Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843

The old squatter paused and drew a deep breath. He had forgotten his usual drawl and deliberation, and had become animated and eager while describing the stirring incidents in which he had borne so active a part. When he had taken breath, he continued.

"I couldn't say how long the fight lasted; it seemed short, we were so busy, and yet long, deadly long. It is no joke to have to defend one's life, and the lives of those one loves best, against fourscore bloodthirsty Spaniards, and that with only half a dozen rifles for arms, and a few palisades for shelter. When it was over we were so dog-tired that we fell down where we were, like overdriven oxen, and without minding the blood which lay like water on the ground. Seven Spaniards and two Acadians were lying dead within the stockade. We ourselves were all wounded and hacked about, some with knife-stabs and sabre-cuts, others with musket-shots; ugly wounds enough, some of them, but none mortal. If the Spaniards had returned to the attack they would have made short work of us; for as soon as we left off fighting and our blood cooled, we became stiff and helpless. But now came the women with rags and bandages, and washed our wounds and bound them up, and we dragged ourselves into the blockhouse, and lay down upon our mattresses of dry leaves. And Godsend loaded the rifles and a dozen Spanish muskets that were lying about, to be in readiness for another attack, and the women kept watch while we slept. But the Spaniards had had enough, and we saw no more of them. Only the next morning, when Jonas went down the ladder to reconnoitre, he found thirty dead and several others dying, and a few wounded, who begged hard for a drink of water, for that their comrades had deserted them. We got them up into the blockhouse, and had their wounds dressed, and after a time they were cured and left us."

"And were you never after attacked again?" said I. "I wonder at your courage in remaining here after becoming aware of the dangers you were exposed to."

"We reckoned we had more right than ever to the land after all the blood it had cost us, and then the news of the fight had got carried into the settlements, and up as far as Salt River; and some of our friends and kinsfolk came down to join us, and there were soon enough of us not to care for twice as many Spaniards as we had beaten off before."

While he was speaking the old squatter descended the ladder, and led us out of the forest and over the ridge of a low hill, on the side of which stood a dozen loghouses, which cast their black shadows on the moonlit slope. We found a rough but kind welcome—few words, but plenty of good cheer—and we made acquaintance with the heroes and heroines of the blockhouse siege, and with their sons and daughters, buxom strapping damsels and fine manly lads, Yankees though they were. I have often enjoyed a softer bed, but never a sounder sleep than that night.

The next day our horses were brought round from the swamp, and we took our departure; but as hardships, however painful to endure, are pleasant to look back upon, so have I often thought with pleasure of our adventures in the prairies, and recurred with the strongest interest to old Nathan's thrilling narrative of the Bloody Blockhouse.

COMMERCIAL POLICY—EUROPE

The land absolutely groans under over-material-production of every sort and degree, as on all hands is now acknowledged. The foundations of Manchester tremble under the ponderous piles of Cobden's calicoes, in Cobden's warerooms, ever, like the liver of Prometheus, undiminished, though daily devoured by the vulture of consumption. The sight of the Pelion upon Ossa, accumulated masses of pig upon bar iron, immovable as the cloud-capped Waen and Dowlais of Merthyr Tydvil themselves, should almost generate burning fever, intense enough, among the unfortunate though too sanguine producers, to smelt all the ironstone in the bowels of South Wales, without the aid of furnace or hot blast. Broad cloths, though encumbering cloth halls, are ceasing all over the earth—so say, at least, the Leeds anti-corn-law sages. Loads of linens, as Marshall proclaims, are sinking his mammoth mills; not to lengthen the lamentable list with the sorrows of silks, of cutlery, crockery, and all other commodities, the created or impelled of the mighty steam power that by turns prospers and prostrates us. As the crowning point, the monster grievance of all, comes the cramming over-production of food, farinaceous and animal, under which the overfed stomach of the country is afflicted with nightmare, as we learn on the unimpeachable authority of that wisest and most infallible of all one-idea'd nostrummongers, the immortal Cobden himself.9

Vast and overwhelming, however, as the ills which follow in the train of over producing power, in the world material and manufacturing, they sink into utter insignificance—for magnitude, they are as Highgate Hill to sky-enveloped Chimborazo of eternal snow—in comparison with that crowding crush, that prodigious overflow, of charlatanic genius, in the world physical and spiritual, which blocks up every highway and byway, swarms in every circle, roars in every market-place, or thunders in each senate of the realm. There is not one ill which flesh is heir to, which this race original cannot kill or cure. Whilst bleeding the patient to death, Sangrado like, and sacking the fees, they will greet him right courteously with Viva V. milanos—live a thousand years, and not one less of the allotted number. Whilst drenching the body politic with Reform purge, or, with slashing tomahawk, inflicting Repeal gashes, they bid the prostrate and panting state subject rejoice over the wondrous dispatch with which its parts can be dismembered, the arithmetical accuracy with which its financial plethora can be depleted. Eccentric in its motions and universal in its aspirations, for the genius of this age no conception is too mean, no subject too intricate, no enterprise too rash, no object too sacred. It will condescend with equal readiness upon torturing a pauper, fleecing the farmer, robbing a church, or undertaking "the command of the Channel fleet at a moment's notice." With Mr Secretary Chadwick, schooled in police courts, it will metamorphose workhouse asylums for the destitute into parish prisons, with "locks, bolts, and bars," for the safe keeping of unfortunate outcasts found guilty of the felony of pauperism. With Dr Kay Shuttleworth and the privy council, when the masses want bread, it will invite to the "whistle belly" feast of roaring in andante, or dissolving in piano, in full choral concert mobs at Exeter Hall; it will induct into the new gipsy jargon scheme of education at Norwood, where the scholar is introduced to the process of analysation before he has learned to read and almost to articulate; or the miserables initiated into the elements of the linear, the curve, and the perspective in drawing, whose eyeballs are glaring in quest of the perspective of a loaf. Oh! genius profound, and forecasting of privy council philanthropy and utilitarian wisdom; more exquisite of refinement than Nero, who only fiddled when Rome was blazing and wretches roasting, thou, with the wizen wand of Cockney Hullah charmed with Wilhem's incantations, canst teach piping voices how to stay craving stomachs; how Kay upon Jacotot may analytically demonstrate that fast and feasting are both but synonymes of one common termination, the difference squared by time alone, and meaning ten or threescore and ten as the case may be. Misery is but a mockery of language after all; for have I not heard it rampant with lungs, and hoarse with disciplined harmony in Exeter Hall, as Hullah cut capers with his tiny truncheon, with Royalty itself, heroic field-marshals, and grave ministers of state, in seeming ecstasy at the sleight of hand? Just as I have heard and seen in the barracones of Bozal negroes for sale, when, at the crack of the black negro-driver's whip, and not unfrequent application of the lash, the flagging gang of exhausted slavery has ever and again set up that chant of revelry, run mad, and danced that dance of desperation, which was to persuade the atrocious dealers in human flesh how sound of wind and limb they were, and the bystanders how happy.

Think not that charlatanic genius rests content with triumphs even so transcendent as these. It disports itself also in "self-supporting" colonization; it runs riot in the ruin of "penny-postage;" it would be gloriously self-suicidal in abolition of corn-laws and free trade. Nay, as—

"Great genius to great madness is allied."

the genius of these days looks even to St Luke's, like Oxford, as a berth in dernier ressort, where a sinecurist may enjoy bed and board at the cost of the state, and as a fair honorario for the trouble of concocting a new scheme for raising the wind, or getting a living. The time may come, and sooth to say, seems drawing near, when Gibbon Wakefield, seated on the woolsack, shall be charged specially with the guardianship of all the fair wards in Chancery. Wo to infant heiress kidnappers, when a chancellor, more experienced than Rhadamanthus, more sanguineous than Draco, shall have the care of the innocent fold, and come to deal with abduction! In womanly lore, his practice and experience are undoubted; for has he not had the active superintendence, and the arduous task, of transportation of all the womankind, virgin, and matronly as well, exported to New Zealand on account, with other goods and chattels, of that moral corporation, the New Zealand trading and emigration company, which so liberally salaries him with L.600 per annum for the use of his "principle?" Again, who so fitted as the renowned Rowland Hill, the very prig pragmatic of pretension, for the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, or First Lord of the Treasury if you will? A man who could contrive a scheme for annihilating some two millions of post-office revenue at one stroke, must be qualified beyond all other pretenders for dealing with a bankrupt treasury; for upon the homœopathic principle, the physic which kills is that alone which should cure. The scientific discovery, indeed, is not of the modern date exactly which is assumed; for the poet of ancient Greece, his "eyes in a fine frenzy rolling," must have had homœopathy in view when he sang—

"So Telephus, renown'd of yore, can tellHow cured the fatal spear by which he fell."

The disinterestedness of Rowland (not he of Roncesvalles, nor even of the honest Macassar oil) need not be doubted, because he claims a large reward for a penny-post scheme, ruinous as it is, utterly unavailable and impracticable, even if as excellent as notoriously prejudicial, but for the really ingenious discovery of the pre-paying stamp system, by a party preferring no title to remuneration, and through which alone, unfortunately, the pretentious project could be practically placed in operation.

Dismissing minor worthies, such as Benjamin Hawes, junior, of the Commission of Fine Arts, selected probably and appropriately from the consideration that home-produced savonnerie may lead to clean ideas of taste, and who, in his own interest, would be a capital Commissioner of Excise; and Bowring, so well qualified to be chairman of a general board of Commissioner Tourists, from his multifarious practice—come we at last to Cobden, of corn and colonial fame, fiercely struggling with gaunt O'Connell himself for stentorian supremacy—

"Linguæ centum sunt, oraque centum,Ferrea vox."

Cobden and the colonies! The conjunction is euphoniously alliterative at least, if not a consistent consequence; yet who more fit to perform at the funeral as the undertaker who alone has got the hearse and mules all ready for the job? Cobden, who has denounced—more still, has passed sentence upon—the colonies, should be the executioner. All hail, therefore, to the Right Hon. Alderman Richard Cobden, M.P., Secretary of State for the Colonial Department—worthy compeer of the Cabinet, where sit Lord Chancellor Gibbon Wakefield, and First Lord of the Treasury Rowland Hill! Rare will be the labours of the trio; the "self-supporting" supported on either hand by a destroying angel.

In the prospective cabinet of Charlatanerie, composed inter aliis, moreover, in addition to the Haweses, the Bowrings, the Brights, the R. R. R. (why does not the man write the names out in full, as Raving, Roaring, Rory) O'Moores, there is, however, already a "split;" the members are each and all at sixes and sevens, for as each has his own sovereign conceit, so each would rule sovereign over the rest, and bear no rival near the throne. All would be kings, but not in turn. That powerful and sarcastic writer, Paul Louis Courier, depicts the same regiphobia as raging among the Parisian Charlatanerie of his day; and with an anxious care for his own reputation and respectability, thus purges himself from contact or connexion with it:—"Ce qui me distingue de mes contemporains et fait de moi un homme rare dans le siècle où nous vivons, c'est que je ne veux pas être roi, et que j'évite soigneusement tout ce qui pourrait me mener là." Chadwick and Cobden are agreed upon pauperizing the whole kingdom; but the former insists upon keeping the paupers in bastiles, whilst the latter requires them in cotton manufactories; both are agreed upon the propriety of reducing the labouring classes to diet less of quantity and coarser of quality, by which the rates of wages are, and are to be, ground down: but Chadwick naturally insists, that to new poor-laws the post of honour should be assigned in the work of desolation; whilst Cobden, though acknowledging their efficient co-operation as a means to an end, and their priority as first in the field, fiercely contends for the greater aristocratical pretensions and more thoroughgoing operation of corn-law abolition. The Wakefield "self-supporting" colonial specific comes into collision, moreover, with Cobden's "perish all colonies." Kay Shuttleworth vaunts the superiority above all of his analytical schemes for training little children at Norwood to construe, for after age,—

"The days that we went gipsying a long time ago;"

whilst Hullah simpers forth, in softest accents of Cockaigne, the superlative claim of choral shows in Exeter Hall—

"That roar again, it had a dying fall.Oh! it came o'er my ear like the rude north,That bursts upon a bank of violets."

Bowring and Hume did, certes, pull together once in the matter of Greek scrip; but, Arcades ambo no longer, the worthy doctor turned anti-slavery monger, whilst Joseph, more honest in the main, cares not two straws whether his sugar be slave-grown or free, excepting as to the greater cheapness of the one or the other. So also with Hawes, never yet pardoned by the financiering economist of "cheese parings and candle ends" for the splendid Thames tunnel job, and £200,000 of the public money at one fell swoop. These people range under the generic head Charlatanerie, as of the distinct species classified as farceurs according to the French nomenclature. For other species, and diversities of species, of a lower scale, but of capacity to ascend into the higher order with time and opportunity, the daily papers may be usefully consulted under the headings devoted to the "pill" specific line—pildoras para en contrar perros, as the Spanish saynete has it.

Happily the country need never despair of salvation, even should the cabinet prospective of farceurs fall to pieces, for there yet remain two species of a genus taking higher rank in the social system; species that really have a root, a name, and pretensions hereditary or legitimately acquired. These each affect philosophy, and represent it too; they of the caste hereditary in grande tenue, they of the new men with much pompous parade of words, and all the Delphic mystics of the schools. They are none of your journeymen—your everyday spouters—in the Commons or common places. They exhibit only on state occasions, after solemn midnight preparation made; their intended movements are duly heralded beforehand; their approach announced with a flourish of trumpets. They carry on a vast wordy traffic in "great principles;" they condescend upon nothing less than the overthrow or manufacture of "constitutions"—in talk. The big swagger about "great principles" eventuates, however, in denouncing by speech from the throne repeal as high treason, and O'Connell the repealer as a traitor to the state; and next, with cap in hand, and most mendicant meanness, supplicating the said traitor—denounced—repealing O'Connell, to deign acceptance of one of the highest offices in the realm. Their practice in the "constitution" line consists in annihilating rotten borough A because it is Tory; in conserving rotten borough B because it is Whig. The grand characteristic of each species is—vox et preterea nihil. Need I further proclaim them and their titles? In the order of Parisian organization they stand as faiseurs and phraseurs. You can make no mistake about the personality ranged under each banner; they are as perfectly distinguishable each from the other, though even knit in close and indissoluble alliance, as Grand Crosses of the Bath from Knights of the Garter. At the head of the faiseurs you have Lord John Russell, Lord Viscount Palmerston, and Lord Viscount Howick. You have only to see them rise in the House of Commons—Lord John, to wit—

"Pride in his port, defiance in his eye"—

to be led into the belief that

—"Now is the dayBig with the fate of Cato and of Rome."

The physical swell of conscious consequence—the eye-distended "wide awake" insinuation of the inconceivable, unutterable things—the grand sentiments about to be outpoured—hold you in silent wonderment and expectation. You conceive nothing less, than either that the world is about to come to an end, or the millennium declared to be the "order of the day." You imagine that the orator will lose self and party in his country. Nothing of all this follows, however. You have some common-places, perhaps common truisms, some undefined, mean-all-or-nothing, declamation about "constitution" and "principles," by way of exordium; for the rest, Rome is sunk as if it existed not, down to the peroration it is all about Cato himself, and his little Whig party about him.

—"Parturiunt montes,Nascitur ridiculus mus."

Chief of the phraseurs stand Mr Babington Macaulay and Mr Lalor Shiel, the peculiarity of whose craft—a profitable craft of late years—consists in furbishing up old ideas into new and euphonious forms of speech. Of the one it may be said, that

—"He could not opeHis mouth, but out there flew a trope."

The other more finished leader of the class mystifies you with metaphysics, half conned and unmastered by himself—more anxious still to make his points than to please his party; and, of the two, would rather sink his country than his climax. He is a rhetorician, a dealer in set phraseology, an ingenious gatherer and polisher of "other men's stuff." Of the faiseurs, may be repeated what Marshal Marmont, in his Voyage en Hongrie, en Transylvanie, &c., says of the faiseurs of Paris—"Subjugués par le gout et cette manie d'uniformité absolue, qui est la maladie de l'époque, et qui resulte de principes abstraits, dont l'application est presque toujours funeste aux peuples qui l'éprouvent, ils ignoraient combien il est dans la nature des choses et dans le bien des nations de modifier l'organization sociale suivant le temps, les lieux, suivant le plus on moins grana degré de civilization, et d'après mille circonstances, qui ne peuvent être prévues d'avance, mais que le legislateur capable apprecie au moment où il est appélé à fonder la société." On the cession of the Illyrian provinces, by Austria, after the battle of Wagram, the faiseurs, or abstract principle men, of Paris, were prompt with their plans, not for "constitutions"—Bonaparte had put an end to that branch of their métier—but for reorganizing the laws, administration, &c., of Transylvania de fond en comble, without knowing any thing of the people or country, without having seen either the one or the other. Marmont, appointed governor of the ceded provinces, who had studied on the spot the institutions established by Austria, found these so perfect and well adapted to the genius and inclination of the population, and the purposes of government, that he opposed the faiseurs with success, and, by his representations, induced Bonaparte to confirm and act upon what existed.

This immense agglomeration, this monstrous over-production of the tribes of farceurs, faiseurs, and phraseurs is a misfortune of the first magnitude—a pest worse than that of the locusts which lay waste the land of Egypt, as here the substance of the people is devoured. Conflagrations may, and do, occasionally diminish the number of cotton-mills, and lighten the warehoused accumulation of cottons, or other inert matter; but no lucky plague, pestilence, or cholera, comes to thin the crowded phalanx, and rid this empire of some portion of the interminable brood of mongers of all shapes and sizes. As Horace says—

"'Tis hard, but patience must endureAnd bear the woes it cannot cure."

And now, leaving this discursive preliminary sketch, the length of which was unpremeditated, of the leading influences which are fast hurrying to social disorganization, it is time that once more we stand face to face with the one disorganizing doctrine of one-sided free trade; with the banner on which the phraseurs and farceurs have inscribed the cabalistic devices, in flaming characters—"Leave the imports alone, the exports will take care of themselves;" and, "A fixed duty is a fixed injustice." One might be tempted to believe the first borrowed from the armorial bearings of Lord Huntingtower's "bill" friends, whose motto is, or should be—"Leave the fools alone, and the knaves will take care of themselves;" the second is clearly no better than a petty-larceny paraphrase of Newgate felony, in whose code of duties it stands decreed, from all time, that "a fixed law is a fixed despotism."

The history of industry and commerce in every country, from the most ancient down to modern times, gives the lie to these pertly pretending truisms; for there is scarcely one branch of manufacture to be named which does not owe its rise, progress, and perfection, to the protective or financial, or both combined, control exercised over imports. If we look at home only, where, we ask, would the woollen manufacture be now, but for the early laws restrictive of the importation of foreign woollens, nay more, restrictive of the export of British fleeces with which the manufactories of Belgium were alimented? Where the cotton trade, even with all Arkwright and Crompton's inventions of mule and throstle frames, and the steam-engine wonders of Watt, but for the importation tax of 87 per cent with which the cotton manufactures of India were weighted and finally crushed? Where the British iron mines and the iron trade, now so pre-eminent over all the world, but for the heavy import duties with which the iron of Swedish, Russian, or other foreign origin was loaded? And so also, may it be asked, in respect to almost all industry and production. If, as contended, the woollen, cotton, and iron industries would not only have been created, but much more largely have flourished, without the aids and appliances of friendly tariffs, the one-sided free traders are, at least, bound to something more potential than mere assertion and idle declamation in support of the vague allegation. They have the evidence of facts patent and abundant to confront and gainsay them; they shall have more; but is there to be no reciprocation of facts counter? Is the evidence and the argument to remain all on one side, and on the other nothing but wordy nothingness—

"Dat inania verba,Dat sine mente sonum."

Where are the unknown lands of factories and furnaces, of puddling and power looms, of steam-engines and blowing machines, all self-created and "self-supporting," scorning the crutches of patronage, and high-mounted on the stilts of free, or one-sided free trade? Either they exist in the shape of matter tangible and substantial; or they exist not except as chateaux en Espagne are dreamt of, or as bubbles blown and chased by idle urchins—modern philosophers in petticoats. This bubble-blowing has been, indeed, converted into something of a mine of industry of late years, most successfully exploité by all the chevaliers d'industrie of the race of farceurs before referred to. Let us not forget, however, that one of the most indefatigable of the class, after various and many voyages by sea, and travels by land, in quest of the picturesque in political economy, did, indeed—or says so, and has compiled a book to prove it—light on this long-sought, never-before discovered land, in whose Arcadian bowers sits enthroned the very genius of trade, free and unfettered as the eagle in his eyry on the crowning crest of St Gotthard. Would you know this thrice-blest region—"Go climb the Alps," as the Roman satirist bids—it is Switzerland snugly ensconced in their bosom.