“Women there are, but I’m afraidThey cannot find a priest.”
“Women there are, but I’m afraidThey cannot find a priest.”
“Women there are, but I’m afraidThey cannot find a priest.”
“Women there are, but I’m afraid
They cannot find a priest.”
“On St Kilda,” says the Census, “there is a manse and a church, but no medical man—no clergyman resident on the island.”
Will the world be better, Eusebius, for all these statistics; will civilisation be one jot advanced, byregisteringour tailors as well as their paletots?—by knowing how many tinkers there are in the world to mend our kettles? They will, be sure of it, trudge about just the same, and do their work as badly or as well as before. All trades will be governed by their own instincts, without the least difference; unless, indeed, statistics take a more useful turn, and fix their stigma upon the adulterators of goods. We may have reason to say something in favour of the ScrutinizerGeneral, when he can tell us where the wines called port are manufactured that never came from Portugal, and who make them; who adulterates our drugs, so that people are dying for lack of the genuine; who, in fact, poison all we eat and drink, and put devils’-dust on our backs for woollen cloth. It is very little to the purpose to have the number of thieves and rascals that infest the world, if the Augean stable of crime is left uncleansed. If dishonesty should ever be driven out of common trades, which it has so notoriously infected, a great thing would be done; and we might bear with a grateful quietude more numbering and registering of us and all our concerns than we quite like; although it surely is not necessary for this to carry on such espionage as this Census contains. Perhaps even its absurdity is dangerous, for it induces people to fix their minds upon that, not upon its ulterior purposes. While men are laughing at things, wilily ridiculous in themselves, they know not what mischief is secretly brewing. I maintain that it is a great offence in any way to touch the sanctity of the hearth—that what economists and statistic inventors may please to call public liberty, should be allowed to destroy home liberty. It is something monstrous that every one should be obliged to give an account of every inmate in his house, their ages, conditions, and their relationship. It is better to let some of the peccadilloes of life escape notice, than register them and the house. If Miss or Mrs Debora Wilkins shall receive under her hospitality a big nephew, it is very hard upon her to be obliged to certify the exact relationship, or induce her into the great error of writing down a falsehood. Men may be a little more careless in such matters, but feminine nicety is touched to the quick. I remember once an Irishman walking into a drawing-room, and introducing to the lady of the house a tall youth, as, “Give me leave to introduce my nephew;” then putting his hand aside of his mouth, he added, in a whisper which may be truly termed Irish, for it was quite as loud as the first introduction, “he’s my son.” Could you, having any bowels of compassion, extort a like confession from such an unprotected female as Miss Debora? A registration commission might, if encouraged, hereafter ransack her unfortunate boxes to find baby-linen. Is there to be nothing but one rigid rule—no charity shown to sex and age—but the unsparing discovery of both on that fatal 30th of March? Must no female, then, escape to her lover’s arms in male attire—no “lubberly boy” pass for a sweet Anne Page, that sweet Anne Page fall not to the lot of a fool? Must foibles, frailties, and follies be all registered in damnatory schedules? Surely there might be a little decent connivance, such as would spare the two village ladies, who, being born in the sameanno Domini, annually visited each other to determine what should be their ages for the ensuing year. Their only comfort will be in bribery and corruption, which they will be thankful is not yet put down, and a fee will spare what uncharitable census would expose. There may be something in attacking crimes and discovering frauds which touch the whole community. These are not much harboured in homes, but in public-houses, and in shops, which are not homes, but as having a public character, and giving public invitation to all to enter them, ought to come under some kind of surveillance; but when the citizen shuts his street-door, let none force an entrance. Let no Asmodeus take off his roof, and publish the within little histories, nor make gimlet-holes in walls and ceilings. Such doings are but, as at present, a slight exaggeration or caricature of a census. Let there be a police, and a good one; even with much secret scrutiny allowed them,—it is for the public safety; but there let it end in its admitted authority. Make not a police of a census commission, nor let the one interfere with or usurp the office of the other. Let a census be content to number the people—a police take crime under its cognisance. The undying, ever-seeing, and acting arrangement of a police is one of the most curious phenomena of society. For revolutions that appear to overturn everything, scarcely touch a well-ordered police; the excellence of which is, that it lives and moves unseen, unfelt, by the good—that it is a protector.
I remember years ago reading an anecdote showing the perfection of the old Parisian police. A gentleman had sojourned in Paris a week or two, when one day he was requested to attend at the police-office. He was surprised when told how he had occupied himself since he had been in Paris—what houses he had frequented, what friends visited, what business he had transacted. He was finally asked the home-question, “Are you a man of courage—can you rely upon yourself?” He thought he might. Then he was told that there was a plot to murder him in his bed that night—that his own servant was in conspiracy with others for that purpose. He was desired to go to bed as usual, and, if he did not sleep, to appear to sleep, and to fear nothing. In the night he heard his room-door open, a person or persons enter—he knew steps were softly approaching his bed—he fancied the arm uplifted to murder him. His reliance and his courage failed him not. Under his bed, and elsewhere in his room, soldiers had been secreted. To make the story short, his servant and the accomplices were taken. The census which a police quietly makes has an object of general safety. It has its one pursuit. It has its particular game, and we may well give it its license. By it we sleep safely in our beds. It does its complicated but defined work silently; whereas the other census is perpetually knocking at every man’s door, to ask impertinent questions. It is a perpetual warning to “beware the Ides of March;” for then it will come and toss the clothes off your bed at earliest dawn, lest you should rise and escape; and you must give an account of all the beds, and all who slept in them. And what is all this disturbance for? For no earthly good that any of the persecuted can yet see, but all mistrust the end. Must every one of us have a ticket and number on his back? It is the same thing, if he and his concerns, and all the relations of his life, are down in Busybody’s book. There he sits in his Centralisation Office, with his millions of electric wires passing underground, and coming up unseen in every man’s house. He means to have his hook in every man’s nose, nay, every man’s, woman’s, and child’s, and to draw them in when he wills, as a big spider does his flies, and perhaps to leave them sucked as dry, suspended in his million-threaded web. And has he not as many eyes as that ugly creature, and as many ways of spreading out his ubiquitous legs—backward, forward, or circular? Oh, this Busybody!—he means to have a line in every one’s mouth, and to draw all after him as Gulliver did the diminutive fleet. But I say, Eusebius, that, Liliputians as we are in his eyes, it is hard if we cannot combine, get our multitudinous toils round his legs, and with a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether, throw him on his back, tie him down hands and feet, search his pockets for his hooks, and then shoot our sharpest arrows into the body of this Quintus Flestrin. We will not be any more gulled by this huge Gulliver. He is the Great Humbug and Deceiver, cajoling silly ones into a belief in the marvel of his arithmetic; that all the commonest things of life must be done by his mystical numbers, or will be done ill; that they must count and think of how many joints, bones, muscles, and sinews they have in their toes, before venturing their feet a single step.
What is become of civilisation all this while, Eusebius? This Census, which was to tell so much, has not thrown light upon the question. Yet, perhaps, after all, it is a more simple one than you or I thought it to be. I go back to the placidity of the Chinese lady in the picture. I am now gazing on her expressive trustfulness—upon a complexion that, if there be many such, justifies the title of “Celestial Empire.” She, the feminine representative of a nation, the prized pearl of the Romance of the Porcelain Empire, the very “Gentilezza,” the embodied purity of a people’s best thoughts, the endowed growth of a perfection above nature, for so much worship as humanity may, for its improvement in civilisation, be allowed to set up in the garden of imaginary virtues, the very Goshen where grow plants and flowers, and sweet waters glide unknown to working nature, and all courting the enchanting and enchanted beauty.
“L’acqua la terra in suo favor s’inchina.” Not to be tedious with you in this fancied passion, Eusebius, I come to the point I aim at. She is the emblem of civilisation, and that is feminine influence. Its ideal has beautified that porcelain world, as it will ever beautify every other where it is felt and maintained.
Yes, Eusebius, civilisation, like common sense, aptly called mother-wit, comes from the mother. He who, as child and boy, loved and reverenced for all her purity, truth, and goodness, a mother, when he becomes man will ever do his part in civilising the world. From the first romance of mother’s love groweth every other romance; for romance is a noble and delicate sentiment. To propagate this is to propagate civilisation. But if any lack this reverence, from whatever cause, and would palm upon society, as better than its romance, an idle knowledge, a low spirit of calculation, an accumulation of mere facts and figures, trust him not with the secrets of your breast; all his doings tend to selfishness and rebarbarism. A mother to him is but as poor old Mrs Bounderby ignored. For my own part, Eusebius, when I see such glib statistical calculators boasting of their practical knowledge, I bethink me of the learned dog in the show, who with perseverance has acquired the trick of putting his paw upon letters and numbers, and of arithmetising required ages. Take heed to your pocket on such occasions; for though you have paid your admission-ticket, there remains the last acquirement, the last main trick to be exhibited, the going round the company with the hat in his mouth.