CANNIBALISM.

"Il faut convenir qu'il est impossible de vivre dans le monde, sans jouer de tems en tems la commedie."-CHAMPFORT.

To live in society, and to tolerate its goings-on, requires either the influence of a good substantial passion, or no small share of frivolity. At the outset of life, when we are boiling over with health and temperament, when we are hot in the pursuit of beauty, pleasure, or wealth, we may contrive to shut our eyes to what is passing around us, and to wrap ourselves up in an optimism founded much more on the tone of our own organs than on the realities of existence. But when the period of illusions is passed,-when we have arrived at "years of discretion," and, ceasing to feel, begin to think, so many incongruities stare us in the face, such varied forms of evil press upon the attention, that unless we can take refuge in a constitutional carelessness, or in determined habits of trifling, we may as well beat a retreat, for we are no longer fit for the world, nor the world for us. To live in society, we must sympathize with it; but no sympathy can subsist between the knaves and fools, who are playing the game of make-believe, and quarrelling over the stakes, and the désabusé, who sees through their trickery, and despises its objects. There is no disguising from the cool eye of philosophy that all living creatures exist in a state of natural warfare; and that man (in hostility with all) is at enmity also with his own species. Man is the natural enemy of man; and society, unable to change his nature, succeeds but in establishing an hollow truce, by which fraud is substituted for violence. Experience points out that killing and eating our fellow man, however amusing, is but a coarse and rude method of turning him to account; that our end is better attained after the Abyssinian method of operating on the living subject; that tears are more prolific than blood, and that lying and imposture are better and safer modes of working the raw material than roasting him whole. On the other hand, it is pleasanter to the victims to be cheated than murdered; and as every man stands, or may stand, in the double relation of pursuer and prey, the voice of the victims goes for something in the calculation. This is the true basis of social institutes; and the theoretic perfection of society would be found in that state in which a maximum of humbug should be united with a minimum of suspicion, in which the trout might be tickled with the greatest dexterity, and the powerful might, like the Vampire-bat, fan the powerless into a delicious slumber, while they were wasting his substance.

The conservative principle of society, the cause of all mitigations of the cannibal tendencies of the animal, is that, while every one desires to eat his neighbour, every one is anxious that his enemy shall not eat him; and that while each is meditating an attack on the other, all are obliged to look to their own defence. In the early stages of society, war and slavery existed in their fullest developement, and the waste of buman life and happiness was enormous. In the feudal times, almost every one above the condition of a serf preyed upon his neighbour, and the chieftain was an wholesale consumer of human flesh. The misery resulting from this state of things produced a gradual change. The feeble conspired to secure themselves; power became more equalized;

and the spirit of liberty curbed the spirit of cannibalism. The desire, however, still subsists unabated in the heart of man; and the wits of the dethroned tyrants of the earth are set to work to defraud those whom they can no longer overpower. In this result of civilization,

the present age far exceeds its predecessors; and the cannibals of England, where greater dexterity is required to manage the cheat, are confessedly pre-eminent over those of the rest of the world, in the great art of wheedling their victims into an unresisting quiescence.

Homer has proverbially established the people-eating propensity of monarchs as an incontrovertible fact in the natural history of the species. But though despots, like other beasts of prey, waste more than they devour, the destruction they cause is not comparable with that produced by some other classes of man-eaters. There is one class, for instance, which must be nameless, which at its regular meals swallows one tenth of the whole agricultural population, not to speak of its occasional luncheons, at the expense of the rest of the public. So exquisite is the address of these cannibals, that they not only persuade their prey, like "dilly dilly duck," "to come and be killed" for the good of his own soul, but also engage him to knock every one on the head who presumes to question their right in his bones and blood. Of the military cannibals it is not necessary to speak at length, because they chiefly prey upon each other, and because they rather should be considered as purveying for the appetites of their employers, than as acting for their own gratification. The lawyers are a very sly and subtile race of man-eaters, especially remarkable for the ingenuity of their nets, hooks, and other engines for taking their prey. They erect weirs so cleverly contrived, that on the outside the watercourse seems quite smooth and unimpeded; while within, the labyrinth is so complicated, that not a fish of the utmost cunning can escape, except such as by their restless efforts to get out become so lean and shotten as not to be worth taking; and these may perhaps slip through some small hole, which is not considered worth the trouble of stopping. Among these gentry there is one who may be taken as the very chief of all anthropophagi, since he consumes in his own proper person more than the whole tribe put together. His especial morsel is the human heart, which he macerates, by "hope delayed," till it is arrived at the proper state of mortification for his cannibal appetite. Like Saturn of old, he consumes a vast number of infants; though he is so far unlike that god, as to be much too cunning to be taken in with a stone. He is likewise especially fond of a madman; and, between the two, has generally to the value of some thirty or forty millions of pounds sterling in his warrens, ready for killing. But so fond is he of a bankrupt above all other sorts of fare, that he will often not leave even a single bone of him at the end of the repast. Of the very few who escape with life from his clutches, all suffer more or less. loses a buttock, another a shoulder; and, strange to say, if he lays but his finger upon a man, the wretch becomes instantly lighter by the process: indeed, so malignant is his nature, that while others must make some exertion to secure their prey, his mere inertness is the death of thousands; and the less he stirs himself, the more certain is the havoc he occasions. Another description of man-eaters, whose depredations have increased exceedingly of late years, consume a multi

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tude of peasants to feed their hares and partridges; and by a refinement on cruelty, contrive to destroy not only the bodies but the souls of their victims. In this process they will sometimes waste as much as onefourth of the whole fruits of the earth; which, by raising the price of corn, consumes the sweat and blood even of the inhabitants of distant towns, which may be considered as served up to their tables in the shape of pasties, and perdrix au chou. Still, however, the destruction of these sportsmen is a mere trifle to the carnage they commit in their capacity of corn lords. Under the false and iniquitous pretence of flattering the farmer, and preventing puddings from ever becoming inordinately dear, they persuade poor silly manufacturers to submit to their cannibal proceedings; and they destroy an entire population to furnish themselves with an additional side-dish to their second course— just as the Romans killed singing-birds by hundreds for the sake of their brains. Like Diomede of old, they nourish their very studs upon human flesh; sacrificing manufacturing towns without mercy, to ride a better horse at a fox-chace. Not, indeed, that these persons are more evil-minded than their neighbours. They are but men, like the rest; and nothing worse can be laid to their door, than the common propensities of humanity. They have more power than others, and they abuse it accordingly; but they do ill only as every other class does,—that is, to the full extent of their combined selfishness, ignorance, and opportunity.

In great cities, cannibalism takes an infinite variety of shapes. In the neighbourhood of St. James's-street there are numerous slaughterhouses, where men are daily consumed by the operation of cards and dice; and where they are caught by the same bait, at which Quin said he should have infallibly bitten. A similar process is likewise carried on in Change Alley, on a great scale; not to speak of that snare especially set for widows and children, called a "joint stock speculation." But your cannibal of cannibals is a Parliament patron. Here, a great borough proprietor swallows a regiment at a single gulp; and there, the younger son of a lord ruminates over a colony till the very crows cannot find a dinner in it; and there again, a duke or a minister, himself and his family, having first "supped full of horrors," casts a diocese to the side-table, to be mumbled at leisure by his son's tutor. The town is occasionally very indignant and very noisy against the gouls of Surgeons' Hall, because they live upon the dead carcases of their fellow-creatures; while, strange to say, it takes but little account of the hordes of wretches who openly, and in the face of day, hunt down living men in their nefarious dealings as porter brewers, quack doctors, informers, attorneys, manufacturers of bean flour, alum, and Portland stone; and torture their subjects like so many barbacued pigs, in the complicated processes of their cookery.

Among the different parts of the British empire, Ireland stands conspicuously prominent for cannibalism; six millions of Catholics being there kept, as in a pen, for the private picking of about five hundred thousand "ascendancy boys," who growl like so many hungry mastiffs, if any one goes but near to the cage-door, or looks as if he meant to let them out. Thousands, and tens of thousands, are on this account annually slain by the processes of starvation and fever, in order to be served up at the tables of the master caste; and as an Irishman is not

famous for patience, every now and then an insurrection or a rebellion adds to the desolation of that land of oppression.

It is impossible to turn a steady eye upon society without being convinced that to live at the expense of the community (that is, of the working classes,) is the great object of all the world; that the various debates which are maintained respecting liberty, free-trade, funding, currency, corn-laws, and Catholics, are all but so many modifications of the one great question of who shall work and who enjoy. Neither can it escape remark that fraud and hypocrisy are the two great instruments for complicating the discussion; and that popular ignorance is the raw material of political fortunes. If the people understood their own interests, being as they are the strongest, the cannibal propensities of the few would be kept in a decent check; but the blindness and incapacity of the multitude compel them to assist in their own degradation, by forcing those who would guide them right, if not to absolute silence, at least to a disgraceful compromise with the whole truth. The man of sense, who disdains to join the conspiracy against his species, is not more disgusted with the knavery, than with the dupery by which he is surrounded. Whichever way he turns, he is encompassed by a circumvallation of common-places; and the pert self-sufficiency, with which the confiding multitude repeat them as undeniable truths, is at least as provoking, as the easy impudence of the clever rogues, who scarcely take the pains of concealing the machinery of their phantasmagoria, or of affecting to believe the doctrines they preach. In such a case, what is to be done," when to be grave exceeds all power of face?" To preserve silence, is to sacrifice the dignity of personal character; while to speak out is to be misapprehended, misrepresented, calumniated, and traduced. The honestest and the boldest man must hide a good half of his thoughts, if he would not be interdicted ab aquá et igni; for the sake of peace and quiet he must refrain from telling, by implication, every third man he meets, that he is a fool or a rascal, and making him feel that in his eagerness to defraud others he is himself the dupe of his own stratagems. There are certain conventional bases upon which all questions of morals, politics, metaphysics, and religion, must be argued, if you would escape stoning. No matter how false, absurd, or inconsistent with each other they may be,--to dispute them, is to resign all chance of a hearing, all hope of a character for virtue or common sense, to offer yourself as the butt for all the malice of all who live and fatten on the popular lie, and to be spurned and assaulted by the very people for whose sake you have made the sacrifice. He who has not the courage to encounter this mass of evil, must pass through life with a bridle perpetually on his tongue. He must hear with a becoming gravity the words honour and patriotism proceeding from the lips of pollution; he must hold law to be synonymous with justice, persecution with tolerance, the doctrine of libel with the liberty of the press, universal pauperism with national prosperity, priestcraft with piety, and plunder with loyalty and religion. He must not attempt to disturb the solemn plausibility which gives to vice the exterior of honesty. When disappointed in all his hopes for the species, cured of his enthusiastic estimates of individual character, he must remain convinced of the hollowness of all around him without betraying by a word or look, by a smile or a sneer, his knowledge of the falsehood.

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Nor is it alone on great questions that sincerity is perilous. There is a commune quoddam vinculum," that binds the great and the little lies together, and you can never know when you are treading upon dangerous ground. It occurred to ourselves to have lost caste for an entire evening, and to have passed for no better than atheists, for venturing to deny that Kean should be banished from the stage, while others, equally frail, were applauded to the skies. To doubt even the sanctity of a Wolf, or to question the "forty parson power" of Messrs. Gordon and Pope, would render the speaker suspected of being suspicious. By long learning, however, we have in part mastered this difficulty; we have been trained to stand by, without wincing, while the second reformation is alleged to advance. We can bear the mention of Mr. Peel's candour, and of Lord Bathurst's high-mindedness. We have suppressed all temptation to laugh at the men who set up the Pope in Italy, and tremble at him in Ireland; and nothing can exceed the demure composure with which we look on, when prayers are offered to" endow the lords of the council with grace, wisdom, and understanding." But can this self-abnegation be practised without grief, indignation, and disgust? Is it not better, a thousand times better, to shut ourselves for ever in a garret, with the few authors who have dared to write after their conscience, than to be compelled eternally to wear a mask, to associate without sympathy, and to bow the head to successful imposture and triumphant folly? A dog, a cat, a mouse, a spider is a better companion than the sycophant who will not trust his own reason, or who, beholding the truth, belies his own conscience to howl with the wolves.

But then it may be said that the fond of society is somewhat redeemed by its forms; that a man may be a very competent rogue, or a pretty tolerable fool, without being wholly unamiable, and that there are subjects upon which all the world are agreed. It is quite true that the largest part of conversation turns upon eating and drinking, the weather, the vices and follies of our neighbours, and a thousand other trifles that lead not to dispute; and it must be admitted that it is bad companionship to be eternally canvassing the greater interests of life, and forcing upon society opinions upon things in general. There are, indeed, themes in plenty which belong to the neutral ground of debate; but it is very pitiable that they should so ill bear repetition. All the world, if they dared avow as much, are heartily tired of them. Like cursing and swearing, they are merely unmeaning expletives to supply the lack of sense, to gain time, and to give a man the satisfaction of sometimes hearing his own voice. With all the assistance of cards, music, dancing, and champagne, society is at best but a dreary business, and it requires no little animal spirits to undergo the infliction with decency. Are you admitted on terms of familiarity to the domestic hearth of your friend, that privilege confers on you the opportunity of becoming intimately acquainted with the faults of his servants, and (what is worse) with the merits of his children.

A dinner of ceremony is a funeral without a legacy; an assembly is a mob, and a ball a compound of glare, tinsel, noise, and dust. However amusing in their freshness, after a few repetitions, they are only rendered endurable by the prospect of some collateral gain, or the gratification of personal vanity. To exhibit the beauty of a young wife,