APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian towns which takes its seat on Swabia’s town-bench of thirty-one towns. Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household goddess; and according to whose “election of grace” it is that poor sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were stolen silver plate with the owner’s name still unobliterated—or as though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came from the tapnearer the topproved sour. However, it is impossible for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too prevalent error respecting large towns.The Behemoths and Condors among towns—Petersburg, London, Vienna—might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what itejects(its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears the country in the first place of villages, and next of country towns—which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of capital cities—inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs. Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,—or converted into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner—any country people that might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming reefs or atolls of a town.When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile of all classes, at heart, to equality—have next to be attacked and, if possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however—could we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable opponents of equality—the peasants, and the people of the smaller towns—should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be extinct—ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was merely aplebeianone. There would be an absolute equality if pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession ofonepatent of nobility, and of real authenticancestors. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing would be as it was in somewhatlatertimes than those just alluded to,allcapital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility are.It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants; what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings, and supplies of, alone and unassisted—to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced, starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty inprecipitatingthe citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered, in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and levyings of contributions—(which none but plebeian authors term “flaying” and “pulling the hide over the ears”),—and, the bark being off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions of men “cash down,” on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people, can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the clever manner in which many German states have, byenergetictreatment,determinedtheir population, as morbid matter, in adownwarddirection (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down to the United States of America, which are situated straightbelowthem.Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of other towns. I admit, as Nicolai’s assertion, that of the 60,000 which Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome—in the West Indies there were of course—more slaves than free men, for which reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble landlords, although the latterought, one would think, to be in the majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with, many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace—in the tax she levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but that of home growth, to excludethoughtand other (in an ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort—and even in her “green market,” or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, “Nobody at home.” (Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel continues to maintain its title ofimperial markettown, like a secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does, which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther threw at the devil.)
GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian towns which takes its seat on Swabia’s town-bench of thirty-one towns. Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household goddess; and according to whose “election of grace” it is that poor sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were stolen silver plate with the owner’s name still unobliterated—or as though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.
The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.
To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came from the tapnearer the topproved sour. However, it is impossible for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too prevalent error respecting large towns.
The Behemoths and Condors among towns—Petersburg, London, Vienna—might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what itejects(its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears the country in the first place of villages, and next of country towns—which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of capital cities—inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs. Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,—or converted into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner—any country people that might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming reefs or atolls of a town.
When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile of all classes, at heart, to equality—have next to be attacked and, if possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however—could we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable opponents of equality—the peasants, and the people of the smaller towns—should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be extinct—ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was merely aplebeianone. There would be an absolute equality if pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession ofonepatent of nobility, and of real authenticancestors. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing would be as it was in somewhatlatertimes than those just alluded to,allcapital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility are.
It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants; what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings, and supplies of, alone and unassisted—to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced, starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty inprecipitatingthe citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered, in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and levyings of contributions—(which none but plebeian authors term “flaying” and “pulling the hide over the ears”),—and, the bark being off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions of men “cash down,” on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people, can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the clever manner in which many German states have, byenergetictreatment,determinedtheir population, as morbid matter, in adownwarddirection (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down to the United States of America, which are situated straightbelowthem.
Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of other towns. I admit, as Nicolai’s assertion, that of the 60,000 which Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome—in the West Indies there were of course—more slaves than free men, for which reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble landlords, although the latterought, one would think, to be in the majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with, many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace—in the tax she levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but that of home growth, to excludethoughtand other (in an ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort—and even in her “green market,” or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, “Nobody at home.” (Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel continues to maintain its title ofimperial markettown, like a secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does, which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther threw at the devil.)