Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848. Various
to break it off. If we have lost our colonies, what security have we that they will not refuse to admit the stream of pauperism which now flows into them from the parent state: that they will not treat them as the fraternising French republicans did the British artisans, and send them all home? And even if they should still consent to receive them, what security should we have for the maintenance of export of the £16,000,000 of British manufactures which now go out to our colonies, if, like the Americans, they levy their whole revenue to maintain their independent government upon imports from this country? Recollect the exports to America, with 20,000,000 inhabitants, are not £10,000,000 annually, or 10s. a head; to Canada, with 1,900,000, about £3,800,000, or £2 a head; and to the West Indies, hitherto about £3,000,000 to 800,000 souls, or nearly £4 a head.
If the English like free-trade – if they are content to have their sovereigns by the million go out, as in 1847, to buy foreign grain, and foreign manufactures supplant British in all our staple branches of manufacture, by all means let them have it. Let them perpetuate the year 1847, with all its blessings, to all eternity. Free-trade is their own work; let them taste its fruits, and drain the cup they have selected to the dregs. But the colonies, be it recollected, had no hand in introducing that system. They were utterly and entirely disfranchised by the Reform Bill; schedules A and B cut up their representation by the roots. Free-trade was forced upon them by the representatives of Great Britain, not only without their concurrence, but in opposition to their most earnest remonstrances. Whatever may be said as to our present distress being the work of our own hands, and of our now reaping the fruits of the seed we have sown, that is wholly inapplicable to the colonies. Protection to their industry is what they have always prayed for; it is to them the condition of existence; it is the sole bond which unites them to the empire. Soon the bond and the connexion will be dissolved. And when dissolved, we shall have the woful reflection, – we shall incur the damning imputation with future times, that it was lost for no national or worthy object; from no foreign danger, or external catastrophe; but from the mere ascendency of interested legislation in the parent state: and that the greatest colonial empire that ever existed, that which had grown up during two centuries, and resisted the assaults of Napoleon in the plenitude of his power – was dissolved from the desire to maintain a principle which promised no greater benefit but, for a few years, to lower the price of sugar a penny a pound to the British consumers.
It is from measures such as we have now advocated, and from them alone, that we expect the extinction of the Chartist or household suffrage agitation, and the restoration of the wonted feelings of steady loyalty in the British nation. The subordinate matters, so much the objects of anxiety and care to the legislature, are not to be despised; but they will prove entirely nugatory, if measures such as these are not simultaneously and vigorously adopted. There is no way of really improving the condition of the working classes, but by augmenting the demand for labour. This is what they want; we never hear of them petitioning for wash-houses and cold baths, or a health-of-towns bill: it is a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work" which they always desire. Rely upon it, they are right. By all means give them wash-houses and cold baths; broad streets and common sewers; airy rooms and moderately sized houses; but recollect, if you do not give them work at the same time, it will all prove nugatory. Lodge them all by a miracle, or a successful revolution, in Buckingham Palace and Stafford House to-morrow, and in a week, if you do not give them the means of earning good wages, they will be as filthy, squalid, and diseased as ever. Thirty families will be located in the grand saloon; twenty-five in the green library; forty or fifty starving Irishmen will be comfortably lodged on the great stair. Typhus will spread, sedition will be hatched, treason prepared in the royal palaces, as well as in St Giles, or Manchester. There was not a more depraved or miserable set in Paris than the seven or eight hundred persons who squatted down in the Tuileries after the late revolution, and were only dislodged by bringing up artillery. Restore protection to colonial industry; relieve the great works in progress throughout the empire; engage in a great system of government emigration; give the country a currency adequate to its necessities, and commensurate to its transactions; and you may bid defiance to Chartist agitation, and drain off, if you cannot extirpate, the stream of Irish pauperism and treason.
STODDART AND ANGLING
11We do not lose a moment – we take the earliest opportunity – to thank Mr Stoddart for his book. Well, this is a cool piece of effrontery! So say some flippant folks, who fancy themselves abreast of the literature of the day, and in whose arid waste of mind, as in the desert, one may pick up now and then a few dates. They are so kind as to remind us that Mr Stoddart's book was published early in the spring of 1847. Apart altogether from our perfect knowledge of the time of the publication, we fling back the charge of effrontery with imperturbable contempt. The spring of 1847! There never was any such season. Who saw the glimpses of its smiles? who heard the chirping of its songs? who smelt its perfume? who felt its refreshing airs? who nibbled its green shoots? None of the human senses recognised its presence, or acknowledged its influence. Notorious it is that a tiny urchin in an infant school, whose little teeth had been previously knocking together in its head in shivering concussion for a month, refused, when brought up to the mellifluous passage, to perpetrate the vernal invocation of Mr James Thomson; and equally defying the allurements or the terrors – the sugar-cane or the birch-rod – the moral or the physical force of tuition, pronounced with Denmanic emphasis any allusion to "etherial mildness," or "showers of roses," even in the month of May 1847, to be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare. He never angled who speaks of the spring of 1847. The gentle craft perished for a while beneath the obdurate inclemency of the weather, and the ceaseless floods of snow-water, which polluted every lucid stream into "gruel thick and slab." We do not pretend to remember when the cloud and the tempest passed away; at all events, it was too late for angling purposes. In breezy, ay in stormy days, there are many bold and happy hits to be made by the cunning hand; but the zany, who throws his line in the teeth of a perpetual tornado, will catch, of course, nothing except what the indignant lexicographer has placed at the extremity farthest from the worm. Besides, there are those, including our author, who think that angling is a bilateral pastime. It is a part of their creed, (which we may look into hereafter,) that the silly fishes enjoy the fun of being captured, and often chuckle audibly on being "encreeled" by a triumphant artist like Mr Stoddart. And lordly salmon, or gentlemanlike trout, may probably dislike, as much as their adversary, an excess of piercing winds and dirty waters. In short, it was thoroughly understood, in the beginning of 1847, by the fisher and the fished, that the atmosphere was too preposterously rude to deserve encouragement at the hands or fins of either party. The temporary cessation of hostilities was accordingly complete. What could we do?
Little difficulty, to be sure, there was in finding pretexts daily for putting up the rod in the dining-room four or five times in the course of the forenoon, and executing, without line, a phantom cast of unerring accuracy across the table diagonally into an imaginary eddy rippling and softly gurgling on the floor round several bottles of Alsop's pale ale, linking sometimes, in our mood of finest frenzy, such preprandial dexterity, with the apparition in the same locality, at a later hour, of a cod's head and shoulders, not without oyster sauce. The music of the reel was also occasionally stirred by the supposititious tugs of a voracious gillaroo, (which is by far the dreadfullest fish of which we any where read,) enacted for the nonce by the same curly scion of truth who disdained to lend himself, in the miscalled spring of 1847, to the untruthful sycophancy of the bard of Ednam. The very fact, however, of its being "our young barbarian at play," and not a gillaroo in earnest, who was thus —
"Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony,"
carried the sound of the whirring thread to our ears "with a difference." The glancing armoury of the fishing-book, meriting better than Hector's helmet did the untranslatable epithet of Homeric monotony, was over and over again paraded and arranged, disordered and re-classified, extricated and intermingled, from pocket to pocket, until each particular hook in the pools and currents of our fancy became prospectively commemorative of multitudinous massacres, "making the green one red." But the basket or the bag, (and we prefer the latter,) would have felt, in the mean time, heavier under the burden of a single minnow than it ever did feel beneath the possible pressure of shoals of contingent bull-trouts. The experiment of wading through the house in