Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849

A man is far gone, indeed, when he has given up his Times! This zeal for emigration amongst the better classes, and especially amongst educated youths, who find the avenues to wealth blocked up in their own country, is, we apprehend, peculiar to our day, and amongst the most novel aspects which the subject of colonisation assumes. How many of these latter find their imaginations travelling even to the antipodes! Where shall we colonise? is a question canvassed in many a family, sometimes half in jest, half in earnest, till it leads to the actual departure of the boldest or most restless of the circle. Books are brought down and consulted; from the ponderous folio of Captain Cook's voyages – which, with its rude but most illustrative of prints, was the amusement of their childhood, when they would have thought a habitation in the moon as probable a business as one in New Zealand – to the last hot-pressed journal of a residence in Sydney; and every colony in turn is examined and discussed. Here climate is so delicious you may sleep without hazard in the open air. Sleep! yes, if the musquitoes let you. Musquitoes – oh! Another reads with delight of the noble breed of horses that now run wild in Australia, and of the bold horsemanship of those who drive in the herd of bullocks from their extensive pasturage, when it is necessary to assemble in order to number and to mark them. The name of the thing does not sound so romantic as that of a buffalo-hunt; but, armed with your tremendous whip, from the back of a horse whom you turn and wind at pleasure, to drive your not over-tractable bullocks, must task a good seat, and a steady hand, and a quick eye. A third dwells with a quieter delight on the beautiful scenery, and the pastoral life so suitable to it, which New Zealand will disclose. Valleys green as the meadows of Devonshire, hills as picturesque as those of Scotland, and the sky of Italy over all! and the aborigines friendly, peaceable. Yes, murmurs one, until they eat you. Faugh! but they are reformed in that particular. Besides, Dr Dieffenbach says, here, that "they find Europeans salt and disagreeable." Probably they had been masticating some tough old sailor, who had fed on junk all his life, and they found him salt enough. But let no one in his love of science suggest this explanation to them; let us rest under the odium of being salt and disagreeable.

These aborigines – one would certainly wish they were out of the way. Wild men! Wild – one cannot have fellowship with them. Men – one cannot shoot them. In Australia they are said to be not much wiser than baboons – one wishes they were altogether baboons, or altogether men. In New Zealand they are, upon the whole, a docile, simple people. The missionaries are schooling them as they would little children. A very simple people! They had heard of horses and of horsemanship; it was some tradition handed down from their great discoverer, Captain Cook. When lately some portly swine were landed on the island, they concluded these were the famous horses men rode upon in England. "They rode two of them to death." Probably, by that time, they suspected there was some error in the case.

Hapless aborigines! How it comes to pass we cannot stop to inquire, but certain it is they never prosper in any union with the white man. They get his gin, they get his gunpowder, and, here and there, some travesty of his religion. This is the best bargain they make where they are most fortunate. The two first gifts of the white man, at all events, add nothing to the amenity of character, and happen to be precisely the gifts they could most vividly appreciate. Our civilisation seems to have no other effect than to break up the sort of rude harmony which existed in their previous barbarism. They imitate, they do not emulate; what they see of us they do not understand. That ridiculous exhibition, so often described, which they make with our costume – a naked man with hat and feathers stuck upon his head; or, better still, converting a pair of leathers into a glistening helmet, the two legs hanging down at the back, where the flowing horse-hair is wont to fall – is a perfect emblem of what they have gained in mind and character from our civilisation.

These poor New Zealanders are losing – what think you says Dr Dieffenbach? – their digestion; getting dyspeptic. The missionaries have tamed them down; they eat more, fight less, and die faster. One of the "brethren," not the least intelligent to our mind, has introduced cricket as a substitute for their war-dances and other fooleries they had abolished.

When we want the soil which such aborigines are loosely tenanting, we must, we presume, displace them. There is no help for it. But, in all other cases, we could wish the white man would leave these dark children of the earth alone. If there exists another Tahiti, such as it was when Cook discovered it, such as we read of it under the old name of Otaheite, we hope that some eternal mist, drawn in a wide circle round the island, will shroud it from all future navigators. Were we some great mariner, and had discovered such an island, and had eaten of the bread-fruit of the hospitable native, and reclined under their peaceful trees, and seen their youths and maidens crowned with green boughs, sporting like fishes in their beautiful clear seas, no mermaid happier – we should know but of one way to prove our gratitude – to close our lips for ever on the discovery we had made. If there exist in some untraversed region of the ocean another such spot, and if there are still any genii, or jins, or whatever sea-fairies may be called, left behind in the world, we beseech of them to protect it from all prying circumnavigators. Let them raise bewildering mists, or scare the helmsman with imaginary breakers, or sit cross-legged upon the binnacle, and bewitch the compass – anyhow let them protect their charge. We could almost believe, from this moment, in the existence of such spirits or genii, having found so great a task for them.

We have no space to go back to other graver topics connected with colonisation which we have passed on our road. On one topic we had not, certainly, intended to be altogether silent. But it is perhaps better as it is; for the subject of transportation is so extensive, and so complicate, and so inevitably introduces the whole review of what we call secondary punishments – of our penal code, in short – that it were preferable to treat it apart. It would be very unsatisfactory merely to state a string of conclusions, without being able to throw up any defences against those objections which, in a subject so full of controversy, they would be sure to provoke.

In fine, we trust to no ideals, no theory or art of colonisation. Neither do we make any extraordinary or novel demands on Government. A great work is going on, but it will be best performed by simple means. We ask from the Government that it should survey and apportion the land, and secure its possession to the honest emigrant, and that it should delegate to the new settlement such powers of self-government as are necessary to its internal improvement. These, however, are important duties, and embrace much. The rest, with the exception of such liberality as may be thought advisable, in addition to the fund raised by the sale of waste land, for the despatch and outfit of the poor labourer or artisan – the rest must be left to the free spirit of Englishmen, whether going single or in groups and societies.

THE REACTION, OR FOREIGN CONSERVATISM

Boston, February 1849.

It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of what a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of conscience. And this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a free people is substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with absolute right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular conscience is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it. They will fancy that they ought to will what they are not permitted to will, and the most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear tyrannical. For such a people there can be no cure, till they are restored to a healthy conscience. A despotism successfully established over them, and then moderately maintained, and benevolently administered, is the only thing that can save them from self-destruction.

I was not writing at random, then, my Basil, when I said in my last letter that the first want of France is a national conscience. As a nation, the French lack the moral sense. What sign of moral life have they shown for the last fifty years? The root of bitterness in the body politic of France, is the astonishing infidelity of the people. Whatever be the causes, the fact is not to be denied: the land whose crown was once, by courtesy, most Christian, must draw on courtesy and charity too, if it be now called Christian at all. The spirit of unbelief is national. It is the spirit of French literature – of the French press – of the French academy – of the French senate; I had almost added of the French church; and if I hesitate, it is not so much because I doubt the corrupting influences of the French priesthood, as because they are no longer Gallican priests, but simply the emissaries of Ultramontanism. There is no longer a French church. The Revolution made an end of that. When Napoleon, walking at Malmaison, heard the bells of Ruel, he was overpowered with a sense of the value of such associations as they revived in his own heart, and forthwith he opened the churches which had so long been the sepulchres of a nation's faith, convinced that they served a purpose in government, if only as a cheap police. He opened the churches, but he could not restore the church of France. He could do no more than enthrone surviving Ultramontanism in her ancient seats, and that by a manœuvre, which made it a creature and a slave of his ambition. When it revolted, he talked of Gallican liberties, but only for political purposes. Nor did the Restoration do any better. The church of St Louis was defunct. Gallican immunities were indeed asserted on paper; but, in effect, the Jesuits gained the day. The Orleans usurpation carried things further; for the priesthood, severed from the state, became more Ultramontane from apparent necessity, and lost, accordingly, their feeble hold on the remaining respect of the French people. Who was not startled, when the once devout Lamartine talked of "the new Christianity" of Liberty and Equality over the ruins of the Orleans dynasty, and thus betrayed the irreligion into which he had been repelled by the Christianity of French ecclesiastics! Thus always uncongenial to the national character, Ultramontanism has coated, like quicksilver, and eaten away those golden liberties which St Louis consecrated his life to preserve, and with which have perished the life and power of Christianity in France.

The history of France is emphatically a religious history. Every student must be struck with it. To understand even the history of its court, one must get at least an outline of what is meant by Jansenism and Molinism, and Ultramontanism, and the whole tissue of isms which they have created. No historian gives us an exemption from this amount of polemical information. The school of Michelet is as forward as that of de Maistre, in claiming a "religious mission" for France among the nations; and de Stael and Chateaubriand are impressed with the same idea. Her publicists, as well as her statesmen, have been always, in their own way, theologians; and, from Louis IX. to Louis XVI., the spirit of theology was, in some form or other, the spirit of every reign. Not only the Mazarins, but the Pompadours also, have made religion part of their craft; and religion became so entirely political under Louis XV., that irreligion was easily made political in its stead. In the court of France, in fact, theology has been the common trade; the trade of Condé and of Guise, of Huguenot and Papist, of Jansenist and Jesuit, of philosopher and poet, of harlots, and almost of lap-dogs. Even Robespierre must legislate upon the "consoling principle of an Etre Suprême," and Napoleon elevates himself into "the eldest son of the church." "A peculiar characteristic of this monarchy," says de Maistre, "is that it possesses a certain theocratic element, special to itself, which has given it fourteen centuries of duration." This element has given its colour to reigns and revolutions alike; and if one admit the necessity of religion to the perpetuity of a state, it deserves our attention, in the light of whatever contending parties have advanced upon the subject.

Let us begin with the revolutionists themselves. In the month of June 1844, Monsieur Quinet, "of the college of France," stood in his lecture-room, venting his little utmost against the "impassioned leaven of Reaction," which he declared to be fermenting in French society. His audience was literally the youth of nations; for, as I gather from his oratory, it embraced not only his countrymen, but, besides them, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and a sprinkling of negroes. Upon this interesting assembly, in which black spirits and white must have maintained the proportion, and something of the appearance, of their corresponding ebony and ivory in the key-board of a pianoforte, and which he had tuned to his liking by a series of preparatory exercises, he played, as a grand finale, a most brilliant experimental quick-step, which satisfied him that every chord vibrated in harmony with his own sweet voice. He was closing his instructions, and addressed his pupils, not as disciples, but as friends. His great object seems to have been to convince them of their own importance, as the illuminated school of a new gospel of which he is himself the dispenser, and through which, he promised them, they would become, with him, the regenerators of the world. Having fully indoctrinated them with his new Christianity, it was necessary to work them into fury against the old. He had already established the unity of politics and religion; he had shown, very artfully, that Christianity had identified itself with Ultramontanism, and that France must perish if it should triumph; and he had only to convince them of danger from that quarter, to influence the combustible spirits of his credulous hearers to the heat which his purpose required. This he did by bellowing Reaction, and anathematising Schlegel and de Maistre.

You were mistaken then, my Basil, in supposing this word Reaction altogether a bugbear, and in understanding it with reference only to the counter-spirit in favour of legitimacy, which has been generated by the revolution of last year. You see it was the hobgoblin of a certain class of fanatics, long before Louis Philippe had received his notice to quit. It was an "impassioned leaven" in French society five years ago, in the heated imagination, or else in the artful theory, of Quinet. What was really the case? There was, in his sober opinion, as much danger from the reaction at that time as from the Great Turk, and no more. He merely used it as an academic man-of-straw to play at foils with. He held it up to contempt as an exploded folly, and then pretended it was a living danger, only to increase his own reputation for daring, and to quicken the development of antagonist principles. He little dreamed the manikin would come to life, and show fight for the Bourbons and legitimacy. He cried Wolf for his own purposes, and the actual barking of the pack must be a terrible retribution! The reaction of 1848 must have come upon the professors like doomsday. I can conceive of him, at present, only as of Friar Bacon, when he stumbled upon the discovery of gunpowder. A moment since, he stood in his laboratory compounding the genuine elixir of life, and assuring his gaping disciples of the success of his experiment; but there has been a sudden detonation, and if the professor has miraculously escaped, it is only to find chaos come again, his admiring auditors blown to atoms, and nothing remaining of his philosophical trituration, except his smutty self, and a very bad smell. I speak of him as the personification of his system. Personally, he has been a gainer by the revolution. Guizot put him out of his place, and the Republic has put him back; but the Reaction is upon him, and his theories are already resolved into their original gases. "The college of France" may soon come to a similar dissolution.

Let us look for a while at foreign conservatism through Monsieur Quinet's glasses. I have introduced you to de Maistre, and de Maistre is to him what the Pope was to Luther. Quinet is, in his own way, another reformer; in fact, he announces his system, in its relations to Protestantism, as another noon risen upon mid-day. The theological character of foreign politics is as prominent in his writings as in those of his antagonists. Thus, to illustrate the character of the French Revolution, he takes us to the Council of Trent; and to demolish French Tories, he attacks Ultramontanism. This is indeed philosophical, considering the actual history of Europe, and the affinities of its Conservative party. Action and reaction are always equal. The cold infidelity of Great Britain was met by the cool reason of Butler, and sufficiently counteracted by even the frigid apologies of Watson, and the mechanical faith of Paley. But the passionate unbelief of the Encyclopædists produced the unbalanced credulity of the reaction; and Diderot, d'Alembert, and Voltaire, have almost, by fatality, involved the noble spirits of their correctors in that wrongheaded habit of believing, which shows its vigorous weakness in the mild Ballanche and the wavering Lamennais, and develops all its weak vigour in de Maistre and de Bonald. Thus it happens that Mons. Quinet gives to his published lectures the title of Ultramontanism; for he prefers to meet his antagonists on the untenable field of their superstition, and there to win a virtual victory over their philosophical and political wisdom. His book has reached me through the translation of Mr Cocks,2 who has kindly favoured the literature of England with several similar importations from "the College of France," and who seems to be the chosen mouthpiece of the benevolent author himself, in addressing the besotted self-sufficiency of John Bull. So far, indeed, as it discusses Ultramontanism in itself, the work may have its use. It shows, with some force and more vociferation, that it has been the death of Spain, and of every state in which it has been allowed to work; and that, moreover, it has been the persevering foe of law, of science, and of morality. This is a true bill; but of him, as of his master Michelet, it may be said with emphasis, Tout, jusqu' à la vérité, trompe dans ses écrits. It does not follow, as he would argue, that political wisdom and Christian truth fall with Ultramontanism; nor does he prove it be so, by proving that de Maistre and others have thought so. The school of the Reaction are convicted of a mistake, into which their masters in Great Britain never fell. That is all that Quinet has gained, though he crows lustily for victory, and proceeds to construct his own political religion, as if Christianity were confessedly defunct. As to the style of the Professor, so far as I can judge it from a tumid and verbose translation, it is not wanting in the hectic brilliancy of rhetoric raised to fever-heat, or of French run mad. Even its argument, I doubt not, sounded logical and satisfactory, when its slender postulate of truth was set off with oratorical sophistry, enforced with professorial shrugs of the shoulders, or driven home with conclusive raps upon the auxiliary tabatière. But the inanimate logic, as it lies coffined in the version of Mr Cocks, looks very revolting. In fact, stripped of its false ornament, all its practical part is simply the revolutionism of the Chartists. Worse stuff was never declaimed to a subterranean conclave of insurgent operatives by a drunken Barabbas, with Tom Paine for his text, and a faggot of pikes for his rostrum. The results have been too immediate for even Mons. Quinet's ambition. From hearing sedition in the "College of France," his motley and party-coloured audience has broken up to enforce it behind the barricades. They turned revolutionists against reaction in posse, and reaction in esse is the very natural consequence.

"Every nation, like every individual, has received a certain mission, which it must fulfil. France exercises over Europe a real magistracy, which cannot be denied, and she was at the head of its religious system." So says de Maistre, and so far his bitter enemy is agreed. But, says de Maistre, "She has shamefully abused her mission; and since she has used her influence to contradict her vocation, and to debauch the morals of Europe, it is not surprising that she is restored to herself by terrible remedies." Here speaks the spirit of Reaction, and Quinet immediately shows fight. In his view she has but carried out her vocation. The Revolution was a glorious outbreak towards a new universal principle. In the jargon of his own sect, "it was a revolution differing from all preceding revolutions, ancient or modern, precisely in this, that it was the deliverance of a nation from the bonds and limits of her church, into the spirit of universality." The spirit of the national church, he maintains, had become Ultramontane; had lost its hold on men's minds; had made way for the ascendency of philosophy, and had tacitly yielded the sceptre of her sway over the intelligence and the conscience to Rousseau and Voltaire. Nor does the Professor admit that subsequent events have restored that sceptre. On the contrary, he appeals to his auditors in asserting that the priesthood have ceased to guide the French conscience. His audience applauds, and the enraptured Quinet catches up the response like an auctioneer. He is charmed with his young friends. He is sure the reaction will never seduce them into travelling to heaven by the old sterile roads. As for the réactionnaires, no language can convey his contempt for them. "After this nation," says he, "has been communing with the spirit of the universe upon Sinai, conversing face to face with God, they propose to her to descend from her vast conceptions, and to creep, crestfallen, into the spirit of sect." Thus he contrasts the catholicity of Pantheism with the catholicity of Romanism; and thus, with the instinct of a bulldog, does he fasten upon the weak points of foreign Conservatism, or hold it by the nose, a baited victim, in spite of its massive sinews and its generous indignation. This plan is a cunning one. He sinks the Conservative principles of the Reaction, and gives prominence only to its Ultramontanism. He shows that modern Ultramontanism is the creature of the Council of Trent, and reviews the history of Europe as connected with that Council. He proves the pernicious results of that Council in every state which has acknowledged it; shows that not preservation but ruin has been its inevitable effect upon national character; and so congratulates France for having broken loose from it in the great Revolution. He then deprecates its attempted resuscitation by Schlegel and de Maistre, and, falling back upon the "religious vocation" of France, exhorts his auditors to work it out in the spirit of his own evangel. This new gospel, it is almost needless to add, is that detestable impiety which was so singularly religious in the revolution of last February, profaning the name of the Redeemer to sanctify its brutal excesses, and pretending to find in the spirit of his gospel the elements of its furious Liberty and Equality. In the true sentiment of that revolution, an ideal portrait of the Messiah is elaborately engraved for the title-page of Mr Cock's translation! So a French quack adorns his shop with a gilded bust of Hippocrates! It is a significant hint of the humble origin of a system which, it must be understood, owes its present dignity and importance entirely to the genius of Mons. Quinet.

That the Reaction is thus identified with Ultramontanism, is a fact which its leading spirits would be the very last to deny. The necessity of religion to the prosperity of France is their fundamental principle; and religion being, in their minds, inseparable from Romanism, they will not see its defects; and their blind faith, like chloroform, makes them absolutely insensible to the sharp point of the weak spear with which Quinet pierces them. And it is but fair to suppose that Quinet and his colleagues are equally honest in considering Christianity and Ultramontanism synonymous. They see that the old religion of France has become, historically, a corrupt thing, and they propose a fresh Christianity in its place. Of one thing I am sure – they do not over-estimate the political importance of the Council of Trent. Let it be fairly traced in its connexions with kingdoms, with science, with letters, and with the conscience of nations, and it will be seen that Quinet is not far from correct, in taking it as the turning-point of the history of Europe. It produced Ultramontanism, or rather changed it from an abstraction into an organised system; and Ultramontanism, in its new shape, gave birth to the Jesuits. Christendom saw a new creed proposed as the bond of unity, and a new race of apostles propagating it with intrigue and with crime, and, in some places, with fire and sword. In proportion as the states of Europe incorporated Ultramontanism with their political institutions, they withered and perished. Old Romanism was one thing, and modern Ultramontanism another. Kingdoms that flourished while they were but Romanised, have perished since they became Tridentine.