The Smuggler: A Tale. Volumes I-III. G. P. R. James
THE HONBLE CHARLES EWAN LAW, M.P.
RECORDER OF LONDON,
ETC. ETC. ETC.
My Dear Sir,
It would be almost superfluous to assure you of my esteem and regard; but feelings of personal friendship are rarely assigned as the sole motives of a dedication. The qualities, however, which command public respect, and the services which have secured it to you in so high a degree, must appear a sufficient motive for offering you this slight tribute, in the eyes not only of those who know and love you in the relations of private life, but of all the many who have marked your career, either as a lawyer, alike eminent in learning and in eloquence, or as a just, impartial, clear-sighted, and yet merciful judge.
You will willingly accept the book, I know, for the sake of the author; though, perhaps, you may have neither time nor inclination to read it. Accept the dedication, also, I beg, as a sincere testimony of respect from one who, having seen a good deal of the world, and studied mankind attentively, is not easily induced to reverence or won to regard.
When you look upon this page, it will probably call to your mind some very pleasant hours, which would doubtless have been as agreeable if I had not been there. As I write it, it brings up before my eyes many a various scene, of which you and yours were the embellishment and the light. At all events, such memories must be pleasant to us both; for they refer to days almost without a shadow, when the magistrate and the legislator escaped from care and thought, and the laborious man of letters cast away his toil.
In the following pages you will find more than one place depicted, as familiar to your remembrance as to mine; and if I have taken some liberties with a few localities, stolen a mile or two off certain distances, or deprived various hills and dales of their due proportions, these faults are of a species of petty larceny, on which I do not think you will pass a severe sentence, and I hope the public will imitate your lenity.
I trust that no very striking errors will meet your eye, for I believe I have given a correct picture of the state of society in this good county of Kent as it existed some eighty or ninety years ago; and, in regard to the events, if you or any of my readers should be inclined to exclaim,--"This incident is not probable!" I have an answer ready, quite satisfactory to myself, whatever it may be to others; namely, that "the improbable incident" is true. All the more wild, stirring, and what may be called romantic parts of the tale, are not alone founded upon fact, but are facts; and the narrative owes me nothing more than a gown owes to a sempstress--namely, the mere sewing of it together with a very common-place needle and thread. In short, a few characters thrown in for relief, a little love, a good deal of landscape, and a few tiresome reflections, are all that I have added to a simple relation of transactions well known to many in this part of the country as having actually happened, a generation or two ago. Among these recorded incidents are the attack of Goudhurst Church by the smugglers, its defence by the peasantry, the pursuit, and defeat of the free-traders of those days by the Dragoons, the implication of some persons of great wealth in the most heinous parts of the transaction, the visit of Mowle, the officer, in disguise, to the meeting-place of his adversaries, his accidental detection by one of them, and the bold and daring manœuvre of the smuggler, Harding, as related near the close of the work. Another incident, but too sadly true--namely, the horrible deed by which some of the persons taking a chief part in the contraband trade called down upon themselves the fierce enmity of the peasantry--I have but lightly touched upon, for reasons you will understand and appreciate. But it is some satisfaction to know that there were just judges in those days, as well as at present, and that the perpetrators of one of the most brutal crimes on record suffered the punishment they so well merited.
Happily, my dear sir, a dedication, in these days, is no compliment; and therefore I can freely offer, and you receive it, as a true and simple expression of high respect and regard,
From yours faithfully,
G. P. R. JAMES.
THE SMUGGLER
It is wonderful what improvements have taken place in clocks and watches during the last half-century; how accurately the escapements are constructed, how delicately the springs are formed, how easily the wheels move, and what good time they keep. After all, society is but a clock, a very complicated piece of mechanism; and it, too, has undergone, in many countries, the same improvements that have taken place in the little ticking machines that we put in our pockets, or those greater indicators of our progress towards eternity that we hang upon our walls. From the wooden clock, with its weight and catgut, to the exquisite chronometer which varies only by a second or two in the course of the year, what a vast advance! and between even a period which many still living can remember, and that in which I now write, what a change has taken place in the machinery and organization of the land in which we dwell!
In the times which I am about to depict, though feudal ages were gone, though no proud barons ruled the country round from castle and stronghold, though the tumultuous times of the great rebellion had also passed away, and men in buff and bandolier no longer preached, or fought, or robbed, or tyrannized under the name of law and liberty, though the times of the second Charles and the second James, William and Mary, and good Queen Anne, falling collars, and hats and plumes, and floating wigs and broad-tailed coats, were all gone--bundled away into the great lumber-room of the Past--still, dear reader, there was a good deal of the wooden clock about the mechanism of society.
One of the parts in which rudeness of construction and coarseness of material were most apparent, was in the Customs system of the country, and in the impediments which it met with. The escapement was anything but fine. Nowadays we do things delicately. If we wish to cheat the government, we forge Exchequer bills, or bribe landing-waiters and supervisors, or courteously insinuate to a superior officer that a thousand pounds is not too great a mark of gratitude for enabling us to pocket twenty thousand at the expense of the Customs. If we wish to cheat the public, there is chalk for our milk, grains of paradise for our beer, sago and old rags for our sugar, lime for our linen, and devils' dust to cover our backs. Chemistry and electricity, steam and galvanism, all lend their excellent aid to the cheat, the swindler, and the thief; and if a man is inclined to keep himself within respectable limits, and deceive himself and others at the same time with perfect good faith and due decorum, are there not homœopathy, hydropathy, and mesmerism?
In the days I speak of it was not so. There was a grander roughness and daringness about both our rogues and our theorists. None but a small villain would consent to be a swindler. We had more robbers than cheats; and if a man chose to be an impostor, it was with all the dignity and decision of a Psalmanazor, or a bottle conjuror. Gunpowder and lead were the only chemical agents employed; a bludgeon was the animal magnetism most in vogue, and your senses and your person were attacked and knocked down upon the open road without having the heels of either delicately tripped up by some one you did not see.
Still this difference was more apparent in the system of smuggling than in anything else, and the whole plan, particulars, course of action, and results were so completely opposed to anything that is, or can be in the present day--the scenes, the characters, the very localities have so totally changed, that it may be necessary to pause a moment before we go on to tell our tale, in order to give some sort of description of the state of the country bordering on the sea-coast, at the period to which I allude.
Scarcely