The hotel at Palma is like the Savoy, but the cooking is a great deal better. It is large and new; its decorations are in the modern style with twiddly lines. Its luxury is greater than that of its London competitor. It has an eager, willing porter and a delightful landlord. You do what you like in it and there are books to read. One of these books was an English guide-book. I read it. It was full of lies, so gross and palpable that I told my host how abominably it traduced his country, and advised him first to beat the book well and then to burn it over a slow fire. It said that the people were superstitious—it is false. They have no taboo about days; they play about on Sundays. They have no taboo about drinks; they drink what they feel inclined (which is wine) when they feel inclined (which is when they are thirsty). They have no taboo book, Bible or Koran, no damned psychical rubbish, no damned "folk-lore," no triply damned mumbo-jumbo of social ranks; kind, really good, simple-minded dukes would have a devil of a time in Palma. Avoid it, my dears, keep away. If anything, the people of Palma have not quite enough superstition. They play there for love, money, and amusement. No taboo (talking of love) about love.
The book said they were poor. Their populace is three or four times as rich as ours. They own their own excellent houses and their own land; no one but has all the meat and fruit and vegetables and wine he wants, and usually draught animals and musical instruments as well.
In fact, the book told the most frightful lies and was a worthy companion to other guidebooks. It moved me to plan a guide-book of my own in which the truth should be told about all the places I know. It should be called "Guide to Northumberland, Sussex, Chelsea, the French frontier, South Holland, the Solent, Lombardy, the North Sea, and Rome, with a chapter on part of Cheshire and some remarks on the United States of America."
In this book the fault would lie in its too great scrappiness, but the merit in its exactitude. Thus I would inform the reader that the best time to sleep in Siena is from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, and that the best place to sleep is the north side of St. Domenic's ugly brick church there.
Again, I would tell him that the man who keeps the "Turk's Head" at Valogne, in Normandy, was only outwardly and professedly an Atheist, but really and inwardly a Papist.
I would tell him that it sometimes snowed in Lombardy in June, for I have seen it—and that any fool can cross the Alps blindfold, and that the sea is usually calm, not rough, and that the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and that Lourdes, contrary to the general opinion, does work miracles, for I have seen them.
I would also tell him of the place at Toulouse where the harper plays to you during dinner, and of the grubby little inn at Terneuzen on the Scheldt where they charge you just anything they please for anything; five shillings for a bit of bread, or half a crown for a napkin.
All these things, and hundreds of others of the same kind, would I put in my book, and at the end should be a list of all the hotels in Europe where, at the date of publication, the landlord was nice, for it is the character of the landlords which makes all the difference—and that changes as do all human things.
There you could see first, like a sort of Primate of Hotels, the Railway Hotel at York. Then the inn at La Bruyère in the Landes, then the "Swan" at Petworth with its mild ale, then the "White Hart" of Storrington, then the rest of them, all the six or seven hundred of them, from the "Elephant" of Chateau Thierry to the "Feathers" of Ludlow—a truly noble remainder of what once was England; the "Feathers" of Ludlow, where the beds are of honest wood with curtains to them, and where a man may drink half the night with the citizens to the success of their engines and the putting out of all fires. For there are in West England three little inns in three little towns, all in a line, and all beginning with an L—Ledbury, Ludlow, and Leominster, all with "Feathers," all with orchards round, and I cannot tell which is the best.
Then my guide-book will go on to talk about harbours; it will prove how almost every harbour was impossible to make in a little boat; but it would describe the difficulties of each so that a man in a little boat might possibly make them. It would describe the rush of the tide outside Margate and the still more dangerous rush outside Shoreham, and the absurd bar at Littlehampton that strikes out of the sea, and the place to lie at in Newhaven, and how not to stick upon the Platters outside Harwich; and the very tortuous entry to Poole, and the long channel into Christchurch past Hengistbury Head; and the enormous tides of South Wales; and why you often have to beach at Britonferry, and the terrible difficulty of mooring in Great Yarmouth; and the sad changes of Little Yarmouth, and the single black buoy at Calais which is much too far out to be of any use; and how to wait for the tide in the Swin. And also what no book has ever yet given, an exact direction of the way in which one may roll into Orford Haven, on the top of a spring tide if one has luck, and how if one has no luck one sticks on the gravel and is pounded to pieces.
Then my guide-book would go on to tell of the way in which to make men pleasant to you according to their climate and country; of how you must not hurry the people of Aragon, and how it is your duty to bargain with the people of Catalonia; and how it is impossible to eat at Daroca; and how careful one must be with gloomy men who keep inns at the very top of glens, especially if they are silent, under Cheviot. And how one must not talk religion when one has got over the Scotch border, with some remarks about Jedburgh, and the terrible things that happened to a man there who would talk religion though he had been plainly warned.
Then my guide-book would go on to tell how one should climb ordinary mountains, and why one should avoid feats; and how to lose a guide which is a very valuable art, for when you have lost your guide you need not pay him. My book will also have a note (for it is hardly worth a chapter) on the proper method of frightening sheep dogs when they attempt to kill you with their teeth upon the everlasting hills.
This my good and new guide-book (oh, how it blossoms in my head as I write!) would further describe what trains go to what places, and in what way the boredom of them can best be overcome, and which expresses really go fast; and I should have a footnote describing those lines of steamers on which one can travel for nothing if one puts a sufficiently bold face upon the matter.
My guide-book would have directions for the pacifying of Arabs, a trick which I learnt from a past master, a little way east of Batna in the year 1905—I will also explain how one can tell time by the stars and by the shadow of the sun; upon what sort of food one can last longest and how best to carry it, and what rites propitiate, if they are solemnized in a due order, the half-malicious fairies which haunt men when they are lost in lonely valleys, right up under the high peaks of the world. And my book should have a whole chapter devoted to Ulysses.
For you must know that one day I came into Narbonne where I had never been before, and I saw written up in large letters upon a big, ugly house:
Lodging for Man and Beast.
So I went in and saw the master, who had a round bullet head and cropped hair, and I said to him: "What! Are you landed, then, after all your journeys? And do I find you at last, you of whom I have read so much and seen so little?" But with an oath he refused me lodging.
This tale is true, as would be every other tale in my book.
What a fine book it will be!
"I will confess and I will not deny," said Wandering Peter (of whom you have heard little but of whom in God's good time you shall hear more). "I will confess and I will not deny that the chief pleasure I know is the contemplation of my fellow beings."
He spoke thus in his bed in the inn of a village upon the River Yonne beyond Auxerre, in which bed he lay a-dying; but though he was dying he was full of words.
"What energy! What cunning! What desire! I have often been upon the edge of a steep place, such as a chalk pit or a cliff above a plain, and watched them down below, hurrying around, turning about, laying down, putting up, leading, making, organizing, driving, considering, directing, exceeding, and restraining; upon my soul I was proud to be one of them! I have said to myself," said Wandering Peter, "lift up your heart; you also are one of these! For though I am," he continued, "a wandering man and lonely, given to the hills and to empty places, yet I glory in the workers on the plain, as might a poor man in his noble lineage. From these I came; to these in my old age I would have returned."
At these words the people about his bed fell to sobbing when they thought how he would never wander more, but Peter Wanderwide continued with a high heart:
"How pleasant it is to see them plough! First they cunningly contrive an arrangement that throws the earth aside and tosses it to the air, and then, since they are too weak to pull the same, they use great beasts, oxen or horses or even elephants, and impose them with their will, so that they patiently haul this contrivance through the thick clods; they tear up and they put into furrows, and they transform the earth. Nothing can withstand them. Birds you will think could escape them by flying up into the air. It is an error. Upon birds also my people impose their view. They spread nets, food, bait, trap, and lime. They hail stones and shot and arrows at them. They cause some by a perpetual discipline to live near them, to lay eggs and to be killed at will; of this sort are hens, geese, turkeys, ducks, and guinea-fowls. Nothing eludes the careful planning of man.
"Moreover, they can build. They do not build this way or that, as a dull necessity forces them, not they! They build as they feel inclined. They hew down, they saw through (and how marvellous is a saw!), they trim timber, they mix lime and sand, they excavate the recesses of the hills. Oh! the fine fellows! They can at whim make your chambers or the Tower prison, or my aunt's new villa at Wimbledon (which is a joke of theirs), or St. Pancras Station, or the Crystal Palace, or Westminster Abbey, or St. Paul's, or Bon Secours. They are agreeable to every change in the wind that blows about the world. It blows Gothic, and they say 'By all means'—and there is your Gothic—a thing dreamt of and done! It suddenly veers south again and blows from the Mediterranean. The jolly little fellows are equal to the strain, and up goes Amboise, and Anet, and the Louvre, and all the Renaissance. It blows everyhow and at random as though in anger at seeing them so ready. They care not at all! They build the Eiffel Tower, the Queen Anne house, the Mary Jane house, the Modern-Style house, the Carlton, the Ritz, the Grand Palais, the Trocadero, Olympia, Euston, the Midhurst Sanatorium, and old Beit's Palace in Park Lane. They are not to be defeated, they have immortal certitudes.
"Have you considered their lines and their drawings and their cunning plans?" said Wandering Peter. "They are astonishing there! Put a bit of charcoal into my dog's mouth or my pet monkey's paw—would he copy the world? Not he! But men—my brothers—theytake it in hand and make war against the unspeaking forces; the trees and the hills are of their own showing, and the places in which they dwell, by their own power, become full of their own spirit. Nature is made more by being their model, for in all they draw, paint, or chisel they are in touch with heaven and with hell…. They write (Lord! the intelligence of their men, and Lord! the beauty of their women). They write unimaginable things!
"They write epics, they write lyrics, they write riddles and marching songs and drinking songs and rhetoric, and chronicles, and elegies, and pathetic memories; and in everything that they write they reveal things greater than they know. They are capable," said Peter Wanderwide, in his dying enthusiasm, "of so writing that the thought enlarges upon the writing and becomes far more than what they have written. They write that sort of verse called 'Stop-Short,' which when it is written makes one think more violently than ever, as though it were an introduction to the realms of the soul. And then again they write things which gently mock themselves and are a consolation for themselves against the doom of death."
But when Peter Wanderwide said that word "death," the howling and the boo-hooing of the company assembled about his bed grew so loud that he could hardly hear himself think. For there was present the Mayor of the village, and the Priest of the village, and the Mayor's wife, and the Adjutant Mayor or Deputy Mayor, and the village Councillor, and the Road-mender, and the Schoolmaster, and the Cobbler, and all the notabilities, as many as could crush into the room, and none but the Doctor was missing.
And outside the house was a great crowd of the village folk, weeping bitterly and begging for news of him, and mourning that so great and so good a man should find his death in so small a place.
Peter Wanderwide was sinking very fast, and his life was going out with his breath, but his heart was still so high that he continued although his voice was failing:
"Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men, horses, ships, and precious stones as you can possibly manage to do. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay at home and hear in one's garden the voice of God.
"For my part I have followed out my fate. And I propose in spite of my numerous iniquities, by the recollection of my many joys in the glories of this earth, as by corks, to float myself in the sea of nothingness until I reach the regions of the Blessed and the pure in heart.
"For I think when I am dead Almighty God will single me out on account of my accoutrement, my stirrup leathers, and the things that I shall be talking of concerning Ireland and the Perigord, and my boat upon the narrow seas; and I think He will ask St. Michael, who is the Clerk and Registrar of battling men, who it is that stands thus ready to speak (unless his eyes betray him) of so many things? Then St. Michael will forget my name although he will know my face; he will forget my name because I never stayed long enough in one place for him to remember it.
"But St. Peter, because he is my Patron Saint and because I have always had a special devotion to him, will answer for me and will have no argument, for he holds the keys. And he will open the door and I will come in. And when I am inside the door of Heaven I shall freely grow those wings, the pushing and nascence of which have bothered my shoulder blades with birth pains all my life long, and more especially since my thirtieth year. I say, friends and companions all, that I shall grow a very satisfying and supporting pair of wings, and once I am so furnished I shall be received among the Blessed, and I shall at once begin to tell them, as I told you on earth, all sorts of things, both false and true, with regard to the countries through which I carried forward my homeless feet, and in which I have been given such fulfilment for my eyes."
When Peter Wanderwide had delivered himself of these remarks, which he did with great dignity and fire for one in such extremity, he gasped a little, coughed, and died.
I need not tell you what solemnities attended his burial, nor with what fervour the people flocked to pray at his tomb; but it is worth knowing that the poet of that place, who was rival to the chief poet in Auxerre itself, gathered up the story of his death into a rhyme, written in the dialect of that valley, of which rhyme this is an English translation:
When Peter Wanderwide was youngHe wandered everywhere he would;And all that he approved was sung,And most of what he saw was good.
When Peter Wanderwide was thrownBy Death himself beyond Auxerre,He chanted in heroic toneTo Priest and people gathered there:
"If all that I have loved and seenBe with me on the Judgment Day,I shall be saved the crowd betweenFrom Satan and his foul array.
"Almighty God will surely cry'St. Michael! Who is this that standsWith Ireland in his dubious eye,And Perigord between his hands,
"'And on his arm the stirrup thongs,And in his gait the narrow seas,And in his mouth Burgundian songs,But in his heart the Pyrenees?'
"St. Michael then will answer right(But not without angelic shame):'I seem to know his face by sight;I cannot recollect his name….'
"St. Peter will befriend me then,Because my name is Peter too;'I know him for the best of menThat ever wallopped barley brew.
"'And though I did not know him well,And though his soul were clogged with sin,Ihold the keys of Heaven and Hell.Be welcome, noble Peterkin.'
"Then shall I spread my native wingsAnd tread secure the heavenly floor,And tell the Blessed doubtful thingsOf Val d'Aran and Perigord."
* * * * *
This was the last and solemn jestOf weary Peter Wanderwide,He spoke it with a failing zest,And having spoken it, he died.
The nation known to history as the Nephalo Ceclumenazenoi, or, more shortly, the Nepioi, inhabited a fruitful and prosperous district consisting in a portion of the mainland and certain islands situated in the Picrocholian Sea; and had there for countless centuries enjoyed a particular form of government which it is not difficult to describe, for it was religious and arranged upon the principle that no ancient custom might be changed.
Lest such changes should come about through the lapse of time or the evil passions of men, the citizens of the aforesaid nation had them very clearly engraved in a dead language and upon bronze tablets, which they fixed upon the doors of their principal temple, where it stood upon a hill outside the city, and it was their laudable custom to entrust the interpretation of them not to aged judges, but to little children, for they argued that we increase in wickedness with years, and that no one is safe from the aged, but that children are, alone of the articulately speaking race, truth-tellers. Therefore, upon the first day of the year (which falls in that country at the time of sowing) they would take one hundred boys of ten years of age chosen by lot, they would make these hundred, who had previously for one year received instruction in their sacred language, write each a translation of the simple code engraved upon the bronze tablets. It was invariably discovered that these artless compositions varied only according to the ability of the lads to construe, and that some considerable proportion of them did accurately show forth in the vernacular of the time the meaning of those ancestral laws. They had further a magistrate known as the Archon. whose business it was to administrate these customs and to punish those who broke them. And this Archon, when or if he proposed something contrary to custom in the opinion of not less than a hundred petitioners, was judged by a court of children.
In this fashion for thousands of years did the Nepioi proceed with their calm and ordinary lives, enjoying themselves like so many grigs, and utterly untroubled by those broils and imaginations of State which disturbed their neighbours.
There was a legend among them (upon which the whole of this Constitution was based) that a certain Hero, one Melek, being in stature twelve foot high and no less than 93 inches round the chest, had landed in their country 150,000 years previously, and finding them very barbarous, slaying one another and unacquainted with the use of letters, the precious metals, or the art of usury, had instructed them in civilization, endowed them with letters, a coinage, police, lawyers, instruments of torture, and all the other requisites of a great State, and had finally drawn up for them this code of law or custom, which they carefully preserved engraved upon the tablets of bronze, which were set upon the walls of their chief temple on the hill outside the city.
Within the temple itself its great shrine and, so to speak, its very cause of being was the Hero's tomb. He lay therein covered with plates of gold, and it was confidently asserted and strictly and unquestionably believed that at some unknown time in the future he would come out to rule them for ever in a millennial fashion—though heaven knows they were happy enough as it was.
Among their customs was this: that certain appointed officers would at every change in the moon proclaim the former existence and virtue of Melek, his residence in the tomb, and his claims to authority. To enter the tomb, indeed, was death, but there was proof of the whole story in documents which were carefully preserved in the temple, and which were from time to time consulted and verified. The whole structure of Nepioian society reposed upon the sanctity of this story, upon the presence of the Hero in his tomb, and of his continued authority, for with this was intertwined, or rather upon this was based, the further sanctity of their customs.
Things so proceeded without hurt or cloud until upon one most unfortunate day a certain man, bearing the vulgar name of Megalocrates, which signifies a person whose health requires the use of a wide head-gear, discovered that a certain herb which grew in great abundance in their territory and had hitherto been thought useless would serve almost every purpose of the table, sufficing, according to its preparation, for meat, bread, vegetables, and salt, and, if properly distilled, for a liquor that would make the Nepioi even more drunk than did their native spirits.
From this discovery ensued a great plenty throughout the land, the population very rapidly increased, the fortunes of the wealthy grew to double, treble, and four times those which had formerly been known, the middle classes adopted a novel accent in speech and a gait hitherto unusual, while great numbers of the poor acquired the power of living upon so small a proportion of foul air, dull light, stagnant water, and mangy crusts as would have astonished their nicer forefathers. Meanwhile this great period of progress could not but lead to further discoveries, and the Nepioi had soon produced whole colleges in which were studied the arts useful to mankind and constantly discovered a larger and a larger number of surprising and useful things. At last the Nepioi (though this, perhaps, will hardly be credited) were capable of travelling underground, flying through the air, conversing with men a thousand miles away in a moment of time, and committing suicide painlessly whenever there arose occasion for that exercise.
It may be imagined with what reverence the authors of all these boons, the members of the learned colleges, were regarded; and how their opinions had in the eyes and ears of the Nepioi an unanswerable character.
Now it so happened that in one of these colleges a professor of more than ordinary position emitted one day the opinion that Melek had lived only half as long ago as was commonly supposed. In proof of this he put forward the undoubted truth that if Melek had lived at the time he was supposed to have lived, then he would have lived twice as long ago as he, the professor, said that he had lived. The more old-fashioned and stupid of the Nepioi murmured against such opinions, and though they humbly confessed themselves unable to discover any flaw in the professor's logic, they were sure he was wrong somewhere and they were greatly disturbed. But the opinion gained ground, and, what is more, this fruitful and intelligent surmise upon the part of the professor bred a whole series of further theories upon Melek, each of which contradicted the last but one, and the latest of which was always of so limpid and so self-evident a truth as to be accepted by whatever was intelligent and energetic in the population, and especially by the young unmarried women of the wealthier classes. In this manner the epoch of Melek was reduced to five, to three, to two, to one thousand years. Then to five hundred, and at last to one hundred and fifty. But here was a trouble. The records of the State, which had been carefully kept for many centuries, showed no trace of Melek's coming during any part of the time, but always referred to him as a long-distant forerunner. There was not even any mention of a man twelve foot high, nor even of one a little over 93 inches round the chest. At last it was proposed by an individual of great courage that he might be allowed to open the tomb of Melek and afterwards, if they so pleased, suffer death. This privilege was readily granted to him by the Archon. The worthy reformer, therefore, prised open the sacred shrine and found within it absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Upon this there arose among the Nepioi all manner of schools and discussions, some saying this and some that, but none with the certitude of old. Their customs fell into disrepute, and even the very professors themselves were occasionally doubted when they laid down the law upon matters in which they alone were competent—as, for instance, when they asserted that the moon was made of a peculiarly delicious edible substance which increased in savour when it was preserved in the store-rooms of the housewives; or when they affirmed with every appearance of truth that no man did evil, and that wilful murder, arson, cruelty to the innocent and the weak, and deliberate fraud were of no more disadvantage to the general state, or to men single, than the drinking of a cup of cold water.
So things proceeded until one day, when all custom and authority had fallen into this really lamentable deliquescence, fleets were observed upon the sea, manned by men-at-arms, the admiral of which sent a short message to the Archon proposing that the people of the country should send to him and his one-half of their yearly wealth for ever, "or," so the message proceeded, "take the consequences." Upon the Archon communicating this to the people there arose at once an infinity of babble, some saying one thing and some another, some proposing to pay neighbouring savages to come in and fight the invaders, others saying it would be cheaper to compromise with a large sum, but the most part agreeing that the wisest thing would be for the Archon and his great-aunt to go out to the fleet in a little boat and persuade the enemy's admiral (as they could surely easily do) that while most human acts were of doubtful responsibility and not really wicked, yet the invasion, and, above all, the impoverishment of the Nepioi was so foul a wrong as would certainly call down upon its fiendish perpetrator the fires of heaven.
While the Archon and his great-aunt were rowing out in the little boat a few doddering old men and superstitious females slunk off to consult the bronze tablets, and there found under Schedule XII these words: "If an enemy threaten the State, you shall arm and repel him." In their superstition the poor old chaps, with their half-daft female devotees accompanying them, tottered back to the crowds to persuade them to some ridiculous fanaticism or other, based on no better authority than the non-existent Melek and his absurd and exploded authority.
Judge of their horror when, as they neared the city, they saw from the height whereon the temple stood that the invaders had landed, and, having put to the sword all the inhabitants without exception, were proceeding to make an inventory of the goods and to settle the place as conquerors. The admiral summoned this remnant of the nation, and hearing what they had to say treated them with the greatest courtesy and kindness and pensioned them off for their remaining years, during which period they so instructed him and his fighting men in the mysteries of their religion as quite to convert them, and in a sense to found the Nepioian State over again; but it should be mentioned that the admiral, by way of precaution, changed that part of the religion which related to the tomb of Melek and situated the shrine in the very centre of the crater of an active volcano in the neighbourhood, which by night and day, at every season of the year, belched forth molten rock so that none could approach it within fifteen miles.
Among the delights of historical study which makes it so curiously similar to travel, and therefore so fatally attractive to men who cannot afford it, is the element of discovery and surprise: notably in little details.
When in travel one goes along a way one has never been before one often comes upon something odd, which one could not dream was there: for instance, once I was in a room in a little house in the south and thought there must be machinery somewhere from the noise I heard, until a man in the house quietly lifted up a trapdoor in the floor, and there, running under and through the house a long way below, was a river: the River Garonne.
It is the same way in historical study. You come upon the most extraordinary things: little things, but things whose unexpectedness is enormous. I had an example of this the other day, as I was looking up some last details to make certain of the affair of Valmy.
Most people have heard of the French Revolution, and many people have heard of the battle of Valmy, which decided the first fate of that movement, when it was first threatened by war. But very few people have read about Valmy, so it is necessary to give some idea of the action to understand the astonishing little thing attaching to it which I am about to describe.
The cannonade of Valmy was exchanged between a French Army with its back to a range of hills and a Prussian Army about a mile away over against them. It was as though the French Army had stretched from Leatherhead to Epsom and had engaged in a cannonade with a Prussian Army lying over against them in a position astraddle of the road to Kingston.
Through this range of hills at the back of the French Army lay a gap, just as there is a gap through the hills behind Leatherhead. Not only was that gap easily passable by an army—easily, at least, compared with the hill country on either side—but it had running through it the great road from Metz to Paris, so that advance along it was rapid and practicable.
It so happened that another force of the enemy besides that which was cannonading the French in front was advancing through this gap from behind, and it is evident that if this second force of the enemy had been able to get through the gap it would have been all up with the French. Dumouriez, who commanded the French, saw this well enough; he had ordered the gap to be strongly fortified and well gunned and a camp to be formed there, largely made up of Volunteers and Irregulars. On the proper conduct of that post depended everything: and here comes the fun. The commander of the post was not what you might expect, a Frenchman of any one of the French types with which the Revolution has made us familiar: contrariwise, he was an elderly private gentleman from the county of Norfolk.
His name was Money. The little that is known about him is entertaining to a degree. His own words prove him to be like the person in the song, "a very honest man," and luckily for us he has left in a book a record of the day (and subsequent actions) stamped vividly with his own character. John Money: called by his neighbours General John Money, not, as you might expect. General Money: a man devoted to the noble profession of arms and also eaten up with a passion for ballooning.
I find it difficult to believe that he was first in action at the age of nine years or that he held King George's commission as a Cornet at the age of ten. He does not tell us so himself nor do any of his friends. The surmise is that of our Universities, and it is worthy of them. Clap on ten years and you are nearer the mark. At any rate he was under fire in 1761, and he was a Cornet in 1762; a Cornet in the Inniskilling Dragoons with a commission dated on the 11th of March of that year. Then he transformed himself into a Linesman, got his company in the 9th Foot eight years later, and eight years later again, at the outbreak of the American War, he was a major. He was quarter-master-general under Burgoyne, he was taken prisoner—I think at Saratoga, but anyhow during that disastrous advance upon the Hudson Valley. He got his lieutenant-colonelcy towards the end of the war. He retired from the Army and never saw active service again. When the Low Countries revolted against Austria he offered his services to the insurgents and was accepted, but the truly entertaining chapter of his adventures begins when he suggested himself to the French Government as a very proper and likely man to command a brigade on the outbreak of the great war with the Empire and with Prussia.
Very beautifully does he tell us in his preface what moved him to that act. "Colonel Money," he says, in the quiet third person of a self-respecting Norfolk gentleman, "does not mean to assign any other reason for serving the armies of France than that he loves his profession and went there merely to improve himself in it." Spoken like Othello!
He dedicates the book, by the way, to the Marquis Townshend, and carefully adds that he has not got permission to dedicate it to that exalted nobleman, nay, that he fears that he would not get permission if he asked for it. But Lord Townshend is such a rattling good soldier that Colonel Money is quite sure he will want to hear all about the war. On which account he has this book so dedicated and printed by E. Harlow, bookseller to Her Majesty, in Pall Mall.
Before beginning his narrative the excellent fellow pathetically says, that as there was no war a little time before, nor apparently any likelihood of one, "Colonel Money once intended to serve the Turks"; from this horrid fate a Christian Providence delivered him, and sent him to the defence of Gaul.
His commission was dated on the 19th of July, 1792; Marshal of the Camps, that is, virtually, brigadier-general. He is very proud of it, and he gives it in full. It ends up "Given in the year of Grace 1792 of our Reign the 19th and Liberty the 4th. Louis." The phrase, in accompaniment with the signature and the date, is not without irony.
Colonel Money could never stomach certain traits in the French people.
Before he left Paris for his command on the frontier he was witness to the fighting when the Palace was stormed by the populace, and he is our authority for the fact that the 5th Battalion of Paris Volunteers stationed in the Champs Elysées helped to massacre the Swiss Guard.
"The lieutenant-colonel of this battalion," writes honest John Money, "who was under my command during part of the campaign, related to me the circumstances of this murder, and apparently with pleasure. He said: 'That the unhappy men implored mercy, but,' added he, 'we did not regard this. We put them all to death, and our men cut off most of their heads and fixed them on their bayonets.'"
Colonel or, as he then was, General Money disapproves of this.
He also disapproves of the officer in command of the Marseillese, and says he was a "Tyger." It seems that the "Tyger" was dining with Théroigne de Méricourt and three English gentlemen in the very hotel where Money was stopping, and it occurs to him that they might have broken in from their drunken revels next door and treated him unfriendly.
Then he goes to the frontier, and after a good deal of complaint that he has not been given his proper command he finds himself at the head of that very important post which was the saving of the Army of Valmy.
Dumouriez, who always talked to him in English (for English was more widely known abroad then than it is now, at least among gentlemen), had a very great opinion of Money; but he deplores the fact that Money's address to his soldiery was couched "in a jargon which they could not even begin to understand." Money does not tell us that in his account of the fighting, but he does tell us some very interesting things, which reveal him as a man at once energetic and exceedingly simple. He left the guns to Galbaud, remarking that no one but a gunner could attend to that sort of thing, which was sound sense; but the Volunteers, the Line, and the Cavalry he looked after himself, and when the first attack was made he gave the order to fire from the batteries. Just as they were blazing away Dillon, who was far off but his superior, sent word to the batteries to cease firing. Why, nobody knows. At any rate the orderly galloped up and told Money that those were Dillon's orders. On which Money very charmingly writes:
"I told him to go back and tell General Dillon that I commanded there, and that whilst the enemy fired shot and shell on meIshould continue to fire back on them." A sentence that warms the heart. Having thus delivered himself to the orderly, he began pacing up and down the parapet "to let my men see that there was not much to be apprehended from a cannonade."
You may if you will make a little picture of this to yourselves. A great herd of volunteers, some of whom had never been under fire, the rest of whom had bolted miserably at Verdun a few days before, men not yet soldiers and almost without discipline: the batteries banging away in the wood behind them, in front of them a long earthwork at which the enemy were lobbing great round lumps of iron and exploding shells, and along the edge of this earthwork an elderly gentleman from Norfolk, in England, walking up and down undisturbed, occasionally giving orders to his army, and teaching his command a proper contempt for fire.
He adds as another reason why he did not cease fire when he was ordered that "without doubt the troops would have thought there was treason in it, and I had probably been cut in pieces."
He did not understand what had happened at Valmy, though he was so useful in securing the success of that day. All he noted was that after the cannonade Kellermann had fallen back. He rode into St. Ménehould, where Dumouriez's head-quarters were, ran up to the top of the steeple and surveyed the country around the enemy's camp with an enormous telescope, laid a bet at dinner of five to one that the enemy would attack again (they did not do so, and so he lost his bet, but he says nothing about paying it), and then heard that France had been decreed a Republic. His comment on this piece of news is strong but cryptical. "It was surprising," he says, "to see what an effect this news had on the Army."
Every sentence betrays the personality: the keen, eccentric character which took to balloons just after the Montgolfiers, and fell with his balloon into the North Sea, wrote his Treatise on the use of such instruments in War, and was never happy unless he was seeing or doing something—preferably under arms. And in every sentence also there is that curious directness of statement which is of such advantage to vivacity in any memoir. Thus of Gobert, who served under him, he has a little footnote: "This unfortunate young man lost his head at the same time General Dillon suffered, and a very amiable young man he was, and an excellent officer."
He ends his book in a phrase from which I think not a word could be taken nor to which a word could be added without spoiling it. I will quote it in full.
"The reader, I trust, will excuse my having so often departed from the line of my profession in giving my opinion on subjects that are not military" (for instance, his objections to the head-cutting business), "but having had occasion to know the people of France I freely venture to submit my judgments to the public and have the satisfaction to find that they coincide with the opinion of those who know that extraordinary nationstill better than myself."
The people of Monomotapa, of whom I have written more than once, I have recently revisited; and I confess to an astonishment at the success with which they deal with the various difficulties and problems arising in their social life.
Thus, in most countries the laws of property are complex in the extreme; punishable acts in connexion with them are numerous and often difficult to define.
In Monomotapa the whole thing is settled in a very simple manner: in the first place, instead of strict laws binding men down by written words, they appoint a number of citizens who shall have it in their discretion to decide whether a man's actions are worthy of punishment or no; and these appointed citizens have also the power to assign the punishment, which may vary from a single day's imprisonment to a lifetime. So crimeless is the country, however, that in a population of over thirty millions less than twenty such nominations are necessary; I must, however, admit that these score are aided by several thousand minor judges who are appointed in a different manner.
Their method of appointment is this: it is discovered as accurately as may be by a man's manner of dress and the hours of his labour and the size of the house he inhabits, whether he have more than a certain yearly revenue; any man discovered to have more than this revenue is immediately appointed to the office of which I speak.
The power of these assessors is limited, however, for though it is left to their discretion whether their fellow-citizens are worthy of punishment or not, yet the total punishment they can inflict is limited to a certain number of years of imprisonment. In old times this sort of minor judge was not appointed in Monomotapa unless he could prove that he kept dogs in great numbers for the purposes of hunting, and at least three horses. But this foolish prejudice has broken down in the progress of modern enlightenment, and, as I have said, the test is now extended to a general consideration of clothes, the size of the house inhabited, and the amount of leisure enjoyed, the type of tobacco smoked, and other equally reasonable indications of judicial capacity.
The men thus chosen to consider the actions of their fellow-citizens in courts of law are rewarded in two ways: the first small body who are the more powerful magistrates are given a hundred times the income of an ordinary citizen, for it is claimed that in this way not only are the best men for the purpose obtained, but, further, so large a salary makes all temptation to bribery impossible and secures a strict impartiality between rich and poor.
The lesser judges, on the other hand, are paid nothing, for it is wisely pointed out that a man who is paid nothing and who volunteers his services to the State will not be the kind of a man who would take a bribe or who would consider social differences in his judgments.
It is further pointed out by the Monomotapans (I think very reasonably) that the kind of man who will give his services for nothing, even in the arduous work of imprisoning his fellow-citizens, will probably be the best man for the job, and does not need to be allured to it by the promise of a great salary. In this way they obtain both kinds of judges, and, oddly enough, each kind speaks, acts, and lives much as does the other.
I must next describe the methods by which this interesting and sensible people secure the ends of their criminal system.
When one of their magistrates has come to the conclusion that on the whole he will have a fellow-citizen imprisoned, that person is handed over to the guardianship of certain officials, whose business it is to see that the man does not die during the period for which he is entrusted to them. When some one of the numerous forms of torture which they are permitted to use has the effect of causing death, the official responsible is reprimanded and may even be dismissed. The object indeed of the whole system is to reform and amend the criminal. He is therefore forbidden to speak or to communicate in any way with human beings, and is segregated in a very small room devoid of all ornament, with the exception of one hour a day, during which he is compelled to walk round and round a deep, walled courtyard designed for the purpose of such an exercise. If (as is often the case) after some years of this treatment the criminal shows no signs of mental or moral improvement, he is released; and if he is a man of property, lives unmolested on what he has, and that usually in a quiet and retired way. But if he is devoid of property, the problem is indeed a difficult one, for it is the business of the police to forbid him to work, and they are rewarded if he is found committing any act which the judges or the magistrates are likely to disapprove. In this way even those who have failed to effect reform in their characters during their first term of imprisonment are commonly—if they are poor—re-incarcerated within a short time, so that the system works precisely as it was intended to, giving the maximum amount of reformation to the worst and the hardest characters. I should add that the Monomotapan character is such that in proportion to wealth a man's virtues increase, and it is remarkable that nearly all those who suffer the species of imprisonment I have described are of the poorer classes of society.
Though they are so reasonable, and indeed afford so excellent a model to ourselves in most of their social relations, the people of Monomotapa have, I confess, certain customs which I have never clearly understood, and which my increasing study of them fails to explain to me.
Thus, in matters which, with us, are thought susceptible of positive proof (such as the taste and quality of cooking, or the mental abilities of a fellow-citizen) the Monomotapans establish their judgment in a transcendental or super-rational manner. The cooking in a restaurant or hotel is with them excellent in proportion, not to the taste of the viands subjected to it, but to the rental of the premises. And when a man desires the most delicious food he does not consider where he has tasted such food in the past, but rather the situation and probable rateable value of the eating-house which will provide him with it. Nay, he is willing—if he understands that that rateable value is high—to pay far more for the same article than he would in a humbler hostelry.
The same super-rational method, as I have called it, applies to the Monomotapan judgment of political ability; for here it is not what a man has said or written, nor whether he has proved himself capable of foreseeing certain events of moment to the State, it is not these characters that determine his political career, but a mixture of other indices, one of which is that his brothers shall be younger than himself, another that when he speaks he shall strike the palm of his open left hand with his clenched right hand in a particular manner by no means commonly or easily acquired; another that he shall not wear at one and the same time a coat which is bifurcated and a hat of hemispherical outline; another that he shall keep silence upon certain types of foreigners who frequent the markets of Monomotapa, and shall even pretend that they are not foreigners but Monomotapans; and this index of statesmanship he must preserve under all circumstances, even when the foreigners in question cannot speak the Monomotapan language.
Some years ago it was required of every statesman that he should, for at least so many times in any one year, extravagantly praise the virtues of these foreign merchants, and particularly allude to their intensely unforeign character; but this custom has recently fallen into abeyance, and silence upon the subject is the most that is demanded.
A further social habit of this people which we should find very strange and which I for my part think unaccountable is their habit of judging the excellence of a literary production, not by the sense or even the sound of it, but by the ink in which it is printed and the paper upon which it is impressed. And this applies not only to their letters but also to their foreign information, and on this account they should (one would imagine) obtain but a very distorted view of the world. For if a good printer prints with excellent ink at five shillings a pound, and with beautiful clear type upon the best linen paper, the statement that the British Islands are uninhabited, while another in bad ink and upon flimsy paper and with worn type affirms that they contain over forty million souls, the first impression and not the second would be conveyed to the Monomotapan, mind. As a fact, however, they are not misinformed, for this singular frailty of theirs (as I conceive it to be) is moderated by one very wise countervailing mental habit of theirs, which is to believe whatever they hear asserted more than twenty-six times, so that even if the assertion be conveyed to them in bad print and upon poor paper, they will believe it if they read it over and over again to the required limits of reiterations.
No people in the world are fonder of animals than this genial race, but here again curious limits to their affection are to be discovered, for while they will tear to pieces some abandoned wretch who beats a llama with a hazel twig for its correction, they will see nothing remarkable in the tearing to pieces of an alpaca goat by dogs specially trained in that exercise.
Generally speaking, the larger an animal is, the warmer is the affection borne it by these people. Fleas and lice are crushed without pity, blackbeetles with more hesitation, small birds are spared entirely, and so on upwards until for calves they have a special legislation to protect and cherish them. At the other end of the scale, microbes are pitilessly exterminated.
Divorce is not common in Monomotapa. But such divorces as take place are very rightly treated differently, according to the wealth of the persons involved. Above a certain scale of wealth divorce is only granted after a lengthy trial in a court of justice; but with the poor it is established by the decree of a magistrate who usually, shortly after pronouncing his sentence, finds an occasion to imprison the innocent party. Moreover, the poor can be divorced in this manner, if any magistrate feels inclined to exercise his power, while for the divorce of the rich set conditions are laid down.
I should add that the Monomotapans have no religion; but the tolerance of their Constitution is nowhere better shown than in this particular, for though they themselves regard religion as ridiculous, they will permit its exercise within the State, and even occasionally give high office and emoluments to those who practise it.
We have, indeed, much to learn in this matter of religion from the race whose habits I have discovered and here describe. Nothing, perhaps, has done more to warp our own story than the hide-bound prejudice that a doctrine could not be both false and true at the same time, and the unreasoning certitude, inherited from the bad old days of clerical tyranny, that a thing either was or was not.
No such narrowness troubles the Monomotapan. He will prefer—and very wisely prefer—an opinion that renders him comfortable to one that in any way interferes with his appetites; and if two such opinions contradict each other, he will not fall into a silly casuistry which would attempt to reconcile them: he will quietly accept both, and serve the Higher Purpose with a contented mind.
It is on this account that I have said that the Monomotapans regard religion as ridiculous. For true religion, indeed (as they phrase it), they have the highest reverence; and true religion consists in following the inclinations of an honest man, that is, oneself; but "religion in the sense of fixed doctrine," as one of their priests explained to me, "is abhorrent to our free commonwealth." Thus such hair-splitting questions as whether God really exists or no, whether it be wrong to kill or to steal, whether we owe any duties to the State, and, if so, what duties, are treated by the honest Monomotapans with the contempt they deserve: they abandon such speculation for the worthy task of enjoying, each man, what his fortune permits him to enjoy.
But, as I have said above, they do not persecute the small minority living in their midst who cling with the tenacity of all starved minds to their fixed ideas; and if a man who professes certitude upon doctrinal matters is useful in other ways, they are very far from refusing his services to the State. I have known more than one, for instance, of this old-fashioned and bigoted lot who, when he offered a sum of money in order to be admitted to the Senate of Monomotapa, found it accepted as readily and cheerfully as though it had been offered by one of the broadest principles and most liberal mind.
Let no one be surprised that I have spoken of their priests, for though the Monomotapans regard religion with due contempt, it does not follow that they will take away the livelihood of a very honest class of people who in an older and barbaric state of affairs were employed to maintain the structure of what was then a public worship. The priesthood, therefore, is very justly and properly retained by the Monomotapans, subject only to a few simple duties and to a sacred intonation of voice very distressing to those not accustomed to it. If I am asked in what occupation they are employed, I answer, the wealthier of them in such sports and futilities as attract the wealthy, and the less wealthy in such futilities and sports as the less wealthy customarily enjoy. Nor is it a rigid law among them that the sons of priests should be priests, but only the custom—so far, at least, as I have been able to discover.
My dear Ormond,
Nothing was further from my thoughts. I had imagined you knew me well enough—and, for the matter of that, all your mother's family—to judge me better. Believe me, no conception of blaming your profession entered my mind for a moment. Whether there be such a thing as "property" in the abstract I should leave it to metaphysicians to decide: in practical affairs everything must be judged in its own surroundings.
It was not upon any musty theological whimsy that I wrote; the definition of stealing or "theft"—I care not by what name you call it—is not for practical men to discuss. Nor was I concerned with the ethical discussion of burglary (to give the matter its old legal and technical title); it was lack of judgment, sudden actions due to nothing but impulse, and what I think I may call "the speculative side" of a burglar's life.
You have not, as yet, any great responsibilities. No one is dependent upon you—you have but yourself to provide for; but you must remember that such responsibilities will arrive in their natural course, and that if you form habits of rashness or obstinacy now they will cling to you through life. We are all looking forward to a certain event when Anne is free again; in plain English, my boy, we know your loyal heart, and we shall bless the union; but I should feel easier in my mind if I saw you settled into one definite branch of the profession before you undertook the nurture of a family.
Adventure tempts you because you are brave, and something of a poet in you leads you to unusual scenes of action. Well, Youth has a right to its dreams, but beware of letting a dangerous Quixotism spoil your splendid chances.
Take, for example, your breaking into Mr. Cowl's house. You may say Mr. Cowl was not a journalist, but only a reviewer; the distinction is very thin, but let it pass. You know and I know that the houses ofnonein any way connected with the daily Press should ever be approached. It is plain common sense. The journalist comes home at all hours of the night. His servant (if he keeps one) is often up before he is abed. Do you think to enter such houses unobserved?
Again, in one capacity or another, the journalist is dealing with our profession all day long. Some he serves and knows as masters; others he is employed in denouncing at about forty-two shillings the 1600 words; others again it is his business to interview and to pacify or cajole in the lobbies of the House—do you think he would not know what you were if he found you in the kitchen with a dark lantern?
There is another peril—I mean that of alienating friends. Mr. Cowl is an Imperialist—of a very unemphatic type: he wears (as you will say) gold spectacles, and has a nervous cough, but heisan Imperialist. I never said that it waswrongor evenfoolishto alienate such a man. I said that a great and powerful section of opinion thought it a breach of honour in one of Ours to do it. Do not run away with the first impression my words convey. Believe me, I weigh them all.
There has been so much misunderstanding that I hardly know what to choose. Take those watches. I did not say that watches were "a mere distraction." You have put the words into my mouth. What I said was that watches, especially watches at a Tariff Reform meeting, were not worth the risk. Of course a hatful of watches, such as your Uncle Robert would bring home from fires, or better still, such a load as your poor cousin Charles obtained upon Empire Day last year, has value. But how many gold watches are there, off the platform, at a Tariff Reform meeting? And what possible chance have you of gettingonthe platform? Now church and purses, that is another thing, but your mid-Devon adventure was simple folly.
Who is Lord Darrell? I never heard of him! For Heaven's sake don't get caught by a title. Do you know any of the servants? His butler or his secretary? The fellow who catalogues the library is useful. Do recollect that lots of the ornaments in those Mayfair houses are fastened to the wall. That is where your dear father failed over the large Chinese jar in Park Street…. Your mother would never forgive me if you were to get into another of your boyish scrapes.
There is another little matter, my dear Ormond, which I wish you to lay to heart very seriously. Now do take an old man's advice and do not get up upon your Quixotic hobby-horse the moment you sniff what it is—for I suppose you have guessed it already. Yes, it is what you feared: I want to urge you to follow your mother's ardent wish and add commission business to your other work. I know very well that young men must dream their dreams, but the world is what it is, and after all there is nothing so very dreadful in the commission side of our profession. You do not come into direct relation with the collectors of curios and church ornaments: there is always an agent to break the crudeness of the connexion. And it is a certain and profitable source of income with none of the risks attached to it that the older branches of the profession unfortunately show. Moreover, it affords excellent opportunities for foreign travel, and gives one a special position very difficult to define, but easily appreciable among one's colleagues.
George Burton made to my knowledge three thousand pounds last year in a short season; he got this very large commission without the necessity of breaking into a single public-house; he earned it entirely upon objects taken out of churches upon the Continent, and in only three cases had he to pick a pocket. It would have hurt him very much with his knowledge and tastes to have had to break a stained-glass window.
Do consider this, my dear Ormond, for your mother's sake. Don't think for a moment that I am advising you to take up any of those forms of work which we both agree in despising, and which are quite unworthy of your traditions, as for instance stealing pictures on commission out of the houses of dealers and then turning detective to recover them again. It is much too easy work for a man of your talents, much too ill-paid, and much too dangerous. It is all very well for the picture dealer to leave the door open, but what if the policeman is not in the know? No, you will always find me on your side in your steady refusal to have anything to do with this kind of business.
Ormond, my dear lad, bear me no ill-will. It is true of every profession, of the Bar and of the City, of homicide, medicine, the Services, even Politics—everything, that success only comes slowly, and that the experience of older men is the key to it.
Tomorrow is Ascension Day, and I am at leisure. Come and dine with me at the Colonial Club at eight for eight-fifteen. I will show you a magnificent littla tanagra I picked up yesterday, and we will talk about the new prospectus.
God bless you! (Dress.)
Your affectionate Uncle
A privileged body slips so easily into regarding its privileges as common rights that I fear the plea which the SIMIAN LEAGUE repeats in this pamphlet will still sound strange in the ears of many, though the work of the League has been increasingly successful and has reached yearly a wider circle of the educated public since its foundation by Lady Wayne in 1902. We desire to place before our fellow-citizens the claims of Monkeys, and we hope once more that nothing we say may seem extreme or violent, for we know full well what poor weapons violence and passion are in the debate of a practical political matter.
Perhaps it is best to begin by pointing out how rarely even the best of us pause in our fevered race for wealth to consider the disabilities of any of our fellow-creatures: when that truth is grasped it will be easier to plead the special cause of the Simian.
Were English men and women to realize the wrongs of the Race, or at any rate the illogical and therefore unjust position in which we have placed them; were the just and thoughtful men, the refined and golden-hearted ladies who are ready in this country to support every good cause when it is properly presented; weretheyto realize the disabilities of the Monkey, I do not say as vividly they realize the tragedies and misfortunes of London life, they could not, I think, avoid an ill-ease, a pricking of conscience, which would lead at last to some hearty and English effort for the relief of the cousin and forerunner of man.
The attitude adopted towards Monkeys by the mass of those who, after all, live in the same world, and have much the same appetites and necessities and sufferings as they, is an attitude I am persuaded, not of heartlessness, but of ignorance. To disturb that ignorance, and in some to awake a consciousness which, perhaps, they fear, is not a grateful task, but it is our duty, and we will pursue it.
Let the reader consider for one moment the aspect not only of formal law but of the whole community, and of what is called "public opinion" towards this section of sentient beings.
As things now are—aye! and have been for centuries in this green England of ours—a Monkey may not marry; he may not own land; he may not fill any salaried post under the Crown. The Papists themselves are debarred from no honour (outside Ireland) save the Lord Chancellorship. Monkeys, who are responsible for no persecutions in the past, whose religion presents no insult or outrage to our common reason, and who differ little from ourselves in their general practice of life and thought,are debarred from all!
A Monkey may not be a Member of Parliament, a Civil Servant, an officer in either Service, no, not even in the Territorial Army. It is doubtful whether he may hold a commission for the peace. True, there is no statute upon the subject, and the rural magistracy is perhaps the freest and most open of all our offices, and the least restricted by artificial barriers of examination or test; nevertheless, it is the considered opinion of the best legal authorities that no Monkey could sit upon the Bench, and in any case the discussion is purely academic, for it is difficult to believe that any Lord-Lieutenant, under the ridiculous anachronism of our present Constitution, would nominate a Monkey to such a position—unless (which is by law impossible) he should be heir to an owner of an estate in land.
Nor is this all. The mention of unpaid posts recalls the damning truth that all honorary positions in the Diplomatic Service, including even the purely formal stage in the Foreign Office, are closed to the Monkey; the very Court sinecures, which admittedly require no talents, are denied to our Simian fellow-creatures, if not by law at least by custom and in practice.
There have been employed by the League in the British Museum the services of two ladies who feel most keenly upon this subject. They are (to the honour of their sex) as amply qualified as any person in this kingdom for the task which they have undertaken, and they report to the Executive Commission after two months of minute research that (with one doubtful exception occurring during the reign of Her late Majesty) no Monkey has held any position whatever at Court.
All judicial positions are equally inaccessible to them; for though, perhaps, in theory a Monkey could be promoted to the Bench if he had served his party sufficiently long and faithfully in the House of Commons (to which body he is admissible—at least I can find no rule or custom, let alone a statute, against it), yet he is cut off from such an ambition at the very outset by his inadmissibility to a legal career. The Inns of Court are monopolist, and, like all monopolists, hopelessly conservative. They have admitted first one class and then another—though reluctantly—to their privileges, but it will be twenty or thirty years at least before they will give way in the matter of Monkeys. To be a physician, a solicitor, an engineer, or a Commissioner for Oaths is denied them as effectually as though they did not exist. Indeed, no occupation is left them save that of manual labour, and on this I would say a word. It is fashionable to jeer at the Monkey's disinclination to sustained physical effort and to concentrated toil; but it is remarkable that those who affect such a contempt for the Monkey's powers are the first to deny him access to the liberal professions in which they know (though they dare not confess it) he would be a serious rival to the European. As it is, in the few places open to Monkeys—the somewhat parasitical domestic occupation of "companions" and the more manly, but still humiliating, task of acting as assistants to organ-grinders, the Monkey has won universal if grudging praise.
Latterly, since progress cannot be indefinitely delayed, the Monkey has indeed advanced by one poor step towards the civic equality which is his right, and has appeared as an actor upon the boards of our music-halls. It should surely be a sufficient rebuke for those who continue to sneer at the Simian League and such devoted pioneers as Miss Greeley and Lady Wayne that the Monkey has been honourably admitted and has done first-rate work in a profession which His late Gracious Majesty and His late Majesty's late revered mother, Queen Victoria, have seen fit to honour by the bestowal of knighthoods, and in one case (where the recipient was childless) of a baronetcy.
The disabilities I have enumerated are by no means exhaustive. A Monkey may not sign or deliver a deed; he may not serve on a jury; he may be ill-treated, forsooth, and even killed by some cruel master, and the law will refuse to protect him or to punish his oppressor. He may be subjected to all the by-laws of a tyrannical or fanatical administration, but in preventing such abuses he has no voice. He may not enter our older Universities, at least as the member of a college; that is, he can only take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge under the implied and wholly unmerited stigma applying to the non-collegiate student. And these iniquities apply not only to the great anthropoids whose strength and grossness we might legitimately fear, but to the most delicately organized types—to the Barbary Ape, the Lemur, and the Ring-tailed Baboon. Finally—and this is the worst feature in the whole matter—a Monkey, by a legal fiction at least as old as the fourteenth century, is not a person in the eye of the law.
We call England a free country, yet at the present day and as you read these lines,any Monkey found at large may be summarily arrested. He has no remedy; no action for assault will lie. He is not even allowed to call witnesses in his own defence, or to establish an alibi.
It may be pleaded that these disabilities attach also to the Irish, but we must remember that the Irish are allowed a certain though modified freedom of the Press, and have extended to them the incalculable advantage of sending representatives to Westminster. The Monkey has no such remedies. He may be incarcerated, naychained, yet he cannot sue out a writ for habeas corpus any more than can a British subject in time of war, and worst of all, through the connivance or impotence of the police, cases have been brought forwardand approvedin which Monkeys have been openly bought and sold!
We boast our sense of delicacy, and perhaps rightly, in view of our superiority over other nations in this particular; yet we permit the Monkey to exhibit revolting nakedness, and we hardly heed the omission! It is true that some Monkeys are covered from time to time with little blue coats. A cap is occasionally disdainfully permitted them, and not infrequently they are permitted a pair of leather breeches, through a hole in which the tail is permitted to protrude; but no reasonable man will deny that these garments are regarded in the light of mere ornaments, and rarely fulfil those functions which every decent Englishman requires of clothing.
And now we come to the most important section of our appeal.What can be done?
We are a kindly people and we are a just people, but we are also a very conservative people. The fate of all pioneers besets those who attempt to move in this matter. They are jeered at, or, what is worse, neglected. One of the most prominent of the League's workers has been certified a lunatic by an authority whose bitter prejudice is well known, and against whom we have as yet had no grant of amandamus, and we have all noticed the quiet contempt, the sort of organized boycott or conspiracy of silence with which a company at dinner will receive the subject when it is brought forward.
There are also to be met the violent prejudices with which the mass of the population is still filled in this regard. These prejudices are, of course, more common among the uneducated poor than in the upper classes, who in various relations come more often in contact with Monkeys, and who also have a wider and more tolerant, because a better cultivated, spirit. But the prejudice is discernible in every class of society, even in the very highest. We have also arrayed against us in our crusade for right and justice the dying but still formidable power of clericalism. Society is but half emancipated from its medieval trammels, and the priest, that Eternal Enemy of Liberty, can still put in his evil word against the rights of the Simian.
Let us not despair! We can hope for nothing, it is true, until we have effected a profound change in public opinion, and that change cannot be effected by laws. It can only be brought about by a slow and almost imperceptible effort, unsleeping, tireless, and convinced: something of the same sort as has destroyed the power of militarism upon the Continent of Europe; something of the same sort as has scotched landlordism at home; something of the same sort as has freed the unhappy natives of the Congo from the misrule of depraved foreigners; something of the same sort as has produced the great wave in favour of temperance through the length and breadth of this land.