Rural Rides Page 31

  Just after we had finished the bread and cheese, we crossed the turnpike road that goes from Basingstoke to Stockbridge; and Mr Bailey had told us, that we were then to bear away to our right, and go to the end of a wood (which we saw one end of), and keep round with that wood, or coppice, as he called it, to our left; but we, seeing Beacon-Hill more to the left, and resolving to go, as nearly as possible, in a straight line to it, steered directly over the fields; that is to say, pieces of ground from 30 to 100 acres in each. But, a hill, which we had to go over, had here hidden from our sight a part of this ‘coppice’, which consists, perhaps, of 150 or 200 acres, and which we found sweeping round, in a crescent-like form so far, from towards our left, as to bring our land-mark over the coppice at about the mid-length of the latter. Upon this discovery we slackened sail; for this coppice might be a mile across; and though the bottom was sound enough, being a coverlet of flints upon a bed of chalk, the underwood was too high and too thick for us to face, being, as we were, at so great a distance from the means of obtaining a fresh supply of clothes. Our leather leggings would have stood any thing; but, our coats were of the common kind; and, before we saw the other side of the coppice we should, I dare say, have been as ragged as forest-ponies in the month of March.

  In this dilemma I stopped and looked at the coppice. Luckily two boys, who had been cutting sticks (to sell, I dare say, at least I hope so), made their appearance, at about half a mile off, on the side for the coppice. Richard galloped off to the boys, from whom he found, that, in one part of the coppice, there was a road cut across, the point of entrance into which road they explained to him. This was to us, what the discovery of a canal across the isthmus of Darien5 would be to a ship in the Gulph of Mexico, wanting to get into the Pacific without doubling Cape-Home. A beautiful road we found it. I should suppose the best part of a mile long, perfectly straight, the surface sound and smooth, about tight feet wide, the whole length seen at once, and, when you are at one end, the other end seeming to be hardly a yard wide. When we got about halfway, we found a road that crossed this. These roads are, I suppose, cut for the hunters. They are very pretty, at any rate, and we found this one very convenient; for it cut our way short by a full half mile.

  From this coppice, to Whitchurch, is not more than about four miles, and we soon reached it, because here you begin to descend into the vale, in which this little town lies, and through which there runs that stream, which turns the mill of ‘SQUIRE PORTAL, and which mill makes the Bank of England Note-Paper! Talk of the THAMES and the HUDSON, with their forests of masts; talk of the Nile and the DELAWARE, bearing the food of millions on their bosoms; talk of the Ganges and the Mississippi sending forth over the world their silks and their cottons; talk of the Rio de la Plata and the other rivers, their beds pebbled with silver and gold and diamonds. What, as to their effect on the condition of mankind, as to the virtues, the vices, the enjoyments and the sufferings of men; what are all these rivers put together, compared with the river of Whitchurch, which a man of threescore may jump across dry-shod, which moistens a quarter of a mile wide of poor, rushy meadow, which washes the skirts of the park and game-preserves of that bright patrician,6 who wedded the daughter of HANSON, the attorney and late solicitor to the Stamp-Office, and which is, to look at it, of far less importance than any gutter in the WEN! Yet, this river, by merely turning a wheel, which wheel sets some rag-tearers and grinders and washers and recompressers in motion, has produced a greater effect on the condition of men, than has been produced on that condition by all the other rivers, all the seas, all the mines and all the continents in the world. The discovery of America, and the consequent discovery and use of vast quantities of silver and gold, did, indeed, produce great effects on the nations of Europe. They changed the value of money, and caused, as all such changes must, a transfer of property, raising up new families and pulling down old ones, a transfer very little favourable either to morality, or to real and substantial liberty. But this cause worked slowly; its consequences came on by slow degrees; it made a transfer of property, but it made that transfer in so small a degree, and it left the property quiet in the hands of the new possessor for so long a time, that the effect was not violent, and was not, at any rate, such as to uproot possessors by whole districts, as the hurricane uproots the forests.

  Not so the product of the little sedgy rivulet of Whitchurch! It has, in the short space of a hundred and thirty-one years, and, indeed, in the space of the last FORTY, caused greater changes as to property than had been caused by all other things put together in the long course of seven centuries, though, during that course there had been a sweeping, confiscating Protestant reformation. Let us look back to the place where I started, on this present rural ride. Poor old BARON MASERES, succeeded, at REIGATE, by little PARSON FELLOWES, and at BETCHWORTH (three miles on my road) by KENDRICK, is no bad instance to begin with; for, the Baron was nobly descended, though from French ancestors. At ALDBURY, fifteen miles on my road, Mr DRUMMOND (a banker) is in the seat of one of the HOWARDS, and, close by, he has bought the estate, just pulled down the house, and blotted out the memory of the GODSCHALLS. At CHILWORTH, two miles further down the same vale, and close under St MARTHA’S HILL, Mr TINKLER, a powder-maker (succeeding HILL, another powder-maker, who had been a breeches-maker at Hounslow) has got the old mansion and the estate of the old DUCHESS of MARLBOROUGH, who frequently resided in what was then a large quadrangular mansion, but the remains of which now serve as out farm-buildings and a farm-house, which I found inhabited by a poor labourer and his family, the farm being in the hands of the powder-maker, who does not find the once noble seat good enough for him. Coming on to WAVERLEY ABBEY, there is Mr THOMPSON, a merchant, succeeding the ORBY HUNTERS and Sir ROBERT RICH. Close adjoining, Mr LAING, a West India dealer of some sort, has stepped into the place of the lineal descendants of Sir WILLIAM TEMPLE. At FARNHAM the park and palace remain in the hands of a Bishop of Winchester, as they have done for about eight hundred years; but why is this? Because they are public property; because they cannot, without express laws, be transferred. Therefore the product of the rivulet of Whitchurch has had no effect upon the ownership of these, which are still in the hands of a Bishop of Winchester; not of a William of Wykham, to be sure; but still, in those of a bishop, at any rate. Coming on to OLD ALRESFORD (twenty miles from Farnham) SHERIFF, the son of a SHERIFF, who was a Commissary in the American war, has succeeded the GAGES. TWO miles further on, at ABBOTSTON (down on the side of the Itchen) ALEXANDER BARING has succeeded the heirs and successors of the DUKE OF BOLTON, the remains of whose noble mansion I once saw here. Not above a mile higher up, the same Baring has, at the GRANGE, with its noble mansion, park and estate, succeeded the heirs of LORD NORTHINGTON; and, at only about two miles further, Sir THOMAS BARING, at Stratton Park, has succeeded the RUSSELLS in the ownership of the estates of Stratton and Micheldever, which were once the property of ALFRED THE GREAT! Stepping back, and following my road, down by the side of the meadows of the beautiful river Itchen, and coming to Easton, I look across to MARTYR’S WORTHY, and there see (as I observed before) the OGLES succeeded by a general or a colonel, somebody; but who, or whence, I cannot learn.

  This is all in less than four score miles, from Reigate even to this place, where I now am. Oh! mighty rivulet of Whitchurch! All our properties, all our laws, all our manners, all our minds, you have changed! This, which I have noticed, has all taken place within forty, and, most of it, within ten years. The small gentry, to about the third rank upwards (considering there to be five ranks from the smallest gentry up to the greatest nobility,) are all gone, nearly to a man, and the small farmers along with them. The Barings alone have, I should think, swallowed up thirty or forty of these small gentry without perceiving it. They, indeed, swallow up the biggest race of all; but, innumerable small fry slip down unperceived, like caplins down the throats of the sharks, while these latter feel only the cod-fish. It frequendy happens, too, that a big gendeman or nobleman, whose estate ha
s been big enough to resist for a long while, and who has swilled up many caplin-gentry, goes down the throat of the loan-dealer with all the caplins in his belly.

  Thus the Whitchurch rivulet goes on, shifting property from hand to hand. The big, in order to save themselves from being ‘swallowed up quick’ (as we used to be taught to say, in our Church Prayers against Buonaparte,) make use of their voices to get, through place, pension, or sinecure, something back from the taxers. Others of them fall in love with the daughters and widows of paper-money people, big brewers, and the like; and sometimes their daughters fall in love with the paper-money people’s sons, or the fathers of those sons; and, whether they be Jews, or not, seems to be little matter with this all-subduing passion of love. But, the small gentry have no resource. While war lasted, glorious war’, there was a resource; but now, alas! not only is there no war, but there is no hope of war; and, not a few of them will actually come to the parish-book. There is no place for them in the army, church, navy, customs, excise, pension-list, or any where else. All these are now wanted by ‘their betters’. A stock-jobber’s family will not look at such pennyless things. So that while they have been the active, the zealous, the efficient instruments, in compelling the working classes to submit to half-starvation, they have, at any rate been brought to the most abject ruin themselves; for which I most heartily thank God. The ‘harvest of war’ is never to return without a total blowing up of the paper-system. Spain must belong to France, St Domingo must pay her tribute. America must be paid for slaves taken away in war, she must have Florida, she must go on openly and avowedly making a navy for the purpose of humbling us; and all this, and ten times more, if France and America should choose; and yet, we can have no war, as long as the paper-system last; and, if that cease, then what is to come!

  Burghclere, Sunday Morning, 6th November

  It has been fine all the week, until to-day, when we intended to set off for HURSTBOURN-TARRANT, vulgarly called UPHUSBAND, but the rain seems as if it would stop us. From Whitchurch to within two miles of this place, it is the same sort of country as between Winchester and Whitchurch. High, chalk bottom, open downs or large fields, with here and there a farm-house in a dell, sheltered by lofty trees, which, to my taste, is the most pleasant situation in the world.

  This has been with Richard, one whole week of hare-hunting, and with me, three days and a half. The weather has been amongst the finest that I ever saw, and Lord Caernarvon’s preserves fill the country with hares, while these hares invite us to ride about and to see his park and estate, at this fine season of the year, in every direction. We are now on the north side of that Beacon-hill for which we steered last Sunday. This makes part of a chain of lofty chalk-hills and downs, which divides all the lower part of Hampshire from Berkshire, though, the ancient ruler, owner, of the former, took a little strip all along, on the flat, on this side of the chain, in order I suppose, to make the ownership of the hills themselves the more clear of all dispute; just as the owner of a field hedge and bank owns also the ditch on his neighbour’s side. From these hills you look, at one view, over the whole of Berkshire, into Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, and you can see the Isle of Wight and the sea. On this north side the chalk soon ceases, the sand and clay begin, and the oak-woods cover a great part of the surface. Amongst these is the farm-house, in which we are, and from the warmth and good fare of which we do not mean to stir, until we can do it without the chance of a wet skin.

  This rain has given me time to look at the newspapers of about a week old. Oh, oh! The Cotton Lords are tearing! Thank God for that! The Lords of the Anvil are snapping! Thank God for that too! They have kept poor souls, then, in a heat of 84 degrees to little purpose, after all. The ‘great interests’ mentioned in the King’s Speech, do not, then, all continue to flourish!7 The ‘prosperity’ was not, then, permanent’ though the King was advised to assert so positively that it was! ‘Anglo-Mexican and Pasco-Peruvian’ fall in price, and the Chronicle assures me, that ‘the ‘respectable owners of the Mexican Mining shares mean to take measures to protect their property’. Indeed! Like protecting the Spanish Bonds, I suppose? Will the Chronicle be so good as to tell us the names of these ‘respectable persons’? Doctor Black must know their names; or else he could not know them to be respectable. If the parties be those that I have heard, these mining works may possibly operate with them as an emetic, and make them throw-up a part, at least, of what they have taken down.

  There has, I see, at New York, been that confusion, which I, four months ago, said would and must take place; that breaking of merchants and all the ruin, which, in such a case, spreads itself about, ruining families and producing fraud and despair. Here will be, between the two countries, an interchange of cause and effect, proceeding from the dealings in cotton, until, first and last, two or three hundred thousands of persons have, at one spell of paper-money work, been made to drink deep of misery. I pity none but the poor English creatures, who are compelled to work on the wool of this accursed weed, which has done so much mischief to England. The slaves who cultivate and gather the cotton, are well fed. They do not suffer. The sufferers are those who spin it and weave it and colour it, and the wretched beings who cover with it those bodies, which, as in the time of Old FORTESCUE, ought to be ‘clothed throughout in good woollens’.

  One newspaper says, that Mr HUSKISSON is gone to Paris, and thinks it likely that he will endeavour to ‘inculcate in the mind of the Bourbons wise principles of free trade’! What the devil next! Persuade them, I suppose, that it is for their good, that English goods should be admitted into France and into St Domingo, with little or no duty? Persuade them to make a treaty of commerce with him; and, in short, persuade them to make France help to pay the interest of our debt and dead-weight, lest our system of paper should go to pieces, and lest that should be followed by a radical reform, which reform would be injurious to ‘the monarchical principle’! This newspaper politician does, however, think, that the Bourbons will be ‘too dull’ to comprehend these ‘enlightened and liberal’ notions; and I think so too. I think the Bourbons, or, rather, those who will speak for them, will say: ‘No thank you. You contracted your debt without our participation; you made your dead-weight for your own purposes; the seizure of our museums and the loss of our frontier towns followed your victory of Waterloo, though we were “your ALLIES” at the time; you made us pay an enormous TRIBUTE after that battle, and kept possession of part of France till we had paid it; you wished, the other day, to keep us out of Spain, and you, Mr HUSKISSON, in a speech at Liverpool, called our deliverance of the King of Spain an unjust and unprincipled act of aggression, while Mr Canning prayed to God that we might not succeed. No thank you, Mr HUSKISSON, no. No coaxing, Sir; we saw, then, too clearly the advantage we derived from your having a debt and a dead-weight, to wish to assist in relieving you from either. “Monarchical principle” here, or “monarchicalprinciple” there, we know, that your mill-stone debt is our best security. We like to have your wishes, your prayers, and your abuse against us, rather than your subsidies and your fleets: and so, farewell, Mr HUSKISSON: if you like, the English may drink French wine; but whether they do or not, the French shall not wear your rotten cottons. And, as a last word, how did you maintain the “monarchical principle” ‘the “paternal principle”or as CASTLEREAGH called it, the “social system”, when you called that an unjust and unprincipled aggression, which put an end to the bargain, by which the convents and other church-property of Spain were to be transferred to the Jews and Jobbers of London? Bon jour, Monsieur Huskisson, ci-devant membre et orateur du club de quatre vingt neuf !’8

  If they do not actually say this to him, this is what they will think; and that is, as to the effect, precisely the same thing. It is childishness to suppose, that any nation will act from a desire of serving all other nations, or any one other nation, as well as itself. It will make, unless compelled, no compact, by which it does not think itself a gainer; and, amongst its gains, it must, a
nd always does, reckon the injury to its rivals. It is a stupid idea, that all nations are to gain, by any thing. Whatever is the gain of one, must, in some way or other, be a loss to another. So that this new project of ‘free trade’ and ‘mutual gain’ is as pure a humbug as that which the newspapers carried on, during the ‘glorious days’ of loans, when they told us, at every loan, that the bargain was ‘equally advantageous to the contractors and to the public’! The fact is, the ‘free trade’ project is clearly the effect of a consciousness of our weakness. As long as we felt strong, we felt bold, we had no thought of conciliating the world; we upheld a system of exclusion, which long experience proved to be founded in sound policy. But, we now find, that our debts and our loads of various sorts cripple us. We feel our incapacity for the carrying of trade sword in hand: and so, we have given up all our old maxims, and are endeavouring to persuade the world, that we are anxious to enjoy no advantages that are not enjoyed also by our neighbours. Alas! the world sees very clearly the cause of all this; and the world laughs at us for our imaginary cunning. My old doggrel, that used to make me and my friends laugh in Long-Island is precisely pat to this case.