The system was so completely the ruling element in English history and English life, especially in the country, that it seemed the most natural organization of society, and was even endeared to the dependent people. Hence the manners of the aristocracy, without haughtiness or arrogance, implied rather than expressed the consciousness of undisputed rank; and female beauty added to its loveliness the blended graces of dignity and humility. 1763. Yet the privileged class defended its rural pleasures and its agricultural interests with vigilance. The life of the farmer from generation to generation was but “an equal conflict between industry and want;" and the laboring. poor, "with all their thrift and ingenious parsimony," could not thrive. The game laws, parcelling out among the large proprietors the exclusive right of hunting, which had been wrested from the king as too grievous a prerogative, were maintained with relentless severity; and to steal or even to hamstring a sheep was as much punished by death as murder or treason. During the reign of George II., sixtythree new capital offences had been added to the criminal laws, and five new ones, on the average, continued to be discovered annually; so that the criminal code of England, formed under the influence of the rural gentry, was written in blood, and owed its mitigation only to executive clemency. But this cruelty, while it encouraged and hardened offenders, did not revolt the instinct of submission in the rural population. The tenantry, holding lands at a moderate rent, for the most part without permanent leases, transmitting the occupation of them from father to son through many generations, clung to the lord of the manor as ivy to massive old walls. They loved to live in his light; to lean on his support; to gather round him with affectionate deference rather than base cowering; and, by their faithful attachment, to win his sympathy and care, happy when he was such a one as merited their love. They caught refinement of their superiors, so that their cottages were carefully neat, with roses and honeysuckles clambering to their roofs. They cultivated the soil in sight of the towers of the church 1763. round which reposed the ashes of their ancestors for almost a thousand years. The whole island was mapped out into territorial parishes, as well as into counties; and the affairs of local interest, the assessment of rates, the care of the poor and of the roads, were intrusted to elected vestries or magistrates, with little interference from the central government. The resident magistrates were unpaid, being taken from among the landed gentry; and the local affairs of the county, and all criminal prosecutions of no uncommon importance, were settled by them in a body at quarterly sessions, where a kind-hearted landlord often presided, to appall the convict by the earnestness of his rebuke, and then to show him mercy by a lenient sentence. All judgments were controlled by fixed law; and, at the assizes, no sentence could be pronounced against the accused but by the consent of impartial men taken from the body of the people. Thus the local institutions of England shared the common character: they were at once the evidence of aristocracy and the badges of liberty. The climate, so inviting to rural life, was benign also to industry of all sorts. Nowhere could labor apply itself so steadily, or in the same time achieve so much; and it might seem that the population engaged in manufactures would have constituted a separate element not included within the aristocratic system, but the great manufacture of the material not produced at home was still in its infancy. The weaver toiled in his own cottage, and the thread which he used was with difficulty supplied to him sufficiently by the spinners at the wheel of his own family and among his neighbors. Men had not as yet learned by machinery to produce, continuously and uniformly, from the down of cotton, the porous cords of parallel filaments; to attenuate them by gently drawing them out; to twist and extend the threads; and to wind them regularly on pins of wood as fast as they are spun. In 1763, the inconsiderable cotton manufactures of Great Britain, transported from place to place on pack-horses, did not form one two-hundredth part of the production of ninety years later, and were politically of no importance. Not yet had art done more than begin the construction of channels for still-water navigation; not yet had Wedgwood fully succeeded in changing, annually, tens of thousands of tons of clay and flint into brilliantly glazed and durable ware, capable of sustaining heat, cheap in price, and beautiful and convenient in form; not yet had the mechanics of England, after using up its forests, learned familiarly to smelt iron with pit coal, or to drive machinery by steam. 1763. Let the great artificers of England in iron and clay adopt science as their patron; let the cotton-spinners, deriving their raw material from abroad, perfect their manufacture by inventive plebeian genius, and so prosper as to gather around their mills a crowded population,—and there will then exist a powerful and opulent and numerous class, emancipated from aristocratic influence, thriving independently outside of the old society of England. But at that time the great manufactures of the realm were those of wool and the various preparations from sheepskins and hides, far exceeding in value all others of all kinds put together; and for these the land-owner furnished all the raw material, so that his prosperity was bound up in that of the manufacturer. The manufacture of wool was cherished as the most valuable of all. It had grown with the growth and wealth of England, and flourished in every part of the island; at Kidderminster and Wilton and Norwich, not less than in the West Riding of York. It had been privileged by King Stephen and regulated by the lion-hearted Richard. Its protection was as much a part of the statute-book as the game laws, and was older than Magna Charta itself. To foster it was an ancient custom of the country, coeval with the English constitution; and it was so interwoven with the condition of life in England that it seemed to form an intimate dependency of the aristocracy. The landowner, whose rich lawns produced the fleece, sympathized with the industry that wrought it into beautiful fabrics. Mutual confidence was established between the classes of society; no chasm divided its orders. Thus unity of character marked the constitution and the social life of England. The sum of the whole was an intense nationality in its people. They were happy in their form of government, and were justly proud of it; for they enjoyed more perfect freedom than the world up to that time had known. In spite of the glaring defects of their system, Greece, in the days of Pericles or Phocion, had not been blessed with such liberty. Italy, in the fairest days of her ill-starred republics, had not had such security of property and person, so pure an administration of justice, such unlicensed expression of thought. These benefits were held by a firm tenure, safe against revolutions and sudden changes in the state. The laws reigned, and not men; and the laws had been the growth of centuries, yielding to amendment only by the gradual method of nature, when opinions exercising less instant influence should slowly infuse themselves through the public mind into legislation: so that the constitution of England, though like all things else perpetually changing, changed like the style of architecture along the aisles of its own cathedrals, where the ponderous severity of the Norman age melts in the next almost imperceptibly, into the more genial pointed arch and the seemingly lighter sheaf of columns, yet without sacrificing the stately majesty of the proportions or the massive durability of the pile. 1763. With all the defects which remained in the form of their constitution, the English felt that they were great not by restraining laws, not by monopoly, but by liberty and labor. Liberty was the cry of them all; and every opposition, from whatever selfish origin it might spring, took this type, always demanding more than even a liberal government would concede. Liberty and industry gave Englishmen their nationality and greatness, and a feeling of superiority over every other nation. The Frenchman loved France, and, when away from it, longed to return to it, as the only country where life could be thoroughly enjoyed. The German, in whom the sentiment of his native soil was enfeebled by its divisions into so many states and sovereignties, gained enlargement in his sphere of vision, and at home had a curiosity for all learning; away from home, had eyes for every thing. The Englishman, wherever he travelled, was environed by an English atmosphere. He saw the world abroad as if to perceive how inferior it was to the land of his birth. The English statesmen, going from the classical schools to the universities, brought up in a narrow circle of classical and mathematical learning, with no philosophical training or acquaintance with general principles, travelled as Englishmen. They went young to the house of commons; and were so blinded by admiration of their own country that they thought nothing blameworthy which promoted its glory, its power, or its welfare. They looked out upon the surrounding sea as their wall of defence, and the great deep seemed to them their inheritance, inviting them everywhere to enter upon it as their rightful domain. They gazed beyond the Atlantic; and, not content with their own colonies, they counted themselves defrauded of their due as the sole representatives of liberty, so long as Spain should hold exclusively such boundless em- 1763. pires. Especially to them the house of Bourbon was an adder, that might be struck at whenever it should rear its head. To promote British interests and command the applause of the British senate, they were ready to infringe on the rights of other countries, and even on those of the outlying dominions of the crown. |