Growth of the Commercial Interest.—Family Pride almost extinct.—Effect of heavy Taxation.—Titles indiscriminately granted.—Increase of the House of Peers.
The commercial system has long been undermining the distinction of ranks in society, and introducing a worse distinction in its stead. Mushrooms are every day starting up from the dunghill of trade, nobody knows how, and family pride is therefore become a common subject of ridicule in England; the theatres make it the object of a safe jest, sure to find applause from the multitude, who are ever desirous of depreciating what they do not possess; and authors, who are to themselves, as one of their own number says,
"A whole Welsh genealogy alone,"
continue to attack as a prejudice a feeling, which, as philosophers, it is now time for them to defend. That the new gentry of the country should join in this ridicule ought not to be wondered at. He who has no paternal oaks has reason to prefer the poplars of his own planting, and may well like to expatiate upon the inconvenience of an old family house, long galleries, huge halls, and windows which none but the assessor can count, in his own villa, which is built to the pattern of the last tax upon light, and where the stucco upon the walls is hardly dry. But that the true gentlemen of England should so readily yield up their own precedency to vulgar opinion is indeed extraordinary. Nothing, however, is now valued for being old. The windows and the whole front of the mansion must be modernized; the old avenues of elms, which two centuries have just brought to their full perfection, are sacrificed to a hatred of uniformity; and the yew hedges, which have been clipt year after year till they formed a thick and impenetrable wall, are levelled and shorn smooth away. The fashion of the furniture must be changed; even the old plate must be melted down, and recast in the newest shape; and an English Esquire would as soon walk abroad in his grandfather's wedding suit, as suffer the family Tree to be seen in his hall.
This degeneracy of feeling is confined to the English, and has not yet extended to the Scotch, or Welsh, or Irish. That it is not necessarily and unavoidably produced by commerce seems to be proved by the instances of Genoa and Venice; but the commercial spirit was never so universal in those states as it is in England, where it extends to every thing, and poisons every thing:—literature, arts, religion, government, are alike tainted; it is a lues which has got into the system of the country, and is rotting flesh and bone.
In the celestial hierarchy, we are told, the gradations, though infinite, are imperceptible; so gradual is the ascent, and so beautiful and perfect is order in heaven. Experience shows that something like this is desirable in civil society; at least, where the limits of rank are most strongly marked, there is there the worst tyranny and the most abject misery, as among the casts of Hindostan. Towards this evil the English are tending; the commercial system encroaches on the one hand upon the aristocracy, and on the other it treads down the peasants, and little landholders, the yeomanry as they were called, who were once the strength of England. Half a century ago the country was divided into small farms; here was a race of men above the labourers, though labourers themselves; not superior to their hinds in manners or education, and living at the same table with them, but still in independence, and with that feeling of independence which was the pride of the country, and which has made the country what it is. These men have disappeared since agriculture has become a trading speculation: field has been joined to field; a moneyed farmer comes, like Aaron's rod, and swallows up all within his reach. Agriculture is certainly materially improved; whether the markets be better supplied or not is disputed; there is less competition, and the rich cultivator can withhold produce which his poorer predecessor must have brought to sale. In this point perhaps the advantages and disadvantages may be equal. But the evil is, that there is one gradation the less in society; that the second step in the ladder is taken away. And this evil is felt and acknowledged: the race of domestic servants were formerly the children of these little farmers; they were decently and religiously educated; and because they were of respectable parentage, they possessed a sort of family pride which made them respectable themselves. But the labouring and manufacturing poor have no leisure to breed up their children religiously, and no means to do it decently, and a very general depravity of the servants is complained of.
The gentry of small fortune have also disappeared. The colonial war bore hard upon them, but the last has crushed them. Inheriting what to their forefathers had been an ample subsistence, they have found themselves step by step curtailed of the luxuries and at last of the comforts of life, without a possibility of helping themselves. For those who were arrived at manhood it was too late to enter into any profession; and to embark what they possessed in trade was hazarding all, and putting themselves at the mercy of a partner. Meantime year after year the price of every article of necessary consumption has increased with accelerating rapidity: education has become more costly, and at the same time more indispensable; and taxation year after year falls heavier, while the means of payment become less. In vain does he whose father has lived in opulence, and whom the villagers with hereditary respect still address hat in hand, or bow to as they pass,—in vain does he put down the carriage, dismiss the footman, and block up windows even in the house front. There is no escape. Wine disappears from his side-board; there is no longer a table ready for his friend; the priest is no longer invited after service;—all will not do: his boys must out to sea, or seek their fortune in trade; his girls sink lower, and become dependants on the rich, or maintain themselves by the needle, while he mortgages the land, for immediate subsistence, deeper and deeper as the burthen of the times presses heavier and heavier;—and happy is he if it lasts long enough to keep him from absolute want before he sinks into the grave.
While one part of the community is thus depressed by the effects of war, and the commercial system, and the diminished value of money, they who are in the lucky scale rise as others sink; and merchants and bankers and contractors make their way by wealth even into the ranks of nobility. JamesI., whom we compelled to cut off the head of the Raleigh, being perpetually at his shifts to supply the extravagance of his infamous favourites, invented the title of baronet, and offered fifty of these titles for sale at a thousand pounds each,—in those days a weighty sum. This title has never indeed since been publicly put up to sale, yet it is still to be purchased; and as one of the expedients during the American war, it is known that the then minister, having no readier means of rewarding one of his adherents, gave him the blank patent of a baronetcy, to make the most of, and fill up with what name he pleased. It is true that the title confers no power, the holder still continuing a commoner; but when honorary distinctions are thus disposed of, they cease to be honourable. Knighthood is here bestowed indiscriminately upon the greatest and the meanest occasions: it was conferred upon Sir Sidney Smith, who stopt the progress of Bonaparte in Syria and drove him from Acre; and it is lavished upon every provincial merchant who comes up with an address from his native city to the king upon any subject of public congratulation. This title, which consists in affixing Sir to the proper name (a word equivalent in its common acceptation to Senor), differs from the baronetcy in not being hereditary; but, as I have before said, whoever chooses to pay the price may entail it upon his children.
The indiscriminate admission to nobility is a practice which produces the same mischievous effect upon public opinion. They must be short-sighted politicians who do not see that, if they would have nobility respected, they should reserve it as the reward of great and signal services; that it is monstrous to give the same honours and privileges to a man because he has the command of three or four boroughs, as to Nelson for the battle of the Nile. This however is not all the evil; the political system of the country is altered by it, and the power of the old nobles gradually transferred to a set of new men, to an aristocracy of wealth. The Lords in England form the second power in the stale, and no law can be enacted till it has received their approbation. About a century ago the party in opposition to the crown was known to be the strongest in the house of lords, and the queen, knowing that her measures would else be outvoted, created twelve new peers, who turned the scale. This open and undisguised exertion of the prerogative, to the actual subversion of the constitution as it then stood, provoked nothing more than a sarcasm. When the first of these new peers gave his vote upon the question, one of the old nobles addressed himself to the rest, and said, "I suppose, gentlemen, you all vote by your foreman," alluding to their number, which was the same as that of a common jury. This practice of granting peerages has been more frequent during the present reign than at any former period, not less than three-fifths of the house of lords having been created, and the number is every year increased. But to the old aristocracy of the country every new creation is a diminution of their power and weight in the political scale. This evil will eventually occasion its own remedy; the lords will become at last too numerous for one assembly, and sooner or later some mode of election for seats must be resorted to for the younger peers, as is now the case in Scotland.
Agur prayed to the Almighty to give him neither poverty nor riches, and the wisest of mankind recorded his prayer for its wisdom. That which is wisdom for an individual must be wisdom for a nation, for wisdom and morality are not variable. There are too much riches and too much poverty in England; and were there less of the one there would be less of the other. Taxation might be so directed as to break down the great properties, and counteract the law of primogeniture.—Without that law no country can emerge from barbarism, (unless, as in Peru, no right of individual property be acknowledged,) and, in small estates, it seems advisable that it should always hold good; but when a nation has attained to that state of improvement which England has, the operation of the law is mischievous. Society has outgrown it. But thus it is that, retaining institutions after their utility has ceased, man is crippled on his march, by fettering, like the Chinese women, the feet of maturity with the shoes of childhood.
