas of his age—will immediately occur to every reader. Many of these great men adopted erroneous opinions, and, in consequence, did as much evil to their own or the next age as others did good; but they were all characterised by one mark. Their opinions were original, and directly adverse to public opinion around them. The close of the nineteenth century was no exception to the general principle. Following out those doctrines of freedom from restraint of every kind, which in France had arisen from the natural resistance of men to the numerous fetters of the monarchy, and which had been brought forward by Turgot and the Economists, in the boudoirs of Madame Pompadour and the coteries of Paris,—Adam Smith broached the principle of Free Trade, with the exceptions of grain and shipping. The first he excepted, because it was essential to national subsistence; the second, because it was the pillar of national defence. The new philosophy was ardently embraced by the liberal party, who, chagrined by long exclusion from office, were rejoiced to find a tangible and plausible ground whereon to attack the whole existing system of government. From them it gradually extended to nearly all the ardent part of the community, ever eager to embrace doctrines at variance with previous and vulgar belief, and not yet enlightened by experience as to the effect of the new system. It was soon discovered that for a century and a half we had been proceeding on false principles. The whole policy of government since the days of Cromwell had been erroneous; in politics, in social government, in diplomacy, in the colonies, in war, in peace, at home and abroad, we had been running blindfold to destruction. True, we had become great, and glorious, and free under this abominable system; true, it had been accompanied by a growth of national strength, and an amount of national happiness, unparalleled in any former age or country; but that was all by accident. Philosophy had marked it with the sign of reprobation—prosperity had poured upon us by chance in the midst of universal misgovernment. By all the rules of calculation we should have been destroyed, though, strange to say, no symptoms of destruction had yet appeared amongst us. According to every principle of philosophy, the patient should long ago have been dead of the mortal disease under which he laboured: the only provoking thing was, that he was still walking about in robust and florid health.

Circumstances occurred at the same time, early in this century, which had the most powerful effect in exasperating the Opposition party throughout the country, and inducing them to embrace, universally and ardently, the new philosophy, which condemned in such unmeasured terms the whole system of government pursued by their antagonists. For half a century, since the long dominion of the Whigs was terminated in 1761 by George III., the Tories had been, with the exception of a few months, constantly in office. Though their system of government in religion, in social affairs, in foreign relations, was nothing but a continuation of that which the Whigs had introduced, and according to which the government had been conducted from 1688 to 1760, yet, in the ardour of their zeal for the overthrow of their adversaries, the liberal party embraced on every point the opposite side. The descendants of Lord Russel became the advocates of Roman Catholic emancipation; the followers of Marlborough and Godolphin, the partisans of submission to France; the successors of Walpole and Chatham, the advocates of free trade and colonial neglect. These feelings, embraced from the influence of a determination to find fault with government in every particular, were worked up to the highest pitch by the glorious result of the war with France, and the apparently interminable lease of power acquired by their adversaries from the overthrow of Napoleon. That memorable event, so opposite to that which they had all so long in public predicted, so entirely the reverse of that which many had in secret wished, produced a profound impression on the Whig party. Their feelings were only the more acute, that, amidst the tumult of national exultation, they were forced to suppress them, and to wear the countenance of satisfaction, when the bitterness of disappointment was in their hearts. To the extreme asperity of these feelings, and the universal twist which they gave to the minds of the whole liberal party in Great Britain, the subsequent general change in their political principles is to be ascribed; and, in the practical application of these principles, the real cause of our present distressed condition is to be found.

While one set of causes thus prepared, in the triumph of Conservative and protective principles, the strongest possible reaction against them, and prognosticated, at no distant period, their general banishment from popular thought, another, and a not less powerful set, flowing from the same cause, gave these principles the means of acquiring a political supremacy, and ruling the government of the state. The old policy of England, it has been already observed, for a hundred and fifty years, had been to take care of the producers, and let the consumers take care of themselves. Such had been the effects of this protective policy, that, before the close of the Revolutionary war, during which it received its full development, the producing classes, both in town and country, had become so rich and powerful, that it was easy to see they would ere long give a preponderance to urban over rural industry. The vast flood of agricultural riches poured for expenditure into towns; that of the manufacturers and merchants seldom left it. The great manufacturing and mercantile places, during a century, had advanced in population tenfold, in wealth thirty-fold. The result of this change was very curious, and in the highest degree important. Under the shadow of protection to industry in all its branches, riches, both in town and country, had increased so prodigiously, that the holders of it had acquired a preponderance over the classes in the state yet engaged in the toilsome and hazardous work of production. The owners of realised capital had become so numerous and weighty, from the beneficial effects of the protective system under which the country had so long flourished, that they formed an important class apart, which began to look to its separate interests. The consumers had become so numerous and affluent, that they were enabled to bid defiance to the producers. The maxim became prevalent, "Take care of the consumer, and let the producer take care of himself." Thence the clamour for free trade. Having passed the labour of production, during which they, or their fathers, had strenuously supported the protective principles, by which they were making their money, the next thing was to support the opposite principles, by which the value of the made money might be augmented. This was to be done by free trade and a contracted currency. Having made millions by protection, the object now was to add a half to every million by raising its value. The way to do this seemed to be by cheapening the price of every other article, and raising the price of money: in other words, the system of cheapening everything without reference to its effect on the interests of production.

Parliamentary reform, for which the Whigs, disappointed by long exclusion from office, laboured strenuously, in conjunction with the commercial and moneyed classes, enriched by protection, gave them the means of carrying both objects into execution, because it made two-thirds of the House of Commons the representatives of burghs. The cry of cheap bread was seductive to all classes in towns:—to the employer, because it opened the prospect of reducing the price of labour, and to the operative, because it presents that of lowering that of provisions. To these two objects, accordingly, of raising the value of money and lowering the remuneration of industry, the Reform parliament, the organ of the moneyed interest and consuming classes, has, through all the changes of party, been perfectly steady. It is no wonder it has been so, for it was the first-born of those interests. Twenty years before the cry for reform convulsed the nation—in 1810—the Bullion Committee brought forward the principle of a metallic, and, consequently, a contracted currency; and they recommended its adoption in the very crisis of the war, when Wellington lay at Torres Vedras, and when the monetary crisis to which it must have led would have made us a province of France. Reform was the consequence of the change in the currency, not its cause. The whole time from 1819 to 1831, with the exception of 1824 and 1825, was one uninterrupted period of suffering. Such was the misery it produced that the minds of men were prepared for any change. A chaos of unanimity was produced by a chaos of suffering.

Thus, by a singular and most interesting chain of causes and effects, it was the triumph of Conservative and protective principles in the latter years of the war, and the entire demonstration thus afforded of their justice and expedience, which was the immediate cause of their subsequent abandonment, and all the misery which has thence arisen, and with which we are still everywhere surrounded. For it at once turned all the intellectual energies of the great liberal party to oppose, in every particular, the system by which their opponents had been glorified, and concentrated all the energies of the now powerful moneyed classes to swell, by a change of policy, the fortunes on which their consequence depended, and which had arisen from the long prevalence of the opposite system. For such is the tendency to action and reaction, in all vigorous and intellectual communities, that truth itself is for long no security against their occurrence. On the contrary, so vehement are the passions excited by a great and lasting triumph of one party, even though in the right, that the victory of truth, whether in politics or religion, is often the immediate cause of the subsequent triumph of error. The great Roman Catholic reaction against the Reformation, which Ranke has so clearly elucidated, and Macaulay has so powerfully illustrated, has its exact counterpart in the great political reaction of the Whig party, of which Macaulay is himself the brightest ornament.

That this is the true explanation of the strange and tortuous policy, both in domestic and foreign affairs, under which the nation has so long suffered, is apparent on the slightest survey of political affairs in the last and present century.

The old principle of the English constitution, which had worked itself into existence, or grown up from the necessities of men, during a long course of years, was, that the whole interests of the state should be represented, and that the House of Commons was the assembly in which the representatives of all those varied interests were to be found. For the admission of these varied interests, a varied system of electoral qualifications, admitting all interests, noble, mercantile, industrial, popular, landed, and colonial, was indispensable. In the old House of Commons, all these classes found a place for their representatives, and thence the commercial protection it afforded to industry. According to the new system, a vast majority of seats was to be allotted to one class only, the householders and shopkeepers of towns. That class was the moneyed and consuming class; and thence the whole subsequent course of British policy, which has been to sacrifice everything to their interests.

The old maxim of government, alike with Whigs and Tories, was, that native industry of all sorts, and especially agricultural industry, was to be protected, and that foreign competition was to be admitted only in so far as was not inconsistent with this primary object. The new philosophy taught, and the modern liberals carried into execution, a different principle. They went on the maxim that the interests of the consumers alone were to be considered: that to cheapen everything was the great object; and that it mattered not how severely the producers of articles suffered, provided those who purchased them were enabled to do so at a reduced rate. This policy, long lauded in abstract writings and reviews, was at length carried into execution by Sir R. Peel, by the tariff of 1842 and the free-trade measures of 1846.

To protect and extend our colonial dependencies was the great object of British policy, alike with Whigs and Tories, from the time of Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon. In them, it was thought our manufacturers would find a lasting and rapidly increasing market for their produce, which would, in the end, enable us equally to defy the hostility, and withstand the rivalry of foreign states. The new school held that this was an antiquated prejudice: that colonies were a burden rather than a blessing to the mother country: that the independence of America was the greatest blessing that ever befell Great Britain; and that, provided we could buy colonial produce a little cheaper, it signified nothing though our colonies perished by the want of remuneration for their industry, or were led to revolt from exasperation at the cruel and unnatural conduct of the mother country.

The navy was regarded by all our statesmen, without exception, from Cromwell to Pitt, as the main security of the British empire; its bulwark in war; the bridge which united its far-distant provinces during peace. To feed it with skilled seamen, the Navigation Laws were upheld even by Adam Smith and the first free-traders, as the wisest enactments which were to be found in the British statute-book. But here, too, it was discovered that our ancestors had been in error: the system under which had flourished for two centuries the greatest naval power that ever existed, was found to have been an entire mistake; and provided freights could be had ten per cent cheaper, it was of no consequence though the fleets of France and Russia blockaded the Thames and Mersey, and two-thirds of our trade was carried on in foreign bottoms.

To provide a CURRENCY equal to the wants of the nation, and capable of growth in proportion to the amount of their numbers and transactions, was one main object of the old policy of Great Britain. Thence the establishment of banks in such numbers in every part of the empire during the eighteenth century, and the introduction of the suspension of the obligation to pay in gold in 1797, when the necessities of war had drained nearly all that part of the currency out of the country, and it was evident that, unless a substitute for it in sufficient quantities was provided, the nation itself, and all the individuals in it, would speedily become bankrupt. The marvels of British finance from that time till 1815, which excited the deserved astonishment of the whole world, had no effect in convincing the impassioned opponents of Mr Pitt, that this was the true system adapted for that or any similar crisis. On the contrary, it left no doubt in their minds that it was entirely wrong. The whole philosophers and liberal school of politicians discovered that the very opposite was the right principle; that gold, the most variable in price and evanescent, because the most desired and portable of earthly things, was the only safe foundation for a currency; that paper was worthless and perilous, unless in so far as it could be instantly converted into that incomparable metal; and that, consequently, the more the precious metals were withdrawn from the country, by the necessities of war or the effects of adverse exchanges, the more the paper circulation should be contracted. If the last sovereign went out, they held it clear the last note should be drawn in. The new system was brought into practice by Sir R. Peel, by the acts of 1844 and 1845, simultaneously with a vast importation of grain under the free-trade system—and we know the consequence. We were speedily near our last sovereign and last note also.

To establish a sinking fund, which should secure to the nation during peace the means of discharging the debt contracted amidst the necessities of war, was one of the greatest objects of the old English policy, which was supported with equal earnestness by Mr Pitt and Mr Fox, by Mr Addington and Lord Henry Petty. So steadily was this admirable system adhered to through all the dangers and necessities of the war, that we had a clear sinking fund of £15,000,000 a-year, when the contest terminated in 1815, which, if kept up at that amount, from the indirect taxes from which it was levied during peace, would, beyond all question, as the loans had ceased, have discharged the whole debt by the year 1845. But the liberals soon discovered that this was the greatest of all errors: it was all a delusion; the mathematical demonstration, on which it was founded, was a fallacy; and the only wisdom was to repeal the indirect taxes, from which the sinking fund was maintained, and leave posterity to dispose of the debt as they best could, without any fund for its discharge. This system was gradually carried into effect by the successive repeal of the indirect taxes by different administrations; until at length, after thirty-three years of peace, we have, instead of the surplus of fifteen millions bequeathed to us by the war, an average deficit of fifteen hundred thousand pounds; and the debt, after the longest peace recorded in British history, has undergone scarcely any diminution.

Indirect taxation was the main basis of the British finance in old times—equally when directed by the Whigs as the Tories. Direct taxes were a last and painful resource, to be reserved for a period during war, when it had become absolutely unavoidable. So efficacious was this system proved to be by the event, when acting on a nation enjoying protected industry, and an adequate and irremovable currency, that, before the end of the war, £72,000,000 was, amidst universal prosperity, with ease raised from eighteen millions of people in Great Britain and Ireland. This astonishing result, unparalleled in the previous history of the world, had no influence in convincing the modern liberals that the system which produced it was right. On the contrary, it left no doubt in their minds that it was entirely wrong. They introduced the opposite system: in twenty-five years, they repealed £40,000,000 of indirect taxes; and they reintroduced the income tax as a permanent burden during peace. We see the result. The sinking fund has disappeared; the income tax is fixed about our necks; a deficit of from a million and a half to two millions annually incurred; and it is now more difficult to extract fifty-two millions annually from twenty-nine millions of souls, than, at the close of the war, it was to raise seventy-two millions from eighteen millions of inhabitants.

To discourage revolution, both abroad and at home, and enable industry, in peace and tranquillity, to reap the fruits of its toil, was the grand object of the great contest which Pitt's wisdom bequeathed to his successors, and Wellington's arm brought to a glorious termination. This, however, was ere long discovered to be the greatest error of all. England, it was found out, had a decided interest in promoting the cause of revolution all over the world. So enamoured did we soon become of the propagandist mania, that we pursued it in direct opposition to our planned national interests, and with the entire abrogation of our whole previous policy, for which we had engaged in the greatest and most costly wars, alike under Whig and Tory administrations. We supported revolutions in the South American states, though thereby we reduced to a half of its former amount the supply of the precious metals throughout the globe; and, in consequence, increased immensely the embarrassment which a contracted paper currency had brought upon the nation: we supported revolution in Belgium, though thereby we brought the tricolor standard down to Antwerp, and surrendered to French influence the barrier fortresses won by the victories of Marlborough and Wellington: we supported it during four years of carnage and atrocity in Spain, though thereby we undid the work of our own hands, in the treaty of Utrecht, surrendered the whole objects gained by the War of the Succession, and placed the female line upon the throne, as if to invite the French princes to come and carry off the glittering prize: we supported revolutions in Sicily and Italy, though thereby we gave such a blow to our export trade, that it sank £1,400,000 in the single month of last May, and above £5,000,000 in the course of the year 1848.

To abolish the slave trade was one of the objects which Whigs and Tories had most at heart in the latter years of the old system; and in that great and glorious contest Mr Pitt, Mr Fox, and Mr Wilberforce stood side by side. But this object, so important in its results, so interesting to humanity from its tendency to alleviate human suffering, ere long yielded to the enlightened views of modern liberals. It was discovered that it was much more important to cheapen sugar for a time[8] than to rescue the African race from perdition. Free trade in sugar was introduced, although it was demonstrated, and, indeed, confessed, that the effect of it would be to ruin all the free-labour colonies, and throw the supply of the world into the hands of the slave states. Provided, for a few years, you succeeded in reducing the average retail price of sugar a penny a pound, it was deemed of no consequence though we extinguished the growth of free-labour sugar—destroyed colonies in which a hundred millions of British capital were invested, and doubled the slave trade in extent, and quadrupled it in horror, throughout the globe.

It had been the constant policy of the British government, under all administrations, for above a century and a half, to endeavour to reclaim the Irish population by introducing among them colonies of English who might teach them industry, and Protestant missionaries who might reclaim them from barbarism. The Irish landlords and boroughs were the outposts of civilisation among a race of savages; the Irish Church the station of Christianity amidst the darkness of Romish slavery. So effectual was this system, and so perfectly adapted to the character of the Celtic race—capable of great things when led by others, but utterly unfit for self-government, and incapable of improvement when left to itself,—that even in the ruthless hands of Cromwell, yet reeking with the slaughter of stormed cities, it soon spread a degree of prosperity through the country then unknown, and rarely if ever since equalled in that ill-starred land.[9] But the experience of the utter futility of all attempts, during a century and a half, to leave the native Irish Celts to themselves or their own direction, had no effect whatever in convincing our modern liberals that they were incapable of self-direction, and would only be ruined by Saxon institutions. On the contrary, it left no doubt in their minds that the absence of self-government was the sole cause of the wretchedness of the country, and that nothing was wanting but an entire participation in the privileges of British subjects, to render them as industrious, prosperous, and loyal as the yeomen of Kent or Surrey. In pursuance of those principles, Catholic Emancipation was granted: the Whigs had effected one revolution in 1688, by coalescing with the whole Tories to exclude the Catholics from the government; they brought about another revolution, in 1829, by coalescing with a section of the Tories to bring them in. In furtherance of the new system, so plausible in theory, so dangerous in practice, of extending to all men, of all races, and in all stages of political advancement, the same privileges, the liberals successively gave the Irish the command of their boroughs, the abridgment of the Protestant Church, and the abolition of tithes as a burden on the tenant. They encouraged agitation, allowed treason to be openly spoken in every part of the country, and winked at monster meetings, till the community was wellnigh thrown into convulsions. Meanwhile, agriculture was neglected—industry disappeared—capital was scared away. The land was run out, and became unfit for anything but lazy-beds of potatoes. The people became agitators, not cultivators: they were always running about to meetings—not frequenting fairs. The potato-blight fell on a country thus prepared for ruin, and the unparalleled misery of 1847, and the rebellion of 1848, were the consequence.

It would be easy to carry these illustrations farther, and to trace the working of the principles we have mentioned through the whole modern system of government in Great Britain. Enough has been said to show that the system is neither founded on the principles contended for by the old Whigs, nor on any appreciation of, or attention to, the national interests, or the dictates of experience in any respect. It has arisen entirely from a blind desire of change, and an opposition to the old system of government, whether of Whig or Tory origin, and a selfish thirst for aggrandisement on the part of the moneyed and commercial classes, whom that system had elevated to riches and power. Experience was not disregarded by this school of politicians; on the contrary, it was sedulously attended to, its lessons carefully marked. But it was considered as a beacon to be avoided, not a light to be followed. Against its conclusions the whole weight of declamation and shafts of irony were directed. It had been the cri de guerre of their enemies, the standard of Mr Pitt's policy; therefore the opposite system was to be inscribed on their banners. It was the ruling principle of their political opponents; and, worst of all, it was the system which, though it had raised the country to power and greatness, had for twenty years excluded themselves from power. Thence the modern system, under which the nation has suffered, and is suffering, such incalculable misfortunes. It has been said, by an enlightened Whig of the old school, that "this age appears to be one in which every conceivable folly must be believed and reduced to practice before it is abandoned." It is really so; and the reason is, it is an age in which the former system of government, founded on experience and brought about by necessity, has been supplanted by one based on a systematic and invariable determination to change the old system in every particular. The liberals, whether factious or moneyed, of the new school, flattered themselves they were making great advances in political science, when they were merely yielding to the same spirit which made the Calvinists stand up when they prayed, because all the world before them had knelt down, and sit still during psalms, because the Roman Catholics had stood up.

But truth is great, and will prevail; experience is its test, and is perpetually contradicting the theories of man. The year 1848 has been no exception to the maxims of Tacitus and Burke. Dreadful indeed in suffering, appalling in form, are the lessons which it has read to mankind! Ten months have not elapsed, since, by a well-concerted urban tumult, seconded by the treachery of the national guard, the throne of the Barricades was overturned in France—and what do we already see on the continent of Europe? Vienna petitioning for a continuation of the state of siege, as the only security against the tyranny of democracy: Berlin hailing with rapture the dissolution of the Assembly, and reappearance of the king in the capital: Milan restored to the sway of the Austrians: France seeking, in the quasi imperial crown of Prince Louis Napoleon, with 90,000 soldiers in its capital, a refuge from the insupportable evils of a democratic republic. The year 1848 has added another to the numerous proofs which history affords, that popular convulsions, from whatever cause arising, can terminate only in the rule of the sword; but it has taught two other lessons of incalculable importance to the present and future tranquillity of mankind. These are, that soldiers who in civil convulsions fraternise with the insurgents, and violate their oaths, are the worst enemies of the people, for they inevitably induce a military despotism, which extinguishes all hopes of freedom. The other is, that the institution of a national guard is in troubled times of all others the most absurd; and that, to put arms into the hands of the people, when warmed by revolutionary passions, is only to light the torch of civil discord with your own hand, and hand over the country to anarchy, ruin, and slavery.

Nor has the year been less fruitful of civil premonitions or lessons of the last importance to the future tranquillity and prosperity of Great Britain. Numerous popular delusions have been dispelled during that period. The dreams of Irish independence have been broken; English Chartism has been crushed. The revolutionists see that the people of Great Britain are not disposed to yield their property to the spoiler, their throats to the murderer, their homes to the incendiary. Free trade and a fettered currency have brought forth their natural fruits—national embarrassment, general suffering, popular misery. One half of the wealth of our manufacturing towns has been destroyed since the new system began. Two years of free trade and a contracted currency have undone nearly all that twenty years of protection and a sufficient currency had done. The great mercantile class have suffered so dreadfully under the effect of their own measures, that their power for good or for evil has been essentially abridged. The colossus which, for a quarter of a century, has bestrode the nation, has been shaken by the earthquake which itself had prepared. Abroad and at home, in peace and in war, delusion has brought forth suffering. The year of revolutions has been the Ninth of Thermidor, of liberal principles, for it has brought them to the test of experience.

FRENCH CONQUERORS AND COLONISTS.

The extraordinary deficiency recently exhibited by a great Continental nation in two qualities eminently prized by Englishmen—in common consistency, namely, and in common sense—has cast into the shade all previous shortcomings of the kind, making them appear remote and trivial. A people of serfs, ruled for centuries with an iron rod, pillaged for their masters' profit, and lashed at the slightest murmur, were excusable if, on sudden emancipation from such galling thraldom, their joyful gambols exceeded the limits prescribed by public decorum, and by a due regard to their own future prosperity. They might be forgiven for dancing round maypoles, and dreaming of social perfection. It would not be wonderful if they had difficulty in immediately replacing their expelled tyrants by a capable and stable government, and if their brief exhilaration were succeeded by a period of disorganisation and weakness. Such allowances cannot be made for the mad capers of republican France. The deliverance is inadequate to account for the ensuing delirium. The grievances swept away by the February revolution, and which patience, prudence, and moderation, could not have failed ultimately to remove—as thoroughly, if less rapidly—were not so terrible as to justify lunacy upon redress. Nevertheless, since then, the absurdities committed by France, or at least by Paris, are scarcely explicable save on the supposition of temporary aberration of intellect. Unimaginative persons have difficulty in realising the panorama of events, alternately sanguinary and grotesque, lamentable and ludicrous, spread over the last ten months. Europe—the portion of it, that is to say, which has not been bitten by the same rabid and mischievous demon—has looked on, in utter astonishment, at the painful spectacle of a leader of its civilisation galloping, with Folly on its crupper, after mad theories and empty names, and riding down, in the furious chase, its own prosperity and respectability.

We repeat, then, that these great follies of to-day eclipse the minor ones of yesterday. When we see France destroying, in a few weeks, her commerce and her credit, and doing herself more harm than as many years will repair, we overlook the fact, that for upwards of fifteen years she has annually squandered from three to five millions sterling upon an unproductive colony in North Africa. France used not to be petty in her wars, or paltry in her enterprises. If she was sometimes quarrelsome and aggressive, she was wont at least to fasten on foes worthy of her power and resources. Since 1830 she has derogated in this particular. A complication of causes—the most prominent being the vanity characteristic of the nation, the crooked policy of the sovereign, and the morbid love of fighting bequeathed by the warlike period of the Empire—has kept France engaged in a costly and discreditable contest, whose most triumphant results could be but inglorious, and in which she has decimated her best troops, and deteriorated her ancient fame, whilst pursuing, with unworthy ferocity and ruthlessness, a feeble and inoffensive foe. This is no partial or malicious view of the character of the Algerine war. Deliberately, and after due reflection, we repeat, that France has gravely compromised in Africa her reputation as a chivalrous and clement nation, and that she no longer can claim—as once she was wont to do—to be as humane in victory as she is valiant in the fight. For proof of this we need seek no further than in the speeches and despatches of French generals, of men who themselves have served and commanded in Africa. We will judge France by the voices of her own sons, of those she has selected as worthiest to govern her half-conquered colony, and to marshal her legions against a handful of Arabs. More than one of these officers testify, voluntarily or unwittingly, to the barbarity of the system pursued in Africa. What said General Castellane, in his well-known speech in the Chamber of Peers, on the 4th July 1845? "We have reduced the country by an arsenal of axes and phosphorus matches. The trees were cut down, the crops were burned, and soon the mastery was obtained of a population reduced to famine and despair." And elsewhere in the same speech: "Few soldiers perish by the hand of the enemy in this war—a sort of man-hunt on a large scale, in which the Arabs, ignorant of European tactics, having no cannon-balls to exchange against ours, do not fight with equal arms." Monsieur A. Desjobert, long a deputy for the department of the Lower Seine, is the author of a volume, and of several pamphlets, upon the Algerine question. In the most recent of these we find the following remarkable note:—"In February 1837, General Bugeaud said to the Arabs, 'You shall not plough, you shall not sow, nor lead your cattle to the pasture, without our permission.' Later, he gives the following definition of a razzia: 'A sudden irruption, having for its object to surprise the tribes, in order to kill the men, and to carry off the women, children, and cattle.' In 1844, he completes this theory, by saying to the Kabyles, 'I will penetrate into your mountains, I will burn your villages and your crops, I will cut down your fruit-trees.' (Proclamation of the 30th March.) In 1846, rendering an account of his operations against Abd-el-Kader, he says to the authorities of Algiers, 'The power of Abd-el-Kader consists in the resources of the tribes; hence, to ruin his power, we must first ruin the Arabs; therefore have we burned much, destroyed much.' (From the Akhbar newspaper of February 1846.)" These are significant passages in the mouth of a general-in-chief. Presently, when we come to details, we shall show they were not thrown away upon his subordinates. The extermination of the Arabs was always the real aim of Marshal Bugeaud; he took little pains to cloak his system, and is too great a blunderer to have succeeded, had he taken more. A man of greater presumption than capacity, his audacity, obstinacy, and unscrupulousness knew no bounds. Before this African man-hunt, as M. Castellane calls it, he was unknown, except as the Duchess de Berry's jailer, as the slayer of poor Dulong, and as a turbulent debater, whose noisy declamation, and occasional offences against the French language, were a standing joke with the newspapers. A few years elapse, and we find him opposing his stubborn will to that of Soult, then minister at war, and successfully thwarting Napoleon's old lieutenant. This he was enabled to do mainly by the position he had made himself in Africa. He had ridden into power and importance on the shoulders of the persecuted Arabs, by a system of razzias and village-burning, of wholesale slaughter and relentless oppression. Brighter far were the laurels gathered by the lieutenant of the Empire, than those plucked by Louis Philippe's marshal amidst the ashes of Bedouin douars and the corpses of miserable Mussulmans, slain in defence of their scanty birthright, of their tents, their flocks, and the free range of the desert. Poor was the defence they could make against their skilful and disciplined invaders; slight the loss they could inflict in requital of the heavy one they suffered. Again we are obliged to M. Desjobert for statistics, gathered from reports to the Commission of Credits, and from Marshal Bugeaud's own bulletins. From these we learn that the loss in battle of the French armies, during the first ten years of the occupation of Algeria, was an average of one hundred and forty men per annum. In the four following years, eight hundred and eighty-five men perished. The capture of Constantine cost one hundred men, the much-vaunted affair of the Smala nine, the battle of Isly TWENTY-SEVEN! We well remember, for we chanced to be in Paris at the time, the stir produced in that excitable capital by the battle of Isly. No one, unacquainted with the facts, would have doubted that the victory was over a most valiant and formidable foe. People's mouths were filled with this revival of the military glories of Gaul. Newspapers and picture-shops, poets and painters, combined to celebrate the exploit and sound the victors' praise. One engraving de circonstance, we remember, represented a sturdy French foot-soldier, trampling, like Gulliver, a host of Lilliputian Moors, and carrying a score of them over his shoulder, spitted on his bayonet. "Out of my way!" was the inscription beneath the print—"Les Français seront toujours les Français." Horace Vernet, colourist, by special appointment, to the African campaign, pictorial chronicler of the heroic feats of the house militant of Orleans, prepared his best brushes, and stretched his broadest canvass, to immortalise the marshal and his men. After a few days, two dingy tents and an enormous umbrella were exhibited in the gardens of the Tuileries; these were trophies of the fight—the private property of Mohammed-Abderrhaman, the vanquished prince of Morocco, the real merit of whose conquerors was about as great as that of an active tiger who gloriously scatters a numerous flock of sheep. From one of several books relating to Algeria, now upon our table, we will take a French officer's account of the affair of Isly. The story of Escoffier, a trumpeter who generously resigned his horse to his dismounted captain, himself falling into the hands of the Arabs, whose prisoner he remained for about eighteen months, is told by M. Alby, an officer of the African army. Although a little vivid in the colouring, and comprising two or three very tough "yarns,"—due, we apprehend, to the imagination of trumpeter or author—its historical portion professes to be, and probably is, correct; and, at any rate, there can be no reason for suspecting the writer of depreciating his countrymen's achievements, and understating their merits. The account of the battle, or rather of the chase, for fighting there was none, is given by a deserter from the Spahis, who, after the defeat of the Moors, joined Abd-el-Kader. The Emir and his Arabs took no part in the affair.[10]

"I deserted, with several of my comrades, during the night-march stolen by the French upon the Moors. We sought the emperor's son in his camp, and informed him of the movement making by the French column. The emperor's son had our horses taken away, and gave orders not to lose sight of us. Then he said to us:—

"'Let them come, those dogs of Christians; they are but thirteen thousand strong, and we a hundred and sixty thousand: we will receive them well.'

"The day was well advanced before the Moors perceived the French. Then the emperor's son ordered his horsemen to mount and advance. The French marched in a square. They unmasked their artillery, and the guns sent their deadly charge of grape into the ranks of the Moors, who immediately took to flight, and the French had nothing to do but to sabre them."

"The Moors," says M. Alby, "had fine horses and good sabres; but their muskets were bad; and the men, softened by centuries of peace and prosperity, smoking keef[11] and eating copiously, might be expected to run, as they did, at the first cannon-shot."

It is hard to understand how the loss of the French should have amounted to even the twenty-seven men at which it is stated in their general's bulletin. Did M. Bugeaud, unwilling to admit the facility of his triumph, slay the score and seven with his goosequill? But if the victory was easily won, on the other hand, it was largely rewarded. For having driven before him, by the very first volley from his guns, a horde of overfed barbarians, enervated by sloth and narcotics, and total strangers to the tactics of civilised warfare, the marshal was created a duke! Shade of Napoleon! whether proudly lingering within the trophy-clad walls of the Invalides, or passing in spectral review the dead of Austerlitz and Borodino, suspend your lonely walk, curb your shadowy charger, and contemplate this pitiable spectacle! You, too, gave dukedoms, and lavished even crowns, but you gave them for services worth the naming. Ney and the Moskwa, Massena and Essling, Lannes and Montebello, are words that bear the coupling, and grace a coronet. The names of the places, although all three recall brilliant victories, are far less glorious in their associations than the names of the men. But Bugeaud and Isly! What can we say of them? Truly, thus much—they, too, are worthy of each other.

When reviewing, about two years ago, Captain Kennedy's narrative of travel and adventure in Algeria, we regretted he did not speak out about the mode of carrying on the war, and about the prospects of Algerine colonisation; and we hinted a suspicion that the amenities of French military hospitality, largely extended to a British fellow-soldier, had induced him, if not exactly to cloak, at least to shun laying bare, the errors and mishaps of his entertainers. We cannot make the same complaint of the very pretty book, rich in vignettes and cream-colour, entitled, A Campaign in the Kabylie. Mr Borrer, whom the Cockneys, contemptuous of terminations, will assuredly confound with his great gipsy cotemporary, George Borrow of the Bible, has, like Captain Kennedy, dipped his spoon in French messes. He has ridden with their regiments, and sat at their board, and been quartered with their officers, and received kindness and good treatment on all hands; and therefore any thing that could be construed into malicious comment would come with an ill grace from his pen. But it were exaggerated delicacy to abstain from stating facts, and these he gives in all their nakedness; generally, however, allowing them to speak for themselves, and adding little in the way of remark or opinion. In pursuance of this system, he relates the most horrible instances of outrage and cruelty with a matter-of-fact coolness, and an absence alike of blame and sympathy, that may give an unfavourable notion of his heart, to those who do not accept our lenient interpretation of his cold-blooded style. The traits he sets down, and which are no more than will be found in many French narratives, despatches, and bulletins, show how well the Franco-African army carry out the merciful maxims of Bugeaud.

Mr Borrer, a geographer and antiquary, passed seventeen months in Algeria; and during his residence there, in May 1846, a column of eight thousand French troops, commanded by the Duke of Isly in person, marched against the Kabyles, "that mysterious, bare-headed, leathern-aproned race, whose chief accomplishment was said to be that of being 'crack-shots,' their chief art that of neatly roasting their prisoners alive, and their chief virtue that of loving their homes." It may interest the reader to hear a rather more explicit account of this singular people, who dwell in the mountains that traverse Algeria from Tunis to Morocco—an irregular domain, whose limits it is difficult exactly to define in words. The Kabyles are, in fact, the highlanders of North Africa, and they hold themselves aloof from the Arabs and Europeans that surround them. Concerning them, we find some diversity in the statements of Mr Borrer, and of an anonymous Colonist, twelve years resident at Bougie, whose pamphlet is before us. Of the two, the Frenchman gives them the best character, but both agree as to their industry and intelligence, their frugality and skill in agriculture. They are not nomadic like the Arabs, but live in villages, till the land, and tend flocks. Dwelling in the mountains, they have few horses, and fight chiefly on foot. Divided into many tribes, they are constantly quarreling and fighting amongst themselves, but they forget their feuds and quickly unite to repel a foreign foe. "Predisposed by his character," says the Colonist, "to draw near to civilisation, the Kabyle attaches himself sincerely to the civilised man when circumstances establish a friendly connexion between them. He is still inclined to certain vices inherent in the savage: but of all the Africans, he is the best disposed to live in friendship and harmony with us, which he will do when he shall find himself in permanent contact with the European population." This is not the general opinion, and it differs widely from that expressed by Mr Borrer. But the Colonist had his own views, perhaps his own interests, to further. He wrote some months previous to the expedition which Mr Borrer accompanied, and which was then not likely to take place, and he strongly advocated its propriety—admitting, however, that public opinion in France was greatly opposed to a military incursion into Kabylia. Himself established at Bougie, of course in some description of commerce, the necessity of roads connecting the coast and the interior was to him quite evident. A good many of his countrymen, whose personal benefit was not so likely to be promoted by causeway-cutting in Algeria, strongly deprecated any sort of road-making that was likely to bring on war with the Kabyles. France began to think she was paying too dear for her whistle. She looked back to the early days of the Orleans dynasty, when Marshal Clausel promised to found a rich and powerful colony with only 10,000 men. She glanced at the pages of the Moniteur of 1837, and there she found words uttered by the great Bugeaud in the Chamber of Deputies. "Forty-five thousand men and one good campaign," said the white-headed warrior, as the Arabs call him, "and in six months the country is pacified, and you may reduce the army to twenty thousand men, to be paid by imposts levied on the colony, consequently costing France nothing." Words, and nothing more—mere wind; the greatest bosh that ever was uttered, even by Bugeaud, who is proverbial for dealing largely in that flatulent commodity. Nine years passed away, and the Commission of the Budget "deplored a situation which compelled France to maintain an army of more than 100,000 men upon that African territory." (Report of M. Bignon of the 15th April 1846, p. 237.) Bugeaud himself had mightily changed his tone, and declared that, to keep Algiers, as large an army would be essential as had been required to conquer it. Lamoricière, a great authority in such matters, confirmed the opinion of his senior. Monsieur Desjobert, and a variety of pamphleteers and newspaper writers, attacked, with argument, ridicule, and statistics, the party known as the Algérophiles, who made light of difficulties, scoffed at expense, and predicted the prosperity and splendour of French Africa. Algeria, according to them, was to become the brightest gem in the citizen-crown of France. These sanguine gentlemen were met with facts and figures. During 1846, said the anti-Algerines, your precious colony will have cost France 125,000,000 of francs. And they proved it in black and white. There was little chance of the expense being less in following years. Then came the loss of men. In 1840, said M. Desjobert, giving chapter and verse for his statements, 9567 men perished in the African hospitals, out of an effective army of 63,000. Add those invalids who died in French hospitals, or in their homes, from the results of African campaigning, and the total loss is moderately stated at 11,000 men, or more than one-sixth of the whole force employed. Out of these, only 227 died in action. The thing seemed hopeless and endless. What do we get for our money? was the cry. What is our compensation for the decimation of our young men? France can better employ her sons, than in sending them to perish by African fevers. What do we gain by all this expenditure of gold and blood?—The unreasonable mortals! Had they not gained a Duke of Isly and a Moorish pavilion? M. Desjobert surely forgets these inestimable acquisitions when he asks and answers the question—"What remains of all our victories? A thousand bulletins, and Horace Vernet's big pictures."

"How many times," says the same writer, "has not the subjection of the Arabs been proclaimed! In 1844, General Bugeaud gains the battle of Isly. Are the Arabs subdued?

"When the Arabs appear before the judges who dispose of life and death, they confess their faith, and proclaim their hatred of us; and when we are simple enough to tell them that some of their race are devoted to us, they reply, 'Those lie to you, through fear, or for their own interest; and as often as a scheriff shall come whom they believe able to conquer you, they will follow him, even into the streets of Algiers.' (Examination of Bou Maza's brother, 12th November 1845.) Thus spoke the chief. The common Arab had already said to the Christian, "If my head and thine were boiled in the same vessel, my broth would separate itself from thy broth."

This was discouraging to those who had dreamed of the taming of the Arab; and the more sanguinary mooted ideas of extermination. Such a project, clearly written down, and printed, and placed on Parisian breakfast tables, might be startling; in Algeria it had long been put in practice. What said General Duvivier in his Solution de la Question d'Algérie, p. 285? "For eleven years they have razed buildings, burned crops, destroyed trees, massacred men, women, and children, with a still-increasing fury." We have already shown that this work of extermination was not carried on with perfect impunity. Here is further confirmation of the fact. "Every Arab killed," says M. Leblanc de Prébois, another officer, who wrote on the Algerian war, and wrote from personal experience, "costs us the death of thirty-three men, and 150,000 francs." Supposing a vast deal of exaggeration in this statement, the balance still remains ugly against the French, for whom there is evidently very little difference between catching an Arab and catching a Tartar. Whilst upon the subject of extermination, Mr Borrer gives an opinion more decidedly unfavourable to his French friends than is expressed in any other part of his book. His estimate of Kabyle virtues differs considerably, it will be observed, from that of the Colonist, and of the two is much nearest the truth.

"The abominable vices and debaucheries of the Kabyle race, the inhuman barbarities they are continually guilty of towards such as may be cast by tempest, or other misfortune, upon their rugged shores; the atrocious cruelties and refined tortures they, in common with the Arab, delight in exercising upon any such enemies as may be so unhappy as to fall alive into their hands, must render the hearts of those acquainted with this people perfectly callous as to what misfortunes may befall them or their country; and many may think that, as far as the advancement of civilisation is concerned, the wiping off of the Kabyle and Arab races of Northern Africa from the face of the earth, would be the greatest boon to humanity. Though, however, they may be fraught with all the vices of the Canaanitish tribes of old, yet the command, 'Go ye after him through the city and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women,' is not justifiably issued at the pleasure of man; and we can but lament to see a great and gallant nation engaged in a warfare exasperating both parties to indulge in sanguinary atrocities,—atrocities to be attributed on one side to the barbarous and savage state of those having recourse to them; but on the other, proceeding only from a thirst for retaliation and bloody revenge, unworthy of those enjoying a high position as a civilised people. War is, as we all know, ever productive of horrors: but such horrors may be greatly restrained and diminished by the exertions and example of those in command."

The hoary-headed hero of Isly is not the man to make the exertion, or set the example. At the beginning of 1847, rumours of a projected inroad amongst the Kabyles caused uneasiness and dissatisfaction in Algeria, when such a movement was highly unpopular, as likely to lead to a long and expensive war. The "Commission of Credits," a board appointed by the French Chamber for the particular investigation and regulation of Algerine affairs, applied to the minister of war to know if the rumours were well founded. The minister confessed they were; adding, however, that the expedition would be quite peaceable; but at the same time laying before the commission letters from Bugeaud, "expressing regret that force of arms was not to be resorted to more than was absolutely necessary, the submission of the aborigines being never certain until powder had spoken." The marshal evidently "felt like fighting." The Commission protested; the minister rebuked them, bidding them mind their credits, and not meddle with the royal prerogative. Thus unjustly snubbed—for they certainly were minding their credits, by opposing increase of expenditure—the Commission were mute, one of the members merely observing, by way of a last shot, that it was easier to refuse to listen than to reply satisfactorily. In France, public opinion, the Chamber of Deputies, and Marshal Soult, had, on various occasions, declared against attacking the Kabyles. "Nevertheless, a proclamation was issued by Marshal Bugeaud to the inhabitants of the Kabylie, to warn them that the French army was upon the point of entering their territory, 'to cleanse it of those adventurers who there preached the war against France.' The proclamation then went on to state, that the marshal had no desire to fight with them, or to devastate their property; but that, if there were amongst them any who wished for war, they would find him ready to accept it." If a hard-favoured stranger, armed with a horsewhip, walked uninvited into M. Bugeaud's private residence, loudly proclaiming he would thrash nobody unless provoked, the marshal would be likely to resist the intrusion. The Kabyles, doubtless, thought his advance into their territory an equally unjustifiable proceeding. As to the pretext of "the adventurers who preached war," it was unfounded and ridiculous. Such propagandists have never been listened to in Kabylia. "The voice of the Emir Abd-el-Kader himself," says the Colonist, "would not obtain a hearing. Did he not go in person, in 1839, when preparing to break his treaty of peace with us, and preach the holy war? Did he not traverse the valley of the Souman, from one end to the other, to recruit combatants? And what did he obtain from the Kabyles? Hospitality for a few days, coupled with the formal invitation to evacuate the country as soon as possible. Did he succeed better when he lately again tried to raise Kabylia against us?" Mr Borrer confirms this. Marshal Bugeaud himself had said in the Chamber of Deputies, "The Kabyles are neither aggressive nor hostile; they defend themselves vigorously when intruded upon, but they do not attack." The marshal, whose whole public life has been full of contradictions, was the first to intrude upon them, although but a very few years had elapsed since he said in a pamphlet, "The Kabyles are numerous and very warlike; they have villages, and their agriculture is sedentary; already there is too little land to supply their wants; there is no room, therefore, for Europeans in the mountains of Kabylia, and they would cut a very poor figure there." This last prophetic sentence was realised by M. Bugeaud himself, who certainly made no very brilliant appearance when, forgetting his former theory, he hazarded himself in May 1847, at the head of eight thousand men, and with Mr Borrer in his train, amongst the hardy mountaineers of Kabylia.

Hereabouts Mr Borrer quotes, in French, the statement of a member of the Commission already referred to. It is worth extracting, as fully confirming our conviction that the conduct of France in Algeria has been throughout characterised by an utter want of judgment and justice. "The native towns have been invaded, ruined, sacked, by our administration, more even than by our arms. In time of peace, a great number of private estates have been ravaged and destroyed. A multitude of title-deeds delivered to us for verification have never been restored. Even in the environs of Algiers, fertile lands have been taken from the Arabs and given to Europeans, who, unable or unwilling to cultivate their new possessions, have farmed them out to their former owners, who have thus become the mere stewards of the inheritance of their fathers. Elsewhere, tribes, or fractions of tribes, not hostile to us, but who, on the contrary, had fought for us, have been driven from their territory. Conditions have been accepted from them, and not kept—indemnities promised, and never paid—until we have compromised our honour even more than their interests." Such a statement, proceeding from a Frenchman—from one, too, delegated by his government, to examine the state of the colony—is quite conclusive as to administrative proceedings in Algeria. It would be superfluous and impertinent to add another line of evidence. A comment may be appropriate. "Is it not Montesquieu," says Mr Borrer, "in his Esprit des Lois, who observes—'The right of conquest, though a necessary and legitimate right, is an unhappy one, bequeathing to the conqueror a heavy debt to humanity, only to be acquitted by repairing, as far as possible, those evils of which he has been the cause'?—and Montesquieu was a wise man, and a Frenchman!"

Dismissing this branch of the subject, let us see how the Duke of Isly made "the powder speak" in Kabylia, and try our hand at a rough sketch, taking the loan of Mr Borrer's colours. A strong body of French troops—the 8000 have been increased, since departure, by several battalions and some spahis—are encamped in a rich valley, cutting down the unripe wheat for the use of their horses, whilst, from the surrounding heights, the Kabyles gloomily watch the unscrupulous foragers. "Now 'soft-winged evening,'" as Mr Dawson Borrer poetically expresses himself, "hovers o'er the scene, chasing from woodlands and sand-rock heights the gilded tints of the setting sun." In other words, it gets dark—and shots are heard. The natives, vexed at the liberties taken with their crops, harass the outposts. Their bad powder and overloaded guns have no chance against French muskets. "In the name of the Prophet, HEADS!" Bugeaud the Merciful pays for them ten francs a-piece. Four are presented to him before breakfast. The premium is to make the soldiers alert against horse-stealers. Ten francs being a little fortune to a French soldier, whose pay in hard cash is two or three farthings a-day, Mr Borrer suspects the heads are sometimes taken from shoulders where they have a right to remain. An Arab is always an Arab, whether a horse-stealer or a mere idler. But no matter—a few more or less. Day returns; the column marches; the Kabyles show little of the intrepidity, in defence of their hearths and altars, attributed to them by M. Bugeaud and others. Their horsemen fly before a platoon of French cavalry; the infantry limit their offensive operations to cowardly long shots at the rear-guard. Four venerable elders bring two yoked oxen in token of submission. In general, the inhabitants have disappeared. Their deserted towns appear, in the distance, by no means inferior to many French and Italian villages. The marshal will not permit exploring parties for fear of ambuscade. Night arrives, and passes without incident of note. At three in the morning, the camp is aroused by hideous yells. A sentinel has fired at a horse-thief and broken his leg, and now, mindful of the ten francs, tries to cut off the head of the wounded man, who objects and screams. A bayonet-thrust stops his mouth, and the bill on Bugeaud is duly severed. The next day is passed in skirmishing with the Beni-Abbez, the most numerous tribe of the valley of the Souman, but not a very warlike one—so says the Colonist; and, indeed, they offer but slight resistance, although they, or some other tribes, make a firm and determined attack upon the French outposts in the course of that night. There is more smoke than bloodshed; but the Kabyles show considerable pluck, burn a prodigious number of cartridges, and make no doubt they have nearly "rubbed out" the Christians; in which particular they are rather mistaken—the French, not choosing to leave their camp, having quietly lain down, and allowed the Berber lead to fly over them. At last the assailants' ammunition runs low, and they retire, leaving a sprinkling of dead. Mr Borrer quotes the Koran. "'Those of our brothers who fall in defence of the true faith, are not dead, but live invisible, receiving their nourriture from the hand of the Most High,' says the Prophet." Nourriture is not quite English, at least with that orthography; but no matter for Mr Borrer's Gallicisms, which are many. We rush with him into the Kabyle fire. Here he sits, halted amongst the olive-trees, philosophically lighting his pipe, the bullets whistling about his ears, whilst he admires the sang froid of a pretty vivandière, seated astride upon her horse, and jesting at the danger. The column advances—the Kabyles retreat, fighting, pursued by the French shells, which they hold in particular horror, and call the howitzer the twice-firing cannon. The object of the advance is to destroy the towns and villages of the Beni-Abbez, the night-attack upon his bivouac affording the marshal a pretext. The villages are surrounded with stiff walls of stones and mud, crowned with strong thorny fences, and having hedges of prickly pear growing at their base; and the gaunt burnoosed warriors make good fight through loop-holes and from the terraces of their houses. But resistance is soon overcome, and the narrow streets are crowded with Frenchmen, ravishing, massacring, plundering; no regard to sex or age; outrage for every woman—the edge of the sword for all.

"Upon the floor of one of the chambers lay a little girl of twelve or fourteen years of age, weltering in gore, and in the agonies of death: an accursed ruffian thrust his bayonet into her. God will requite him.... When the soldiers had ransacked the dwellings, and smashed to atoms all they could not carry off, or did not think worth seizing as spoil, they heaped the remnants and the mattings together and fired them. As I was hastily traversing the streets to regain the outside of the village, disgusted with the horrors I witnessed, flames burst forth on all sides, and torrents of fire came swiftly gliding down the thoroughfares, for the flames had gained the oil. An instant I turned—the fearful doom of the poor concealed child and the decrepid mother flashing on my mind. It was too late.... The unfortunate Kabyle child was doubtless consumed with her aged parent. How many others may have shared her fate!"

At noon, the atmosphere is laden with smoke arising from the numerous burning villages. From one spot nine may be counted, wrapped in flames. There is merry-making in the French camp. Innumerable goatskins, full of milk, butter, figs, and flour, are produced and opened. Some are consumed; more are squandered and strewn upon the ground. Let the Kabyle dogs starve! Have they not audaciously levelled their long guns at the white-headed warrior and his followers, who asked nothing but submission, free passage through the country, corn-fields for their horses, and the fat of the land for themselves? But stay—there is still a town to take, the last, the strongest, the refuge of the women and of the aged. Its defence is resolute, but at last it falls. "Ravished, murdered, burnt, hardly a child escaped to tell the tale. A few of the women fled to the ravines around the village; but troops swept the brushwood; and the stripped and mangled bodies of females might there be seen.... One vast sheet of flame crowned the height, which an hour or two before was ornamented with an extensive and opulent village, crowded with inhabitants. It seemed to have been the very emporium of commerce of the Beni-Abbez; fabrics of gunpowder, of arms, of haïks, burnooses, and different stuffs, were there. The streets boasted of numerous shops of workers in silver, workers in cord, venders of silk, &c." All this the soldiers pillaged, or the fire devoured; then the insatiable flames gained the corn and olive trees, and converted a smiling and prosperous district into a black and barren waste. Bugeaud looked on and pronounced it good, and his men declared the country "well cleaned out," and vaunted their deeds of rapine and violence. "I heard two ruffians relating, with great gusto, how many young girls had been burned in one house, after being abused by their brutal comrades and themselves." Out of consideration for his readers, Mr Borrer says, he writes down but the least shocking of the crimes and atrocities he that day witnessed. We have no inclination to transcribe a tithe of the horrors he records, and at sight of which, he assures us, the blood of many a gallant French officer boiled in his veins. He mentions no attempt on the part of these compassionate officers to curb the ferocity of their men, who had not the excuse of previous severe sufferings, of a long and obstinate resistance, and of the loss of many of their comrades, to allege in extenuation of their savage violence. History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, as, for instance, after protracted sieges, great exposure, and a long and bloody fight, soldiers of all nations are liable to forget discipline, and, maddened by fury, by suffering and excitement, to despise the admonitions and reprimands of the chiefs—nay, even to turn their weapons against those whom for years they have been accustomed to respect and implicitly obey. But there is no such excuse in the instance before us. A pleasant military promenade through a rich country, fine weather, abundant rations, and just enough skirmishing to give zest to the whole affair, whose fighting part was exceeding brief, as might be expected, when French bayonets and artillery were opposed to the clumsy guns and irregular tactics of the Beni-Abbez—we find nothing in this picture to extenuate the horrible cruelties enacted by the conquerors after their easily achieved victory. Their whole loss, according to their marshal's bulletin, amounted to fifty-seven killed and wounded. This included the loss in the night-attack on the camp. In fact, it was mere child's play for the disciplined French soldiery; and Mr Borrer virtually admits this, by applying to the affair General Castellane's expression of a man-hunt. He then, with no good grace, endeavours to find an excuse for his campaigning comrades. "The ranks of the French army in Africa are composed, in great measure, of the very scum of France." They have condemned regiments in Africa, certainly; the Foreign Legion are reckless and reprobate enough; we dare say the Zouaves, a mixed corps of wild Frenchmen and tamed Arabs, are neither tender nor scrupulous; but these form a very small portion of the hundred thousand French troops in Africa, and there is little picking and choosing amongst the line regiments, who take their turn of service pretty regularly, neither is there reason for considering the men who go to Algeria to be greater scamps than those who remain in France. So this will not do, Mr Borrer: try another tack. "The only sort of excuse for the horrors committed by the soldiery in Algeria, is their untamed passions, and the fire added to their natural ferocity by the atrocious cruelties so often committed by the Arabs upon their comrades in arms, who have been so unhappy as to fall into their power." This is more plausible, although it is a query who began the system of murderous reprisals. Arab treatment of prisoners is not mild. On the evening of the 1st June, some men straggled from the French bivouac, and were captured. "It was said that from one of the outposts the Kabyles were seen busily engaged, in roasting their victims before a large fire upon a neighbouring slope; but whether this was a fact or not, I never learned." It was possibly true. Escoffier tells us how one of his fellow-prisoners, a Jew named Wolf, who fell into the hands of Moorish shepherds, was thrown upon a blazing pile of faggots; and although we suspect the brave trumpeter, or his historian, of occasional exaggeration, there are grounds for crediting the authenticity of this statement. As to Mr Borrer, he guarantees nothing but what he sees with his own eyes, the camp being, he says, full of blagueurs, or tellers of white lies. The inventions of these mendacious gentry are not always as innocent as he appears to think them. Imaginary cruelties, attributed to an enemy, are very apt to impose upon credulous soldiers, and to stimulate them to unnecessary bloodshed, and to acts of lawless revenge. Many a village has been burned, and many an inoffensive peasant sabred, on the strength of such lying fabrications. In Africa especially, where the lex talionis seems fully recognised, and its enforcement confided to the first straggler who chooses to fire a house or stick an Arab, the blagueurs should be handed over, in our opinion, to summary punishment. On the advance of the French column, a soldier or two, straying from the bivouac to bathe or fish, had here and there been shot by the lurking Kabyles. On its return, "I was somewhat surprised," Mr Borrer remarks, "to observe, in the wake of the column, flames bursting forth from the gourbies (villages) left in our rear. It was well known that the tribe upon whose territory we were riding had submitted, and that their sheikh was even riding at the head of the column." None could explain the firing of the villages. The sheikh, indignant at the treachery of the French, set spurs to his mare, and was off like the wind. The conflagration was traced to soldiers of the rear-guard, desirous to revenge their comrades, picked off on the previous march. We are not told that the crime was brought home to the perpetrators, or visited upon them. If it was, Mr Borrer makes no mention of the fact, but passes on, as if the burning of a few villages were a trifle scarce worth notice. How were the Kabyles to distinguish between the acts of the private soldier and of the epauleted chief? Their submission had just been accepted, and friendly words spoken to them: their sheikh rode beside the gray-haired leader of the Christians, and marked the apparent subordination of the white-faced soldiery. Suddenly a gross violation occurred of the amicable understanding so recently come to. How persuade them that the submissive and disciplined soldiers they saw around them would venture such breach of faith without the sanction or connivance of their commander? The offence is that of an insignificant sentinel, but the dirt falls upon the beard of Bugeaud; and confidence in the promises of the lying European is thoroughly and for ever destroyed.

A colony, whose mode of acquisition and of government, up to the present time, reflects so little credit upon French arms and administrators, ought certainly to yield pecuniary results or advantages of some kind, which, in a mercenary point of view, might balance the account. France surely did not place her reputation for humanity and justice in the hands of Marshal Bugeaud and of others of his stamp, without anticipating some sort of compensation for its probable deterioration. Such expectations have hitherto been wholly unfulfilled; and we really see little chance of their probable or speedy realisation. The colony is as unpromising, as the colonists are inapt to improve it. The fact is, the work of colonisation has not begun. The French are utterly at a loss how to set about it. All kinds of systems have been proposed. Bugeaud has had his—that of military colonisation, which he maintained, with characteristic stubbornness, in the teeth of public opinion, of the French government, of common sense, and even of possibility. He proposed to take, during ten years, one hundred and twenty thousand recruits from the conscription, and to settle them in Africa, with their wives. He estimated the expense of this scheme at twelve millions sterling. His opponents stated its probable cost at four times that sum. Whichever estimate was correct, it is not worth while examining the plan, which for a moment was entertained by a government commission, but has since been completely abandoned. It presupposes an extraordinary and arbitrary stretch of power on the part of the government that should adopt such a system of compulsory colonisation. We are surprised to find Mr Borrer inclined to favour the exploded plan. General Lamoricière (the terrible Bour-à-boi of the Arabs,[12]) proposed to give premiums to agriculturists settling in Algeria, at the rate of twenty-five per cent of their expenses of clearing, irrigation, construction, and plantation. But M. Lamoricière—a very practical man indeed, with his sabre in his fist, and at the head of his Zouaves—is a shallow theorist in matters of colonisation. The staff of surveyors, valuers, and referees essential to carry out his project, would alone have been a heavy additional charge on the unprofitable colony. "M. Lamoricière," says M. Desjobert, "was one of the warmest advocates of the occupation of Bougie," (a seaport of Kabylie,) "and partly directed, in 1833, that fatal expedition." (Fatal, M. Desjobert means, by reason of its subsequent cost in men and money. The town was taken by a small force on the 29th September 1833.) "The soldiers were then told that their mission was agricultural rather than military, that they would have to handle the pick and the spade more frequently than the musket. The unfortunates have certainly handled pick and spade; but it was to dig in that immense cemetery which, each day, swallows up their comrades. Already, in 1836, General d'Erlon, ex-governor of Algiers, demanded the evacuation of Bougie, which had devoured, in three years, three thousand men and seven millions of francs." The demand was not complied with, and Bougie has continued to consume more than its quota of the six thousand men at which M. Desjobert estimates the average annual loss, by disease alone, of the African army. Bougie has not flourished under the tricolor. In former times a city of great riches and importance, it still contained several thousand inhabitants when taken by the French. At the period of Mr Borrer's visit, it reckoned a population of five hundred, exclusive of the garrison of twelve hundred men. To return, however, to the systems of colonisation. When the generals had had their say, it was the turn of the commissions; the commission of Africa, that of the Chamber of Deputies, &c. There was no lack of projects; but none of them answered. The colonial policy of the Orleans government was eminently short-sighted. This is strikingly shown in Mr Borrer's 14th chapter, "A Word upon the Colony." Of the fertile plain of the Metidja, containing about a million and a half acres of arable and pasture land, a very small portion is cultivated. The French found a garden; they have made a desert. "Before the French occupation, vast tracts which now lie waste, sacrificed to palmetta and squills, were cultivated by the Arabs, who grew far more corn than was required for their own consumption; whereas now, they grow barely sufficient: the consequence of which is, that the price of corn is enormous in Algeria at present." Land is cheap enough, but labour is dear, because the necessaries of life are so. Instead of making Algiers a free port, protection to French manufactures is the order of the day, and this has driven Arab commerce to Tunis and Morocco. Rivalry with England—the feverish desire for colonies and for the supremacy of the seas—must unquestionably be ranked amongst the motives of the tenacious retention of such an expensive possession as Algeria. And now the odious English cottons are an obstacle to the prosperity of the colony. To sell a few more bales of French calicoes and crates of French hardware, the wise men at Paris put an effectual check upon the progress of African agriculture. Here, if anywhere, free-trade might be introduced with advantage; in common necessaries, at any rate, and for a few years, till the country became peopled, and the colonists had overcome the first difficulties of their position. It would make very little difference to Rouen and Lyons, whilst to the settlers it would practically work more good than would have been done them by M. Lamoricière's subvention, supposing this to have been adopted, and that the heavily-taxed agriculturist of France—in many parts of which country land pays but two and a half or three per cent—had consented to pay additional imposts for the benefit of the agriculturist of Algeria. In the beginning, the notion of the French government was, that its new conquest would colonise itself unassisted; that there would be a natural and steady flow of emigrants from the mother country. In any case this expectation would probably have proved fallacious—at least it would never have been realised to the extent anticipated; but the small encouragement given to such emigration, rendered it utterly abortive. The "stream" of settlers proved a mere dribble. Security and justice, Mr Thiers said, were all that France owed her colony. Even these two things were not obtained, in the full sense of the words. The centralisation system weighed upon Algeria. Everything was referred to Paris. Hence interminable correspondence, and delays innumerable. In the year 1846, Mr Borrer says, twenty-four thousand despatches were received by the civil administration from the chief bureau in the French capital, in exchange for twenty-eight thousand sent. Instead of imparting all possible celerity to the administrative forms requisite to the establishment of emigrants, these must often wait a year or more before they are put in possession of the land granted. Meanwhile they expend their resources, and are enervated by idleness and disease. The climate of North Africa is ill-adapted to French constitutions. M. Desjobert has already told us the average loss of the army, and General Duvivier, in his Solution de la Question d'Algérie, fully corroborated his statements. "A man," said the general, "whose constitution is not in harmony with the climate of Africa, never adapts himself to it; he suffers, wastes away, and dies. The expression, that a mass of men who have been for some time in Africa have become inured to the climate, is inexact. They have not become inured to it; they have been decimated by death. The climate is a great sieve, which allows a rapid passage to everything that is not of a certain force." Supposing 100,000 men sent from France to Algeria for six years' service. At the end of that time, their loss by disease alone, at the rate of six per cent—proved by M. Desjobert to be the annual average—would amount to upwards of 30,000, or to more than three-tenths of the whole. The emigrants fare no better. "They look for milk and honey," says Borrer: "they find palmetta and disease. The villages scattered about the Sahel or Massif of Algiers (a high ground at the back of the city, forming a rampart between the Metidja and the Mediterranean) are, with one or two exceptions, a type of desolation. Perched upon the most arid spots, distant from water, the poor tenants lie sweltering between sun and sirocco." A Mississippi swamp must be as eligible "squatting" ground as this—Arabs instead of alligators, and the Algerine fever in place of Yellow Jack. "At the gates of Algiers, in the villages of the Sahel," said the "Algérie" newspaper of the 22d December 1845, "the colonists desert, driven away by hunger. If any remain, it is because they have no strength to move. In the plain of the Metidja, the misery and desolation are greater still. At Fondouck, in the last five months, 120 persons have died, out of a population of 280." The reporter to the Commission of the French budget of 1837 (Monsieur Bignon) admitted that "the results of the colonisation are almost negative." He could not obtain, he said, an estimate of the agricultural population. At the same period, an Algiers newspaper (La France Algérienne) estimated the European agriculturists at 7000, two-thirds of whom were mere market-gardeners.

It is unnecessary to multiply proofs; and we will here conclude this imperfect sketch of Franco-African colonisation, of its crimes, its errors, and its cost, by extracting a rather remarkable passage from a writer we have more than once referred to, and who, although perhaps disposed to view things in Algeria upon the black side, is yet deserving of credit, as well by his position as by reason of his painstaking research and, so far as we have verified them, accurate statistics.

"The colonists cannot deny," says Monsieur Desjobert in his Algérie en 1846, "and they admit:

"1º. That Europe alone maintains the 200,000 Europeans in Algeria. In 1846 we are compelled to repeat what General Bernard, minister of war, said in 1838: 'Algeria resembles a naked rock, which it is necessary to supply with everything, except air and water.'

"2º. That so long as we remain in this precarious situation, a naval war, by interrupting the communications, would compromise the safety of our army. In 1846 we repeat M. Thiers' words, uttered in 1837: 'If war surprises you in the state of indecision in which you are, I say that the disgraceful evacuation of Africa will be inevitable.'

"M. Thiers did not speak the whole truth when he talked of evacuation. In such an extremity, evacuation would be impossible. Our army would perish of misery, and its remnant would fall into the hands of the enemy."

Another enemy than the Arabs is here evidently pointed at; that possible foe is now a friend to France, and we trust will long remain so. But on many accounts the sentences we have just quoted are significant, as proceeding from the pen of a French deputy. They need no comment, and we shall offer none. We wait with interest to see if France's African colony prospers better under the Republic of 1848 than it did under the Monarchy of 1830.

THE CAXTONS.

PART IX.—CHAPTER XXXIX.

And my father pushed aside his books.

O young reader, whoever thou art,—or reader, at least, who hast been young,—canst thou not remember some time when, with thy wild troubles and sorrows as yet borne in secret, thou hast come back from that hard, stern world which opens on thee when thou puttest thy foot out of the threshold of home—come back to the four quiet walls, wherein thine elders sit in peace—and seen, with a sort of sad amaze, how calm and undisturbed all is there? That generation which has gone before thee in the path of the passions—the generation of thy parents—(not so many years, perchance, remote from thine own)—how immovably far off, in its still repose, it seems from thy turbulent youth! It has in it a stillness as of a classic age, antique as the statues of the Greeks. That tranquil monotony of routine into which those lives that preceded thee have merged—the occupations that they have found sufficing for their happiness, by the fireside—in the armchair and corner appropriated to each—how strangely they contrast thine own feverish excitement! And they make room for thee, and bid thee welcome, and then resettle to their hushed pursuits, as if nothing had happened! Nothing had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world seems to have shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war! And you sit down, crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no more, and smile mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one, you say nothing till the time comes for bed, and you take up your candle, and creep miserably to your lonely room.

Now, if in a stage coach in the depth of winter, when three passengers are warm and snug, a fourth, all besnowed and frozen, descends from the outside and takes place amongst them, straightway all the three passengers shift their places, uneasily pull up their cloak collars, re-arrange their "comforters," feel indignantly a sensible loss of caloric—the intruder has at least made a sensation. But if you had all the snows of the Grampians in your heart, you might enter unnoticed: take care not to tread on the toes of your opposite neighbour, and not a soul is disturbed, not a "comforter" stirs an inch! I had not slept a wink, I had not even laid down all that night—the night in which I had said farewell to Fanny Trevanion—and the next morning, when the sun rose, I wandered out—where I know not. I have a dim recollection of long, gray, solitary streets—of the river, that seemed flowing in dull silence, away, far away, into some invisible eternity—trees and turf, and the gay voices of children. I must have gone from one end of the great Babel to the other: but my memory only became clear and distinct when I knocked, somewhere before noon, at the door of my father's house, and, passing heavily up the stairs, came into the drawing-room, which was the rendezvous of the little family; for, since we had been in London, my father had ceased to have his study apart, and contented himself with what he called "a corner"—a corner wide enough to contain two tables and a dumb waiter, with chairs à discretion all littered with books. On the opposite side of this capacious corner sat my uncle, now nearly convalescent, and he was jotting down, in his stiff military hand, certain figures in a little red account-book—for you know already that my uncle Roland was, in his expenses, the most methodical of men.

My father's face was more benign than usual, for, before him lay a proof—the first proof of his first work—his one work—the Great Book! Yes! it had positively found a press. And the first proof of your first work—ask any author what that is! My mother was out, with the faithful Mrs Primmins, shopping or marketing no doubt; so, while the brothers were thus engaged, it was natural that my entrance should not make as much noise as if it had been a bomb, or a singer, or a clap of thunder, or the last "great novel of the season," or anything else that made a noise in those days. For what makes a noise now? Now, when the most astonishing thing of all is in our easy familiarity with things astounding—when we say, listlessly, "Another revolution at Paris," or, "By the bye, there is the deuce to do at Vienna!"—when De Joinville is catching fish in the ponds at Claremont, and you hardly turn back to look at Metternich on the pier at Brighton!

My uncle nodded, and growled indistinctly; my father—

"Put aside his books; you have told us that already."

Sir, you are very much mistaken, he did not put aside his books, for he was not engaged in them—he was reading his proof. And he smiled, and pointed to it (the proof I mean) pathetically, and with a kind of humour, as much as to say—"What can you expect, Pisistratus?—my new baby! in short clothes—or long primer, which is all the same thing!"

I took a chair between the two, and looked first at one, then at the other, and—heaven forgive me!—I felt a rebellious, ungrateful spite against both. The bitterness of my soul must have been deep indeed to have overflowed in that direction, but it did. The grief of youth is an abominable egotist, and that is the truth. I got up from the chair, and walked towards the window; it was open, and outside the window was Mrs Primmins' canary, in its cage. London air had agreed with it, and it was singing lustily. Now, when the canary saw me standing opposite to its cage, and regarding it seriously, and, I have no doubt, with a very sombre aspect, the creature stopped short, and hung its head on one side, looking at me obliquely and suspiciously. Finding that I did it no harm, it began to hazard a few broken notes, timidly and interrogatively, as it were, pausing between each; and at length, as I made no reply, it evidently thought it had solved the doubt, and ascertained that I was more to be pitied than feared—for it stole gradually into so soft and silvery a strain that, I verily believe, it did it on purpose to comfort me!—me, its old friend, whom it had unjustly suspected. Never did any music touch me so home as did that long, plaintive cadence. And when the bird ceased, it perched itself close to the bars of the cage, and looked at me steadily with its bright intelligent eyes. I felt mine water, and I turned back and stood in the centre of the room, irresolute what to do, where to go. My father had done with the proof, and was deep in his folios. Roland had clasped his red account book, restored it to his pocket, wiped his pen carefully, and now watched me from under his great beetle brows. Suddenly he rose, and, stamping on the hearth with his cork leg, exclaimed, "Look up from those cursed books, brother Austin! What is there in that lad's face? Construe that, if you can!"

CHAPTER XL.

And my father pushed aside his books, and rose hastily. He took off his spectacles, and rubbed them mechanically, but he said nothing; and my uncle, staring at him for a moment, in surprise at his silence, burst out,—

"Oh! I see—he has been getting into some scrape, and you are angry! Fie! young blood will have its way, Austin—it will. I don't blame that—it is only when—come here, Sisty! Zounds! man, come here."

My father gently brushed off the captain's hand, and, advancing towards me, opened his arms. The next moment I was sobbing on his breast.

"But what is the matter?" cried Captain Roland, "will nobody say what is the matter? Money, I suppose—money, you confounded extravagant young dog. Luckily you have got an uncle who has more than he knows what to do with. How much?—fifty?—a hundred? two hundred? How can I write the cheque, if you'll not speak?"

"Hush, brother! it is no money you can give that will set this right. My poor boy! have I guessed truly? Did I guess truly the other evening, when—"

"Yes, sir, yes! I have been so wretched. But I am better now—I can tell you all."

My uncle moved slowly towards the door: his fine sense of delicacy made him think that even he was out of place in the confidence between son and father.

"No, uncle," I said, holding out my hand to him, "stay; you too can advise me—strengthen me. I have kept my honour yet—help me to keep it still."

At the sound of the word honour Captain Roland stood mute, and raised his head quickly.

So I told all—incoherently enough at first, but clearly and manfully as I went on. Now I know that it is not the custom of lovers to confide in fathers and uncles. Judging by those mirrors of life, plays and novels, they choose better;—valets and chambermaids, and friends whom they have picked up in the street, as I had picked up poor Francis Vivian—to these they make clean breasts of their troubles. But fathers and uncles—to them they are close, impregnable, "buttoned to the chin." The Caxtons were an eccentric family, and never did anything like other people. When I had ended, I lifted my eyes, and said pleadingly, "Now, tell me, is there no hope—none?"

"Why should there be none?" cried Captain Roland hastily—"the De Caxtons are as good a family as the Trevanions; and as for yourself, all I will say is, that the young lady might choose worse for her own happiness."

I wrung my uncles hand, and turned to my father in anxious fear—for I knew that, in spite of his secluded habits, few men ever formed a sounder judgment on worldly matters, when he was fairly drawn to look at them. A thing wonderful is that plain wisdom which scholars and poets often have for others, though they rarely deign to use it for themselves. And how on earth do they get at it? I looked at my father, and the vague hope Roland had excited fell as I looked.

"Brother," said he slowly, and shaking his head, "the world, which gives codes and laws to those who live in it, does not care much for a pedigree, unless it goes with a title-deed to estates."

"Trevanion was not richer than Pisistratus when he married Lady Ellinor," said my uncle.

"True; but Lady Ellinor was not then an heiress, and her father viewed these matters as no other peer in England perhaps would. As for Trevanion himself, I dare say he has no prejudices about station, but he is strong in common sense. He values himself on being a practical man. It would be folly to talk to him of love, and the affections of youth. He would see in the son of Austin Caxton, living on the interest of some fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds, such a match for his daughter as no prudent man in his position could approve. And as for Lady Ellinor"—

"She owes us much, Austin!" exclaimed Roland, his face darkening.

"Lady Ellinor is now what, if we had known her better, she promised always to be—the ambitious, brilliant, scheming woman of the world. Is it not so, Pisistratus?"

I said nothing. I felt too much.

"And does the girl like you?—but I think it is clear she does!" exclaimed Roland. "Fate—fate; it has been a fatal family to us! Zounds, Austin, it was your fault. Why did you let him go there?"

"My son is now a man—at least in heart, if not in years—can man be shut from danger and trial? They found me in the old parsonage, brother!" said my father mildly.

My uncle walked, or rather stumped, three times up and down the room; and he then stopped short, folded his arms, and came to a decision—

"If the girl likes you, your duty is doubly clear—you can't take advantage of it. You have done right to leave the house, for the temptation might be too strong."

"But what excuse shall I make to Mr Trevanion?" said I feebly—"what story can I invent? So careless as he is while he trusts, so penetrating if he once suspects, he will see through all my subterfuges, and—and—"

"It is as plain as a pike-staff," said my uncle abruptly—"and there need be no subterfuge in the matter. 'I must leave you, Mr Trevanion.' 'Why?' says he. 'Don't ask me.' He insists. 'Well then, sir, if you must know, I love your daughter. I have nothing—she is a great heiress. You will not approve of that love, and therefore I leave you!' That is the course that becomes an English gentleman—eh, Austin?"

"You are never wrong when your instincts speak, Roland," said my father. "Can you say this, Pisistratus, or shall I say it for you?"

"Let him say it himself," said Roland; "and let him judge himself of the answer. He is young, he is clever, he may make a figure in the world. Trevanion may answer, 'Win the lady after you have won the laurel, like the knights of old.' At all events, you will hear the worst."

"I will go," said I, firmly; and I took my hat, and left the room. As I was passing the landing-place, a light step stole down the upper flight of stairs, and a little hand seized my own. I turned quickly, and met the full, dark, seriously sweet eyes of my cousin Blanche.

"Don't go away yet, Sisty," said she coaxingly. "I have been waiting for you, for I heard your voice, and did not like to come in and disturb you."

"And why did you wait for me, my little Blanche?"

"Why! only to see you. But your eyes are red. Oh, cousin!"—and, before I was aware of her childish impulse, she had sprung to my neck and kissed me. Now Blanche was not like most children, and was very sparing of her caresses. So it was out of the deeps of a kind heart that that kiss came. I returned it without a word; and, putting her down gently, ran down the stairs, and was in the streets. But I had not got far before I heard my father's voice; and he came up, and, hooking his arm into mine, said, "Are there not two of us that suffer?—let us be together!" I pressed his arm, and we walked on in silence. But when we were near Trevanion's house, I said hesitatingly, "Would it not be better, sir, that I went in alone. If there is to be an explanation between Mr Trevanion and myself, would it not seem as if your presence implied either a request to him that would lower us both, or a doubt of me that—"

"You will go in alone, of course: I will wait for you—"

"Not in the streets—oh no, father," cried I, touched inexpressibly. For all this was so unlike my father's habits, that I felt remorse to have so communicated my young griefs to the calm dignity of his serene life.

"My son, you do not know how I love you. I have only known it myself lately. Look you, I am living in you now, my first-born; not in my other son—the great book: I must have my way. Go in; that is the door, is it not?"

I pressed my father's hand, and I felt then, that, while that hand could reply to mine, even the loss of Fanny Trevanion could not leave the world a blank. How much we have before us in life, while we retain our parents! How much to strive and to hope for! What a motive in the conquest of our sorrow—that they may not sorrow with us!

CHAPTER XLI.

I entered Trevanion's study. It was an hour in which he was rarely at home, but I had not thought of that; and I saw without surprise that, contrary to his custom, he was in his armchair, reading one of his favourite classic authors, instead of being in some committee room of the House of Commons.

"A pretty fellow you are," said he, looking up, "to leave me all the morning, without rhyme or reason. And my committee is postponed—chairman ill—people who get ill should not go into the House of Commons. So here I am, looking into Propertius: Parr is right; not so elegant a writer as Tibullus. But what the deuce are you about?—why don't you sit down? Humph! you look grave—you have something to say,—say it!"

And, putting down Propertius, the acute, sharp face of Trevanion instantly became earnest and attentive.

"My dear Mr Trevanion," said I, with as much steadiness as I could assume, "you have been most kind to me; and, out of my own family, there is no man I love and respect more."

Trevanion.—Humph! What's all this! (In an under tone)—Am I going to be taken in?

Pisistratus.—Do not think me ungrateful, then, when I say I come to resign my office—to leave the house where I have been so happy.

Trevanion.—Leave the house!—Pooh!—I have overtasked you. I will be more merciful in future. You must forgive a political economist—it is the fault of my sect to look upon men as machines.

Pisistratus—(smiling faintly.)—No, indeed—that is not it! I have nothing to complain of—nothing I could wish altered—could I stay.

Trevanion (examining me thoughtfully.)—And does your father approve of your leaving me thus?

Pisistratus—Yes, fully.

Trevanion (musing a moment.)—I see, he would send you to the University, make you a book-worm like himself: pooh! that will not do—you will never become wholly a man of books,—it is not in you. Young man, though I may seem careless, I read characters, when I please it, pretty quickly. You do wrong to leave me; you are made for the great world—I can open to you a high career. I wish to do so! Lady Ellinor wishes it—nay, insists on it—for your father's sake as well as yours. I never ask a favour from ministers, and I never will. But (here Trevanion rose suddenly, and, with an erect mien and a quick gesture of his arm, he added)—but a minister himself can dispose as he pleases of his patronage. Look you, it is a secret yet, and I trust to your honour. But, before the year is out, I must be in the cabinet. Stay with me, I guarantee your fortunes—three months ago I would not have said that. By-and-by I will open parliament for you—you are not of age yet—work till then. And now sit down and write my letters—a sad arrear!"

"My dear, dear Mr Trevanion!" said I, so affected that I could scarcely speak, and seizing his hand, which I pressed between both mine—"I dare not thank you—I cannot! But you don't know my heart—it is not ambition. No! if I could but stay here on the same terms for ever—here—(looking ruefully on that spot where Fanny had stood the night before,) but it is impossible! If you knew all, you would be the first to bid me go!"

"You are in debt," said the man of the world, coldly. "Bad, very bad—still—"

"No, sir; no! worse—"

"Hardly possible to be worse, young man—hardly! But, just as you will; you leave me, and will not say why. Good-by. Why do you linger? shake hands, and go!"

"I cannot leave you thus: I—I—sir, the truth shall out. I am rash and mad enough not to see Miss Trevanion without forgetting that I am poor, and—"

"Ha!" interrupted Trevanion softly, and growing pale, "this is a misfortune indeed! And I, who talked of reading characters! Truly, truly, we would-be practical men are fools—fools! And you have made love to my daughter!"

"Sir! Mr Trevanion! I—no—never, never so base! In your house, trusted by you,—how could you think it? I dared, it may be, to love—at all events, to feel that I could not be insensible to a temptation too strong for me. But to say it to your daughter—to ask love in return—I would as soon have broken open your desk! Frankly I tell you my folly: it is a folly, not a disgrace."

Trevanion came up to me abruptly, as I leant against the book-case, and, grasping my hand with a cordial kindness, said,—"Pardon me! You have behaved as your father's son should—I envy him such a son! Now, listen to me—I cannot give you my daughter—"

"Believe me, sir, I never—"

"Tut, listen! I cannot give you my daughter. I say nothing of inequality—all gentlemen are equal; and if not, all impertinent affectation of superiority, in such a case, would come ill from one who owes his own fortune to his wife! But, as it is, I have a stake in the world, won not by fortune only, but the labour of a life, the suppression of half my nature—the drudging, squaring, taming down—all that made the glory and joy of my youth—to be that hard matter-of-fact thing which the English world expect in a—statesman! This station has gradually opened into its natural result—power! I tell you I shall soon have high office in the administration: I hope to render great services to England—for we English politicians, whatever the mob and the press say of us, are not selfish placehunters. I refused office, as high as I look for now, ten years ago. We believe in our opinions, and we hail the power that may carry them into effect. In this cabinet I shall have enemies. Oh, don't think we leave jealousy behind us, at the doors of Downing Street! I shall be one of a minority. I know well what must happen: like all men in power, I must strengthen myself by other heads and hands than my own. My daughter should bring to me the alliance of that house in England which is most necessary to me. My life falls to the ground, like a house of cards, if I waste—I do not say on you, but on men of ten times your fortune (whatever that be,)—the means of strength which are at my disposal in the hand of Fanny Trevanion. To this end I have looked; but to this end her mother has schemed—for these household matters are within a man's hopes, but belong to a woman's policy. So much for us. But for you, my dear, and frank, and high-souled young friend—for you, if I were not Fanny's father—if I were your nearest relation, and Fanny could be had for the asking, with all her princely dower, (for it is princely,)—for you I should say, fly from a load upon the heart, on the genius, the energy, the pride, and the spirit, which not one man in ten thousand can bear; fly from the curse of owing every thing to a wife!—it is a reversal of all natural position, it is a blow to all the manhood within us. You know not what it is: I do! My wife's fortune came not till after marriage—so far, so well; it saved my reputation from the charge of fortune-hunting. But, I tell you fairly, that if it had never come at all, I should be a prouder, and a greater, and a happier man than I have ever been, or ever can be, with all its advantages; it has been a millstone round my neck. And yet Ellinor has never breathed a word that could wound my pride. Would her daughter be as forbearing? Much as I love Fanny, I doubt if she has the great heart of her mother. You look incredulous;—naturally. Oh, you think I shall sacrifice my child's happiness to a politician's ambition! Folly of youth! Fanny would be wretched with you. She might not think so now; she would five years hence! Fanny will make an admirable duchess, countess, great lady; but wife to a man who owes all to her!—no, no, don't dream it! I shall not sacrifice her happiness, depend on it. I speak plainly, as man to man—man of the world to a man just entering it—but still man to man! What say you?"

"I will think over all you tell me. I know that you are speaking to me most generously—as a father would. Now let me go, and may God keep you and yours!"

"Go—I return your blessing—go! I don't insult you now with offers of service; but, remember, you have a right to command them—in all ways, in all times. Stop!—take this comfort away with you—a sorry comfort now, a great one hereafter. In a position that might have moved anger, scorn, pity, you have made a barren-hearted man honour and admire you. You, a boy, have made me, with my gray hairs, think better of the whole world: tell your father that."

I closed the door, and stole out softly—softly. But when I got into the hall, Fanny suddenly opened the door of the breakfast parlour, and seemed, by her look, her gesture, to invite me in. Her face was very pale, and there were traces of tears on the heavy lids.

I stood still a moment, and my heart beat violently. I then muttered something inarticulately, and, bowing low, hastened to the door.

I thought, but my ears might deceive me, that I heard my name pronounced; but fortunately the tall porter started from his newspaper and his leather chair, and the entrance stood open. I joined my father.

"It is all over," said I, with a resolute smile. "And now, my dear father, I feel how grateful I should be for all that your lessons—your life—have, taught me;—for, believe me, I am not unhappy."

CHAPTER XLII.

We came back to my father's house, and on the stairs we met my mother, whom Roland's grave looks, and her Austin's strange absence, had alarmed. My father quietly led the way to a little room, which my mother had appropriated to Blanche and herself; and then, placing my hand in that which had helped his own steps from the stony path, down the quiet vales of life, he said to me,—"Nature gives you here the soother;"—and, so saying, he left the room.

And it was true, O my mother! that in thy simple loving breast nature did place the deep wells of comfort! We come to men for philosophy—to women for consolation. And the thousand weaknesses and regrets—the sharp sands of the minutiæ that make up sorrow—all these, which I could have betrayed to no man—not even to him, the dearest and tenderest of all men—I showed without shame to thee! And thy tears, that fell on my cheek, had the balm of Araby; and my heart, at length, lay lulled and soothed under thy moist gentle eyes.

I made an effort, and joined the little circle at dinner; and I felt grateful that no violent attempt was made to raise my spirits—nothing but affection, more subdued, and soft, and tranquil. Even little Blanche, as if by the intuition of sympathy, ceased her babble, and seemed to hush her footstep as she crept to my side. But after dinner, when we had reassembled in the drawing-room, and the lights shone bright, and the curtains were let down—and only the quick roll of some passing wheels reminded us that there was a world without—my father began to talk. He had laid aside all his work; the younger, but less perishable child was forgotten,—and my father began to talk.

"It is," said he musingly, "a well-known thing, that particular drugs or herbs suit the body according to its particular diseases. When we are ill, we don't open our medicinechest at random, and take out any powder or phial that comes to hand. The skilful doctor is he who adjusts the dose to the malady."

"Of that there can be no doubt," quoth Captain Roland. "I remember a notable instance of the justice of what you say. When I was in Spain, both my horse and I fell ill at the same time; a dose was sent for each; and, by some infernal mistake, I swallowed the horse's physic, and the horse, poor thing, swallowed mine!"

"And what was the result?" asked my father.

"The horse died!", answered Roland mournfully—"a valuable beast—bright bay, with a star!"

"And you?"

"Why, the doctor said it ought to have killed me; but it took a great deal more than a paltry bottle of physic to kill a man in my regiment."

"Nevertheless, we arrive at the same conclusion," pursued my father,—"I with my theory, you with your experience,—that the physic we take must not be chosen hap-hazard; and that a mistake in the bottle may kill a horse. But when we come to the medicine for the mind, how little do we think of the golden rule which common-sense applies to the body."

"Anon," said the Captain, "what medicine is there for the mind? Shakspeare has said something on that subject, which, if I recollect right, implies that there is no ministering to a mind diseased."

"I think not, brother; he only said physic (meaning boluses and black draughts) would not do it. And Shakspeare was the last man to find fault with his own art; for, verily, he has been a great physician to the mind."

"Ah! I take you now, brother,—books again! So you think that, when a man breaks his heart, or loses his fortune, or his daughter—(Blanche, child, come here)—that you have only to clap a plaster of print on the sore place, and all is well. I wish you would find me such a cure."

"Will you try it?"

"If it is not Greek," said my uncle.

CHAPTER XLIII.

MY FATHER'S CROTCHET ON THE HYGEIENIC CHEMISTRY OF BOOKS.

"If," said my father—and here his hand was deep in his waistcoat—"if we accept the authority of Diodorus, as to the inscription on the great Egyptian library—and I don't see why Diodorus should not be as near the mark as any one else?" added my father interrogatively, turning round.

My mother thought herself the person addressed, and nodded her gracious assent to the authority of Diodorus. His opinion thus fortified, my father continued,—"If, I say, we accept the authority of Diodorus, the inscription on the Egyptian library was—'The Medicine of the Mind.' Now, that phrase has become notoriously trite and hackneyed, and people repeat vaguely that books are the medicine of the mind. Yes; but to apply the medicine is the thing!"

"So you have told us at least twice before, brother," quoth the Captain, bluffly. "And what Diodorus has to do with it, I know no more than the man of the moon."

"I shall never get on at this rate," said my father, in a tone between reproach and entreaty.

"Be good children, Roland and Blanche both," said my mother, stopping from her work, and holding up her needle threateningly—and indeed inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain's shoulder.

"Rem acu tetigisti, my dear," said my father, borrowing Cicero's pun on the occasion.[13] "And now we shall go upon velvet. I say, then, that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. In a great grief like that, you cannot tickle and divert the mind; you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb—bury it in an abyss, hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable sorrows of middle life and old age, I recommend a strict chronic, course of science and hard reasoning—Counter-irritation. Bring the brain to act upon the heart! If science is too much against the grain, (for we have not all got mathematical heads,) something in the reach of the humblest understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest—a new language—Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welch! For the loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the understanding.—I would administer something elegant and cordial. For as the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we find the higher class of poets a very valuable remedy. For observe, that poets of the grander and more comprehensive kind of genius have in them two separate men, quite distinct from each other—the imaginative man, and the practical, circumstantial man; and it is the happy mixture of these that suits diseases of the mind, half imaginative and half practical. There is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the homeliest, the very 'poet of circumstance,' as Gray has finely called him; and yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest into forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his banker's book can cover. There is Virgil, far below him, indeed.

—'Virgil the wise,
Whose verse walks highest, but not flies.'

as Cowley expresses it. But Virgil still has genius enough to be two men—to lead you into the fields, not only to listen to the pastoral reed, and to hear the bees hum, but to note how you can make the most of the glebe and the vineyard. There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, and by no means undervalue the good things of this life; but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum, or parva rura. There is Shakspeare, who, above all poets, is the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyreal fancy—and a great many more, whom I need not name; but who, if you take to them gently and quietly, will not, like your mere philosopher, your unreasonable stoic, tell you that you have lost nothing; but who will insensibly steal you out of this world, with its losses and crosses, and slip you into another world, before you know where you are!—a world where you are just as welcome, though you carry no more earth of your lost acres with you than covers the sole of your shoe. Then, for hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk alterative course of travels—especially early, out of the way, marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life; or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis to Tartary, meet 'the carts of Zagathai laden with houses, and think that a great city is travelling towards you.'[14] Gaze on that vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the descendants of Jenghis 'multiply and disperse over the immense waste desert, which is as boundless as the ocean.' Sail with the early northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among sea-serpents and bears, and tusked morses, with the faces of men. Then, what think you of Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the kingdom of Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that audacious brute Pizarro? and the Polynesians, just for all the world like the ancient Britons? and the American Indians, and the South-Sea Islanders? how petulant, and young, and adventurous, and frisky your hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of the mind which I call sectarianism—not in the religious sense of the word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door neighbour, because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled; and gossiping and prying into people's affairs, and back-biting, and thinking heaven and earth are coming together, if some broom touch a cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains—what like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear) course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the head!—better than the hellebore with which the old leeches of the middle ages purged the cerebellum. There, amidst all that great whirl and sturmbad (storm-bath), as the Germans say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and ages, how your mind enlarges beyond that little, feverish animosity to John Styles; or that unfortunate prepossession of yours, that all the world is interested in your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife!

"I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent pharmacy—its resources are boundless, but require the nicest discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the first strata, I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling crystallised masses; and, by the time I had got him into the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht, and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear! it is no laughing matter. I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at Cambridge, who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading over his depth in Spinosa. None of the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least good in that state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently upon the chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker's book, (you should read, it, Sisty;) then I threw in strong doses of Fichté; after that I put him on the Scotch metaphysicians, with plunge baths into certain German transcendentalists; and having convinced him that faith is not an unphilosophical state of mind, and that he might believe without compromising his understanding—for he was mightily conceited on that score—I threw in my divines, which he was now fit to digest; and his theological constitution, since then, has become so robust, that he has eaten up two livings and a deanery! In fact, I have a plan for a library that, instead of heading its compartments, 'Philology, Natural Science, Poetry,' &c., one shall head them according to the diseases for which they are severally good, bodily and mental—up from a dire calamity, or the pangs of the gout, down to a fit of the spleen, or a slight catarrh; for which last your light reading comes in with a whey posset and barley-water. But," continued my father more gravely, "when some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania—when you think, because heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank—oh, then diet yourself well on biography—the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own; and how triumphantly the life sails on, beyond it! You thought the wing was broken!—Tut-tut—it was but a bruised feather! See what life leaves behind it, when all is, done!—a summary of positive facts far out of the region of sorrow and suffering, linking themselves with the being of the world. Yes, biography is the medicine here! Roland, you said you would try my prescription—here it is,"—and my father took up a book, and reached it to the Captain.

My uncle looked over it—Life of the Reverend Robert Hall. "Brother, he was a Dissenter, and, thank heaven, I am a church-and-state man, back and bone!"

"Robert Hall was a brave man, and a true soldier under the great commander," said my father artfully.

The Captain mechanically carried his forefinger to his forehead in military fashion, and saluted the book respectfully.

"I have another copy for you, Pisistratus—that is mine which I have lent Roland. This, which I bought for you to-day, you will keep."

"Thank you, sir," said I listlessly, not seeing what great good the Life of Robert Hall could do me, or why the same medicine should suit the old weatherbeaten uncle, and the nephew yet in his teens.

"I have said nothing," resumed my father, slightly bowing his broad temples, "of the Book of Books, for that is the lignum vitæ, the cardinal medicine for all. These are but the subsidiaries: for, as you may remember, my dear Kitty, that I have said before—we can never keep the system quite right unless we place just in the centre of the great ganglionic system, whence the nerves carry its influence gently and smoothly through the whole frame—the Saffron Bag!"

CHAPTER XLIV.

After breakfast the next morning, I took my hat to go out, when my father, looking at me, and seeing by my countenance that I had not slept, said gently—

"My dear Pisistratus, you have not tried my medicine yet."

"What medicine, sir?"

"Robert Hall."

"No, indeed, not yet," said I, smiling.

"Do so, my son, before you go out; depend on it, you will enjoy your walk more."

I confess that it was, with some reluctance I obeyed. I went back to my own room, and sate resolutely down to my task. Are there any of you, my readers, who have not read the Life of Robert Hall? If so, in the words of the great Captain Cuttle, "When found, make a note of it." Never mind what your theological opinion is—Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pædobaptist, Independent, Quaker, Unitarian, Philosopher, Freethinker—send for Robert Hall! Yea, if there exist yet on earth descendants of the arch-heresies, which made such a noise in their day—men who believe with Saturnians that the world was made by seven angels; or with Basilides, that there are as many heavens as there are days in the year; or with the Nicolaitanes, that men ought to have their wives in common, (plenty of that sect still, especially in the Red Republic;) or with their successors, the Gnostics, who believed in Jaldaboath; or with the Carpacratians, that the world was made by the devil; or with the Cerinthians, and Ebionites, and Nazarites, (which last discovered that the name of Noah's wife was Ouria, and that she set the ark on fire;) or with the Valentinians, who taught that there were thirty Æones, ages, or worlds, born out of Profundity, (Bathos,) male, and Silence, female; or with the Marcites, Colarbasii, and Heracleonites, (who still kept up that bother about Æones, Mr Profundity, and Mrs Silence;) or with the Ophites, who are said to have worshipped the serpent; or the Cainites, who ingeniously found out a reason for honouring Judas, because he foresaw what good would come to men by betraying our Saviour; or with the Sethites, who made Seth a part of the Divine substance; or with the Archonticks, Ascothyptæ, Cerdonians, Marcionites, the disciples of Apelles, and Severus, (the last was a teetotaller, and said wine was begot by Satan!) or of Tatian, who thought all the descendants of Adam were irretrievably damned except themselves, (some of those Tatiani are certainly extant!) or the Cataphrygians, who were also called Tascodragitæ, because they thrust their forefingers up their nostrils to show their devotion; or the Pepuzians, Quintilians, and Artotyrites; or—but no matter. If I go through all the follies of men in search of the truth, I shall never get to the end of my chapter, or back to Robert Hall: whatever, then, thou art, orthodox or heterodox, send for the Life of Robert Hall. It is the life of a man that it does good to manhood itself to contemplate.

I had finished the biography, which is not long, and was musing over it, when I heard the Captain's cork-leg upon the stairs. I opened the door for him, and he entered, book in hand, as I, also book in hand, stood ready to receive him.

"Well, sir," said Roland, seating himself, "has the prescription done you any good?"

"Yes, uncle—great."

"And me too. By Jupiter, Sisty, that same Hall was a fine fellow! I wonder if the medicine has gone through the same channels in both? Tell me, first, how it has affected you."

"Imprimis, then, my dear uncle, I fancy that a book like this must do good to all who live in the world in the ordinary manner, by admitting us into a circle of life of which I suspect we think but little. Here is a man connecting himself directly with a heavenly purpose, and cultivating considerable faculties to that one end; seeking to accomplish his soul as far as he can, that he may do most good on earth, and take a higher existence up to heaven; a man intent upon a sublime and spiritual duty: in short, living as it were in it, and so filled with the consciousness of immortality, and so strong in the link between God and man, that, without any affected stoicism, without being insensible to pain—rather, perhaps, from a nervous temperament, acutely feeling it—he yet has a happiness wholly independent of it. It is impossible not to be thrilled with an admiration that elevates while it awes you, in reading that solemn 'Dedication of himself to God.' This offering of 'soul and body, time, health, reputation, talents,' to the divine and invisible Principle of Good, calls us suddenly to contemplate the selfishness of our own views and hopes, and awakens us from the egotism that exacts all and resigns nothing.

"But this book has mostly struck upon the chord in my own heart, in that characteristic which my father indicated as belonging to all biography. Here is a life of remarkable fulness, great study, great thought, and great action; and yet," said I, colouring, "how small a place those feelings, which have tyrannised over me, and made all else seem blank and void, hold in that life. It is not as if the man were a cold and hard ascetic; it is easy to see in him not only remarkable tenderness and warm affections, but strong self-will, and the passion of all vigorous natures. Yes, I understand better now what existence in a true man should be."

"All that is very well said," quoth the Captain, "but it did not strike me. What I have seen in this book is courage. Here is a poor creature rolling on the carpet with agony; from childhood to death tortured by a mysterious incurable malady—a malady that is described as 'an internal apparatus of torture;' and who does, by his heroism, more than bear it—he puts it out of power to affect him; and though (here is the passage) 'his appointment by day and by night was incessant pain, yet high enjoyment was, notwithstanding, the law of his existence.' Robert Hall reads me a lesson—me, an old soldier, who thought myself above taking lessons—in courage, at least. And, as I came to that passage when, in the sharp paroxysms before death, he says, 'I have not complained, have I, sir?—and I won't complain,'—when I came to that passage I started up, and cried, 'Roland de Caxton, thou hast been a coward! and, an thou hadst had thy deserts, thou hadst been cashiered, broken, and drummed out of the regiment long ago!"

"After all, then, my father was not so wrong—he placed his guns right, and fired a good shot."

"He must have been from 6° to 9° above the crest of the parapet," said my uncle, thoughtfully—"which, I take it, is the best elevation, both for shot and shells, in enfilading a work."

"What say you, then, Captain? up with our knapsacks, and on with the march!"

"Right about—face!" cried my uncle, as erect as a column.

"No looking back, if we can help it."

"Full in the front of the enemy—'Up, guards, and at 'em!'"

"'England expects every man to do his duty!"'

"Cypress or laurel!" cried my uncle, waving the book over his head.

CHAPTER XLV.

I went out—and to see Francis Vivian; for, on leaving Mr Trevanion, I was not without anxiety for my new friend's future provision. But Vivian was from home, and I strolled from his lodgings, into the suburbs on the other side of the river, and began to meditate seriously on the best course now to pursue. In quitting my present occupations, I resigned prospects far more brilliant, and fortunes far more rapid than I could ever hope to realise in any other entrance into life. But I felt the necessity, if I desired to keep steadfast to that more healthful frame of mind I had obtained, of some manly and continuous labour—some earnest employment. My thoughts flew back to the university; and the quiet of its cloisters—which, until I had been blinded by the glare of the London world, and grief had somewhat dulled the edge of my quick desires and hopes, had seemed to me cheerless and unaltering—took an inviting aspect. They presented what I needed most—a new scene, a new arena, a partial return into boyhood; repose for passions prematurely raised; activity for the reasoning powers in fresh directions. I had not lost my time in London: I had kept up, if not studies purely classical, at least the habits of application; I had sharpened my general comprehension, and augmented my resources. Accordingly, when I returned home, I resolved to speak to my father. But I found he had forestalled me; and, on entering, my mother drew me up stairs into her room, with a smile kindled by my smile, and told me that she and her Austin had been thinking that it was best that I should leave London as soon as possible; that my father found he could now dispense with the library of the Museum for some months; that the time for which they had taken their lodgings would be up in a few days; that the summer was far advanced, town odious, the country beautiful—in a word, we were to go home. There I could prepare myself for Cambridge, till the long vacation was over; and, my mother added hesitatingly, and with a prefatory caution to spare my health, that my father, whose income could ill afford the requisite allowance to me, counted on my soon lightening his burden, by getting a scholarship. I felt how much provident kindness there was in all this—even in that hint of a scholarship, which was meant to rouse my faculties, and spur me, by affectionate incentives, to a new ambition. I was not less delighted than grateful.

"But poor Roland," said I, "and little Blanche—will they come with us?"

"I fear not," said my mother, "for Roland is anxious to get back to his tower; and, in a day or two, he will be well enough to move."

"Do you not think, my dear mother, that, somehow or other, this lost son of his had something to do with his illness,—that the illness was as much mental as physical?"

"I have no doubt of it, Sisty. What a sad, bad heart that young man must have!"

"My uncle seems to have abandoned all hope of finding him in London; otherwise, ill as he has been, I am sure we could not have kept him at home. So he goes back to the old tower. Poor man, he must be dull enough there!—we must contrive to pay him a visit. Does Blanche ever speak of her brother?"

"No, for it seems they were not brought up much together—at all events, she does not remember him. How lovely she is! Her mother must surely have been very handsome."

"She is a pretty child, certainly, though in a strange style of beauty—such immense eyes!—and affectionate, and loves Roland as she ought."

And here the conversation dropped.

Our plans being thus decided, it was necessary that I should lose no time in seeing Vivian, and making some arrangement for the future. His manner had lost so much of its abruptness, that I thought I could venture to recommend him personally to Trevanion; and I knew, after what had passed, that Trevanion would make a point to oblige me. I resolved to consult my father about it. As yet I had either never forced, or never made the opportunity to talk to my father on the subject, he had been so occupied; and, if he had proposed to see my new friend, what answer could I have made, in the teeth of Vivian's cynic objections? However, as we were now going away, that last consideration ceased to be of importance; and, for the first, the student had not yet entirely settled back to his books. I therefore watched the time when my father walked down to the Museum, and, slipping my arm in his, I told him, briefly and rapidly, as we went along, how I had formed this strange acquaintance, and how I was now situated. The story did not interest my father quite as much as I expected, and he did not understand all the complexities of Vivian's character—how could he?—for he answered briefly, "I should think that, for a young man, apparently without a sixpence, and whose education seems so imperfect, any resource in Trevanion must be most temporary and uncertain. Speak to your uncle Jack—he can find him some place, I have no doubt—perhaps a readership in a printer's office, or a reporter's place on some journal, if he is fit for it. But if you want to steady him, let it be something regular."

Therewith my father dismissed the matter, and vanished through the gates of the Museum.—Readership to a printer, reportership on a journal, for a young gentleman with the high notions and arrogant vanity of Francis Vivian—his ambition already soaring far beyond kid gloves and a cabriolet! The idea was hopeless; and, perplexed and doubtful, I took my way to Vivian's lodgings. I found him at home, and unemployed, standing by his window, with folded arms, and in a state of such reverie that he was not aware of my entrance till I had touched him on the shoulder.

"Ha!" said he then, with one of his short, quick, impatient sighs, "I thought you had given me up, and forgotten me—but you look pale and harassed. I could almost think you had grown thinner within the last few days."

"Oh! never mind me, Vivian: I have come to speak of yourself. I have left Trevanion; it is settled that I should go to the university—and we all quit town in a few days."

"In a few days!—all!—who are all?"

"My family—father, mother, uncle cousin, and myself. But, my dear fellow, now let us think seriously what is best to be done for you? I can present you to Trevanion."

"Ha!"

"But Trevanion is a hard, though an excellent man; and, moreover, as he is always changing the subjects that engross him, in a month or so, he may have nothing to give you. You said you would work—will you consent not to complain if the work cannot be done in kid gloves? Young men who have risen high in the world have begun, it is well known, as reporters to the press. It is a situation of respectability, and in request, and not easy to obtain, I fancy; but still—"

Vivian interrupted me hastily—

"Thank you a thousand times! but what you say confirms a resolution I had taken before you came. I shall make it up with my family, and return home."

"Oh! I am so really glad. How wise in you!"

Vivian turned away his head abruptly—

"Your pictures of family life and domestic peace, you see," he said, "seduced me more than you thought. When do you leave town?"

"Why, I believe, early next week."

"So soon!" said Vivian, thoughtfully. "Well, perhaps I may ask you yet to introduce me to Mr Trevanion; for—who knows?—my family and I may fall out again. But I will consider. I think I have heard you say that this Trevanion is a very old friend of your father's, or uncle's?"

"He, or rather Lady Ellinor, is an old friend of both."

"And therefore would listen to your recommendations of me. But perhaps I may not need them. So you have left—left of your own accord—a situation that seemed more enjoyable, I should think, than rooms in a college;—left—why did you leave?"

And Vivian fixed his bright eyes, full and piercingly, on mine.

"It was only for a time, for a trial, that I was there," said I, evasively: "out at nurse, as it were, till the Alma Mater opened her arms—alma indeed she ought to be to my father's son."

Vivian looked unsatisfied with my explanation, but did not question me farther. He himself was the first to turn the conversation, and he did this with more affectionate cordiality than was common to him. He inquired into our general plans, into the probabilities of our return to town, and drew from me a description of our rural Tusculum. He was quiet and subdued; and once or twice I thought there was a moisture in those luminous eyes. We parted with more of the unreserve and fondness of youthful friendship—at least on my part, and seemingly on his—than had yet endeared our singular intimacy; for the cement of cordial attachment had been wanting to an intercourse in which one party refused all confidence, and the other mingled distrust and fear with keen interest and compassionate admiration.

That evening, before lights were brought in, my father, turning to me, abruptly asked if I had seen my friend, and what he was about to do?

"He thinks of returning to his family," said I.

Roland, who had seemed dozing, winced uneasily.

"Who returns to his family?" asked the Captain.

"Why, you must know," said my father, "that Sisty has fished up a friend of whom he can give no account that would satisfy a policeman, and whose fortunes he thinks himself under the necessity of protecting. You are very lucky that he has not picked your pockets, Sisty; but I daresay he has? What's his name?"

"Vivian," said I—"Francis Vivian."

"A good name, and a Cornish," said my father. "Some derive it from the Romans—Vivianus; others from a Celtic word, which means"—

"Vivian!" interrupted Roland—"Vivian!—I wonder if it be the son of Colonel Vivian?"

"He is certainly a gentleman's son," said I; "but he never told me what his family and connexions were."

"Vivian," repeated my uncle—"poor Colonel Vivian. So the young man is going to his father. I have no doubt it is the same. Ah!"—

"What do you know of Colonel Vivian, or his son?" said I. "Pray, tell me, I am so interested in this young man."

"I know nothing of either, except by gossip," said my uncle, moodily. "I did hear that Colonel Vivian, an excellent officer, and honourable man, had been in—in—(Roland's voice faltered)—in great grief about his son, whom, a mere boy, he had prevented from some improper marriage, and who had run away and left him—it was supposed for America. The story affected me at the time," added my uncle, trying to speak calmly.

We were all silent, for we felt why Roland was so disturbed, and why Colonel Vivian's grief should have touched him home. Similarity in affliction makes us brothers even to the unknown.

"You say he is going home to his family—I am heartily glad of it!" said the envying old soldier, gallantly.

The lights came in then, and, two minutes after, uncle Roland and I were nestled close to each other, side by side; and I was reading over his shoulder, and his finger was silently resting on that passage that had so struck him—"I have not complained—have I, sir?—and I won't complain!"

THE WHITE NILE.[15]

Fifty years since, the book before us would have earned for its author the sneers of critics and the reputation of a Munchausen: at the present more tolerant and more enlightened day, it not only obtains credit, but excites well-merited admiration of the writer's enterprise, energy, and perseverance. "The rich contents and great originality of the following work," says Professor Carl Ritter, in his preface to Mr Werne's narrative, "will escape no one who bestows a glance, however hasty, upon its pages. It gives vivid and life-like pictures of tribes and territories previously unvisited, and is welcome as a most acceptable addition to our literature of travel, often so monotonous." We quite coincide with the learned professor, whose laudatory and long-winded sentences we have thus freely rendered. His friend, Mr Ferdinand Werne, has made good use of his opportunities, and has produced a very interesting and praiseworthy book.

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to remind the reader, that the river Nile is formed of two confluent streams, the Blue and the White, whose junction is in South Nubia, between 15° and 16° of North Latitude. The source of the Blue Nile was ascertained by Bruce, and by subsequent travellers, to be in the mountains of Abyssinia; but the course of the other branch, which is by far the longest, had been followed, until very lately, only as far south as 10° or 11° N. L. Even now the river has not been traced to its origin, although Mr Werne and his companions penetrated to 4° N. L. Further they could not go, owing to the rapid subsidence of the waters. The expedition had been delayed six weeks by the culpable dilatoriness of one of its members; and this was fatal to the realisation of its object.

We can conceive few things more exciting than such a voyage as Mr Werne has accomplished and recorded. Starting from the outposts of civilisation, he sailed into the very heart of Africa, up a stream whose upper waters were then for the first time furrowed by vessels larger than a savage's canoe—a stream of such gigantic proportions, that its width, at a thousand miles from the sea, gave it the aspect of a lake rather than of a river. The brute creation were in proportion with the magnitude of the water-course. The hippopotamus reared his huge snout above the surface, and wallowed in the gullies that on either hand run down to the stream; enormous crocodiles gaped along the shore; elephants played in herds upon the pastures; the tall giraffe amongst the lofty palms; snakes thick as trees lay coiled in the slimy swamps; and ant-hills, ten feet high, towered above the rushes. Along the thickly-peopled banks hordes of savages showed themselves, gazing in wonder at the strange ships, and making ambiguous gestures, variously construed by the adventurers as signs of friendship or hostility. Alternately sailing and towing, as the wind served or not; constantly in sight of natives, but rarely communicating with them; often cut off for days from land by interminable fields of tangled weeds,—the expedition pursued its course through innumerable perils, guaranteed from most of them by the liquid rampart on which it floated. Lions looked hungry, and savages shook their spears, but neither showed a disposition to swim off and board the flotilla.

The cause of science has countless obligations to the cupidity of potentates and adventurers. May it not be part of the scheme of Providence, that gold is placed in the most remote and barbarous regions, as a magnet to draw thither the children of civilisation? The expedition shared in by Mr Werne is an argument in favour of the hypothesis. It originated in appetite for lucre, not in thirst for knowledge. Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt, finding the lands within his control unable to meet his lavish expenditure and constant cry for gold, projected working mines supposed to exist in the districts of Kordovan and Fazogl. At heavy cost he procured Austrian miners from Trieste, a portion of whom proceeded in 1836 to the land of promise, to open those veins of gold whence it was reported the old Venetian ducats had been extracted. Already, in imagination, the viceroy beheld an ingot-laden fleet sailing merrily down the Nile. He was disappointed in his glowing expectations. Russegger, the German chief of the expedition, pocketed the pay of a Bey, ate and drank in conformity with his rank, rambled about the country, and wrote a book for the amusement and Information of his countrymen. Then he demanded thirty thousand dollars to begin the works. An Italian, who had accompanied him, offered to do it for less; mistrust and disputes arose, and at last their employer would rely on neither of them, but resolved to go and see for himself. This was in the autumn of 1838; and it might well be that the old fox was not sorry to get out of the way of certain diplomatic personages at Alexandria, and thus to postpone for a while his reply to troublesome inquiries and demands.

"It was on the 15th October 1838," Mr Werne says, "that I—for some time past an anchorite in the wilderness by Tura, and just returned from a hunt in the ruins of Memphis—saw, from the left shore of the Nile, the Abu Dagn, (Father of the Beard,) as Mohammed Ali was designated to me by a Fellah standing by, steam past in his yacht, in the direction of those regions to which I would then so gladly have proceeded. Already in Alexandria I had gathered, over a glass of wine, from frigate-captain Achmet, (a Swiss, named Baumgartner,) the secret plan of the expedition to the White Stream, (Bach'r el Abiat,) and I had made every effort to obtain leave to join it, but in vain, because, as a Christian, my discretion was not to be depended upon."

The Swiss, whom some odd caprice of fate, here unexplained, had converted into an Egyptian naval captain, and to whom the scientific duties of the expedition were confided, died in the following spring, and his place was taken by Captain Selim. Mr Werne and his brother, who had long ardently desired to accompany one of these expeditions up the Nile, were greatly discouraged at this change, which they looked upon as destructive to their hopes. At the town of Chartum, at the confluence of the White and Blue streams, they witnessed, in the month of November 1839, the departure of the first flotilla; and, although sick and weak, from the effects of the climate, their hearts were wrung with regret at being left behind. This expedition got no further than 6° 35' N. L.; although, either from mistakes in their astronomical reckoning or wishing to give themselves more importance, and not anticipating that others would soon follow to check their statements, they pretended to have gone three degrees further south. But Mehemet Ali, not satisfied with the result of their voyage, immediately ordered a second expedition to be fitted out. Mr Werne, who is a most adventurous person, had been for several months in the Taka country, in a district previously untrodden by Europeans, with an army commanded by Achmet Bascha, governor-general of Sudan, who was operating against some rebellious tribes. Here news reached him of the projected expedition; and, to his great joy, he obtained from Achmet permission to accompany it in the quality of passenger. His brother, then body-physician to the Bascha, could not be spared, by reason of the great mortality in the camp.

At Chartum the waters were high, the wind was favourable, and all was ready for a start early in October, but for the non-appearance of two French engineers, who lingered six weeks in Korusko, under one pretext or other, but in reality, M. Werne affirms, because one of them, Arnaud by name, who has since written an account of the expedition, was desirous to prolong the receipt of his pay as bimbaschi, or major, which rank he temporarily held in the Egyptian service. At last he and his companion, Sabatier, arrived: on the 23rd November 1840 a start was made; and, on that day Mr Werne began a journal, regularly kept, and most minute in its details, which he continued till the 22d April 1841, the date of his return to Chartum. He commences by stating the composition of the expedition. "It consists of four dahabies from Kahira, (vessels with two masts and with cabins, about a hundred feet long, and twelve to fifteen broad,) each with two cannon; three dahabies from Chartum, one of which has also two guns; then two kaias, one-masted vessels, to carry goods, and a sàndal, or skiff, for intercommunication; the crews are composed of two hundred and fifty soldiers, (Negroes, Egyptians, and Surians,) and a hundred and twenty sailors and boatmen from Alexandria, Nubia, and the land of Sudàn." Soliman Kaschef (a Circassian of considerable energy and courage, who, like Mr Werne himself, was protected by Achmet Bascha) commanded the troops. Captain Selim had charge of the ships, and a sort of general direction of the expedition, of which, however, Soliman was the virtual chief; the second captain was Feizulla Effendi of Constantinople; the other officers were two Kurds, a Russian, an Albanian, and a Persian. Of Europeans, there were the two Frenchmen, already mentioned, as engineers; a third, named Thibaut, as collector; and Mr Werne, as an independent passenger at his own charges. The ships were to follow each other in two lines, one led by Soliman, the other by Selim; but this order of sailing was abandoned the very first day; and so, indeed, was nearly all order of every kind. Each man sailed his bark as he pleased, without nautical skill or unity of movement; and, as to one general and energetic supervision of the whole flotilla and its progress, no one dreamed of such a thing. Mr Werne indulged in gloomy reflections as to the probable results of an enterprise, at whose very outset such want of zeal and discipline was displayed. It does not appear to have struck him that not the least of his dangers upon the strange voyage he had so eagerly undertaken, was from his shipmates, many of them bigoted Mahometans and reckless, ferocious fellows, ready with the knife, and who would have thought little of burthening their conscience with so small a matter as a Christian's blood. He is evidently a cool, courageous man, prompt in action; and his knowledge of the slavish, treacherous character of the people he had to deal with, doubtless taught him the best line of conduct to pursue with them. This, as appears from various passages of his journal, was the rough and ready style—a blow for the slightest impertinence, and his arms, which he well knew how to use, always at hand. He did not scruple to interfere when he saw cruelty or oppression practised, and soon he made himself respected, if not feared, by all on board; so much so, that Feizulla, the captain of the vessel in which he sailed, a drunken old Turk, who passed his time in drinking spirits and mending his own clothes, appointed him his locum tenens during his occasional absences on shore. During his five months' voyage, Mr Werne had a fine opportunity of studying the peculiarities of the different nations with individuals of which he sailed; and, although his long residence in Africa and the East had made him regard such matters with comparative indifference, the occasional glimpses he gives of Turkish and Egyptian habits are amongst the most interesting passages in his book. Already, on the third day of the voyage, the expiration of the Rhamadan, or fasting month, and the setting in of the little feast of Bairam, gave rise to a singular scene. The flotilla was passing through the country governed by Achmet Bascha, in which Soliman was a man of great importance. By his desire, a herd of oxen and a large flock of sheep were driven down to the shore, for the use of the expedition. The preference was for the mutton, the beef in those regions being usually tough and coarse, and consequently despised by the Turks. "This quality of the meat is owing to the nature of the fodder, the tender grass and herbs of our marsh-lands and pastures being here unknown—and to the climate, which hardens the animal texture, a fact perceived by the surgeon when operating upon the human body. Our Arabs, who, like the Greeks and Jews, born butchers and flayers, know no mercy with beasts or men, fell upon the unfortunate animals, hamstrung them in all haste, to obviate any chance of resumption of the gift, and the hecatomb sank upon the ground, pitiful to behold. During the flaying and quartering, every man tried to secrete a sippet of meat, cutting it off by stealth, or stealing it from the back of the bearers. These coveted morsels were stuck upon skewers, broiled at the nearest watch-fire, and ravenously devoured, to prepare the stomach for the approaching banquet. Although they know how to cook the liver excellently well, upon this occasion they preferred eating it raw, cut up in a wooden dish, and with the gall of the slaughtered beast poured over it. Thus prepared, and eaten with salt and pepper, it has much the flavour of a good raw beefsteak." The celebration of the Bairam was a scene of gluttony and gross revelry. Arrack was served out instead of the customary ration of coffee; and many a Mussulman drank more than did him good, or than the Prophet's law allows. In the night, Captain Feizulla tumbled out of bed; and, having spoiled his subordinates by over-indulgence, not one of them stirred to his assistance. Mr Werne picked him up, found him in an epileptic fit, and learned, with no great pleasure, Feizulla being his cabin-mate, that the thirsty skipper was subject to such attacks. He foresaw a comfortless voyage on board the narrow bark, and with such queer companions; but the daily increasing interest of the scenery and surrounding objects again distracted his thoughts from considerations of personal ease. He had greater difficulty in reconciling himself to the negligence and indolence of his associates. So long as food was abundant and work scanty, all went well enough; but when liquor ran low, and the flesh-pots of Egypt were empty, grumbling began, and the thoughts of the majority were fixed upon a speedy return. Their chiefs set them a poor example. Soliman Kaschef lay in bed till an hour after sunrise, and the signal to sail could not be given till he awoke; and Feizulla, when his and Mr Werne's stock of brandy was out, passed one half his time in distilling spirits from stale dates, and the other moiety in getting intoxicated on the turbid extract thus obtained. Then the officers had female slaves on board; and there was a licensed jester, Abu Haschis, who supplied the expedition with buffoonery and ribaldry; and the most odious practices prevailed amongst the crews; for further details concerning all which matters we refer the curious to Mr Werne himself. A more singularly composed expedition was perhaps never fitted out, nor one less adapted effectually to perform the services required of it. Cleanliness and sobriety, so incumbent upon men cooped up in small craft, in a climate teeming with pestilence and vermin, were little regarded; and subordination and vigilance, essential to safety amidst the perils of an unknown navigation, and in the close vicinity of hostile savages, were utterly neglected,—at first to the great uneasiness of Mr Werne. But after a while, seeing no chance of amendment, and having no power to rebuke or correct deficiencies, he repeated the eternal Allah Kerim! (God is merciful) of his fatalist shipmates, and slept soundly, when the musquitos permitted, under the good guard of Providence.

On the 29th November, the expedition passed the limit of Turco-Egyptian domination. The land it had now reached paid no tribute. "All slaves," was the reply of Turks and Arabs to Mr Werne's inquiry who the inhabitants were. "I could not help laughing, and proving to them, to their great vexation, that these men were free, and much less slaves than themselves; that before making slaves of them, they must first make them prisoners, a process for which they had no particular fancy,—admitting, with much naiveté, that the 'slaves' hereabout were both numerous and brave. This contemptuously spoken Kulo Abit, (All slaves,) is about equivalent to the 'barbarian' of the ancients—the same classical word the modern Greeks have learned out of foreign school-books."

"The trees and branches preventing our vessels from lying alongside the bank, I had myself carried through the water, to examine the country and get some shooting. But I could not make up my mind to use my gun, the only animals to aim at being large, long-tailed, silver-gray apes. I had shot one on a former occasion, and the brute had greatly excited my compassion by his resemblance to a human being, and by his piteous gestures. M. Arnaud, on the contrary, took particular pleasure in making the repeated observation that, on the approach of death, the gums of these beasts turn white, like those of a dying man. They live in families of several hundreds together, and their territory is very circumscribed, even in the forest, as I myself subsequently ascertained. Although fearful of water, and swimming unwillingly, they always fled to the branches overhanging the river, and not unfrequently fell in. When this occurred, their first care on emerging was to wipe the water from their faces and ears. However imminent their danger, only when this operation was completed did they again climb the trees. Such a monkey republic is really a droll enough sight; its members alternately fighting and caressing each other, combing and vermin-hunting, stealing and boxing each other's ears, and, in the midst of all these important occupations, running down every moment to drink, but contenting themselves with a single draught, for fear of becoming a mouthful for the watchful crocodile. The tame monkeys on board our vessels turned restless at sight of the joyous vagabond life of their brethren in the bush. First-lieutenant Hussein Aga, of Kurdistan, lay alongside us, and was in raptures with his monkey, shouting over to me: 'Schuf! el naùti taïb!' (See! the clever sailor!)—meaning his pet ape, which ran about the rigging like mad, hanging on by the ropes, and looking over the bulwarks into the water; until at last he jumped on the back of a sailor who was wading on shore with dirty linen to wash, and thence made a spring upon land to visit his relations, compared to whom, however, he was a mere dwarf. Overboard went the long Kurd, with his gun, to shoot the deserter; but doubtless the little seaman, in his capacity of Turkish slave, and on account of his diminutive figure, met a bad reception, for Hussein was no sooner under the trees than his monkey dropped upon his head. He came to visit me afterwards, brought his 'naùti ta��b' with him, and told me, what I had often heard before, how apes were formerly men, whom God had cursed. It really is written in the Koran that God and the prophet David had turned into monkeys the Jews who did not keep the Sabbath holy. Therefore a good Moslem will seldom kill or injure a monkey. Emin Bey of Fazogl was an exception to this rule. Sitting at table with an Italian, and about to thrust into his mouth a fragment of roast meat, his monkey snatched it from between his thumb and fingers. Whereupon the Bey quietly ordered the robber's hand to be cut off, which was instantly done. The poor monkey came to his cruel master and showed him, with his peculiarly doleful whine, the stump of his fore-paw. The Bey gave orders to kill him, but the Italian begged him as a gift. Soon afterwards the foolish brute came into my possession, and, on my journey back to Egypt, contributed almost as much to cheer me, as did the filial attentions of my freed man Hagar, whom my brother had received as a present, and had bequeathed to me. My servants would not believe but that the monkey was a transformed gabir, or caravan guide, since even in the desert he was always in front and upon the right road, availing himself of every rock and hillock to look about him, until the birds of prey again drove him under the camels, to complain to me with his 'Oehm-oehm;' which was also his custom when he had been beaten in my absence by the servants, whose merissa (a sort of spirit) he would steal and drink till he could neither go nor stand."

During this halt, and whilst rambling along the bank, picking up river-oysters and tracing the monstrous footsteps of hippopotami, Mr Werne nearly walked into the jaws of the largest crocodile he had ever seen. His Turkish servant, Sale, who attended him on such occasions and carried his rifle, was not at hand, and he was glad to beat a retreat, discharging one of his barrels, both of which were laden with shot only, in the monster's face. On being scolded for his absence, Sale very coolly replied, that it was not safe so near shore; for that several times it had occurred to him, whilst gazing up in the trees at the birds and monkeys, to find himself, on a sudden, face to face with a crocodile, which stared at him like a ghost, (Scheitan, Satan,) and which he dared not shoot, lest he should slay his own father. Amongst the numerous Mahommedan superstitions, there is a common belief in the transformation, by witches and sorcerers, of men into beasts, especially into crocodiles and hippopotami.

"Towards evening, cartridges were served out and muskets loaded, for we were now in a hostile country. The powder-magazine stood open, and lighted pipes passed to and fro over the hatchway. Allah Kerim! I do my best to rouse my captain from his indolence, by drawing constant comparisons with the English sea-service; then I fall asleep myself whilst the powder is being distributed, and, waking early in the morning, find the magazine still open, and the sentry, whose duty it is to give an alarm should the water in the hold increase overmuch, fast asleep, with his tobacco-pipe in his hand and his musket in his lap. Feizulla Capitan begged me not to report the poor devil." This being a fair specimen of the prudence and discipline observed during the whole voyage, it is really surprising that Mr Werne ever returned to write its history, and that his corpse—drowned, blown up, or with a knife between the ribs—has not long since been resolved into the elements through the medium of a Nile crocodile. The next day the merciful Feizulla, whose kindness must have sprung from a fellow-feeling, got mad-drunk at a merry-making on an island, and had to be brought by force on board his ship. He seemed disposed to "run amuck;" grasped at sabre and pistols, and put his people in fear of their lives, until Mr Werne seized him neck and heels, threw him on his bed, and held him there whilst he struggled himself weary and fell asleep. The ship's company were loud in praise and admiration of Mr Werne, who, however, was not quite easy as to the possible results of his bold interference. "Only yesterday, I incurred the hatred of the roughest of our Egyptian sailors, as he sat with another at the hand-mill, and repeatedly applied to his companion the word Nasrani, (Christian,) using it as a term of insult, until the whole crew came and looked down into the cabin where I sat, and laughed—the captain not being on board at the time. At last I lost my patience, jumped up, and dealt the fellow a severe blow with my fist. In his fanatical horror at being struck by a Christian, he tried to throw himself overboard, and vowed revenge, which my servants told me. Now, whilst Feizulla Capitan lies senseless, I see from my bed this tall sailor leave the fore-part of the ship and approach our cabin, his comrades following him with their eyes. From a fanatic, who might put his own construction upon my recent friendly constraint of Captain Feizulla, and might convert it into a pretext, I had everything to apprehend. But he paused at the door, apologised, and thanked me for not having reported him to his commander. He then kissed my right hand, whilst in my left I held a pistol concealed under the blanket."

Dangers, annoyances, and squabbles did not prevent Mr Werne from writing up his log, and making minute observations of the surrounding scenery. This was of ever-varying character. Thickly-wooded banks were succeeded by a sea of grass, its monotony unvaried by a single bush. Then came a crowd of islands, composed of water-plants, knit together by creepers and parasites, and alternately anchored to the shore, or floating slowly down the stream, whose sluggish current was often imperceptible. The extraordinary freshness and luxuriance of the vegetable creation in that region of combined heat and moisture, excited Mr Werne's enthusiastic admiration. At times he saw himself surrounded by a vast tapestry of flowers, waving for miles in every direction, and of countless varieties of tint and form. Upon land were bowers and hills of blossom, groves of dark mimosa and gold-gleaming tamarind; upon the water and swamps, interminable carpets of lilac convolvulus, water-lilies, flowering-reeds, and red, blue, and white lotus. The ambak tree, with its large yellow flowers and acacia-like leaf, rose fifteen feet and more above the surface of the water out of which it grew. This singular plant, a sort of link between the forest-tree and the reed of the marshes, has its root in the bed of the Nile, with which it each year rises, surpassing it in swiftness of growth. Its stem is of a soft spungy nature, more like the pith of a tree than like wood, but having, nevertheless, a pith of its own. The lotus was one of the most striking features in these scenes of floral magnificence; its brilliant white flower, which opens as the sun rises, and closes when it sets, beaming, like a double lily, in the shade it prefers. Mr Werne made the interesting observation, that this beautiful flower, where it had not some kind of shelter, closed when the sun approached the zenith, as though unable to endure the too ardent rays of the luminary that called it into life. Details of this kind, and fragments of eloquent description of the gorgeous scenery of the Nile banks, occur frequently in the earlier part of the "Expedition," during which there was little intercourse with the natives, who were either hostile, uninteresting, or concealed. Amongst other reasons for not remaining long near shore, and especially for not anchoring there at night, was the torture the voyagers experienced from gnats, camel-flies, and small wasps, which not only forbade sleep, but rendered it almost impossible to eat and drink. To escape this worse than Egyptian plague, the vessels lay in the middle of the river, which, for some time after their departure, was often three or four miles across. When the breeze was fresh, there was some relief from insect persecution, but a lull made the attacks insupportable. Doubtless a European complexion encouraged these. Our German lifts up his voice in agony and malediction.

"The 10th December.—A dead calm all night. Gnats!!! No use creeping under the bed-clothes, at risk of stifling with heat, compelled as one is by their penetrating sting to go to bed dressed. Leave only a little hole to breathe at, and in they pour, attacking lips, nose, and ears, and forcing themselves into the throat—thus provoking a cough which is torture, since, at each inspiration, a fresh swarm finds its way into the gullet. They penetrate to the most sensitive part of the body, creeping in, like ants, at the smallest aperture. In the morning my bed contained thousands of the small demons which I had crushed and smothered by the perpetual rolling about of my martyred body. As I had forgotten to bring a musquito net from Chartum, there was nothing for it but submission. Neither had I thought of providing myself with leather gloves, unbearable in that hot climate, but which here, upon the Nile, would have been by far the lesser evil, since I was compelled to have a servant opposite to me at supper-time, waving a huge fan so close under my nose, that it was necessary to watch my opportunity to get the food to my mouth. One could not smoke one's pipe in peace, even though keeping one's hands wrapped in a woollen burnous, for the vermin stung through this, and crept up under it from the ground. The black and coloured men on board were equally ill-treated; and all night long the word 'Baùda' resounded through the ship, with an accompaniment of curses and flapping of cloths. The baùda resemble our long-legged gnats, but have a longer proboscis, with which they bore through a triple fold of strong linen. Their head is blue, their back tawny, and their legs are covered with white specks like small pearls, Another sort has short, strong legs, a thick brown body, a red head, and posteriors of varying hues." These parti-coloured and persevering bloodsuckers caused boils by the severity of their sting, and so exhausted the sailors by depriving them of sleep, that the ships could hardly be worked. Bitterly and frequently does Mr Werne recur to his sufferings from their ruthless attacks. At last a strange auxiliary came to his relief. On Christmas-day he writes:—"For the last two nights we have been greatly disturbed by the gnats, but a small cat, which I have not yet seen by daylight, seems to find particular pleasure in licking my face, pulling my beard, and purring continually, thus keeping off the insects. Generally the cats in Bellet-Sudan are of a very wild and fierce nature, which seems the result of their indifferent treatment by the inhabitants. They walk into the poultry-houses and carry off the strongest fowls, but care little for rats and mice. The Barabras, especially those of Dongola, often eat them; not so the Arabs, who spare them persecution—the cat having been one of Mahomet's favourite animals—but who, at the same time, hold them unclean."

There is assuredly no river in the world whose banks, for so great a distance, are so thickly peopled as those of the Nile. Day after day the expedition passed an unbroken succession of populous villages, until Mr Werne wondered whence the inhabitants drew their nourishment, and a sapient officer from Kurdistan opined the Schilluks to be a greater nation than the French. But what people, and what habitations! The former scarce a degree above the brute, the latter resembling dog-kennels, or more frequently thatched bee-hives, with a round hole in the side, through which the inmates creep. Stark-naked, these savages lay in the high grass, whose seed forms part of their food, and gibbered and beckoned to the passing Turks, who, for the most part, disregarded their gestures of amity and invitation, shrewdly suspecting that their intentions were treacherous and their lances hidden in the herbage. Wild rice, fruits, and seeds, are eaten by these tribes, (the Schilluks, Dinkas, and others,) who have also herds of cattle—oxen, sheep, and goats, and who do not despise a hippopotamus chop or a crocodile cutlet. Where the land is unproductive, fish is the chief article of food. They have no horses or camels, and when they steal one of these animals from the Turks, they do not kill it, probably not liking its flesh, but they put out its eyes as a punishment for having brought the enemy into their country. In one hour Mr Werne counted seventeen villages, large or small; and Soliman Kaschef assured him the Schilluks numbered two millions of souls, although it is hard to say how he obtained the census. The Bando or king, although dwelling only two or three leagues from the river, did not show himself. He mistrusted the Turks, and all night the great war-drum was heard to beat. His savage majesty was quite right to be on his guard. "I am well persuaded," says Mr Werne, "that if Soliman Kaschef had once got the dreaded Bando of the Schilluks on board, he would have sailed away with him. I read that in his face when he was told the Bando would not appear. And gladly as I would have seen this negro sovereign, I rejoiced that his caution frustrated the projected shameful treachery. He had no particular grounds for welcoming the Musselmans, those sworn foes of his people. Shortly before our departure, he had sent three ambassadors to Chartum, to put him on a friendly footing with the Turks, and so to check the marauding expeditions of his Arab neighbours, of Soliman Kaschef amongst the rest. The three Schilluks, who could not speak Arabic, were treated in the Divan with customary contempt as Abit, (slaves) and were handed over like common men to the care of Sheikh el Bellet of Chartum. The Sheikh, who receives no pay, and performs the duties of his office out of fear rather than for the sake of the honour, showed them such excellent hospitality, that they came to us Franks and begged a few piastres to buy bread and spirits." On Mr Werne's representations to the Effendi, or chief man at Chartum, dresses of honour (the customary presents) were prepared for them, but they departed stealthily by night; and their master, the Bando, was very indignant on learning the treatment they had received.

A vast green meadow, a sort of elephant pasture, separates the Schilluks from their neighbours the Jengähs, concerning whom Mr Werne obtained some particulars from a Tschauss or sergeant, named Marian of Mount Habila, the son of the Mak or King of the mountains of Nuba. His father had been vanquished and murdered by the Turks, and he had been made a slave. This sergeant-prince was of middle height, with a black tatooed countenance, and with ten holes in each ear, out of which his captors had taken the gold rings. He was a sensible, well-behaved man, and had been thirteen years in the service, but was hopeless of promotion, having none to recommend him. Besides this man, there were two Dinkas and a Jengäh on board; but from them it was impossible to extract information with respect to the manners and usages of their countrymen. They held it treachery to divulge such particulars. Many of the soldiers and sailors composing the expedition being natives of the countries through which it sailed, apprehensions of desertion were entertained, and partially realised. On the 30th December, whilst passing through the friendly land of the Keks, everybody slept on shore, and in the night sixteen men on guard deserted. They were from the distant country of Nuba, (a district of Nubia,) which it seemed scarcely possible they should ever reach, with their scanty store of ammunition, and exposed to the assaults of hunger, thirst, and hostile tribes. Hussein Aga went after them with fifty ferocious Egyptians, likely to show little mercy to the runaways, with whom, however, they could not come up. And suddenly the drums beat to call all hands on board, for there was a report that all the negroes were planning escape. During this halt Mr Werne made ornithological observations, ascertaining, amongst other things, the species of certain white birds, which he had observed sitting impudently upon the backs of the elephants, picking the vermin from their thick hides, as crows do in Europe from the backs of pigs. The elephants evidently disapproved the operation, and lashed with their trunks at their tormentors, who then flew away, but instantly returned to recommence what Mr Werne calls their "dry fishing." These birds proved to be small herons. Shortly before this, a large pelican had been shot, and its crop was found to contain twenty-four fresh fish, the size of herrings. Its gluttony had caused its death, the weight it carried impeding its flight. Prodigious swarms of birds and water-fowl find their nourishment in the White Stream, and upon its swampy banks. In some places the trees were white with their excrements, whose accumulation destroyed vegetable life. There is no lack of nourishment for the feathered tribes—water and earth are prolific of vermin. Millions of glow-worms glimmer in the rushes, the air resounds with the shrill cry of myriads of grasshoppers, and with the croaking of countless frogs. But for the birds, which act as scavengers and vermin-destroyers, those shores would be uninhabitable. The scorching sun fecundates the sluggish waters and rank fat marsh, causing a never-ceasing birth of reptiles and insects. Monstrous fish and snakes of all sizes abound. Concerning the latter, the Arabs have strange superstitions. They consider them in some sort supernatural beings, having a king, Shach Maran by name, who is supposed to dwell in Turkish Kurdistan, not far from Adana, where two villages are exempted from tribute on condition of supplying the snakes with milk. Abdul-Elliab, a Kurd officer of the expedition, had himself offered the milk-sacrifice to the snakes; and he swore that he had seen their king, or at any rate one of his Wokils, or vicegerents, of whom his serpentine majesty has many. He had no sooner poured his milky offering into one of the marble basins nature has there hollowed out, than a great snake, with long hair upon its head, stepped out of a hole in the rocks and drank. It then retired, without, as in some other instances, speaking to the sacrificer, a taciturnity contritely attributed by the latter to his not having yet entirely abjured strong drinks. Two other Kurds vouched for the truth of this statement, adding, that the Maran had a human face, for that otherwise he could not speak, and that he never showed himself except to a sultan or to a very holy man. To the latter character the said Abdul-Elliab had great pretensions, and his bigotry, hypocrisy, and constant quotations from the Koran procured him from his irreverent shipmates, from Mr Werne amongst the number, the nickname of the Paradise-Stormer, it being manifest that he reckoned on taking by assault the blessed abode promised by Mahomet to the faithful. Pending his admission to the society of the houris, he solaced himself with that of a young female slave, who often experienced cruel treatment at the hands of her saintly master. Having one day committed the heinous offence of preparing merissa, a strong drink made from corn, for part of the crew, the Kurd, formerly, according to his own admission, a stanch toper, beat her with a thong as she knelt half-naked upon the deck. "As he did not attend to my calls from the cabin," says Mr Werne, "but continued striking her so furiously as to cut the skin and draw streams of blood, I jumped out, and pulled him backwards, so that his legs flew up in the air. He sprang to his feet, retreated to the bulwark of the ship, drew his sabre, and shouted, with a menacing countenance, 'Effendi!' instead of calling me Kawagi, which signifies a merchant, and is the usual title for a Frank. I had no sooner returned to the cabin than he seized his slave to throw her overboard, whereupon I caught up my double-barrel and levelled at him, calling out, 'Ana oedrup!' (I fire.) Thereupon he let the girl go, and with a pallid countenance protested she was his property, and he could do as he liked with her. Subsequently he complained of me to the commandant, who, knowing his malicious and hypocritical character, sent him on board the skiff, to the great delight of the whole flotilla. On our return to Chartum, he was cringing enough to ask my pardon, and to want to kiss my hand, (although he was then a captain) because he saw that the Bascha distinguished me. A few days previously to this squabble, I had gained the affection and confidence of our black soldiers, one of whom, a Tokruri or pilgrim from Darfur, had quarrelled with an Arab, and wounded him with his knife. He jumped overboard to drown himself, and, being unable to swim, had nearly accomplished his object, when he drifted to our ship and was lifted on board. They wanted to make him stand on his head, but I had him laid horizontally upon his side, and began to rub him with a woollen cloth, but at first could get no one to help me because he was an Abit, a slave, until I threatened the captain he should be made to pay the Bascha for the loss of his soldier. After long-continued rubbing, the Tokruri gave signs of life, and they raised him into a sitting posture, whilst his head still hung down. One of the soldiers, who, as a Faki, pretended to be a sort of awaker of the dead, seized him from behind under the arms, lifted him, and let him fall thrice violently upon his hinder end, shouting in his ear at the same time passages from the Koran, to which the Tokruri at last replied by similar quotations. The superstition of these people is so gross, that they believe such a pilgrim may be completely and thoroughly drowned, and yet retain power to float to any part of the shore he pleases, and, once on dry land, to resume his vitality."

A credulous traveller would have been misled by some of the strange fables put forward, with great plausibility, by these Arabs and other semi-savages, who have, moreover, a strong tendency to exaggerate, and who, perceiving the avidity with which Mr Werne investigated the animal and vegetable world around him, and his desire for rare and curious specimens, occasionally got up a lie for his benefit. Although kept awake many nights by the merciless midges, his zeal for science would not suffer him to sleep in the day, because he had no one he could trust to note the windings of the river. One sultry noon, however, when the Arab rowers were lazily impelling the craft against unfavourable breezes, and the stream was straight for a long distance ahead, he indulged in a siesta, during which visions of a happy German home hovered above his pillow. On awaking, bathed in perspiration, to the dismal realities of the pestilential Bach'r el Abiat, of incessant gnats and barbarian society, his Arab companions had a yarn cut and dried for him. During my sleep they had seen a swimming-bird as large as a young camel, with a straight beak like a pelican, but without a crop; they had not shot it for fear of awaking me, and because they had no doubt of meeting with some more of these unknown birds. No others appeared, and Mr Werne noted the camel-bird as an Egyptian lie, not as a natural curiosity.

A month's sail carried the expedition into the land of the Keks, a numerous, but not a very prosperous tribe. Their tokuls or huts were entirely of straw, walls as well as roof. The men were quite naked, and of a bluish-gray colour, from the slime of the Nile, with which they smear themselves as a protection against the gnats. "There was something melancholy in the way in which those poor creatures raised their hands above their heads, and let them slowly fall, by manner of greeting. They had ivory rings upon their arms, and one of them turned towards his hut, as if inviting us in. Another stood apart, lifted his arms, and danced round in a circle. A Dinka on board, who is acquainted with their language, said they wanted us to give them durra, (a sort of corn,) and that their cows were far away and would not return till evening. This Dinka positively asserted, as did also Marian, that the Keks kill no animal, but live entirely on grain and milk. I could not ascertain, with certainty, whether this respect for brute life extended itself to game and fish, but it is universally affirmed that they eat cattle that die a natural death. This is done to some extent in the land of Sudan, although not by the genuine Arabs: it is against the Koran to eat a beast even that has been slain by a bullet, unless its throat has been cut whilst it yet lived, to let the prohibited blood escape. At Chartum I saw, one morning early, two dead camels lying on a public square; men cut off great pieces to roast, and the dogs looked on longingly. I myself, with Dr Fischer and Pruner, helped to consume, in Kahira, a roasted fragment of Clot Bey's beautiful giraffe, which had eaten too much white clover. The meat was very tender, and of tolerably fine grain. The tongue was quite a delicacy. On the other hand, I never could stomach the coarse-grained flesh of camels, even of the young ones." Africa is the land of strong stomachs. The Arabs, when on short rations, eat locusts; and some of the negro tribes devour the fruit of the elephant-tree, an abominable species of pumpkin, coveted by elephants, but rejected even by Arabs, and which Mr Werne found wholly impracticable, although his general rule was to try all the productions of the country. His gastronomical experiments are often connected with curious details of the animals upon which he tried his teeth. On the 12th January, whilst suffering from an attack of Nile-fever, which left him scarcely strength enough to post up his journal, he heard a shot, and was informed that Soliman Kaschef had killed with a single bullet a large crocodile, as it lay basking on a sandy promontory of the bank. The Circassian made a present of the skin to M. Arnaud, an excellent excuse for an hour's pause, that the Frenchman might get possession of the scaly trophy. Upon such trifling pretexts was the valuable time of the expedition frittered away. "Having enough of other meat at that moment, the people neglected cutting off the tail for food. My servants, however, who knew that I had already tasted that sort of meat at Chartum, and that at Taka I had eaten part of a snake, prepared for me by a dervish, brought me a slice of the crocodile. Even had I been in health, I could not have touched it, on account of the strong smell of musk it exhaled; but, ill as I was, they were obliged to throw it overboard immediately. When first I was in crocodile countries, it was incomprehensible to me how the boatmen scented from afar the presence of these creatures; but on my journey from Kahira to Sennaar, when they offered me in Korusko a young one for sale, I found my own olfactories had become very sensitive to the peculiar odour. When we entered the Blue Stream, I could smell the crocodiles six hundred paces off, before I had seen them. The glands, containing a secretion resembling musk, are situated in the hinder part of the animal, as in the civet cats of Bellet Sudan, which are kept in cages for the collection of the perfume."

As the travellers ascended the river, their intercourse with the natives became much more frequent, inasmuch as these, more remote from Egyptian aggression, had less ground for mistrustful and hostile feelings. Captain Selim had a stock of coloured shirts, and an immense bale of beads, with which he might have purchased the cattle, villages, goods and chattels, and even the bodies, of an entire tribe, had he been so disposed. The value attached by the savages of the White Stream to the most worthless objects of European manufacture, enabled Mr Werne to obtain, in exchange for a few glass beads, a large collection of their arms, ornaments, household utensils, &c., now to be seen in the Royal Museum at Berlin. The stolid simplicity of the natives of those regions exceeds belief. One can hardly make up one's mind to consider them as men. Even as the ambak seems the link between useful timber and worthless rushes, so does the Kek appear to partake as much of brute as of human nature. He has at least as much affinity with the big gray ape, whose dying agonies excited Mr Werne's compassion at the commencement of his voyage, as with the civilised and intellectual man who describes their strange appearance and manners. A Kek, who had been sleeping in the ashes of a fire, a common practice with that tribe, was found standing upon the shore by some of the crew, who brought him on board Selim's vessel. "Bending his body forward in an awkward ape-like manner, intended perhaps to express submission, he approached the cabin, and, on finding himself near it, dropped upon his knees and crept forward upon them, uttering, in his gibberish, repeated exclamations of greeting and wonderment. He had numerous holes through the rims of his ears, which contained, however, no other ornament than one little bar. They threw strings of beads over his neck, and there was no end to his joy; he jumped and rolled upon the deck, kissed the planks, doubled himself up, extended his hands over all our heads, as if blessing us, and then began to sing. He was an angular, high-shouldered figure, about thirty years of age. His attitude and gestures were very constrained, which arose, perhaps, from the novelty of his situation; his back was bent, big head hung forward, his long legs, almost calf-less, were as if broken at the knees; in his whole person, in short, he resembled an orang-outang. He was perfectly naked, and his sole ornaments consisted of leathern rings upon the right arm. How low a grade of humanity is this! The poor natural touches one with his childish joy, in which he is assuredly happier than any of us. By the help of the Dinka interpreter, he is instructed to tell his countrymen they have no reason to retreat before such honest people as those who man the flotilla. Kneeling, jumping, creeping, kissing the ground, he is then led away by the hand like a child, and would assuredly take all he has seen for a dream, but for the beads he bears with him." Many of these tribes are composed of men of gigantic stature. On the 7th January, Mr Werne, being on shore, would have measured some of the taller savages, but they objected. He then gave his servants long reeds and bade them stand beside the natives, thus ascertaining their average height to be from six to seven Rhenish feet. The Egyptians and Europeans looked like pigmies beside them. The women were in proportion with the men. Mr Werne tells of one lady who looked clear away over his head, although he describes himself as above the middle height.

At this date, (7th January) the flotilla reached a large lake, or inlet of the river, near to which a host of elephants grazed, and a multitude of light-brown antelopes stood still and stared at the intruders. The sight of the antelopes, which were of a species called ariel, whose flesh is particularly well-flavoured, was too much for Soliman Kaschef to resist. There was no wind; he gave orders to cease towing, and went on shore to shoot his supper. The antelopes retreated when the ships grated against the bank; and as the rush-jungle was by no means safe, beasts of prey being wont to hide there to catch the antelopes as they go to water at sunset, a few soldiers were sent forward to clear the way. Nevertheless, "on our return from the chase, during which not a single shot was fired, we lost two báltaschi, (carpenters or sappers,) and all our signals were insufficient to bring them back. They were Egyptians, steady fellows, and most unlikely to desert; but their comrades did not trouble themselves to look for them, shrugged their shoulders, and supposed they had been devoured by the assad or the nimr—the lion or tiger. The word nimr is here improperly applied, there being no tigers in Africa, but it is the general term for panthers and leopards." Here, at four-and-twenty degrees of latitude south of Alexandria, this extraordinary river was nearly four hundred paces wide. Mr Werne speculates on the origin of this astonishing water-course, and doubts the possibility that the springs of the White Stream supply the innumerable lakes and creeks, and the immense tracts of marsh contiguous to it; that, too, under an African sun, which acts as a powerful and constant pump upon the immense liquid surface. When he started on his voyage, the annual rains had long terminated. What tremendous springs those must be, that could keep this vast watery territory full and overflowing! Then the sluggishness of the current is another puzzle. Were the Nile one stream, Mr Werne observes—referring, of course, to the White Nile—it must flow faster than it does. And he concludes it to have tributaries, which, owing to the level nature of the ground, and to the resistance of the main stream, stagnate to a certain extent, rising and falling with the river, and contributing powerfully to its nourishment. But the notion of exploring all these watery intricacies with a flotilla of heavy-sailing barges, manned by lazy Turks and Arabs, and commanded by men who care more for getting drunk on arrack and going a-birding, than for the great results activity and intelligence might obtain, is essentially absurd. The proper squadron to explore the Bach'r el Abiat, through the continued windings, and up the numerous inlets depicted in Mr Mahlmann's map, is one consisting of three small steamers, drawing very little water, with steady well-disciplined English crews, accustomed to hot climates, and commanded by experienced and scientific officers. With the strongest interest should we watch the departure and anticipate the return of such an expedition as this. "Much might be done by a steam-boat," says Mr Werne; who then enumerates the obstacles to its employment. To bring it over the cataracts of the Nile, (below the junction of the Blue and White Streams,) it would be necessary to take the paddles entirely out, that it might be dragged up with ropes, like a sailing vessel. Or else it might be built at Chartum, but for the want of proper wood; the sunt-tree timber, although very strong, being exceedingly brittle and ill-adapted for ship-building. The greatest difficulty would be the fuel—the establishment and guard of coal stores; and as to burning charcoal, although the lower portion of the White Stream has forests enough, they are wanting on its middle and upper banks; to say nothing of the loss of time in felling and preparing the wood, of the danger of attacks from natives, &c., &c. If some of these difficulties are really formidable, others, on the contrary, might easily be overcome, and none are insuperable. Mr Werne hardly makes sufficient allowance for the difference between Soliman Kaschef and a European naval officer, who would turn to profit the hours and days the gallant Circassian spent in antelope-shooting, in laughing at Abu Haschis the jester, and in a sort of travelling seraglio he had arranged in his inner cabin, a dark nook with closely-shut jalousies, that served as prison to an unfortunate slave-girl, who lay all day upon a carpet, with scarcely space to turn herself, guarded by a eunuch. Not a glimpse of the country did the poor thing obtain during the whole of the voyage; and, even veiled, she was forbidden to go on deck. Besides these oriental relaxations, an occasional practical joke beguiled for the commodore the tedium of the voyage. Feizulla, the tailor-captain, whose strange passion for thimble and thread made him frequently neglect his nautical duties, chanced one day to bring to before his superior gave the signal. "Soliman Kaschef had no sooner observed this than he fired a couple of shots at Feizulla Capitan, so that I myself, standing before the cabin door, heard the bullets whistle. Feizulla, did not stir, although both he and the sailors in the rigging afterwards affirmed that the balls went within a hand's-breadth of his head: he merely said, 'Malesch—hue billab,' (It is nothing—he jests;) and he shot twice in return, pointing the gun in the opposite direction, that Soliman might understand he took the friendly greeting as a Turkish joke, and that he, as a bad shot, dared not level at him." Soliman, on the other hand, was far too good a shot for such a sharp jest to be pleasant. The Turks account themselves the best marksmen and horsemen in the world, and are never weary of vaunting their prowess. Mr Werne says he saw an Arnaut of Soliman's shoot a running hare with a single ball, which entered in the animal's rear, and came out in front. And it was a common practice, during the voyage, to bring down the fruit from lofty trees by cutting the twigs with bullets. All these pastimes, however retarded the progress of the expedition. The wind was frequently light or unfavourable, and the lazy Africans made little way with the towing rope. Then a convenient place would often tempt to a premature halt; and, notwithstanding Soliman's sharp practice with poor Feizulla, if a leading member of the party felt lazily disposed, inclined for a hunting-party, or for a visit to a negro village, he seldom had much difficulty in bringing the flotilla to an anchor. In a straight line from north to south, the expedition traversed, between its departure from Chartum and its return thither, about sixteen hundred miles. It is difficult to calculate the distance gone over; and probably Mr Werne himself would be puzzled exactly to estimate it; but adding 20 per cent for windings, obliquities, and digressions, (a very liberal allowance,) we get a total of nearly two thousand miles, accomplished in five months, including stoppages, being at the very moderate rate of about 13 miles a day. And this, we must remember, was on no rapid stream, but up a river, whose current, rarely faster than one mile in an hour, was more frequently only half a mile, and sometimes was so feeble that it could not be ascertained. The result is not surprising, bearing in mind the quality of ships, crews, and commanders: but write "British" for "Egyptians," and the tale would be rather different.

The upshot of this ill-conducted expedition was its arrival in the kingdom of Bari, whose capital city, Pelenja, is situated in 4° N. L., and which is inhabited by an exceedingly numerous nation of tall and powerful build; the men six and a-half to seven French feet in height—equal to seven and seven and a-half English feet—athletic, well-proportioned, and, although black, with nothing of the usual negro character in their features. The men go naked, with the exception of sandals and ornaments; the woman wear leathern aprons. They cultivate tobacco and different kinds of grain: from the iron found in their mountains they manufacture weapons and other implements, and barter them with other tribes. They breed cattle and poultry, and are addicted to the chase. About fifteen hundred of these blacks came down to the shore, armed to the teeth—a sight that inspired the Turks with some uneasiness, although they had several of their chiefs on board the flotilla, besides which, the frank cordiality and good-humoured intelligent countenances of the men of Bari forbade the idea of hostile aggression. "It had been a fine opportunity for a painter or sculptor to delineate these colossal figures, admirably proportioned, no fat, all muscle, and magnificently limbed. None of them have beards, and it would seem they use a cosmetic to extirpate them. Captain Selim, whose chin was smooth-shaven, pleased them far better than the long-bearded Soliman Kaschef; and when the latter showed them his breast, covered with a fell of hair, they exhibited a sort of disgust, as at something more appropriate to a beast than to a man." Like most of the tribes on the banks of the White Nile, they extract the four lower incisors, a custom for which Mr Werne is greatly puzzled to account, and concerning which he hazards many ingenious conjectures. Amongst the ape-like Keks and Dinkas, he fancied it to originate in a desire to distinguish themselves from the beasts of the field—to which they in so many respects assimilate; but he was shaken in this opinion, on finding the practice to prevail amongst the intelligent Bari, who need no such mark to establish their difference from the brute creation. The Dinkas on board confirmed his first hypothesis, saying that the teeth are taken out that they may not resemble the jackass—which in many other respects they certainly do. The Turks take it to be a rite equivalent to Mahomedan circumcision, or to Christian baptism. The Arabs have a much more extravagant supposition, which we refrain from stating, the more so as Mr Werne discredits it. He suggests the possibility of its being an act of incorporation in a great Ethiopian nation, divided into many tribes. The operation is performed at the age of puberty; it is unaccompanied by any particular ceremonies; and women as well as men undergo it. Its motive still remains a matter of doubt to Mr Werne.