Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

support the insulting mockery of appointing a Finance Committee to suggest retrenchments, and then stultify their proceedings by refusing to effect a single saving? If oppressive taxation be the great cause of absenteeism, its reduction would seem to be the simplest remedy for the evil; but this would not answer the purposes of those, who, having long tasted the sweetness of the public money, do not like to see any of the pretty pickings, any of the loaves and fishes, removed from their grasp. That we should be assailed by a man of this stamp ; by a man who, having perhaps feathered his nest by a corrupt adherence to every administration, ought to show a little consideration for those who have had more principle, or less good luck than himself, is surely "the unkindest cut of all." Why, we are the inevitable results of his system, the work of his hands, his own act and deed, his victims; and to scold us for not staying at home to pay more taxes, when he has already taken from us nearly all the "means whereby we live," is to imitate the footpad, who maltreats the poor man he has robbed for not having a heavier purse.

my

"Quo lapsus sum, quid feci ?" do I boldly demand on behalf of self and my brother absentees. What is the head and front of our offending? We have taken the gentlemen of this stamp at their wordwe have submitted to their favourite toast, we have reluctantly left the country when we could no longer live in it with comfort, we have given them what they so often and so tauntingly prayed for "a good riddance of bad rubbish!" and we cannot but smile, when they want to woo us back for the purpose of swelling the revenue in which so many of them have a strong personal interest, to find how completely their note is changed, how bland, and courteous, and urbane, and even fawning and complimentary, these hip! hip! hip! three-times-three gentlemen can suddenly become. Lo and behold! instead of being the "bad rubbish" of which they wanted to get rid, we are converted into respectable country gentlemen, the most estimable characters in the world, so long as they reside upon their native soil, and discharge the duties of their several stations. Euge! Papa! the grumblers and radicals are "all honourable men;" and every individual capable of paying taxes, is unexpectedly rendered as important to his country as the lost Italian author of whom Boerhaave mournfully said "Omnibus potiùs quam hocce carere possumus." The fatal consequences of our absence are next pourtrayed in a long and lachrymose jeremiade. The chimneys of the family mansion are smokeless, the pew at church is closed, the village church-yard is no longer a place of pleasant meeting for the landlord and his tenants, and the neglected clergyman participates no more in the customary hospitalities, a grievance that is exceedingly naif, and savours vehemently of the Cassock, especially when the writer seems to share the regret of Selden, that the "Fairies have left off dancing, and the parsons conjuring."-We are next made responsible for the increase of poverty and crime in the neighbourhoods we have abandoned, a grave and unsupported charge, in answer to which it is sufficient to state, that if we had remained at home we should ourselves have become impoverished in a few years, and have thus contributed to swell the ranks of paupers, or perchance of criminals, the avoidance of either of which contingencies we hold to afford a present excuse for ourselves, and to make our absence an ultimate benefit, instead of a detriment to

our native country. But, admitting that absenteeism may be productive of much local evil in England, as well as in Ireland, granting even that it is the real parent of all those mischiefs which are now sworn against it, who are the guilty parties, who are the most culpable, the victims or the authors of the system that has engendered it? Needless was it for the Reviewer to enlarge upon the blessings of living in one's own country. Attachment to our native land, endeared as it must ever be to us by so many ties, sympathies, and associations, is so universal and natural a feeling, that no man can be disrooted and transplanted without pain. "So violent a wrench from all we love," can never be the result of choice; and wherever, therefore, expatriation prevails to any considerable extent, and among the respectable classes, it may safely be affirmed that the fault is not in the individuals, but springs from some intolerable defect in the system or government of the country. Let Ireland be restored to a state of tranquillity by conceding Catholic Emancipation, and redressing her other grievances; let the taxation be reduced in England, and all the necessaries of life be kept down to a lower level by allowing the free importation of corn, and an Irish or English emigrant would soon become as scarce upon the Continent as a French one now is in England. Until some approximation be made towards these desirable results, I doubt whether many of them will be wheedled back, even by the smooth-tongued cajolery of the writer in question, unless he can first disprove that important fact in household economy-" Qu'on vit de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage."

But if we smile at his blandishments when he would decoy us within the pale of taxation, we must laugh outright when he hints at coercion, and by way of punishment, should we contumaciously refuse to come into Court, suggests the propriety of .a property tax; that is to say, that when the admitted cause of the evil is an excess of taxation, the remedy is to be an increase of the imposts! This is indeed to smother a fire with gunpowder, to cure an atrophy by bleeding, to lure the absentee back to his house by running away with his furniture. It is ludicrous to see how instantly these gentry who have a pensioner's interest in the revenue, propose taxation as the infallible succedaneum, the universal panacea that is to salve all the maladies of the State. With one eye on the Red Book, and the other on the Schedule of the year's Revenue, they have a single simple method for adjusting the balance,to impose fresh burthens if the latter falls short. As to effecting their object by any retrenchment of the former, it is a thought that never enters their heads. To give him his due, however, the Reviewer is particularly courteous, and even friendly, at the very moment that he is suggesting this playful little plan for putting his hand into our pockets. He rivals the politeness as well as the conduct of Lamorce and the Bravoes in the last act of "The Inconstant:"- "Ha! ha! ha! Sir, you have got the prettiest ring upon your finger there--but I would not take it upon any account-a family ring! (Takes it.)—Oh, dear Sir, an English watch, Tompion's, I presume. (Takes it.) But, Sir, above all things, I admire the fashion and make of your sword-hilt. (Takes it.) Lookye, Sir, mine is a family wig, and I would not part with it, but if you like it-(They exchange wigs.) Oh, Sir, we shall rob you.' "That you do, I'll be sworn," says Mirabel aside; and so might the English absentee say openly, if he is to be heavily and vindictively amerced

for choosing his own place of residence. Did it never occur to the sapient proposer of this measure, that its immediate effect would be to drive the property out of the country as well as the owner, and to make But there is no end the temporary resident abroad a permanent alien?

to the inconsistencies of this class of politicians, who, in their blind selfishness, would compel the labouring poor to emigrate, that they may be relieved from the burthen of supporting them, and would oblige the poor gentry to come back to England that they may uphold the taxes and the tax-eaters.

One word as to the charge that a long residence abroad is injurious to the moral character both of our men and women, a dangerous and ticklish subject upon which the Reviewer delicately touches en passant, just as the Egyptian dogs sip the water of the Nile as they run, for fear of the crocodiles. Of all the cant of our most canting countrymen, none is so vain and false as the assertion that we are superior to the rest of the world in virtue and religion. If our claims rested upon the puritanical rigour with which we observe the Sabbath, and all the external forms of devotion, upon the repulsive coldness of our manners, the apparent prudery and squeamishness of our females, the number and variety of our churches and chapels, our Bible, Tract, and Vice-suppressing Societies, and our innumerable institutions for the professed object of upholding morality; if our claims admitted of no surer criteria than these, it might be difficult to reject them. But what is the result of all this bustling austerity and noisy sanctity? for the result is the only question of importance. Let us compare the number of people annually committed to prison for offences of every sort, the number actually tried, condemned, transported, and executed, with the similar delinquents in other European countries, according to their respective populations, and it will be found that the English are not only the most abandoned and vicious people in Europe, but perhaps in the whole world. I should be sorry to take the residents abroad as a fair average specimen of our countrymen; since many of them are compulsory exiles from the most discreditable motives, but such as they unfortunately are, I maintain without hesitation, that they are much more likely to corrupt our Gallic neighbours, than to receive from them any additional moral taint; an opinion which the French themselves loudly express in the indignant alarm that their own manners may be vitiated by the intercourse. That in the purlieus of the Palais Royal you may find plenty of those divinities qui s'humanisent avec tout le monde, cannot be denied, but you must at least go to seek them; they do not, as with us, disgustingly and openly obtrude themselves upon the eyes of wives and daughters. Immodesty at least wears a veil in France; they have no such gross, beastly, and public abominations as the lobbies of our theatres. The averment that many of our countrymen become listless idlers abroad, or betake themselves to gambling for want of an excitement, is founded in truth; but it must be recollected that the same individuals would have been loungers in Pall Mall and subscribers to Crockford's, instead of occasional visitants to the Salon des Etrangers at Paris. The existence of this, and other minor evils may be conceded, but are there no great and counterbalancing advantages, which, in their meliorating effects upon both nations, nay, upon the world at large, may well atone for the petty, selfish, and financial objections urged by our monitor? Boldly

do I maintain that there are. He contemplates the steam-engine with awe and admiration, and speculates upon the purposes to which its formidable physical powers may be applied in the event of war. I behold, in the limitless means of national intercourse which it affords, a great moral agent by the instrumentality of which war itself will be rendered of much less frequent occurrence, if it be not altogether prevented. If the facilities of inter-communication continue to increase as they have done in the last ten years, and this is likely to be the case in an augmented ratio, there will be such a friendly fusion of the two nations, such a dispelling of prejudices, such a transformation of blind hatred and bitterness into feelings of brotherhood and mutual esteem, that neither people will easily allow themselves to be pitted against each other. By a commixture of minds each will be morally humanized and improved, just as a physical melioration is effected by crossing the breed in animals. Except with the devout ultras of both countries, the blasphemous notion that France and England are natural enemies is already exploded and execrated; monarchs themselves may grow wiser and better, struck with the same compunctious visitings as the Devil, who, according to Ariosto, having invented a carbine, threw it into a river out of compassion to mankind. Subjects, at all events, on either side of the Channel, instructed by, and appreciating each other, and guided to a knowledge of their true interests by a free press in both countries, will not be readily led, like a hired gang of brutal gladiators, to cut each other's throats for the exclusive profit or amusement of their governors. They will discover that a general history of all wars might be entitled a history of the particular passions of ministers. That sort of patriotism which consists in a bravo-like readiness to murder and rob our neighbours, or in hating the great mass of our fellow-creatures under the pretext of loving an insignificant fraction of them, (a feeling which is at direct variance with the doctrine inculcated by Jesus Christ in the parable of the good Samaritan,) will be condemned as an unchristian and devilish error, invented by rulers for the subjection and torment of mankind; and war, that great scourge of humanity, will consequently be of much less frequent occurrence, as well as of mitigated ferocity.

If the Reviewer could have raised his eyes above the grovelling, narrow fiscal interests of a particular class in a particular country, if he could have entertained the enlarged, liberal, and long-reaching views of a philanthropist, if he had reflected that the number of English Residents in France, their intermarriages with the French, and the perpetually increasing personal, friendly, and commercial ties between the two nations, are daily multiplying the chances for the long preservation of peace, and the increase of human happiness, he would have seen a glorious counterpoise to the evils he has enumerated, even had the major part of them been real instead of imaginary. Nay more, with respect to the revenue itself, the darling object of his solicitude, he would have been forced to confess, if there be any truth in the view we have taken, that the English Residents Abroad, by diminishing the probabilities of war, are doing a thousand times more for the finances of their country, than if they could be laid under immediate and heavy contribution, by visiting them with his favourite panacea and punishment a Property

Tax!

[ocr errors]

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLUBS, NO. IV.

We have nearly outlived that infatuated predilection for the metropolis, which, in spite both of reason and fact, so long convinced us that no other soil or climate is propitious to intellectual culture. London is unquestionably the seat of patronage; the fountain-head from which a thousand streams are perpetually springing to refresh and fructify the growth of all kinds of ingenuity and talent; "native," as well as" hospitable to famous wits," and with the genial rays of public encouragement, warming into life, or calling from their hiding-places, genius and merit wherever they are to be found. Take into the account her indiscriminate and ill-directed munificence-her ostentatious but undiscerning bounties, which have covered the land with countless hosts of impostors, who have no earthly claim to the proud recompenses that enable them to shove aside their more deserving competitors but the impenetrable front with which their pretensions are set forth, and the extravagant self-estimates (the more extravagant, the more likely to succeed) by which they impose on a credulity, which is for ever the willing accessary to its own deception,-let this be weighed, and our reverence for London, as the exclusive parent and nurse of literary excellence, will probably be abated. She must, indeed, draw within her vortex a considerable portion of our provincial talent; the spurious and doubtful kinds will naturally fly to her; but it is equally certain, that no despicable part of the really intellectual commonwealth of Great Britain is still to be found in their distant retirements, far, far beyond the reach of her allurements.

It is a class of talent too that stands high; neither oppressed by an unseemly distrust of its powers, nor fearful of vindicating its rightful place; for a provincial life strengthens the inward consciousness of desert; a consciousness that raises it above all external estimates, and that fevered love of outward applause which is the worst disease of the literary character. But the men of this class are, of all others, the least fitted for the elbowing and justling of the metropolis. The capital that they carry to that great mart may be of unquestionable solidity; but they have not the indifference, the insensibility, the recklessness as to the means of arriving at their end, that so frequently ensure success to less scrupulous adventurers, who start with the advantage of having little to lose. They had been smit from their youth upwards with the love of Wisdom, and in the stillness of their souls, dedicated themselves to her worship; and nothing but pure and undefiled truth, at once simple in form, and immutable in essence, showed to their eyes like wisdom. But give them a sample or two of a London conversation amongst your professed diners out-they would soon feel how far they had wandered from the clime of their beloved philosophy. What a cold neutrality as to those presiding principles, the strictest deference to which, in their honest discussions, they had habitually paid and exacted-how easy and polite the nonchalance with which the most sacred points of the controversy are mutually conceded! How bitter the sneer, how heart-withering the laugh, how freezing the enthusiasm of inward conviction! How all this would make them sigh with regret for the ingenuous converse of their little provincial circles! As for that Truth, in whose pursuit they had grown pale over the midnight lamp,

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »