On the 8th I went to Holbeach, in this noble county of Lincoln; and, gracious God! what acontrastwith the scene at Lynn! I knew not a soul in the place. Mr. Fields, a bookseller and printer, had invited me by letter, and had, in the nicest and most unostentatious manner, made all the preparations. Holbeach lies in the midst of some of the richest land in the world; a small market-town, but a parish more than twenty miles across, larger, I believe, than the county of Rutland, produced an audience (in a very nice room, with seats prepared) of 178, apparently all wealthy farmers, and men in that rank of life; and an audience sodeeplyattentive to the dry matters on which I had to address it, I have very seldom met with. I was delighted with Holbeach; a neat little town; a most beautiful church with a spire, like that of “the man of Ross, pointing to the skies;” gardens very pretty; fruit-trees in abundance, with blossom-buds ready to burst; and land, dark in colour, and as fine in substance as flour, as fine as if sifted through one of the sieves with which we get the dust out of the clover seed; and when cut deep down into with a spade, precisely, as to substance, like a piece of hard butter; yet nowhere is thedistressgreater than here. I walked on from Holbeach, six miles, towards Boston; and seeing the fatness of the land, and the fine grass and the never-ending sheep lying about likefat hogs, stretched in the sun, and seeing the abject state of the labouring people, I could not help exclaiming, “God has given us the best country in the world; our brave and wise and virtuous fathers, who built all these magnificent churches, gave us the best government in the world, and we, their cowardly and foolish and profligate sons, have made this once-paradise what we now behold!”
I arrived at Boston (where I am now writing) to-day, (Friday, 9th April) about ten o’clock. I must arrive at Louth before Ican saypreciselywhat my future route will be. There is an immense fair at Lincoln next week; and a friend has beenhereto point out the proper days to be there; as, however, this Register will not come from the press until after I shall have had an opportunity of writing something at Louth, time enough to be inserted in it. I will here go back, and speak of the country that I have travelled over, since I left Cambridge on the 29th of March.
From Cambridge to St. Ives the land is generally in open, unfenced fields, and some common fields; generally stiff land, and some of it not very good, and wheat, in many places, looking rather thin. From St. Ives to Chatteris (which last is in the Isle of Ely), the land is better, particularly as you approach the latter place. From Chatteris I came back to Huntingdon and once more saw its beautiful meadows, of which I spoke when I went thither in 1823. From Huntingdon, through Stilton, to Stamford (the two last in Lincolnshire), is a country of rich arable land and grass fields, and of beautiful meadows. The enclosures are very large, the soil red, with a whitish stone below; very much like the soil at and near Ross in Herefordshire, and like that near Coventry and Warwick. Here, as all over this country, everlasting fine sheep. The houses all along here are built of the stone of the country: you seldom see brick. The churches are large, lofty, and fine, and give proof that the country was formerly much more populous than it is now, and that the people had a vast deal more of wealth in their hands and at their own disposal. There are three beautiful churches at Stamford, not less, I dare say, than three [quære] hundred years old; but two of them (I did not go to the other) are as perfect as when just finished, except as to theimages, most of which have been destroyed by the ungrateful Protestant barbarians, of different sorts, but some of which (out of the reachof their ruthless hands) are still in the niches.
From Stamford to Peterborough is a country of the same description, with the additional beauty ofwoodshere and there, and with meadows just like those at Huntingdon, and not surpassed by those on the Severn near Worcester, nor by those on the Avon at Tewkesbury. The cathedral at Peterborough is exquisitely beautiful, and I have great pleasure in saying, that, contrary to themore magnificentpile at Ely, it is kept in good order; the Bishop (Herbert Marsh) residing a good deal on the spot; and though hedidwrite a pamphlet to justify and urge on the war, the ruinous war, and though hedidget apensionfor it, he is, they told me, very good to the poor people. My daughters had a great desire to see, and I had a great desire they should see, the burial-place of that ill-used, that savagely-treated,woman, and that honour to woman-kind, Catherine, queen of the ferocious tyrant, Henry the Eighth. To the infamy of that ruffian, and the shame of after ages, there is nomonumentto record her virtues and her sufferings; and the remains of this daughter of the wise Ferdinand and of the generous Isabella, who sold her jewels to enable Columbus to discover the new world, lie under the floor of the cathedral, commemorated by a short inscription on a plate of brass. All men, Protestants or not Protestants, feel as I feel upon this subject; search theheartsof the bishop and of his dean and chapter, and these feelings are there; but to dojusticeto the memory of this illustrious victim of tyranny, would be to cast a reflection on that event to which they owe their rich possessions, and, at the same time, to suggest ideas not very favourable to the descendants of those who divided amongst them the plunder of the people arising out of that event, and which descendants are their patrons, and give them what they possess. From this cause, and no other, it is, that the memory of the virtuous Catherine is unblazoned, while that of the tyrannical, the cruel, and the immoral Elizabeth, is recorded with all possible veneration, and all possible varnishing-over of her disgusting amours and endless crimes.
They relate at Peterborough, that the same sexton who buried Queen Catherine, also buried here Mary, Queen of Scots. The remains of the latter, of very questionable virtue, or, rather, of unquestionable vice, were removed to Westminster Abbey by her son, James the First; but those of the virtuous Queen were suffered to remain unhonoured! Good God! what injustice, what a want of principle, what hostility to all virtuous feeling, has not been the fruit of this Protestant Reformation; what plunder, what disgrace to England, what shame, what misery, has that event not produced! There is nothing that I address to my hearers with more visible effect than a statement ofthe manner in which the poor-rates and the church-rates came. This, of course, includes an account ofhow the poor were relieved in Catholic times. To the far greater part of people this is informationwholly new; they aredeeply interestedin it; and the impression is very great. Always before we part, Tom Cranmer’s church receives a considerable blow.
There is in the cathedral a very ancient monument, made to commemorate, they say, the murder of the abbot and his monks by the Danes. Its date is the year 870. Almost all the cathedrals, were, it appears, originally churches of monasteries. That of Winchester and several others, certainly were. There has lately died, in the garden of the bishop’s palace, a tortoise that had beentheremore, they say, than two hundred years; a fact very likely to be known; because, at the end of thirty or forty,people would begin to talk about it as something remarkable; and thus the record would be handed down from father to son.
From Peterborough to Wisbeach, the road, for the most part, lies through theFens, and here we passed through the village of Thorney, where there was a famous abbey, which, together with its valuable domain, was given by the savage tyrant, Henry VIII., to John Lord Russell (made a lord by that tyrant), the founder of the family of that name. This man got also the abbey and estate at Woburn; the priory and its estate at Tavistock; and in the next reign he got Covent Garden and other parts adjoining; together with other things, all thenpublic property. A history, atrue historyof this family (which I hope I shall find time to write) would be a most valuable thing. It would be a nice little specimen of the way in which these families became possessed of a great part of their estates. It would show how the poor-rates and the church-rates came. It would set the whole nationrightat once. Some years ago I had a set of theEncyclopædia Britannica(Scotch), which contained an account of every othergreat familyin the kingdom; but I could find in it no account ofthisfamily, either under the word Russell or the word Bedford. I got into a passion with the book, because it contained no account of the mode of raising the birch-tree; and it was sold toa son(as I was told) of Mr. Alderman Heygate; and if that gentleman look into the book, he will find what I say to be true; but if I should be in error about this, perhaps he will have the goodness to let me know it. I shall be obliged to any one to point me out any printed account of this family; and particularly to tell me where I can get an old folio, containing (amongst other things) Bulstrode’s argument and narrative in justification of the sentence and execution of Lord William Russell, in the reign of Charles the Second. It is impossible to look at the now-miserable village of Thorney, and to think of its once-splendid abbey; it is impossible to look at thetwenty thousand acresof land around, covered with fat sheep, or bearing six quarters of wheat or ten of oats to the acre, without any manure; it is impossible to think of these without feeling a desire that the whole nation should know all about thesurprising meritsof the possessors.
Wisbeach, lying farther up the arm of the sea than Lynn, is, like the latter, a little town of commerce, chiefly engaged in exporting to the south,the cornthat grows in this productive country. It is a good solid town, though not handsome, and has a large market, particularly for corn.
To Crowland, I went, as before stated, from Wisbeach, staying two nights at St. Edmund’s. Here I was in the heart of theFens. The whole country aslevelas the table on which I am now writing. The horizon like the sea in a dead calm: you see the morning sun come up, just as at sea; and see it go down over the rim, in just the same way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep lying about upon it, as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye. The kind and polite friends, with whom we were lodged, had a very neat garden, and fine young orchard. Everything grows well here: earth without a stone so big as a pin’s head; grass as thick as it can grow on the ground; immense bowling-greens separated by ditches; and not the sign of dock or thistle or other weed to be seen. What a contrast between these and the heath-covered sand-hills of Surrey, amongst which I was born! Yet the labourers, who spuddle about the ground in the littledipsbetween those sand-hills, are better off than those that exist in this fat of the land.Herethe grasping system takesallaway, because it has the means of coming at the value of all:there, the poor man enjoyssomething, because he is thought too poor to have anything: he is there allowed to have what is deemedworth nothing; but here, where every inch is valuable, not one inch is he permitted to enjoy.
At Crowland also (still in the Fens) was a great and richabbey, a good part of the magnificent ruins of the church of which are still standing, one corner or part of it being used as theparish church, by the worms, which have crept out of the dead bodies of those who lived in the days of the founders;
“And wond’ring man could want the larger pile,Exult, and claim the corner with a smile.”
They tell you, that all the country at and near Crowland was a mere swamp, a mere bog,bearing nothing, bearing nothing worth naming, until themodern drainingstook place! The thing called the “Reformation,” has lied common sense out of men’s minds. Solikelya thing to choose a barren swamp whereon, or wherein, to make the site of an abbey, and of a benedictine abbey too! It has been always observed, that the monks took care to choose for their places of abode, pleasant spots, surrounded by productive land. The likeliest thing in the world for these monks to choose a swamp for their dwelling-place, surrounded by land that produced nothing good! The thing gives the lie to itself: and it is impossible to reject the belief, that these Fens were as productive of corn and meat a thousand years ago, and more so, than they are at this hour. There is a curious triangular bridge here, on one part of which stands the statue of one of the ancient kings. It is all of great age; andeverything shows that Crowland was a place of importance in the earliest times.
From Crowland to Lynn, through Thorney and Wisbeach, is all Fens, well besprinkled, formerly, with monasteries of various descriptions, and still well set with magnificent churches. From Lynn to Holbeach you get out of the real Fens, and into the land that I attempted to describe, when, a few pages back, I was speaking of Holbeach. I say attempted; for I defy tongue or pen to make the description adequate to the matter: to know what the thing is, you mustseeit. The same land continues all the way on to Boston: endless grass and endless fat sheep; not a stone, not a weed.
Boston, Sunday, 11th April, 1830.
Last night, I made a speech at the playhouse to an audience, whose appearance was sufficient to fill me with pride. I had given notice that I should performon Friday, overlooking the circumstance that it was Good Friday. In apologising for this inadvertence, I took occasion to observe, that even if I had persevered, the clergy of the church could have nothing to object, seeing that they were now silent while a bill was passing in Parliament to putJewson a level withChristians; to enable Jews, the blasphemers of the Redeemer, to sit on the bench, to sit in both Houses of Parliament, to sit in council with the King, and to be kings of England, if entitled to the Crown, which, by possibility, they might become, if this bill were to pass; that to this billthe clergy had offered no opposition; and that, therefore, how could they hold sacred the anniversary appointed to commemorate the crucifixion of Christ by the hands of the blaspheming and bloody Jews? That, at any rate, if this bill passed; if those who called Jesus Christ animpostorwere thus declared to beas goodas those who adored him, there was not, I hoped, a man in the kingdom who would pretend, that it would be just to compel the people to pay tithes, and fees, and offerings, to men forteaching Christianity. This was aclincher; and as such it was received.
This morning I went out at six, looked at the town, walked three miles on the road to Spilsby, and back to breakfast at nine. Boston (bosis Latin forox) though not above a fourth or fifth part of the size of itsdaughterin New England, which got its name, I dare say, from some persecuted native of this place, who had quitted England and all her wealth and all her glories, to preserve thatfreedom, which was still more dear to him; though not a town like New Boston, and though little to what it formerly was, when agricultural produce was the great stapleof the kingdom and the great subject of foreign exchange, is, nevertheless, a very fine town; good houses, good shops, pretty gardens about it, a fine open place, nearly equal to that of Nottingham, in the middle of it a river and a canal passing through it, each crossed by a handsome and substantial bridge, a fine market for sheep, cattle, and pigs, and another for meat, butter, and fish; and being, like Lynn, a great place for the export of corn and flour, and having many fine mills, it is altogether a town of very considerable importance; and, which is not to be overlooked, inhabited by people none of whom appear to be in misery.
The great pride and glory of the Bostonians, istheir church, which is, I think, 400 feet long, 90 feet wide, and has a tower (or steeple, as they call it) 300 feet high, which is both a land-mark and a sea-mark. To describe the richness, the magnificence, the symmetry, the exquisite beauty of this pile, is wholly out of my power. It is impossible to look at it without feeling, first, admiration and reverence and gratitude to the memory of our fathers who reared it; and next, indignation at those who affect to believe, and contempt for those who do believe, that, when this pile was reared, the age wasdark, the people rude and ignorant, and the countrydestitute of wealthandthinly peopled. Look at this church, then; look at the heaps of white rubbish that the parsons have lately stuck up under the “New-church Act,” and which, after having been built with money forced from the nation by odious taxes, they have stuffed full oflocked-up pens, calledpews, which they let for money, as cattle- and sheep- and pig-pens are let at fairs and markets; nay, after having looked at this work of the “darkages,” look at that great, heavy, ugly, unmeaning mass of stone called St.Paul’s, which an American friend of mine, who came to London from Falmouth and had seen the cathedrals at Exeter and Salisbury, swore to me, that when he first saw it, he was at a loss to guess whether it were acourt-houseor ajail; after looking at Boston Church, go and look at that great, gloomy lump, created by a Protestant Parliament, and by taxes wrung by force from the whole nation; and then say which is the age really meriting the epithetdark.
St. Botolph, to whom this church is dedicated, while he (if saints see and hear what is passing on earth) must lament that the piety-inspiring mass has been, in this noble edifice, supplanted by the monotonous hummings of an oaken hutch, has not the mortification to see his church treated in a manner as if the new possessors sighed for the hour of its destruction. It is taken great care of; and though it has cruelly suffered fromProtestant repairs; though the images are gone and the stained glass; and though the glazing is now in squares instead of lozenges;though the nave is stuffed withpenscalled pews; and though other changes have taken place detracting from the beauty of the edifice, great care is taken of it as it now is, and the inside is not disfigured and disgraced by agallery, that great and characteristic mark of Protestant taste, which, as nearly as may be, makes a church like a playhouse. Saint Botolph (on the supposition before mentioned) has the satisfaction to see, that the base of his celebrated church is surrounded by an iron fence, to keep from it all offensive and corroding matter, which is so disgusting to the sight round the magnificent piles at Norwich, Ely and other places; that the churchyard, and all appertaining to it, are kept in the neatest and most respectable state; that no money has been spared for these purposes; that here the eye tells the heart, that gratitude towards the fathers of the Bostonians is not extinguished in the breasts of their sons; and this the Saint will know that he owes to the circumstances, that the parish is a poor vicarage, and that the care of his church is in the hands ofthe industrious people, and not in those of a fat and luxurious dean and chapter, wallowing in wealth derived from the people’s labour.
Horncastle, 12th April.
A fine, soft, showery morning saw us out of Boston, carrying with us the most pleasing reflections as to our reception and treatment there by numerous persons, none of whom we had ever seen before. The face of the country, for about half the way, the soil, the grass, the endless sheep, the thickly-scattered and magnificent churches, continue as on the other side of Boston; but, after that, we got out of the low and level land. At Sibsey, a pretty village five miles from Boston, we saw, for the first time since we left Peterborough, land rising above the level of the horizon; and, not having seen such a thing for so long, it had struck my daughters, who overtook me on the road (I having walked on from Boston), that the sight had an effect like that produced by the firstsight of landafter a voyage across the Atlantic.
We now soon got into a country of hedges and dry land and gravel and clay and stones; the land not bad, however; pretty much like that of Sussex, lying between the forest part and the South Downs. A good proportion of woodland also; and just before we got to Horncastle, we passed the park of that Mr. Dymock who is called “the Champion of England,” and to whom, it is said hereabouts, that we pay out of the taxes eight thousand pounds a year! This never can be, to be sure; but if we pay him only a hundred a year, I will lay down mygloveagainst that of the “Champion,” that we do not pay him eventhatfor five years longer.
It is curious, that the moment you get out of therich land, the churches becomesmaller,mean, and with scarcely anything in the way oftowerorsteeple. This town is seated in the middle of a large valley, not, however, remarkable for anything of peculiar value or beauty; a purely agricultural town; well built, and not mean in any part of it. It is a great rendezvous for horses and cattle, and sheep-dealers, and for those who sell these; and accordingly, it suffers severely from the loss of the small paper-money.
Horncastle, 13th April, Morning.
I made a speech last evening to from 130 to 150, almost all farmers, and most men of apparent wealth to a certain extent. I have seldom been better pleased with my audience. It is not the clapping and huzzaing that I value so much as thesilent attention, theearnest lookat me fromall eyesat once, and then when the point is concluded, thelook and nod at each other, as if the parties were saying, “Think of that!” And of these I had a great deal at Horncastle. They say that there area hundred parish churches within six miles of this town. I dare say that there was one farmer from almost every one of those parishes. This is sowing the seeds of truth in a very sure manner: it is not scattering broadcast; it is reallydrilling the country.
There is one deficiency, and that, with me, a great one, throughout this country of corn and grass and oxen and sheep, that I have come over during the last three weeks; namely, the want ofsinging birds. We are now just in that season when they sing most. Here, in all this country, I have seen and heard only about four sky-larks, and not one other singing bird of any description, and, of the small birds that do not sing, I have seen only oneyellow-hammer, and it was perched on the rail of a pound between Boston and Sibsey. Oh! the thousands of linnets all singing together on one tree, in the sand-hills of Surrey! Oh! the carolling in the coppices and the dingles of Hampshire and Sussex and Kent! At this moment (5 o’clock in the morning) the groves at Barn Elm are echoing with the warblings of thousands upon thousands of birds. Thethrushbegins a little before it is light; next theblack-bird; next thelarksbegin to rise; all the rest begin the moment the sun gives the signal; and, from the hedges, the bushes, from the middle and the topmost twigs of the trees, comes the singing of endless variety; from the long dead grass comes the sound of the sweet and soft voice of thewhite-throatornettle-tom, while the loud and merry song ofthelark(the songster himself out of sight) seems to descend from the skies.Milton, in his description of paradise, has not omitted the “song of earliest birds.” However, everything taken together, here, in Lincolnshire, are more good things than man could have had the conscience toaskof God.
And now, if I had time and room to describe the state ofmen’s affairsin the country through which I have passed, I should show that the people at Westminster would have known, how to turn paradise itself into hell. I must, however, defer this until my next, when I shall have been at Hull and Lincoln, and have had a view of the whole of this rich and fine country. In the meanwhile, however, I cannot help congratulating thatsensiblefellow, Wilmot Horton, and his co-operator, Burdett, that Emigration is going on at a swimming rate. Thousands are going, and that, too,without mortgaging the poor-rates. But,sensiblefellows! it is not theaged, thehalt, theailing; it is not thepaupersthat are going; but men with from 200l.to 2,000l.in their pocket! This very year, from two to five millions of pounds sterling will actually be carriedfrom Englandto the United States. The Scotch, who have money to pay their passages, go to New York; those who have none get carried to Canada, that they may thence get into the United States. I will inquire, one of these days, whatrightBurdett has to live in England more than those whom he proposes to send away.
Spittal, near Lincoln, 19th April 1830.
Here we are, at the end of a pretty decent trip since we left Boston. The next place, on our way to Hull, was Horncastle, where I preached politics in the playhouse to a most respectable body of farmers, who had come in the wet to meet me. Mr. John Peniston, who had invited me to stop there, behaved in a very obliging manner, and made all things very pleasant.
The countryfromBoston continued, as I said before, flat for about half the way to Horncastle, and we then began to see the high land. From Horncastle I set off two hours before the carriage, and going through a very pretty village called Ashby, got to another at the foot of a hill, which, they say, forms part of theWolds; that is, a ridge of hills. This second village is called Scamblesby. The vale in which it lies is very fine land. A hazel mould, rich and light too. I saw a man here ploughing for barley, after turnips, withone horse: the horse did not seem to work hard, and the man wassinging: I need not say that he was young; and I dare say he had the good sense to keep his legs under another man’s table, and to stretch his body on another man’s bed.
This is a very finecorn country: chalk at bottom: stony near the surface, in some places: here and there a chalk-pit in the hills: the shape of the ground somewhat like that of the broadest valleys in Wiltshire; but the fields not without fences as they are there: fields from fifteen to forty acres: the hills not downs, as in Wiltshire; but cultivated all over. The houses white and thatched, as they are in all chalk countries. The valley at Scamblesby has a little rivulet running down it, just as in all the chalk countries. The land continues nearly the same to Louth, which lies in a deep dell, with beautiful pastures on the surrounding hills, like those that I once admired at Shaftesbury, in Dorsetshire, and like that near St. Austle, in Cornwall, which I described in 1808.
At Louth the wise corporation hadrefusedto let us have the playhouse; but my friends had prepared a very good place; and I had an opportunity of addressing crowded audiences two nights running. At no place have I been better pleased than at Louth. Mr. Paddison, solicitor, a young gentleman whom I had the honour to know slightly before, and to know whom, whether I estimate by character or by talent, would be an honour to any man, was particularly attentive to us. Mr. Naull, ironmonger, who had had the battle to fight for me for twenty years, expressed his exultation at my triumph in a manner that showed that he justly participated it with me. I breakfasted at Mr. Naull’s with a gentleman 88 or 89 years of age, whose joy at shaking me by the hand was excessive. “Ah!” said he, “where arenowthose savages who, at Hull, threatened to kill me for raising my voice against this system?” This is a very fine town, and has a beautiful church, nearly equal to that at Boston.
We left Louth on the morning of Thursday the 15th, and got to Barton on the Humber by about noon, over a very fine country, large fields, fine pastures, flocks of those great sheep, of from 200 to 1,000 in a flock; and here at Barton, we arrived at the northern point of this noble county, having never seen one single acre of waste land, and not one acre that would be called bad land, in the south of England. TheWolds, or high-lands, lie away to our right, from Horncastle to near Barton; and on the other side of the Wolds lie theMarshes of Lincolnshire, which extend along the coast from Boston to the mouth of the Humber, on the bank of which we were at Barton, Hull being on the opposite side of the river, which is here about five miles wide, and which we had to cross in a steam-boat.
But let me not forget Great Grimsby, at which we changed horses, and breakfasted, in our way from Louth to Barton. “What the devil!” the reader will say, “should you want torecollectthatplace for? Why do you want not to forget that sink of corruption? What could you find there to be snatched from everlasting oblivion, except for the purpose of being execrated?” I did, however, find something there worthy of being made known, not only to every man in England but to every man in the world; and not to mention it here would be to be guilty of the greatest injustice.
To my surprise I found a good many people assembled at the inn-door, evidently expecting my arrival. While breakfast was preparing, I wished to speak to the bookseller of the place, if there were one, and to give him a list of my books and writings, that he might place it in his shop. When he came, I was surprised to find that he had it already, and that he, occasionally, sold my books. Upon my asking him how he got it, he said that it was brought down from London and given to him by a Mr. Plaskitt, who, he said, had all my writings, and who, he said, he was sure would be very glad to see me; but that he lived above a mile from the town. A messenger, however, had gone off to carry the news, and Mr. Plaskitt arrived before we had done breakfast, bringing with him a son and a daughter. And from the lips of this gentleman, a man of as kind and benevolent appearance and manners as I ever beheld in my life, I had the following facts; namely, “that one of his sons sailed for New York some years ago; that the ship was cast away on the shores of Long Island; that the captain, crew, and passengers all perished; that the wrecked vessel was taken possession of by people on the coast; that his son had a watch in his trunk, or chest, a purse with fourteen shillings in it, and divers articles of wearing apparel; that the Americans, who searched the wreck,sent all these articles safely to England to him”; “and,” said he, “I keep the purse and the money at home, andhere is the watch in my pocket”!
It would have been worth the expense of coming from London to Grimsby, if for nothing but to learn this fact, which I record, not only in justice to the free people of America, and particularly in justice to my late neighbours in Long Island, but in justice to the character of mankind. I publish it as something to counterbalance the conduct of the atrocious monsters who plunder the wrecks on the coast of Cornwall, and, as I am told, on the coasts here in the east of the island.
Away go, then, all the accusations upon the character of the Yankees. People may call themsharp,cunning,overreaching; and when they have exhausted the vocabulary of their abuse, the answer is found in this one fact, stated by Mr. Joshua Plaskitt, of Great Grimsby, in Lincolnshire, Old England. The person who sent the things to Mr. Plaskitt was named Jones.It did not occur to me to ask his christian name, nor to inquire what was the particular place where he lived in Long Island. I request Mr. Plaskitt to contrive to let me know these particulars; as I should like to communicate them to friends that I have on the north side of that island. However, it would excite no surprise there, that one of their countrymen had acted this part; for every man of them, having the same opportunity, would do the same. Their forefathers carried to New England the nature and character of the people of Old England, before national debts, paper-money, septennial bills, standing armies, dead-weights, and jubilees, had beggared and corrupted the people.
At Hull Ilectured(I laugh at the word) to about seven hundred persons on the same evening that I arrived from Louth, which was on Thursday the 15th. We had what they call the summer theatre, which was crowded in every part except on the stage; and the next evening the stage was crowded too. The third evening was merely accidental, no previous notice having been given of it. On the Saturday I went in the middle of the day to Beverley; saw there the beautiful minster, and some of the fine horses which they show there at this season of the year; dined with about fifty farmers; made a speech to them and about a hundred more, perhaps; and got back to Hull time enough to go to the theatre there.
The country round Hull appears to exceed even that of Lincolnshire. The three mornings that I was at Hull I walked out in three different directions, and found the country everywhere fine. To the east lies the Holderness country. I used to wonder that Yorkshire, to which I, from some false impression in my youth, had always attached the idea ofsterility, should send us of the south those beautiful cattle with short horns and straight and deep bodies. You have only to see the country to cease to wonder at this. It lies on the north side of the mouth of the Humber; is as flat and fat as the land between Holbeach and Boston, without, as they tell me, the necessity of such numerous ditches. The appellation “Yorkshirebite”; the acute sayings ascribed to Yorkshiremen; and their quick manner, I remember, in the army. When speaking of what country a man was, one used to say, in defence of the party, “York, but honest.” Another saying was that it was a bare common that a Yorkshireman would go over without taking a bite. Every one knows the story of the gentleman who, upon finding that a boot-cleaner in the south was a Yorkshireman, and expressing his surprise that he was not become master of the inn, received for answer, “Ah, sir, but master is York too!” And that of the Yorkshire boy who, seeing a gentleman eatingsome eggs, asked the cook to give him a littlesalt; and upon being asked what he could want with salt, he said, “Perhaps that gentleman may give me an egg presently.”
It is surprising what effect sayings like these produce upon the mind. From one end to the other of the kingdom, Yorkshiremen are looked upon as being keener than other people; more eager in pursuit of their own interests; more sharp and more selfish. For my part, I was cured with regard to thepeoplelong before I saw Yorkshire. In the army, where we see men of all counties, I always found Yorkshiremen distinguished for their frank manners and generous disposition. In the United States, my kind and generous friends of Pennsylvania were the children and descendants of Yorkshire parents; and, in truth, I long ago made up my mind that this hardness and sharpness ascribed to Yorkshiremen arose from the sort of envy excited by that quickness, that activity, that buoyancy of spirits, which bears them up through adverse circumstances, and their conquent success in all the situations of life. They, like the people of Lancashire, are just the very reverse of beingcunningandselfish; be they farmers, or be they what they may, you get at the bottom of their hearts in a minute. Everything they think soon gets to the tongue, and out it comes, heads and tails, as fast as they can pour it. Fine materials for Oliver to work on! If he had been sent to thewestinstead of the north, he would have found people there on whom he would have exercised his powers in vain. You are not to have every valuable quality in the same man and the same people: you are not to have prudent caution united with quickness and volubility.
But though, as to the character of thepeople, I, having known so many hundreds of Yorkshiremen, was perfectly enlightened, and had quite got the better of all prejudices many years ago, I still, in spite of the matchless horses and matchless cattle, had a general impression that Yorkshire was asterilecounty, compared with the counties in the south and the west; and this notion was confirmed in some measure by my seeing the moory and rocky parts in the West Riding last winter. It was necessary for me to come and see the country on the banks of the Humber. I have seen the vale of Honiton, in Devonshire, that of Taunton and of Glastonbury, in Somersetshire: I have seen the vales of Gloucester and Worcester, and the banks of the Severn and the Avon: I have seen the vale of Berkshire, that of Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire: I have seen the beautiful vales of Wiltshire; and the banks of the Medway, from Tunbridge to Maidstone, called the Garden of Eden: I was born at one end of Arthur Young’s “finest ten miles in England:” I have ridden my horse across the Thames at its two sources;and I have been along every inch of its banks, from its sources, to Gravesend, whence I have sailed out of it into the channel; and having seen and had ability to judge of the goodness of the land in all these places, I declare that I have never seen any to be compared with the land on the banks of the Humber, from the Holderness country included, and with the exception of the land from Wisbeach to Holbeach, and Holbeach to Boston. Really, the single parish of Holbeach, or a patch of the same size in the Holderness country, seems to be equal in value to the whole of the county of Surrey, if we leave out the little plot of hop-garden at Farnham.
Nor is the town of Hull itself to be overlooked. It is a little city of London: streets, shops, everything like it; clean as the best parts of London, and the people as bustling and attentive. The town of Hull issurroundedwith commodious docks for shipping. These docks are separated, in three or four places, by draw-bridges; so that, as you walk round the town, you walk by the side of the docks and the ships. The town on the outside of the docks is pretty considerable, and the walks from it into the country beautiful. I went about a good deal, and I nowhere saw marks of beggary or filth, even in the outskirts: none of those nasty, shabby, thief-looking sheds that you see in the approaches to London: none of those off-scourings of pernicious and insolent luxury. I hate commercial towns in general: there is generally something so loathsome in the look, and so stern and unfeeling in the manners of seafaring people, that I have always, from my very youth, disliked sea-ports; but really the sight of this nice town, the manners of its people, the civil, and kind and cordial reception that I met with, and the clean streets, and especially the pretty gardens in every direction, as you walk into the country, has made Hull, though a sea-port, a place that I shall always look back to with delight.
Beverley, which was formerly a very considerable city, with three or four gates, one of which is yet standing, had a great college, built in the year 700 by the Archbishop of York. It had three famous hospitals and two friaries. There is one church, a very fine one, and the minster still left; of which a bookseller in the town was so good as to give me copper-plate representations. It is still a very pretty town; the market large; the land all round the country good; and it is particularly famous for horses; those for speed being shown off here on the market-days at this time of the year. The farmers and gentlemen assemble in a very wide street, on the outside of the western gate of the town; and at a certain time of the day the grooms come from their different stables to show off their beautifulhorses; blood horses, coach horses, hunters, and cart horses; sometimes, they tell me, forty or fifty in number. The day that I was there (being late in the season) there were only seven or eight, or ten at the most. When I was asked at the inn to go and see “the horses,” I had no curiosity, thinking it was such a parcel of horses as we see at a market in the south; but I found it a sight worth going to see; for besides the beauty of the horses, there were the adroitness, the agility, and the boldness of the grooms, each running alongside of his horse, with the latter trotting at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and then swinging him round, and showing him off to the best advantage. In short, I was exceedingly gratified by the trip to Beverley: the day was fair and mild; we went by one road and came back by another, and I have very seldom passed a pleasanter day in my life.
I found, very much to my surprise, that at Hull I was very nearly as far north as at Leeds, and, at Beverley, a little farther north. Of all things in the world, I wanted to speak to Mr. Foster of theLeeds Patriot; but was not aware of the relative situation till it was too late to write to him. Boats go up the Humber and the Ouse to within a few miles of Leeds. The Holderness country is that piece of land which lies between Hull and the sea: it appears to be a perfect flat; and is said to be, and I dare say is, one of the very finest spots in the whole kingdom. I had a very kind invitation to go into it; but I could not stay longer on that side of the Humber without neglecting some duty or other. In quitting Hull, I left behind me but one thing, the sight of which had not pleased me; namely, a fine gilded equestrian statue of the Dutch “Deliverer,” who gave to England the national debt, that fruitful mother of mischief and misery. Until this statue be replaced by that of Andrew Marvell, that real honour of this town, England will never be what it ought to be.
We came back to Barton by the steam-boat on Sunday in the afternoon of the 18th, and in the evening reached this place, which is an inn, with three or four houses near it, at the distance of ten miles from Lincoln, to which we are going on Wednesday, the 21st. Between this place and Barton we passed through a delightfully pretty town called Brigg. The land in this, which is called the high part of Lincolnshire, has generally stone, a solid bed of stone of great depth, at different distances from the surface. In some parts this stone is of a yellowish colour, and in the form of very thick slate; and in these parts the soil is not so good; but, generally speaking, the land is excellent; easily tilled; no surface water; the fields very large; not many trees; but what there are, particularly the ash, very fine, andof free growth; and innumerable flocks of those big, long-woolled sheep, from one hundred to a thousand in a flock, each having from eight to ten pounds of wool upon its body. One of the finest sights in the world is one of these thirty or forty-acre fields, with four or five or six hundred ewes, each with her one or two lambs skipping about upon grass, the most beautiful that can be conceived, and on lands as level as a bowling-green. I do not recollect having seen a mole-hill or an ant-hill since I came into the country; and not one acre of waste land, though I have gone the whole length of the country one way, and am now got nearly half way back another way.
Having seen this country, and having had a glimpse at the Holderness country, which lies on the banks of the sea, and to the east and north-east of Hull, can I cease to wonder that those devils, the Danes, found their way hither so often. There were the fat sheep then, just as there are now, depend upon it; and these numbers of noble churches, and these magnificent minsters, were reared because the wealth of the country remainedin the country, and was not carried away to the south, to keep swarms of devouring tax-eaters, to cram the maws of wasteful idlers, and to be transferred to the grasp of luxurious and blaspheming Jews.
You always perceive that the churches are large and fine and lofty, in proportion to the richness of the soil and the extent of the parish. In many places where there arenowbut a very few houses, and those comparatively miserable, there are churches that look like cathedrals. It is quite curious to observe the difference in the style of the churches of Suffolk and Norfolk, and those of Lincolnshire, and of the other bank of the Humber. In the former two counties the churches are good, large, and with a good, plain, and pretty lofty tower. And in a few instances, particularly at Ipswich and Long Melford, you find magnificence in these buildings; but in Lincolnshire the magnificence of the churches is surprising. These churches are the indubitable proof of great and solid wealth, and formerly of great population. From everything that I have heard, theNetherlandsis a country very much resembling Lincolnshire; and they say that the church at Antwerp is like that at Boston; but my opinion is, that Lincolnshire alone contains more of these fine buildings than the whole of the continent of Europe.
Still, however, there is the almost total want of thesinging birds. There had been a shower a little while before we arrived at this place; it was about six o’clock in the evening; and there is a thick wood, together with the orchards and gardens, very near to the inn. We heard a little twittering from one thrush; but at that very moment, if we had been as near tojust such a wood in Surrey, or Hampshire, or Sussex, or Kent, we should have heard ten thousand birds singing altogether; and the thrushes continuing their song till twenty minutes after sunset. When I was at Ipswich, the gardens and plantations round that beautiful town began in the morning to ring with the voices of the different birds. The nightingale is, I believe,never heardanywhere on the eastern side of Lincolnshire; though it is sometimes heard in the same latitude in the dells of Yorkshire. How ridiculous it is to suppose that these frail birds, with their slender wings and proportionately heavy bodies,cross the sea, and come back again! I have not yet heard more than half a dozen skylarks; and I have, only last year, heard ten at a time make the air ring over one of my fields at Barn-Elm. This is a great drawback from the pleasure of viewing this fine country.
It is time for me now, withdrawing myself from these objects visible to the eye, to speak of the state ofthe people, and of the manner in which their affairs are affected by the workings of the system. With regard to the labourers, they are, everywhere, miserable. The wages for those who are employed on the land are, through all the counties that I have come, twelve shillings a week for married men, and less for single ones; but a large part of them are not even at this season employed on the land. The farmers, for want of means of profitable employment, suffer the men to fall upon the parish; and they are employed in digging and breaking stone for the roads; so that the roads are nice and smooth for the sheep and cattle to walk on in their way to the all-devouring jaws of the Jews and other tax-eaters in London and its vicinity. None of the best meat, except by mere accident, is consumed here. To-day (the 20th of April) we have seen hundreds upon hundreds of sheep, as fat as hogs, go by this inn door, their toes, like those of the foot-marks at the entrance of the lion’s den, all pointing towards the Wen; and the landlord gave us for dinner a little skinny, hard leg of old ewe mutton! Where the man got it I cannot imagine. Thus it is: every good thing is literally driven or carried away out of the country. In walking out yesterday, I saw three poor fellows digging stone for the roads, who told me that they never had anything but bread to eat, and water to wash it down. One of them was a widower with three children; and his pay was eighteen-pence a-day; that is to say, about three pounds of bread a day each, for six days in the week; nothing for Sunday, and nothing for lodging, washing, clothing, candle-light, or fuel! Just such was the state of things in France at the eve of the revolution! Precisely such; and precisely the same were thecauses. Whether the effect will bethe same I do not take upon myself positively to determine. Just on the other side of the hedge, while I was talking to these men, I saw about two hundred fat sheep in a rich pasture. I did not tell them what I might have told them; but I explained to them why the farmers were unable to give them a sufficiency of wages. They listened with great attention; and said that they did believe that the farmers were in great distress themselves.
With regard to the farmers, it is said here that the far greater part, if sold up, would be found to be insolvent. The tradesmen in country towns are, and must be, in but little better state. They all tell you they do not sell half so many goods as they used to sell; and, of course, the manufacturers must suffer in the like degree. There is a diminution and deterioration, every one says, in the stocks upon the farms.Sheep-washingis a sort of business in this country; and I heard at Boston that the sheep-washers say that there is a gradual falling off in point of the numbers of sheep washed.
The farmers are all gradually sinking in point of property. The very rich ones do not feel that ruin is absolutely approaching; but they are all alarmed; and as to the poorer ones, they are fast falling into the rank of paupers. When I was at Ely a gentleman who appeared to be a great farmer told me, in presence of fifty farmers at the White Hart inn, that he had seen that morningthree mencracking stones on the road as paupers of the parish of Wilbarton; and that all these men had beenoverseers of the poor of that same parish within the last seven years. Wheat keeps up in price to about an average of seven shillings a bushel; which is owing to our two successive bad harvests; but fat beef and pork are at a very low price, and mutton not much better. The beef was selling at Lynn for five shillings the stone of fourteen pounds, and the pork at four and sixpence. The wool (one of the great articles of produce in these countries) selling for less than half of its former price.
And here let me stop to observe that I was well informed before I left London that merchants were exporting our long wool to France, where it paidthirty per cent. duty. Well, say the landowners, but we have to thank Huskisson for this at any rate; and that is true enough; for the law was most rigid against the export of wool; but what will themanufacturerssay? Thus the collective goes on, smashing one class and then another; and, resolved to adhere to the taxes, it knocks away, one after another, the props of the system itself. By every measure that it adopts for the sake of obtaining security, or of affording relief to the people, it does some act of crying injustice. To save itself from the natural effects of its own measures, it knocked down the country bankers, indirect violation of the law in 1822. It is now about to lay its heavy hand on the big brewers and the publicans, in order to pacify the call for a reduction of taxes, and with the hope of preventing such reduction in reality. It is making a trifling attempt to save the West Indians from total ruin, and the West India colonies from revolt; but by that same attempt it reflects injury on the British distillers, and on the growers of barley. Thus it cannot do justice without doing injustice; it cannot do good without doing evil; and thus it must continue to do, until it take off, in reality, more than one half of the taxes.
One of the great signs of the poverty of people in the middle rank of life is the falling off of the audiences at the playhouses. There is a playhouse in almost every country town, where the players used to act occasionally; and in large towns almost always. In some places they have of late abandoned acting altogether. In others they have acted, very frequently, to not more thanten or twelve persons. At Norwich the playhouse had been shut up for a long time. I heard of one manager who has become a porter to a warehouse, and his company dispersed. In most places the insides of the buildings seem to be tumbling to pieces; and the curtains and scenes that they let down seem to be abandoned to the damp and the cobwebs.Myappearance on the boards seemed to give new life to the drama. I was, until the birth of my third son, a constant haunter of the playhouse, in which I took great delight; but whenhecame into the world I said, “Now, Nancy, it is time for us to leave off going to the play.” It is really melancholy to look at things now, and to think of things then. I feel great sorrow on account of these poor players; for, though they are made the tools of the Government and the corporations and the parsons, it is not their fault, and they have uniformly, whenever I have come in contact with them, been very civil to me. I am not sorry that they are left out of the list of vagrants in the new Act; but in this case, as in so many others, the men have to be grateful to thewomen; for who believes that this merciful omission would have taken place, if so many of the peers had not contracted matrimonial alliances with players; if so many playeresses had not become peeresses. We may thank God for disposing the hearts of our law-makers to be guilty of the same sins and foibles as ourselves; for when a lord had been sentenced to the pillory, the use of that ancient mode of punishing offences was abolished: when a lord (Castlereagh), who was also a minister of state, had cut his own throat, the degrading punishment of burial in cross-roads was abolished; and now, when so many peers and great men have taken to wife play-actresses, which the lawtermedvagrants, that term, as applied to the children of Melpomene and Thalia, is abolished! Laud we the Gods that our rulers cannot after all divest themselves of flesh and blood! For the Lord have mercy upon us if their great souls were once to soar above that tenement!
Lord Stanhope cautioned his brother peers a little while ago against the angry feeling which wasrising up in the poor against the rich. His Lordship is a wise and humane man, and this is evident from all his conduct. Nor is this angry feeling confined to the counties in the south, where the rage of the people, from the very nature of the local circumstances, is more formidable; woods and coppices and dingles and bye-lanes and sticks and stones ever at hand, being resources unknown in counties like this. When I was at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, an open country, I sat with the farmers, and smoked a pipe by way of preparation for evening service, which I performed on a carpenter’s bench in a wheelwright’s shop; my friends, the players, never having gained any regular settlement in that grand mart for four-legged fat meat, coming from the Fens, and bound to the Wen. While we were sitting, a hand-bill was handed round the table, advertisingfarming stockfor sale; and amongst the implements of husbandry “anexcellent fire-engine, several steel traps, and spring guns”! And that is the life, is it, of anEnglish farmer? I walked on about six miles of the road from Holbeach to Boston. I have before observed upon the inexhaustible riches of this land. At the end of about five miles and three quarters I came to a public-house, and thought I would get some breakfast; but the poor woman, with a tribe of children about her, had not a morsel of either meat or bread! At a house called an inn, a little further on, the landlord had no meat except a little bit of chine of bacon; and though there were a good many houses near the spot, the landlord told me that the people were become so poor that the butchers had left off killing meat in the neighbourhood. Just the state of things that existed in France on the eve of the Revolution. On that very spot I looked round me, and counted more than two thousand fat sheep in the pastures! How long; how long, good God! is this state of things to last? How long will these people starve in the midst of plenty? How long will fire-engines, steel traps, and spring guns be, in such a state of things, a protection to property? When I was at Beverley a gentleman told me, it was Mr. Dawson of that place, that some time before a farmer had been sold up by his landlord; and that, in a few weeks afterwards, the farmhouse was on fire, and that when the servants of the landlord arrived to put it out they found the handle of the pump takenaway, and that the homestead was totally destroyed. This was told me in the presence of several gentlemen, who all spoke of it as a fact of perfect notoriety.
Another respect in which our situation so exactly resembles that of France on the eve of the Revolution is thefleeing from the countryin every direction. When I was in Norfolk there were four hundred persons, generally young men, labourers, carpenters, wheelwrights, millwrights, smiths, and bricklayers; most of them with some money, and some farmers and others with good round sums. These people were going to Quebec in timber-ships, and from Quebec by land into the United States. They had been told that they would not be suffered to land in the United States from on board of ship. The roguish villains had deceived them: but no matter; they will get into the United States; and going through Canada will do them good, for it will teach them to detest everything belonging to it. From Boston, two great barge loads had just gone off by canal to Liverpool, most of them farmers; all carrying some money, and some as much as two thousand pounds each. From the North and West Riding of Yorkshire numerous wagons have gone carrying people to the canals leading to Liverpool; and a gentleman, whom I saw at Peterboro’, told me that he saw some of them; and that the men all appeared to be respectable farmers. At Hull the scene would delight the eyes of the wise Burdett; for here the emigration is going on in the “Old Roman Plan.” Ten large ships have gone this spring, laden with these fugitives from the fangs of taxation; some bound direct to the ports of the United States; others, like those at Yarmouth, for Quebec. Those that have most money go direct to the United States. The single men, who are taken for a mere trifle in the Canada ships, go that way, have nothing but their carcasses to carry over the rocks and swamps, and through the myriads of place-men and pensioners in that miserable region; there are about fifteen more ships going from this one port this spring. The ships are fitted up with berths as transports for the carrying of troops. I went on board one morning, and saw the people putting their things on board and stowing them away. Seeing a nice young woman, with a little baby in her arms, I told her that she was going to a country where she would be sure that her children would never want victuals; where she might make her own malt, soap, and candles without being half put to death for it, and where the blaspheming Jews would not have a mortgage on the life’s labour of her children.
There is at Hull one farmer going who is seventy years of age; but who takes out five sons and fifteen hundred pounds! Brave and sensible old man! and good and affectionate father!He is performing a truly parental and sacred duty; and he will die with the blessing of his sons on his head for having rescued them from this scene of slavery, misery, cruelty, and crime. Come, then, Wilmot Horton, with your sensible associates, Burdett and Poulett Thomson; come into Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Yorkshire; come and bring Parson Malthus along with you; regale your sight with this delightful “stream of emigration”; congratulate the “greatest captain of the age,” and your brethren of the Collective: congratulate the “noblest assembly of free men,” on these the happy effects of their measures. Oh! no, Wilmot! Oh! no, generous and sensible Burdett, it is not the aged, the infirm, the halt, the blind, and the idiots that go: it is the youth, the strength, the wealth, and the spirit, that will no longer brook hunger and thirst in order that the maws of tax-eaters and Jews may be crammed. You want the Irish to go, and so they willat our expense, and all the bad of them, to be kept at our expense on the rocks and swamps of Nova Scotia and Canada. You have no money to send them away with: the tax-eaters want it all; and thanks to the “improvements of the age,” the steam-boats will continue to bring them in shoals in pursuit of the orts of the food that their task-masters have taken away from them.
After evening lecture at Horncastle a very decent farmer came to me and asked me about America, telling me that he was resolved to go, for that if he stayed much longer he should not have a shilling to go with. I promised to send him a letter from Louth to a friend at New York, who might be useful to him there and give him good advice. I forgot it at Louth; but I will do it before I go to bed. From the Thames, and from the several ports down the Channel, about two thousand have gone this spring. All the flower of the labourers of the east of Sussex and west of Kent will be culled out and sent off in a short time. From Glasgow the sensible Scotch are pouring out amain. Those that are poor and cannot pay their passages, or can rake together only a trifle, are going to a rascally heap of sand and rock and swamp, called Prince Edward’s Island, in the horrible Gulf of St. Lawrence; but when the American vessels come over with Indian corn and flour and pork and beef and poultry and eggs and butter and cabbages and green pease and asparagus for the soldier-officers and other tax-eaters, that we support upon that lump of worthlessness; for the lump itself bears nothing but potatoes; when these vessels come, which they are continually doing, winter and summer; towards the fall, with apples and pears and melons and cucumbers; and, in short, everlastingly coming and taking away the amount of taxes raised in England; when these vessels return, thesensible Scotch will go back in them for a dollar a head, till at last not a man of them will be left but the bed-ridden. Those villanous colonies are held for no earthly purpose but that of furnishing a pretence of giving money to the relations and dependents of the aristocracy; and they are the nicest channels in the world through which to send English taxes to enrich and strengthen the United States. Withdraw the English taxes, and, except in a small part in Canada, the whole of those horrible regions would be left to the bears and the savages in the course of a year.
This emigration is a famous blow given to the borough-mongers. The way to New York is now as well known and as easy, and as little expensive as from old York to London. First, the Sussex parishes sent their paupers; they invited over others that were not paupers; they invited over people of some property; then persons of greater property; now substantial farmers are going; men of considerable fortune will follow. It is the letters written across the Atlantic that do the business. Men of fortune will soon discover that to secure to their families their fortunes, and to take these out of the grasp of the inexorable tax-gatherer, they must get away. Every one that goes will take twenty after him; and thus it will go on. There can be no interruption butwar; and war the Thing dares not have. As to France or the Netherlands, or any part of that hell called Germany, Englishmen can never settle there. The United States form another England without its unbearable taxes, its insolent game-laws, its intolerable dead-weight, and its tread-mills.
Lincoln, 23rd April 1830.
From the inn at Spittal we came to this famous ancient Roman station, and afterwards grand scene of Saxon and Gothic splendour, on the 21st. It was the third or fourth day of theSpring fair, which is one of the greatest in the kingdom, and which lasts for a whole week. Horses begin the fair; then come sheep; and to-day, the horned-cattle. It is supposed that there were about 50,000 sheep, and I think the whole of the space in the various roads and streets, covered by the cattle, must have amounted to ten acres of ground ormore. Some say that they were as numerous as the sheep. The number of horses I did not hear; but they say that there were 1,500 fewer in number than last year. The sheep sold 5s.a head, on an average, lower than last year; and the cattle in the same proportion. High-priced horses sold well; but the horses which are called tradesmen’s horses were very low. This is the natural march of the Thing: those who live on the taxes have money to throw away; but those whopaythem are ruined, and have, of course, no money to lay out on horses.
The country from Spittal to Lincoln continued to be much about the same as from Barton to Spittal. Large fields, rather light loam at top, stone under, about half corn-land and the rest grass. Not so many sheep as in the richer lands, but a great many still. As you get on towards Lincoln, the ground gradually rises, and you go on the road made by the Romans. When you come to the city you find the ancient castle and the magnificent cathedral on thebrowof a sort of ridge which ends here; for you look all of a sudden down into a deep valley, where the greater part of the remaining city lies. It once hadfifty-two churches; it has now only eight, and only about 9,000 inhabitants! The cathedral is, I believe, thefinest building in the whole world. All the others that I have seen (and I have seen all in England except Chester, York, Carlisle, and Durham) are little things compared with this. To the task of describing a thousandth-part of its striking beauties I am inadequate; it surpasses greatly all that I had anticipated; and oh! how loudly it gives the lie to those brazen Scotch historians who would have us believe that England was formerly apoorcountry! The whole revenue raised from Lincolnshire, even by this present system of taxation, would not rear such another pile in two hundred years. Some of the city gates are down; but there is one standing, the arch of which is said to be two thousand years old; and a most curious thing it is. The sight of the cathedral fills the mind alternately with wonder, admiration, melancholy, and rage: wonder at its grandeur and magnificence; admiration of the zeal and disinterestedness of those who here devoted to the honour of God those immense means which they might have applied to their own enjoyments; melancholy at its present neglected state; and indignation against those who now enjoy the revenues belonging to it, and who creep about it merely as a pretext for devouring a part of the fruit of the people’s labour. There are no men in England who ought to wish forreformso anxiously as the working clergy of the church of England; we are all oppressed; but they are oppressed and insulted more than any men that ever lived in the world. The clergy in America; I mean in free America, notin our beggarly colonies, where clerical insolence and partiality prevail still more than here; I mean in the United States, where every man gives what he pleases, and no more: the clergy of the episcopal church are a hundred times better off than the working clergy are here. They are, also, much more respected, because theirorderhas not to bear the blame of enormous exactions; which exactions here are swallowed up by the aristocracy and their dependents; but which swallowings are imputed to every one bearing the name of parson. Throughout the whole country I have maintained the necessity and the justice of resuming the church property; but I have never failed to say that I know of no more meritorious and ill-used men than the working clergy of the established church.
Leicester, 26th April 1830.
At the famous ancient city of Lincoln I had crowded audiences, principally consisting of farmers, on the 21st and 22nd; exceedingly well-behaved audiences; and great impression produced. One of the evenings, in pointing out to them the wisdom of explaining to their labourers the cause of their distress, in order to ward off the effects of the resentment which the labourers now feel everywhere against the farmers, I related to them what my labourers at Barn-Elm had been doing since I left home: and I repeated to them the complaints that my labourers made, stating to them, from memory, the following parts of that spirited petition:
“That your petitioners have recently observed that many great sums of the money, part of which we pay, have been voted to be given to persons who render no services to the country; some of which sums we will mention here; that the sum of 94,900l.has been voted for disbandedforeignofficers, theirwidowsandchildren; that your petitioners know that ever since the peace this charge has been annually made; that it has been on an average 110,000l.a-year, and that, of course, this band of foreigners have actually taken away out of England, since the peace, one million and seven hundred thousand pounds; partly taken from the fruit of our labour; and if our dinners were actually taken from our table and carried over to Hanover, the process could not be to our eyes more visible than it now is; and we are astonished that those who fear that we, who make the land bring forth crops, and who make the clothing and the houses, shall swallow up the rental, appear to think nothing at all of the swallowings of these Hanoverian men, women, and children, who may continue thus to swallow for half a century to come.
“That the advocates of the project for sending us out of our country to the rocks and snows of Nova Scotia, and the swamps and wilds of Canada, have insisted on the necessity ofchecking marriagesamongst us, in order to cause a decrease in our numbers; that, however, while this is insisted on in your honourable House, we perceive a part of our own earnings voted away to encourage marriage amongst those who do not work, and who live at our expense; and that to your petitioners it does seem most wonderful, that there should be persons to fear that we, the labourers, shall, on account of our numbers, swallow up the rental, while they actually vote away our food and raiment to increase the numbers of those who never have produced, and who never will produce, anything useful to man.
“That your petitioners know that more than one-half of the whole of their wages is taken from them by the taxes; that these taxes go chiefly into the hands of idlers; that your petitioners are the bees, and that the tax-receivers are the drones; and they know, further, that while there is a project for sending the bees out of the country, no one proposes to send away the drones; but that your petitioners hope to see the day when the checking of the increase of the drones, and not of the bees, will be the object of an English Parliament.
“That, in consequence of taxes, your petitioners pay six-pence for a pot of worse beer than they could make for one penny; that they pay ten shillings for a pair of shoes that they could have for five shillings; that they pay seven-pence for a pound of soap or candles that they could have for three-pence; that they pay seven-pence for a pound of sugar that they could have for three-pence; that they pay six shillings for a pound of tea that they could have for two shillings; that they pay double for their bread and meat of what they would have to pay if there were no idlers to be kept out of the taxes; that, therefore, it is the taxes that make their wages insufficient for their support, and that compel them to apply for aid to the poor-rates; that, knowing these things, they feel indignant at hearing themselves described aspaupers, while so many thousands of idlers, for whose support they pay taxes, are callednoble LordsandLadies,honourable Gentlemen,Masters, andMisses; that they feel indignant at hearing themselves described as a nuisance to be got rid of, while the idlers who live upon their earnings are upheld, caressed and cherished, as if they were the sole support of the country.”
Having repeated to them these passages, I proceeded: “My workmen were induced thus to petition in consequence of the information which I, their master, had communicated to them; and, Gentlemen, why should not your labourers petitionin the same strain? Why should you suffer them to remain in a state of ignorance relative to the cause of their misery? The eye sweeps over in this county more riches in one moment than are contained in the whole county in which I was born, and in which the petitioners live. Between Holbeach and Boston, even at a public-house, neither bread nor meat was to be found; and while the landlord was telling me that the people were become so poor that the butchers killed no meat in the neighbourhood. I counted more than two thousand fat sheep lying about in the pastures in that richest spot in the whole world. Starvation in the midst of plenty; the land covered with food, and the working people without victuals: everything taken away by the tax-eaters of various descriptions: and yet you take no measures for redress; and your miserable labourers seem to be doomed to expire with hunger, without an effort to obtain relief. What! cannot you point out to them the real cause of their sufferings; cannot you take a piece of paper and write out a petition for them; cannot your labourers petition as well as mine; are God’s blessings bestowed on you without any spirit to preserve them; is the fatness of the land, is the earth teeming with food for the body and raiment for the back, to be an apology for the want of that courage for which your fathers were so famous; is the abundance which God has put into your hands, to be the excuse for your resigning yourselves to starvation? My God! is there no spirit left in England except in the miserable sand-hills of Surrey?” These words were not uttered without effect I can assure the reader. The assemblage was of that stamp in which thought goes before expression; but the effect of this example of my men in Surrey will, I am sure, be greater than anything that has been done in the petitioning way for a long time past.