Puslapio vaizdai
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we have been so assiduously endeavouring to diminish, and the continuance of which has been long voted by Christian civilization to be a thing certainly not to be desired. With Mr. Carlyle it is however "the good and the beautiful,” the το καλον and το πρεπον, for a large portion of the human race. His physiological principles teach him that negroes have been wrongly ranked among human beings-they are horses.

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"Among speculative persons, a question has sometimes risen in progress of Emancipation, Are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be emancipated, and brought to the supply and demand principle? Horses too have motives;' are acted on by hunger, fear, hope, love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay, they have vanity, ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude outline of all our human spiritualities,-a rude resemblance to us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame. The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed: I am sure if I could make him happy,' I should be willing to grant a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that object! Him too you occasionally tyrannise over, and with bad result to yourselves among others; using the leather in a tyrannous, unnecessary manner; withholding or scantily furnishing the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times. 'Am I not a horse, and half brother?' remedy which, so far as remediable, fancy the horses all 'emancipated restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this globe; turned out to graze in an independent supply and demand manner! So long as grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin; oats in full measure if thou wilt. Hlunh, No-thank!' snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? •Hlunh ! Grey Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,-O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops are ended in this world! For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge's horses to emancipate them. The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this

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habitable earth no grass to eat,-in black Jamaica gradually none; to roam aimless, wasting the seed-fields of the world; and be hunted home to chaos, by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour."

An audible hint is uttered in this and in other passages, that it might be well, not only to make Jamaica as Cuba, but Ireland as Jamaica-and that a few white populations would be improved by being included in the protective system of slavery. Now no one can help laughing at the broad humour of the passage just quoted. But a little of Mr. Carlyle's own sober sorrow may also come upon his reader at the close, though from a different cause. When Mr. Carlyle implies censure of that treatment of animals which injures the brutes and degrades the men, he says a word upon the side of our general civilization, for we hold the common, irritating, maddening system of horsebreaking and horse-using to be a horrid, ignorant barbarism, and the horse-jockey and the carter, practising them, to be the brutes in the case. Even where he hints, “We often use a horse so, why should we not a man?” and puts the horse-jockey and the slave-driver together, instead of helping the beast he is only betraying the man. He should raise the beast to the condition of the slave : whereas he does in fact lower the slave to the condition of the beast. We must do Mr. Carlyle the justice to say that this is an unfortunate and mistaken sequitur from his principles (in which we think there is great truth), that persons incapable of guiding themselves should be guided by others, and that labour is the law of life. Labour is the law of life, and if a man will not work, neither let him eat. But for whom is he to labour? not for you, or for a West Indian or any other planter, but for himself. If he likes to go without sugars and peppers, he may-and if you dont like to go without them, you must work for them. That is the law of labour, and a tolerably stern one. It is a law of labour, not of fagging. I shall work for myself, do you work for yourself. If I cannot by all the efforts of my industry get my bread, I may appeal to your huanity ad interim. But the necessity removed, the appeal

dies. If you like fans, and couches, and blinds, and voyaged Madeira, get them-as for me Squashee, I am as yet content without them, and when I want them I must work for them too. One of the finest things ever said on this question was said by Lord John Russell, when, hearing the lament of the diminished supply of sugar, and the miserable condition of the West Indies, he replied in words after this fashion-that he understood the population in these islands was happy, contented, and improving, and that it was nothing to him that they did not produce as much sugar spontaneously as they did under the lash, for he had yet to learn that the amount of sugar produced was the measure of human happiness and virtue.

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We assent to the principle that men who abuse their liberty to the proved and manifest prejudice of the community should be deprived of it: and therefore we have much more sympathy and agreement with Mr. Carlyle when he speaks reprovingly of the disposition which is perhaps too much growing among us to treat the criminal with a gracious and almost condoling respect. The criminal has taken that for which he has not wrought, and which has not been given to him by those who made it their own by work-or he has deprived a fellow-creature of his sight, or a limb, or liberty, or character, or life and he has proved himself unworthy of that liberty which he cannot use without an invasion on his brother man, and therefore we would take it away from him for whatsoever time was necessary to teach him that lesson— and we would not try twenty times in half a dozen years whether he had learnt it or not, but very quickly test him by longer periods, extending, if need be, at length to life. But what crime has the Black committed except the crime of being black? of being "the image of his Maker," as old Fuller finely said, "cut in ebony ?" The crime, too, in Mr. Carlyle's eyes, of not caring sufficiently for peppers and sugars, which Mr. Carlyle proclaims it is a law of God and Nature, he (surely not he at least, if any, but they who were originally placed there by God or went there themselves) should produce in large quantities, sufficient to supply the wants of as many gentlemen, residing at Chelsea, or elsewhere, as may require them. But the criminal

black wretch, not having had a long taste of liberty or education, or the artificial wants of our old civilisation, is content with a hut, a girdle, and a pumpkin! And what were our ancient British ancestors content with? A good reason to make them slaves for ever-they had a disposition to be content with acorns and wigwams, and would not work for some Roman Carlyle, most likely, who wanted a house upon the Thames, and a chariot! The sin of which the writer of these Pamphlets has allowed himself to be guilty against an oppressed class of his fellow-creatures, and, the ungenerous use of his intellectual powers in support of that sin, exposes him to the reprobation which other acts of tyranny and oppression receive.

The Pamphlet on Model Prisons, though saturated with the same spirit of sneering sarcasm on all that good and humane men have been doing on the subject of prison discipline and gaol reform since the awakening times of Howard, and dwelling with similar diabolical zest on the unsuccessful aspects of many of the results, yet, as summoning the attention to the fact, which there is a disposition to overlook in the thick of the aims of undiscriminating clemency, namely, that we are, after all, administering punishment and dealing with crime, impresses us as not only not without value, but as being exceedingly useful and seasonable.

"Several months ago, some friends took me with them to see one of the London Prisons; a prison of the exemplary or model kind. An immense circuit of buildings, cut out, girt with a high ring wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway, as to a fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all round. It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners, besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the most perfect buildings within the compass of London. We looked at the apartments, sleeping-cells, diningrooms, working-rooms, general courts, or special and private excellent all, the ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.

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"The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food, in their respective cooking places, we tasted; found them of excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work, picking oakum, and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs, of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at least convers

ing only by secret signs: others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean and flagged courts; methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial, wholesome comfort reigned everywhere supreme. The women, in other apartments, some notable murderesses among them, all in the like state of methodic composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing; in long ranges of washhouses, drying-houses, and whatever pertains to the getting-up of clean linen, were certain others, with all conceivable mechanical furtherances, not too arduously working. The notable murderesses were, though with great precautions of privacy, pointed out to us; and we were requested not to look openly at them, or seem to notice them at all, as it was found to cherish their vanity' when visitors looked at them. Schools, too, were there; intelligent teachers of both sexes, studiously instructing the still ignorant of these thieves.

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"From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range of private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were undergoing their term. Chartist Notability First struck me very much; I had seen him about a year before, by involuntary accident, and much to my disgust, magnetizing a silly young person; and had noted well the unlovely voracious look of him, his thick oily skin, his heavy, dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky, potent, insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of him; a fellow adequate to animal magnetise most things, I did suppose; -and here was the post I now found him arrived at. Next neighbour to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or literary chartist, walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a clean highwalled place; the world and its cares quite excluded, for some months to come; master of his own time and spiritual resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent. What literary man' to an equal extent! I fancied I, for my own part, so left with paper and ink, and all taxes and botherations shut out from me, could have written such a Book, as no reader will here ever get of me. Never, O reader, never here in a mere house with taxes and botherations. Here, alas, one has to snatch one's poor Book, bit by bit, as from a conflagration; and to think and live, comparatively, as if the house was not one's own, but mainly the world's and the devil's. Notability Second might have filled me with envy."

Passing over the portrait, drawn with living effect, of the Governor of the Prison, we proceed to the comment most relative to the point in hand.

"This excellent captain was too old a commander to complain of anything; indeed he struggled visibly the other way, to find in his own mind that all here was best; but I could sufficiently discover

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