Harriet Martineau

Byron.

Geologists tell us that they can answer for the modes of life of the people of any extensive district by looking at the geological map of the region. Put a geological map of England before one who understands it, and he will tell you that the inhabitants of the western parts, from Cornwall, through Wales, and up through Cumberland into Scotland, are miners and mountaineers; here living in clusters round the shaft of a mine, and there sprinkled over the hills, and secluded in the valleys. He will tell you that, on the middle portion of the surface, from Devonshire, up through Leicestershire, to the Yorkshire coast, the wide pastures are covered with flocks, while the people are collected into large manufacturing towns; an ordinary map showing, at the same time, that Kidderminster, Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, and Nottingham, Sheffield, Huddersfield, and Leeds, with many others, lie in this district. He will tell you that the third range, comprehending the eastern part of the island, is studded with farms, and that tillage is the great occupation and interest of the inhabitants. The moralist might follow up the observations of the geologist with an account of the general characteristics of societies engaged in these occupations. He knows that a distinct intellectual and moral character belongs to miners, to artisans, and to agriculturists; he knows that miners are prone to superstition, and to speculation in business, from the incalculable nature of their pursuits, the hap-hazard character of their enterprises; he knows that an artisan population is active-minded, communicative, capable and fond of concert; that among them is found the greatest proportion of religious dissent and political sagacity, of knowledge and its results in action. He knows that an agricultural people are less of a society than the others; that they are as mentally sluggish in comparison with operatives, as they are physically superior to them; that they make far less use of speech; are more attached to what is habitual and ancient, and have less enterprise and desire of change. They are, in fact, the representatives of the past,—of feudal times; while an artisan population is a prophecy of the future, and the beginning of the fulfilment. The ideas of equal rights, of representation of person as well as property, and all other democratic notions, originate in towns, and chiefly in manufacturing towns. Loyalty to the person rather than the function of rulers, pride in land and love of it as the blessing of blessings, and jealousy of every other interest, are found wherever corn springs up in the furrows, and there are farm-houses to be miniature representations of the old feudal establishments.

Such are the general tendencies, modified according to circumstances. There are influences which make certain artisans in England tories, and certain landlords and tenants liberals; and there may be times and places where whole societies may have their characteristics modified; but there is rarely or never a complete departure from the general rule. Landlords and their posse of tenants, called liberal, soon find a point beyond which they cannot go, and from which they tend back into the politics of their order; and there is often but a single step for tory artisans into ultra-radicalism; it turns out to be a spurious toryism. So it is possible that there might have been here and there a democrat in La VendÉe in 1793, and a sprinkling of royalists in Lyons in 1817. Yet La VendÉe and Linois may be taken as representatives of the two kinds of society. The weaving population of Lyons are, like that of manufacturing towns generally, disposed to irritability by physical uneasiness, nourishing their ideas and feelings by communication, suffering from the consequences of partial knowledge, having glimpses of a better social state, and laying the blame of their adversities on a deficiency of protection by the government; enterprising and nicely skilled in the improvement of their articles of manufacture, and ever full of aspiration. The inhabitants of La VendÉe are so diametrically opposite in their social circumstances and characteristics, that their bias in politics is a matter of course. Here is a description of the face of the district at the time that Lyons was as intensely republican as La VendÉe was royalist:—

"Only two great roads traversed this sequestered region, running nearly parallel, at a distance of more than seventy miles from each other. The country, though rather thickly peopled, contained, as may be supposed, few large towns; and the inhabitants, devoted almost entirely to rural occupations, enjoyed a great deal of leisure. The noblesse or gentry of the country were very generally resident on their estates, where they lived in a style of simplicity and homeliness which had long disappeared from every other part of the kingdom. No grand parks, fine gardens, or ornamented villas; but spacious clumsy chateaux, surrounded with farm offices, and cottages for the labourers. Their manners and way of life, too, partook of the same primitive rusticity. There was great cordiality, and even much familiarity, in the intercourse of the seigneurs with their dependants: they were followed by large trains of them in their hunting expeditions, which occupied so great a part of their time. Every man had his fowling-piece, and was a marksman of fame or pretensions. The peasants resorted familiarly to their landlords for advice, both legal and medical; and they repaid the visits in their daily rambles, and entered with interest into all the details of their agricultural operations. From all this there resulted a certain innocence and kindliness of character, joined with great hardihood and gaiety. Though not very well educated, the population were exceedingly devout; though theirs was a kind of superstitious and traditional devotion, it must be owned, rather than an enlightened or rational faith. They had the greatest veneration for crucifixes and images of their saints, and had no idea of any duty more imperious than that of attending on all the solemnities of religion. They were singularly attached also to their curÉs, who were almost all born and bred in the country, spoke their patois, and shared in all their pastimes and occupations. When a hunting-match was to take place, the clergyman announced it from the pulpit after prayers, and then took his fowling-piece and accompanied his congregation to the thicket."[J]

The chief contrasting features of these two kinds of society may be recognized in all parts of the civilized world. The most intensely loyal of the loyal Chinese will be found irrigating the terraces of the mountains, or busy in the ploughing-matches of the plains; and the least contented will be found at the loom. Spain is removed from a capacity for social freedom just in proportion to the discouragement of manufactures. The vine-growing districts of Germany are the most, and the commercial towns the least, acquiescent in the rule under which they are living. Russia will be despotically governed as long as she has no manufactures; and England and the United States are rescued, by the full establishment of their manufactures, from all danger of a retrogradation towards feudalism.

The way in which these considerations concern us in this place is, that public and private morals, no less than manners, depend on the degree of feudalism which is left in the community. We have spoken before of the morals of the feudal and democratic states of society; and what we are now pointing out is, that these states, with their attendant morals and manners, may be discerned from the face of the country, and the consequent occupations of its inhabitants.

It appears as if a geological map might be a useful guide to the researches of the moralist,—an idea which would have appeared insanely ridiculous half a century ago, but now reasonable enough. If the traveller be no geologist, so that he cannot, by his own observation, determine the nature of the soil, and thence infer, for his general guidance, the employments and mental and moral state of the people, he must observe the face of the country along the road he travels. He will do better still by mounting any eminences which may be within reach, whether they be churches, pillars, pyramids, pagodas, baronial castles on rocks, or peaks of mountains; thence he should look abroad, from point to point, through the whole region, and mark out what he sees spread beneath him. Are there pastures extended to the horizon, with herdsmen and flocks sprinkled over them, and in the midst a cloud of smoke overhanging a town, from which roads part off in many directions? Or is it a scene of shadowy mountains, with streams leaping from their fissures, and no signs of human habitation but the machinery of a mine, with rows of dwellings near heaps of piled rubbish? Or is the whole intersected with fences, and here dark with fallows, there yellow with corn, while farmsteads terminate the lanes, and the dwellings and grounds of rich proprietors are seen at intervals, with each a hamlet resting against its boundaries? Is this the kind of scene, whether the great house be called mansion, or chateau, or villa, or schloss; whether the produce be corn, or grapes, or tea, or cotton? A person gifted with a precocity of science in the twelfth century might have prophesied what is now happening from the picture stretched beneath him as he gazed from an eminence on the banks of the Don or the Calder. He might see, with the bodily eye, only

with clusters of houses in the far distance, and Robin Hood with his merry men lurking in the thickets of the forest, or basking under the oaks: but with the prophetic eye of science he might discern the multitudes that were, in course of time, to be living in Sheffield or Huddersfield; the stimulus that would be given to enterprise, the thronging of merchants to this region, the physical sufferings, the moral pressure, that must come; the awakening of intelligence, and the arousing of ambition. In the real scene, a cloud-shadow might be passing over a meadow; in the ideal, a smoke-cloud would be resting upon a hundred thousand human beings. In the real scene, a warbling lark might be springing from the grass; in the ideal, a singer[K] of a higher order might appear remonstrating with feudalism from amidst the roar of the furnace-blast and the din of the anvil; and then, when his complaint of social oppression is done, starting forwards to the end of all, and singing the requiem of the world itself.

Somewhat in the same way as such a supposed philosophic observer might be imagined to foresee that democratic strains of remonstrance would here succeed to foresters' and freebooters' songs, may a well-qualified observer of the present day discern the interior mechanism and the remote issues of what lies beneath his eyes. While surveying the vast prairies on the banks of the deep rivers of the Western world, he may safely anticipate the time when self-governing communities will swarm where now a settler's log-house and enclosure are the only break in the wide surface of verdure. While looking down upon the harvests of Volhynia, or watching the processions of wagons laden with corn, and slowly wending their way down to Odessa, he may securely conclude that no vivacious artisan population will enliven this region for a long time to come; that the inhabitants will continue attached to the despotism under which they live; and that the morals of a despotism—the morals which coexist with gross ignorance and social subservience—may be looked for and found for at least an age.

Some preparation may thus be made by a glance over the face of the country. Much depends on whether it is flat or mountainous, pasture or arable land. It appears from fact, too, that much depends on minor circumstances,—even on whether it is damp or dry. It is amusing to the traveller in Holland to observe how new points of morals spring up out of its swamps, as in the East from the dryness of the deserts. To injure the piles on which the city is built, is at Amsterdam a capital offence; and no inhabitant could outgrow the shame of tampering with the vegetation by which the soil of the dykes is held together. While Irish children are meritoriously employed in gathering rushes to make candles, and sedges for thatch, "the veriest child in Holland would resent as an injury any suspicion that she had rooted up a sedge or a rush, which had been planted to strengthen the embankments."[L] Such are certain points of morals in a country where water is the great enemy. In the East, where drought is the chief foe, it is a crime to defile or stop up a well, and the greatest of social glories is to have made water flow where all before was dry. In Holland, a malignant enemy cuts the dyke, as the last act of malice: in Arabia, he fills up the wells. In Holland, a distinct sort of moral feeling seems to have grown up about intemperance in drink. The humidity of the climate, and the scarcity of clear, wholesome water, obliges the inhabitants to drink much of other liquids. If moderation in them were not made a point of conscience of the first importance, the consequences of their prevalent use would be dreadful. The success of this particular moral effort is great. Drunkenness is almost as rare in Holland as carelessness in keeping accounts, and tampering with the dykes. There is no country in the world whose morals have more clearly grown out of its circumstances than Holland. On the theory of an infallible Moral Sense, it would be as difficult to account for a Dutchman's tenderness of conscience on any of the above three heads, as for a soldier's agony at the imputation of sleeping upon guard, or an Alabama planter's resentment at being charged with putting the alphabet in the way of a mulatto.

Having noted the aspect of the country, the observer's next business is to ascertain the condition of the inhabitants as to the supply of the Necessaries of life. He knows that nothing remains to be learned of the domestic morals of people who are plunged in hopeless poverty. There is no foundation for good morals among such. They herd together, desperate or depressed; they have no prospect; their self-respect is prostrated; they have nothing to lose, there is nothing for them to gain by any effort that they can make.—But it is needless to speak of this. When we treat of the domestic morals of any class, it is always presupposed that they are not in circumstances which render total immorality almost inevitable.In agricultural districts, the condition of the inhabitants may be learned by observation of the markets. An observing traveller has said, "To judge at once of a nation, we have only to throw our eyes on the markets and the fields. If the markets are well supplied, the fields well cultivated, all is right. If otherwise, we may say, and say truly, these people are barbarous and oppressed."[M] This, though a rather sweeping judgment, is founded in truth, and is well worthy of being borne in mind in travelling. It so happens that the negroes of Hayti are abundantly supplied with the necessaries, and with many of the comforts of life; that they are by no means barbarous, and far from being oppressed; and yet they have few roads, and scarcely any markets. They grow up in the midst of plenty; but, when a countryman is about to kill a hog, he sends his son round among his neighbours on horseback, to give notice to any who wish for pork, to send for it on a certain day. Their wretched, barbarous, oppressed countrymen in South Carolina, meanwhile, have excellent markets. The Saturday night's market at Charleston might beguile a careless foreigner into the belief that those who throng it are a free and prosperous people. Thus the rule above quoted does not always hold. Yet it is true that the existence and good quality of markets testify to the existence and good quality of other desirable things.

Where markets are abundantly and variously supplied, it is clear that there must be a large demand for the comforts of life, and a diversity of domestic wants. It is clear that there must be industry to meet this demand, and competence to justify it. There must be social security, or the industry and competence would not be put to so hazardous a use. It may happen, as at Charleston, that the capital is the masters' (whose the profits may also be, at any moment); that the industry is called forth by a delusive hope; and that the briskness of the transactions at market is ascribable to the pleasure slaves have in social meetings; but better things may usually be inferred from a well-supplied and well-conducted market.

The traveller's other researches in agricultural regions will be into the Tenure of lands,—whether they are held in small separate properties;—whether such properties are held by individuals, or shared with any kind of partners;—whether portions are rented from landlords; and, if so, whether any order of middlemen are concerned in the business;—whether the land is chiefly held by large owners; and, if so, whether the labourers are attached to the soil under feudal arrangements, or whether they are free labourers working for wages.

The homes of the agricultural population will be found to vary in aspect as any one of these systems prevails. In young and prosperous countries, the system of small separate properties is found to conduce to independence and the virtues which result from it, though it is not favourable to knowledge and enlightenment. Families live much to themselves; and thus, while forming strong domestic attachments, they lose sight of what is going on in the world. They become unused to the light of society, and get to dislike and fear it. The labourers, in such case, usually live with the family, whether they be brothers, as often happens in Switzerland; sons, as in many a farm-house of the United States; or hired servants, as in former times in England,—and still in some retired parts. In each case the picture is easily filled in by the imagination. All are engaged, throughout the year, in the business of living. The work is never ending, still beginning; or, if it has intervals, they are dull and weary, from the absence of interests wherewith to occupy them. The employments of life are innocent, and the principle of association is harmless; but if there be ignorance and prejudice in the region, in these farm-houses will they be found; and in company with them morals of a high order are not to be looked for.

If small properties are held in partnership, poverty is present or threatening. The condition of affairs cannot be lasting; and this may be well; for narrow means and partnership in a property which requires to be managed by skill are more favourable to discontent and disagreement than to a kindly social state.

The middleman system is favourable or unfavourable to morals, just in proportion as it is so to prosperity. Every one knows the wretchedness of it in Ireland, and that there are numerous instances in Italy of the complete success of the mÉtayer plan.

Where the land is the property of large owners, and is tilled by labourers, there must be more or less of the feudal temper and manners remaining. Where the labourers are attached to the soil, there must necessarily exist whatever good arises from the certainty of the means of subsistence, coupled with the evils of subservience to the will of the lord, mental sluggishness, and ignorance. Where they are not irremovably attached to the soil, habit and helplessness have usually much of the same effect. The son hedges, ditches, or ploughs where his father hedged, ditched, or ploughed; he takes his beer, or cider, or thin wine, (according to the country he lives in,) at the same house of entertainment, and gossips about the doings of the lord and his family, much as labourers were wont to gossip two hundred years ago.

It is the business of the traveller to note which mode of agricultural life prevails, and how the morals which pertain to it are modified by particular circumstances.

He must make the same kind of observations on the Manufacturing and Commercial Classes of the country he visits. Here again the chief differences in morals and manners arise out of the comparative prosperity or adversity of the class. Take the cotton manufacture. Passing by the Chinese operative plying his shuttle as he sits under his bamboo shed, and the Hindoo drawing out his fine thread under the shade of the palm, what differences there are among artisans of the same race,—Europeans and of European extraction! In Massachusetts there are villages of artisans, where whole streets of houses are their property; the church on the green in the midst is theirs; the Lyceum, with its library and apparatus, is theirs. There are rows of neat frame-dwellings, painted white or yellow, with piazzas before and behind, and Venetian blinds to every window,—all growing up out of the earnings of girls, who bring their widowed mothers to preside over their establishments. Others are paying off the mortgages on their fathers' farms. Others are procuring for their brothers a learned education in a college. In the cotton settlements of Europe what a contrast! At the best, operatives can only provide for their wants, and the placing out of their children, by a life of strenuous toil. At the worst, they herd together, many families in one house,—often in one room; decency is discarded; recklessness succeeds, to such a degree that, in certain sections of the society, there is scarcely a man of thirty-five who is not a grandfather. Among such there is a barbarism as savage as among the most vicious aristocracy of the worst feudal times. The lowest artisan population of the present day may vie in corruption with the noblesse of France on the eve of the first revolution. It is for the traveller to observe what grade in the wide interval between the operatives of Massachusetts, and those of Lyons and Stockport, is occupied by the artisans of the places he visits.

Upon the extent of the Commerce of a country depends much of the character of its morals. Old virtues and vices dwindle away, and new ones appear. The old members of a rising commercial society complain of the loss of simplicity of manners, of the introduction of new wants, of the relaxation of morals, of the prevalence of new habits. The young members of the same society rejoice that prudery is going out of fashion, that gossip is likely to be replaced by the higher kind of intercourse which is introduced by strangers, and by an extension of knowledge and interests: they even decide that domestic morals are purer from the general enlargement and occupation of mind which has succeeded to the ennui and selfishness in which licentiousness often originates. A highly remarkable picture of the two conditions of the same place may be obtained by comparing Mrs. Grant's account of the town of Albany, New York, in her young days,[N] with the present state of the city. She tells us of the plays of the children on the green slope which is now State Street; of the tea-drinkings and working parties, of the gossip, bickerings, and virulent petty enmities of the young society, with its general regularity and occasional back-sliding; with the gentle despotism of its opulent members, and the more or less restive or servile obedience of the subordinate personages. In place of all this, the stranger now sees a city with magnificent public buildings, and private houses filled with the products of all the countries of the world. The inhabitants are too busy to be given to gossip, too unrestrained in their intercourse with numbers to retain much prudery: social despotism and subservience have become impossible: there is a generous spirit of enterprise, an enlargement of knowledge, an amelioration of opinion. There is, on the other hand, perhaps a decrease of kindly neighbourly regard, and certainly a great increase of the low vices which are the plague of commercial cities. Such is the transformation wrought by commerce. An observer who can also speculate,—one who looks before and after,—will conclude that, amidst some evil, the change is advantageous; and that good must, on the whole, arise from enlarged intercourses between men and societies. Seeing in commerce the instrument by which all the inhabitants of the earth are in time to be brought into common possession of all true ideas, and sympathy in all good feelings, he will mark the progress made by the society he visits towards this end. He will mark whether its merchants as a body have a spirit of generous enterprise or of sordid self-interest; whether they entertain a respect for learning and a taste for art,—bringing the one from abroad, and cherishing the other at home;—whether, in short, the merchants are the princes or the money-grubbers of the community. The spirit of this class will determine that of their subordinates. If the masters of commerce are liberal and enlightened, their servants will be thriving, and will have the virtues which wait upon self-respect: if the contrary, they will be debased. A Jewish money-lender is no more like a merchant of Salem or Bourdeaux than Malay porters at Macao are like the clerk class of Amsterdam. In the mercantile orders of society may be found the extremes of honour, generosity, diligence, and accuracy,—and of treachery, meanness, and selfish carelessness. It is the traveller's business to note the tendencies to the one or the other,—from the vexatious hog and yam traffic of the islands of the South Sea, to the magnificent transactions of the traders of Hamburgh.

The Health of a community is an almost unfailing index of its morals. No one can wonder at this who considers how physical suffering irritates the temper, depresses energy, deadens hope, induces recklessness, and, in short, poisons life. The domestic affections, too, are apt to languish through disappointment in countries where the average of death is very high. There is least marriage in unhealthy countries, and most in healthy ones,—other circumstances being equal. The same kind of spirit (however largely diluted) prevails in sickly regions as in societies which are visited by a pestilence. Study the tempers of the people who are subject to goÎtres, of those who live in marshes, of those who encounter an annual tropical fever; and contrast it with that of dwellers on mountains, and in dry prairies, and in well-ventilated towns. What selfishness, apathy, and discontent in the one class! and what kindliness, briskness, and cheerfulness in the other! In the United States, wide spreading as the country is, and comprehending every variety of people, and almost of climate, the common deficiency of health produces moral effects which must strike the most careless traveller. The epicurean temper of the south, and the puritanic mood of the north, are alike stimulated by this. In the south, the overseers, whose business it is to encounter the fever, seem to be always practically saying, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." There is a recklessness among the trading classes there, a heathen levity and grossness, which are doubtless in a great degree owing to the presence of slavery, but also in part to the certainty of a very large annual mortality. Not the purest Christianity itself could preserve a people so placed from a more or less modified fatalism. The richer members of society leave their homes for some months of every year, and go northwards; and this perpetual unsettling of their families has a bad effect upon the habits of the young people and the comfort of their parents. It operates against domestic diligence, tranquillity, and satisfaction with home pleasures. In the north, there is a perpetual preaching about death, enforced by the never-ceasing recurrence of it; but it has not the effect of making people less worldly-minded than others. It serves only to shade life with apprehension, uncertainty, and bereavement; and, it is to be feared, to give to the vanity of many minds the direction of false heroism about meeting death. This seems too serious a subject for the exercise of human vanity; yet that purpose it has served, perhaps, in all societies; and in none more than in New England. The greater number of very young people, everywhere, who cannot be aware of the importance of life, and of the simplicity of death as its close, have romantic thoughts about dying early; and, in a country where an unusual proportion do die early, this species of vain-glory is likely to flourish. The pain felt everywhere by really enlarged and religious minds on seeing a false resignation exhibited, and hearing shallow sentimentalities given out on the brink of the grave, is peculiarly felt in a region where mourning mothers may be seen who have lost eight, twelve, or fifteen children, and where scarcely an enterprise of any extent can be undertaken which is not almost sure to be interrupted or baffled by sickness or death.—When these considerations are dwelt upon, and when it is remembered what the consequences of a low state of health must be to each future generation, it seems scarcely extravagant to say that the best influence upon the morals of the American nation would be such as might improve their health.

Good and bad health are both cause and effect of good and bad morals. No proof of this is needed, nor any further dwelling upon the proposition. The fact, however, points out to the observer the duty of obtaining a correct general estimate of the health of the community he visits.

There are two principal methods by which he may obtain the knowledge he wants,—by examining civic registers, and by visiting burial-grounds.

A faithful register of births, marriages, and deaths, is wished for by enlightened philanthropists of all advanced countries, far more as a test of national morals and the national welfare, than as a matter of the highest social convenience. For this the physiologist waits as the means of determining the physical condition of the nation; as a guide to him in suggesting and prescribing the methods by which the national health may be improved, and the average of life prolonged.—For this the legislator waits as the means of determining the comparative proneness of the people to certain kinds of social offences, and the causes of that proneness; that the law may be framed so as to include (as all wise laws should include) the largest preventive influence with the greatest certainty of retribution.—For this the philanthropist waits as a guide to him in forming his scheme of universal education; and without this,—without knowing how many need education altogether,—how many under one set of circumstances, and how many under another,—he can proceed only in darkness, or amidst the delusions of false lights. He is only perplexed by the partial knowledge, which is all that his utmost efforts enable him to obtain. If he goes into every house of every town and village in his district, he is no nearer to an understanding of the intellectual and moral condition of the nation than he was before: for other districts have a different soil and different occupations; the employments of the people, their diseases and their resources, are unlike; and, under these diverse influences, their physical, and therefore moral and intellectual condition, must vary. The reports of Philanthropic Societies do little more for him, drawn up as they are with partial objects and under exclusive influences: parliamentary disclosures are of little more use. Vague statements about the increase of drunkenness, resistance to one kind of law or another, alarm and distress him; but such statements again are partial, and so often brought forward for a particular object, that they afford no safe guide to him who would form a general preventive or remedy. Thus it is under all partial methods of observation; but when the philanthropist shall gain access to a register of the national births, marriages, and deaths, he will have under his hand all the materials he requires, as completely as if he were hovering over the kingdom, comprehending all its districts in one view, and glancing at will into all its habitations.

The comparative ages of the dead will indicate to him not only the amount of health, but the comparative force of various species of disease; and from the character of its diseases, and the amount of its health, much of the moral state of a people may be safely pronounced upon. The proportion of marriages to births and deaths is always an indication of the degree of comfort enjoyed, and of the consequent purity of morals; and, therefore, of the degree in which education is present or needed. A large number of children, and a large proportion of marriages, indicate physical and moral welfare, and therefore a comparative prevalence of education. A large number of births, and a small proportion of marriages, indicate the reverse. When these circumstances are taken in connexion with the prevailing occupations of the district to which they relate, the philanthropist has arrived at a sufficient certainty as to the means of education required, and the method in which they are to be applied.

There is, unfortunately, in all countries, an insufficiency of records framed for the purpose of induction, and subsequent practical use. The chief of a tribe, proud in proportion to his barbarian insignificance, may from time to time indulge himself by numbering the people whom he considers as his property; and an ambitious and warlike emperor may organize a conscription; and these records may remain to fulfil hereafter far more exalted purposes than those for which they were designed: but these instances are few; and in the art of constructing tables, and ascertaining averages, the most civilized people are still, for want of practice, in a state of unskilfulness. But, in the absence of that which would spare observers the task of ascertaining results for themselves, they must take the best they can get. A traveller must inquire for any public registers which may exist in all districts, and note and reflect upon the facts he finds there. In case of there being none such, it is possible that the physicians of the district may be able to afford information from private documents of the same nature. If not, there remain the cemeteries.

The calculators of longevity believe that they may now, by taking down the dates from the first thirty tombstones in the cemeteries of the districts they pass through, learn the comparative healthiness and length of life of the inhabitants of the country. However this may be, there is no doubt that a large variety and extent of information may be thus obtained. The observer can ascertain where the fatal diseases of infancy most prevail,—which is the same thing as knowing that the physical and moral condition of the people is low; as a large proportion (not mere number) of deaths in infancy is a most unfavourable symptom of society. He can ascertain where consumption prevails, where fever, and where the largest proportion attains to length of days. It is much to know what character disease and death wear in any district. One character of Morals and Manners prevails where the greater number die young, and another where they die old; one where they are cut off by hardship; another where they waste away under a lingering disease; and yet another where they abide their full time, and then come to their graves like a shock of corn in its season. The grave-yards on the heights of the Alleghanies will tell a different tale of Morals and Manners from the New Orleans' cemetery, glaring in the midst of the swamp; and so would the burial-places in the suburbs of Irish cities, if their contents were known, from those of the hardy Waldenses, or of the decent and thriving colonists of Frederick's-oord.

The Marriage compact is the most important feature of the domestic state on which the observer can fix his attention. If he be a thinker, he will not be surprised at finding much imperfection in the marriage state wherever he goes. By no arrangements yet attempted have purity of morals, constancy of affection, and domestic peace been secured to any extensive degree in society. Almost every variety of method is still in use, in one part of the world or another. The primitive custom of brothers marrying sisters still subsists in some Eastern regions. Polygamy is very common there, as every one knows. In countries which are too far advanced for this, every restraint of law, all sanction of opinion, has been tried to render the natural method,—the restriction of one husband to one wife,—successful, and therefore universal and permanent. Law and opinion have, however, never availed to anything like complete success. Even in thriving young countries, where no considerations of want, and few of ambition, can interfere with domestic peace,—where the numbers are equal, where love has the promise of a free and even course, and where religious sentiment is directed full upon the sanctity of the marriage state,—it is found to be far from pure. In almost all countries, the corruption of society in this department is so deep and wide-spreading, as to vitiate both moral sentiment and practice in an almost hopeless degree. It neutralizes almost all attempts to ameliorate and elevate the condition of the race.—There must be something fearfully wrong where the general result is so unfortunate as this. As in most other cases of social suffering, the wrong will be found to lie less in the methods ordained and put in practice, than in the prevalent sentiment of society, out of which all methods arise.

It is necessary to make mention (however briefly) of the kinds of false sentiment from which the evil of conjugal unhappiness appears to spring.—The sentiment by which courage is made the chief ground of honour in men, and chastity in women, coupled with the inferiority in which women have ever been sunk, was sure to induce profligacy. As long as men were brave nothing more was required to make them honourable in the eyes of society: while the inferior condition of women has ever exposed those of them who were not protected by birth and wealth to the profligacy of men.—The shallowness of the sentiment of honour is another great evil. In its origin, honour includes self-respect and the respect of others. In time, "from its intimate connexion with what is personal in interest and feeling, it is greatly exposed to degenerate into a false and misguiding sentiment. Connecting itself with the notions of character which prevail by chance in the community, rather than with the rule of right and of God, it has erected a false standard of estimate." The requisitions of honour come to be viewed as regarding only equals, or those who are hedged about with honour, and they are neglected with regard to the helpless. Men of honour use treachery with women,—with those to whom they promise marriage, and with those to whom, in marrying, they promised fidelity, love, and care; and yet their honour is, in the eyes of society, unstained.—Feudal ambition is another sentiment fraught with evil to marriage. In a society where pride and ostentation prevail, where rank and wealth are regarded as prime objects of pursuit, marriage comes to be regarded as a means of obtaining these. Wives are selected for their connexions and their fortune, and the love is placed elsewhere.—Any one of these corrupt species of sentiment, and of some others which exist, must ruin domestic peace, if the laws of each country were as wise as they are now, for the most part, faulty, and as powerful as they are now ineffectual.—If the traveller will bear these things in mind, he will gain light upon the moral sentiment of the society by the condition of domestic life in it; and again, what he knows of the prevalent moral sentiment of the society will cast light upon the domestic condition of its members.

Another thing to be carefully remembered is, that asceticism and licentiousness universally coexist. All experience proves this; and every principle of human nature might prophesy the proof. Passions and emotions cannot be extinguished by general rules. Self-mortification can spring only out of a home-felt principle, and not from the will of another, or of any number of others. The exhibition only can be restrained, and the visible conduct ordered by rule. In consequence, it is found that no greater impurity of mind exists than among associated ascetics; and nowhere are crimes of the licentious class so gross, other circumstances being equal, as in communities which have the puritanic spirit. Any one well-informed on the subject is aware that there is much coarseness in the manners of the Quakers; and their regard for the pleasures of the table is open to the observation of all. Nowhere are drunkenness and infanticide more disgusting and horrible, when they do occur, than in Calvinistic Scotland. The bottomless corruption of Vienna is notorious; and much of it is traceable to a species of political asceticism,—to artificial restrictions other than religious, but producing similar effects. Politics are a forbidden topic of conversation. Under this rule, literature is a forbidden topic too; for literary and philosophical necessarily induces political communication. In Vienna may be seen the singular spectacle of an assembled multitude who read, not one of whom opens his lips upon books, or their subject matter. What then remains? Gallantry. The intellect being silenced, the passions run riot; and the excessive corruption of the society,—a corruption which is notorious over the civilized world,—is the natural consequence. It may safely be assumed that wherever artificial restraints are imposed on the passions, or on the intellects and pursuits of men, there must be licentiousness, precisely proportioned to the severity of the restraint.

Celibacy of the clergy, or of any other class of men, involves polygamy, virtual if not avowed, in some other class. To this the relaxation of domestic morals in the higher orders of all Catholic societies bears testimony as strongly as the existence of allowed polygamy in India. It is everywhere professed that Christianity puts an end to polygamy; and so it does, as Christianity is understood in Protestant countries; but a glance at the state of morals in countries where celibacy is the religion of the clergy,—among the higher ranks in Italy, in France, in Spain,—shows that, while the name of polygamy is disclaimed, the thing is held in no great abhorrence. This is mentioned here simply as matter of fact, necessary to our inquiry as to how to observe morals and manners. It is notorious that, wherever celibacy is extensively professed, there is not only, as a consequence, a frequent breach of profession, but a much larger indulgence extended to other classes, in consequence of the restrictions on one. The methods of marriage in Italy and France,—the disposing of the woman at an early age, and before she is capable of giving an enlightened consent,—often even without the form of asking her consent,—on the understanding, tacit or avowed, that she may hereafter place her affections elsewhere,—these proceedings could have been adopted, could now be persevered in, only in countries where partial asceticism had induced a corresponding licentiousness.—The same fact,—the invariable proportion of asceticism and licentiousness,—exists where by some it would be least looked for,—in societies which have the reputation of being eminently pure; and this consideration is sufficient to extinguish all boasting, all assumption of unquestionable moral superiority in one people over another. It is not only that each nation likes its own notions of morals better than those of its neighbours; but that the very same things which are avowed among those who are called the grossest, happen with that which considers itself the most pure. Such superiority as there is is owing, perhaps, in no case to severity of religious sentiment and discipline, but rather to the worldly ease which blesses a young and thinly peopled country, and to the high cultivation of a society which furnishes its members with an extraordinary diversity of interests and pursuits.

Marriage exists everywhere, to be studied by the moral observer. He must watch the character of courtships wherever he goes;—whether the young lady is negociated for and promised by her guardians, without having seen her intended; like the poor girl who, when she asked her mother to point out her future husband from among a number of gentlemen, was silenced with the rebuke, "What is that to you?"—or whether they are left free to exchange their faith "by flowing stream, through wood, or craggy wild," as in the United States;—or whether there is a medium between these two extremes, as in England. He must observe how fate is defied by lovers in various countries. We have seen what was the acquiescence of Philip and Hannah in their eternal separation. None but Moravians, perhaps, would have so parted for ever. Scotch lovers agree to come together after so many years spent in providing the "plenishing." Irish lovers conclude the business, in case of difficulty, by appearing before the priest the next morning. There is recourse to a balcony and rope-ladder in one country; a steam-boat and back-settlement in another; trust and patience in a third; and intermediate flirtations, to pass the time, in a fourth. He must note the degree of worldly ambition which attends marriages, and which may therefore be supposed to stimulate them,—how much space the house with two rooms in humble life, and the country-seat and carriages in higher life, occupy in the mind of bride or bridegroom.—He must observe whether conjugal infidelity excites horror and rage, or whether it is so much a matter of course as that no jealousy interferes to mar the arrangements of mutual convenience.—He must mark whether women are made absolutely the property of their husbands, in mind and in estate; or whether the wife is treated more or less professedly as an equal party in the agreement.—He must observe whether there is an excluded class, victims to their own superstition or to a false social obligation, wandering about to disturb by their jealousy or licentiousness those whose lot is happier.—He must observe whether there are domestic arrangements for home enjoyments, or whether all is planned on the supposition of pleasure lying abroad; whether the reliance is on books, gardens, and play with children, or on the opera, parties, the ale-house, or dances on the green.—He must mark whether the ladies are occupied with their household cares in the morning, and the society of their husbands in the evening, or with embroidery and looking out of balconies; with receiving company all day, or gadding abroad; with the library or the nursery; with lovers or with children.—In each country, called civilized, he will meet with almost all these varieties: but in each there is such a prevailing character in the aspect of domestic life, that intelligent observation will enable him to decide, without much danger of mistake, as to whether marriage is merely an arrangement of convenience, in accordance with low morals, or a sacred institution, commanding the reverence and affection of a virtuous people. No high degree of this sanctity can be looked for till that moderation is attained which, during the prevalence of asceticism and its opposite, is reached only by a few. That it yet exists nowhere as the characteristic of any society,—that all the blessings of domestic life are not yet open to all, so as to preclude the danger of any one encroaching on his neighbour,—is but too evident to the travelled observer. He can only mark the degree of approximation to this state of high morals wherever he goes.

The traveller everywhere finds woman treated as the inferior party in a compact in which both parties have an equal interest. Any agreement thus formed is imperfect, and is liable to disturbance; and the danger is great in proportion to the degradation of the supposed weaker party. The degree of the degradation of woman is as good a test as the moralist can adopt for ascertaining the state of domestic morals in any country.

The Indian squaw carries the household burdens, trudging in the dust, while her husband on horseback paces before her, unencumbered but by his own gay trappings. She carries the wallet with food, the matting for the lodge, the merchandize (if they possess any), and her infant. There is no exemption from labour for the squaw of the most vaunted chief. In other countries the wife may be found drawing the plough, hewing wood and carrying water; the men of the family standing idle to witness her toils. Here the observer may feel pretty sure of his case. From a condition of slavery like this, women are found rising to the highest condition in which they are at present seen, in France, England, and the United States,—where they are less than half-educated, precluded from earning a subsistence, except in a very few ill-paid employments, and prohibited from giving or withholding their assent to laws which they are yet bound by penalties to obey. In France, owing to the great destruction of men in the wars of Napoleon, women are engaged, and successfully engaged, in a variety of occupations which have been elsewhere supposed unsuitable to the sex. Yet there remains so large a number who cannot, by the most strenuous labour in feminine employments, command the necessaries of life, while its luxuries may be earned by infamy, that the morals of the society are naturally bad. Great attention has of late been given to this subject in France: the social condition of women is matter of thought and discussion to a degree which promises some considerable amelioration. Already, women can do more in France than anywhere else; they can attempt more without ridicule or arbitrary hinderance: and the women of France are probably destined to lead the way in the advance which the sex must hereafter make. At present, society is undergoing a transition from a feudal state to one of mutual government; and women, gaining in some ways, suffer in others during the process. They have, happily for themselves, lost much of the peculiar kind of observance which was the most remarkable feature of the chivalrous age; and it has been impossible to prevent their sharing in the benefits of the improvement and diffusion of knowledge. All cultivation of their powers has secured to them the use of new power; so that their condition is far superior to what it was in any former age. But new difficulties about securing a maintenance have arisen. Marriage is less general; and the husbands of the greater number of women are not secure of a maintenance from the lords of the soil, any more than women are from being married. The charge of their own maintenance is thrown upon large numbers of women, without the requisite variety of employments having been opened to them, or the needful education imparted. A natural consequence of this is, that women are educated to consider marriage the one object in life, and therefore to be extremely impatient to secure it. The unfavourable influence of these results upon the happiness of domestic life may be seen at a glance.

This may be considered the sum and substance of female education in England; and the case is scarcely better in France, though the independence and practical efficiency of women there are greater than in any other country. The women in the United States are in a lower condition than either, though there is less striving after marriage, from its greater frequency, and little restriction is imposed upon the book-learning which women may obtain. But the old feudal notions about the sex flourish there, while they are going out in the more advanced countries of Europe; and these notions, in reality, regulate the condition of women. American women generally are treated in no degree as equals, but with a kind of superstitious outward observance, which, as they have done nothing to earn it, is false and hurtful. Coexisting with this, there is an extreme difficulty in a woman's obtaining a maintenance, except by the exercise of some rare powers. In a country where women are brought up to be indulged wives, there is no hope, help, or prospect for such as have not money and are not married.

In America, women can earn a maintenance only by teaching, sewing, employment in factories, keeping boarding-houses, and domestic service. Some governesses are tolerably well paid,—comparing their earnings with those of men. Employment in factories, and domestic service, are well paid. Sewing is so wretched an occupation everywhere, that it is to be hoped that machinery will soon supersede the use of human fingers in a labour so unprofitable. In Boston, Massachusetts, a woman is paid ninepence (sixpence English) for making a shirt.—In England, besides these occupations, others are opening; and, what is of yet greater consequence, the public mind is awakening to the necessity of enlarging the sphere of female industry. Some of the inferior branches of the fine arts have lately offered profitable employment to many women. The commercial adversity to which the country has been exposed from time to time, has been of service to the sex, by throwing hundreds and thousands of them upon their own resources, and thus impelling them to urge claims and show powers which are more respected every day.—In France this is yet more conspicuously the case. There, women are shopkeepers, merchants, professional accountants, editors of newspapers, and employed in many other ways, unexampled elsewhere, but natural and respectable enough on the spot. Domestic morals are affected in two principal respects by these differences. Where feminine occupations of a profitable nature are few, and therefore overstocked, and therefore yielding a scanty maintenance with difficulty, there is the strongest temptation to prefer luxury with infamy to hardship with unrecognized honour. Hence arises much of the corruption of cities,—less in the United States than in Europe, from the prevalence of marriage,—but awful in extent everywhere. Where vice is made to appear the interest of large classes of women, the observer may be quite sure that domestic morals will be found impure. If he can meet with any society where the objects of life are as various and as freely open to women as to men, there he may be sure of finding the greatest amount of domestic purity and peace; for, if women were not helpless, men would find it far less easy to be vicious.

The other way in which domestic morals are affected by the scope which is allowed to the powers of women, is through the views of marriage which are induced. Marriage is debased by being considered the one worldly object in life,—that on which maintenance, consequence, and power depend. Where the husband marries for connexion, fortune, or an heir to his estate, and the wife for an establishment, for consequence, or influence, there is no foundation for high domestic morals and lasting peace; and in a country where marriage is made the single aim of all women, there is no security against the influence of some of these motives even in the simplest and purest cases of attachment. The sordidness is infused from the earliest years; the taint is in the mind before the attachment begins, before the objects meet; and the evil effects upon the marriage state are incalculable.

All this—the sentiment of society with regard to Woman and to Marriage, the social condition of Woman, and the consequent tendency and aim of her education,—the traveller must carefully observe. Each civilized society claims for itself the superiority in its treatment of woman. In one, she is indulged with religious shows, and with masquerades, or Punch, as an occasional variety. In another, she is left in honourable and undisputed possession of the housekeeping department. In a third, she is allowed to meddle, behind the scenes, with the business which is confided to her husband's management. In a fourth, she is satisfied in being the cherished domestic companion, unaware of the injury of being doomed to the narrowness of mind which is the portion of those who are always confined to the domestic circle. In a fifth, she is flattered at being guarded and indulged as a being requiring incessant fostering, and too feeble to take care of herself. In a sixth society, there may be found expanding means of independent occupation, of responsible employment for women; and here, other circumstances being equal, is the best promise of domestic fidelity and enjoyment.

It is a matter of course that women who are furnished with but one object,—marriage,—must be as unfit for anything when their aim is accomplished as if they had never had any object at all. They are no more equal to the task of education than to that of governing the state; and, if any unexpected turn of adversity befals them, they have no resource but a convent, or some other charitable provision. Where, on the other hand, women are brought up capable of maintaining an independent existence, other objects remain when the grand one is accomplished. Their independence of mind places them beyond the reach of the spoiler; and their cultivated faculty of reason renders them worthy guardians of the rational beings whose weal or woe is lodged in their hands. There is yet, as may be seen by a mere glance over society, only a very imperfect provision made anywhere for doing justice to the next generation by qualifying their mothers; but the observer of morals may profit by marking the degrees in which this imperfection approaches to barbarism. Where he finds that girls are committed to convents for education, and have no alternative in life but marriage, in which their will has no share, and a return to their convent, he may safely conclude that there a plurality of lovers is a matter of course, and domestic enjoyments of the highest kind undesired and unknown. He may conclude that as are the parents, so will be the children; and that, for one more generation at least, there will be little or no improvement. But where he finds a variety of occupations open to women; where he perceives them not only pursuing the lighter mechanic arts, dispensing charity and organizing schools for the poor, but occupied in education, and in the study of science and the practice of the fine arts, he may conclude that here resides the highest domestic enjoyment which has yet been attained, and the strongest hope of a further advance.

Children in all countries are, as Mrs. Grant of Laggan says, first vegetables, and then they are animals, and then they come to be people; but their way of growing out of one stage into another is as different, in different societies, as their states of mind when they are grown up. They all have limbs, senses, and intellects; but their growth of heart and mind depends incalculably upon the spirit of the society amidst which they are reared. The traveller must study them wherever he meets them. In one country, multitudes of them lie about in the streets, basking in the sun, and killing vermin; while the children of the very poorest persons of another country are decently clothed, and either busily occupied with such domestic employments as they are capable of, or at school, or playing among the rocks, or climbing trees, or crawling about the wooden bridges, without fear or danger. From this one symptom, the observer might learn the poverty and idleness of the lower classes of Spain, and the comfort and industry of those of the United States. As to the children of the richer classes, there is the widest difference in the world between those who are the idols of their mothers, (as in societies where the heart's love is lavished on the children which has not been engaged by the husband,) and those who are early steeped in corruption, (as in slave countries,) and those who are reared philosophers and saints, and those to whom home is a sunny paradise hedged round with love and care, and those who are little men and women of the world from the time they can walk alone. All these kinds of children exist,—sure breathings of the moral atmosphere of their homes. The traveller must watch them, talk with them, and learn from their bearing towards their parents, and the bent of their affections, what is the spirit of the families of the land.

From observation on these classes of facts,—the Occupation of the people, the respective Characters of the occupied classes, the Health of the population, the state of Marriage and of Women, and the character of Childhood,—the moralist may learn more of the private life of a community than from the conversation of any number of the individuals who compose it.