obstruct domestic industry, and in judicious reductions which might leave the gross revenue safe, as in the case of the excessive duty on tea; but such questions are at present subordinate, and the aggregate of the national revenue cannot be reduced with safety to the highest interests of the country. Nearly one-half of the bulk of our taxation is appropriated, under the most binding obligations, to the payment of the national debt, which, however unwisely incurred, is now under the protection of the national faith, and however burthensome in past times, has been growing continually less so from year to year, and is now certain to be of less importance than ever. To disturb or meddle with that obligation, even by discussion, is as wrong as to bring into question the titles of landowners to their estates. In both matters a reckless logic may gain very cheap triumphs, but the peril of such attempts to lift the foundations is awful. Their tendency can be only to violent revolution and a scramble, and to the inconceivable wretchedness and hopeless demoralization which such events always engender. The other half of the revenue may not be either levied or expended with the soundest judgment, but its aggregate amount, instead of being too great, is too small for the great objects which ought to be accomplished by the English Government. This opinion is sustained by the high authority of Mr. Mill, and the convictions of men like Mr. Mill and Mr. Norman must ultimately have more weight than all the vague popular prejudices which are now everywhere ready to float about the hustings. Let us, therefore, while we remove as far as we can from that decaying prejudice of a narrow political economy, which would bar the most important exercises of the power bestowed upon Governments by civilization, cast also aside this popular error of the unparalleled weight of our taxation, and endeavour with minds free from bias to look at the great facts of our real position at the present time, and see whether, upon grounds intelligible to every man of common sense, there be not some measures of a comprehensive nature required, to serve as a counterpoise to the over-rapid development of com mercial wealth; to secure the highest welfare of the manufacturing population itself; and, most urgent of all, to organize on a solid foundation an effective system of military defence, and to enable England, without fear or shame, to resume her proper place, and perform her most sacred duties as a member of the great family of nations. CHAPTER III. RURAL LIFE AND EMPLOYMENTS. "The stately homes of England, Amid their tall ancestral trees, O'er all the pleasant land."-HEMANS. Rural Scenery of England. THE sweet singer from whom these lines proceeded never uttered anything more beautiful or more true. No one, I suppose, would like to see the tall ancestral trees displaced, or even disfigured by the smoke of manufacturing chimneys. The great men of the mills and the mines have strong in them the healthy old English relish for a country life. How they fly when they can from the factory and the counting-house to the fields, like children with delight rushing home when the business of the school is over. There is Mr. Mark Philips, with his fine figure and ruddy cheeks, as perfect a squire as if his ancestors had been out under Rupert, or his title-deeds the gift of William the Norman. There are the Gregs, whose farming accounts, furnished to the Committee on Burdens on Land, contain such valuable materials for exact insight into the nature and relations of agricultural capital and income. There are the Marshalls, a colony of them in Cumberland. How they must revel in the intoxicating beauties of Ullswater and the lake of Keswick! But there is no need to go to Cumberland, or even to Devonshire, for rural beauty. It is, as Wordsworth says, the simple produce of the common day. Go where you will, you cannot escape it. The ordinary English landscape is far more beautiful than any that one usually meets with on this side of the Alps, or than the general surface of Ireland or Scotland. Ireland, in spite of her rich green pastures, has generally a bare and desolate aspect, and the luxuriance of Wicklow and Killarney are at times almost agonizing from their contrast with the visible wretchedness of the people. But in England, to the outward eye at least, all is harmonious. One great charm arises from the multitude of hedgerows, full of wild flowers, which, as Mary Howitt's sweet lyric teaches us, exist for their beauty alone. Then there are the masses of varied foliage scattered over the more distant landscape in every variety of grouping-here stretching off in lines, like a rich framework for the precious corn-fields, and there spreading out over the slopes of the hills, but everywhere delighting the eye, which at last, perhaps, draws off and half closes under the shade of a near group of lofty elms, or, grander still, of ancient gnarled oaks, flinging their branches abroad, and suggesting the thought that they may have seen the great Civil Wars, or may connect us with the days of Elizabeth. How one sees in the productions of the great Elizabethan writers the influence of the English landscape. In reading Shakspeare, above all, it is as if the sun, glancing through the leaves, constantly cast their shadows on the page. Milton had such scenery in his eye in the creation of Comus, and the Garden of Eden. You see it in the unrivalled imagery of Jeremy Taylor, in the rural yet holy tranquillity which breathes in the poems and the Country Parson of George Herbert. You see it breaking in through all those terrible internal conflicts upon the soul of John Bunyan, that great poet of the people. Nay, you see the natural love of it even in Alexander Pope, forcing its way through the restraints of the false French taste, rising again with great force in Thomson, running like a silver thread through the dark and mysterious web of Cowper's life, and then spreading out in boundless expanse for the inspiration and refreshment of mankind in the pages of Wordsworth. How full of it is English art! I am no judge of art, admiring only with the children and the Easter-Monday mechanics, but Italy can scarcely have any treasures of more worth to the common mind, than some of those landscapes of COOPER, and LEE, and CRESWICK'. Its Moral and Social Effects. This love of natural beauty, and the scenery which corresponds to the feeling, constitute the chief sustaining influence in the lives of many men. I know one noble-hearted worker, a man of true Cromwellian energy, and indeed with an infusion of actual Cromwellian blood in him too-who will even, I believe, do one day what Cromwell could not, namely, get the better of those sons of Zeruiah, his brethren the lawyers, and force a reform in chancery procedure, with proofs gathered from facts by the strictest method of induction-who, with a prodigious mass of work, far too much, on his shoulders, can go year after year, in his holiday, to the same place on the banks of the Thames, and with his wife and his children, and the artist friends who love him scarcely less, drink in from the riverbanks, and the trees, and the waving autumn corn-fields, and the hills receding towards evening in the lovely ever-deepening blue distance, not only immediate enjoyment, but strength, and that bracing of all the higher powers of the soul which fits men for the sternest tasks of duty. But it is not only in natures like this one, in which the elements of love and poetry are overflowing, that the passion for the country appears. It is found strong in men who care comparatively little for poets and pictures, who live almost wholly in strife, and who have it fresh, as it were, from the original fountain of nature, welling up in their own souls. There was William Cobbett, whose life was a storm and a battle, yet whose enjoyment of rural 1 As to Mr. MILLAIS, I dare not say half what I feel. The painter of "The Hugonot" is surely a great artist, if ever there was one. May he sacredly obey the monitions of his genius, and may we, in these days when temptation can so readily entwine itself with the tenderest affections, profit as we ought by that noble and soul-strengthening lesson. |