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Extension of Enclosures.

347

are thus suddenly deprived ?-for of even the richest and most luxurious man's expenditure, how large a portion resolves itself virtually into mere wages of labour-race-horses, and operadancers excepted. Not to mention the absurdity of a nation plunged into a war, determining before-hand the sum which it would spend upon it each year, as if in undertaking a chancery suit any one was able to allowance himself with a fixed annual amount of litigatory menus plaisirs.

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Reverting to our internal condition, much mischief is attributed by Mr. Doubleday (apparently for want of better reasons,) to the general extension of enclosures. From 1760 to 1831, 7,000,000 of acres in England and Wales have been enclosed. It would really be a waste of time to combat such an argument, even were his assertion true, which it is not, that the poor of the country had been despoiled of these their possessions, and that no others enjoyed any right over them. Very little advantage could have been derived from them by persons too poor to lay out capital upon them, and who only possessed a limited right of enjoyment in them. Things held absolutely in common, forbid, from their nature, the application of capital by a few of the individuals interested, as the benefits accruing from such outlay would go to the commoners at large, and not exclusively to the investers. The writer is incorrect in his account of these commons, when he states that "they were gradually abandoned by the richer proprietors as inconvenient holdings—at last they became the joint property of the poorer, and a village or town naturally rose on the verge of each, which was the origin of townships, into which parishes came to be divided."

Had he been as active in ascertaining where and what people had a right to graze, as in demonstrating what debts, or interests they ought not to pay, he would not have been betrayed into such inaccuracies-he would have found it distinctly recorded in the memorial rolls of three-fourths of the courts-baron, that the clear and undisputed ownership of these wastes was in the Lord of the Manor, subject to a limited and restricted right of enjoyment by the commoners, varying according to the custom of each particular manor; and the same records show that the commoners were by no means negligent of their own rights, from the frequent presentments of any who intruded without license from the lord or other valid title. The question of enclosures has been rather needlessly pressed into the service by Mr. Doubleday, in his attack on our finance, for we can trace no connexion betwixt them. As far as enclosures have had any effect on the labouring class, it has been a beneficial one, from the employment and the food they have afforded; though, un

fortunately, he views them like many other matters, through a strangely distorted medium.

In fact, it is difficult to ascertain what classes of men or things occupy the lowest place in his favour. Ministers and economists, favourites and demagogues, landlords and Jews-events and periods even, all come in by turns for marks of his displeasure. The South Sea villains"-" this atrociously villanous proceeding"" the slavish and impudent pedant"-" the pompous and over-praised bully, Johnson;" "the long, gloomy, mad, and wicked reign of Geo. III.," who is further noted as the "boorish semi-idiot"-"who nominally governed"-" the profligate Scotchman," (Lord Bute,)—and "the regal demi-rep," (the Prince of Wales) "who really ruled"-" the empty and flippant Canning,"-" the incapable Robinson,"-" a shallow and superficial man," the "most silly and contemptible of all financiers."

In his praise he is more sparing; but its objects find themselves in unexpected company in his pages. He ranks together "the much-maligned but honest (?) monarch, James II.," the late William Cobbett, and the present hon. member for Oldham-"the excellent John Fielden,"-"the Protector Cromwell," and "the illustrious President Jackson," who is complimented for having forced the United States to return to those cash payments "which had been suspended to the great injury of the morals, credit, and prosperity of the Union;" just the very course, in short, which he bitterly reproaches Mr. Peel and the Parliament for having followed in 1819. The Protector, we suppose, is lauded, in order to afford an opportunity of scolding at the repeal of the navigation laws, and of abusing the pacific policy of England, contrasted with the bold bearing which the internal weakness of the then natural rivals of England justified Cromwell in assuming in his foreign correspondence.

We are taunted with not opposing an English army to the French invasion of Spain in 1823. We are told we must submit to any sacrifice rather than resort to hostilities. We are reproached with the submission of Wellington to the blockade of Enos by the Russians in 1829-with the capture of the Vixen -the extirpation of Poland-the annexation of Texas-the overthrow of Espartero-the Spanish marriages-Russian agressions in Turkey-Russian intrigues in Asia,-all of which are contrasted with the boastful dictum of Chatham, that not a cannon should be fired in Europe but that England should know the reason why.

No doubt these several incidents, some of which it would have been inconvenient, others extravagant, in us to oppose or punish by force, have been pro tanto triumphs of barbarism over civilization, of despotism over that liberty and independence among the

Position of England in Prospect of War.

349

nations of the world which it is the proud distinction of England to have inspired, and which it is still her privilege to lead. She must, however, be content with the influence which her position and her intellectual state in advance of the whole world ensure for her. She cannot act as police-officer and public prosecutor for every offence against liberty and property committed on the face of the globe. The wider her commerce, the more extended her relations, the more intricate the net-work of the communications she maintains for the diffusion of wealth and intellect among mankind, the more cautious does it behove her to be of interrupting, even temporarily and over a limited surface, the ramifications by which her civilizing influences are distributed to other nations. Nothing can be so afflicting as the contemplation of a renewal of the general European struggle which terminated in the last generation: the men of this, now in their prime, have the happiness, for the most part, of knowing of those horrors by description and tradition only, as having been inflicted in other countries-never as having been endured in our own. They have not felt as our fathers did, who were actors in and responsible for the issue of the tremendous struggle then raging, what really was a contest pro aris et focis.

Mr. Doubleday is so certain of our ruin if the struggle ever be renewed: he looks on that ruin as so valuable an instrument of punishment for the crimes of sundry extortioners, that he almost seems to regret that we did not plunge into hostilities in order that his anger at certain of our institutions or classes of men might be appeased by their destruction in the conflict. We admit that our difficulties as to money would be pressing. But those of the enemy would be in no respect less embarrassing. In the last war, France, the general aggressor, started with the advantage of providing for her armies by a general confiscation of land and tithes-everything, in short, that belonged to the Church and noblesse, the owners having been first guillotined or exiled. From the States she subdued, she plundered enough to maintain her armies and enrich her leaders-just as her forefathers had done under Brennus and Vercingetorix twenty centuries before.

Our policy was different. We raised soldiers and sailors, who, when they fought, conquered, and honestly and gallantly earned their daily bread, even with wheat at 120s. the quarter; but we unluckily hired the military service of every nation on the continent who had an army to let, and sent them into the field one after another, at our expense, against Buonaparte, by whom they were uniformly beaten and dispersed, while their captured material went to increase the military stores of the conquerors.

But all this is now essentially altered. In the event of any general hostilities calling for great national efforts, the Conti

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nental Powers would be at least as much embarrassed as ourselves. If they have less debt, they have also far less credit; and they have difficulties, too, which we are exempt from. Capitalists of all kinds, Jew and Gentile, will, in view of the onward progress of opinion and the decline of the simple monarchical principle of Government in every country, in future require some better guarantee than a minister's word or a prince's promise before they will abandon their industrial reproductive investments in order to furnish the sinews of war for the destruction of man and his works.. The intervention of another party to the bargain -that of the tax-payer, through his lawfully constituted attorney or representative-will be more generally insisted upon as a guarantee to the security of the loan. In Prussia, in the midst of peace in 1847, as in the France of 1789, financial embarrassment leads to the convocation of a States-General, and we see the monarchical past ungraciously doing homage to the representative future. Could Austria, Prussia, or Russia, could any the smaller German States, save enough out of their present respective revenues to recommence the conflict which expired in 1815, upon the plan advocated by Ricardo? Such an impost is out of the question. There remains then the resource of borrowing. But in any case for the increase of taxation requisite to pay the interest of the money, recourse must be had to the national will. The caprice of the sovereign, his family connexion with other royal families, piques or predilections among princes, will not be admitted as a sufficient cause for mortgaging the industry of every man, woman, and child in the country, in order to gratify them. We do not believe that France could now endure a war in order to obtain Spain as an appanage for the Orleans family, any more than that England would permit her army to be disembarked in Portugal in order to maintain the consort of Donna Maria, the cousin of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in the possession of an unconstitutional authority.*

There could be no avoiding, in the greater part of the Continental States, in such a case as that above supposed, an appeal to the national wishes in some shape;-a costly war now-a-days must enlist the intelligence and wealth of a country on its side, or it cannot be persevered in. Since our continental neighbours have undertaken to be manufacturers too, they are more heavily bound over to keep the peace than before. Even in Russia the Czar would be forced to modify his policy to the feelings and interests of his nobles. A general cessation of the exports of raw material consequent upon our short general blockade of the

* Some of the French press have nevertheless attempted to give circulation to this stupid calumny.

Condition of France.

351

Baltic in the last war, spread discontent as well as distress among the squirearchy of the Sclavonic race ;-a revival of the blockade, our most effectual, and to us least costly, means of offence, would renew those feelings with increased effect.

Our nearest and most probable enemy is France. She is formidable from her compactness, her position, and also_from the unforgiving recollections with which her people brood over Trafalgar and Waterloo. Those conditions alone do not insure success. They do not even render it probable. But then she has had her revolutions, say some-she is at least exempt from falling lower, while her neighbours are either in a transition state which would cripple their action, or, it may be, on the brink of such a catastrophe as that with which she has been visited. These arguments are not convincing. From her statistical compilations, as well as from her political writers on both sides, it may be gathered that there is quite as much of distress and ferment as in England, with less of security for property. "France," says the enthusiastic Michelet, "did not by her revolution destroy her nobility; she has, on the contrary, gained 34,000,000 of nobles. But this new nobility (he is alluding to the general possession of land by the French peasant) is threatened with extinction." Borne down by the weight of usury and direct taxation, the cultivator becomes daily more estranged from his fellow-countrymen-he regards with increasing ill-will all those who do not, like himself, derive their livelihood from tilling the soil with their own hands. The Chevalier Tapïès (Statisque de la France et l'Angleterre) pronounces, on the other hand, against the petite culture so much insisted upon by Michelet. "The misery of the cultivator deprives him of all credit; he has no means of making manure, its absence must be supplied by successive labour, and yet the produce is but moderate." "In reading history one sees every where that the nations, à petite culture, (cottiers, small farmers, &c.,) dwelling on plains, have always been invaded and conquered by the people à grande culture." Thus Hants and Wilts might, if Lord Ashburton and Mr. Benett were so minded, entirely overrun and reduce into captivity the conacre men and home colonists, which Mr. Powlett Scrope so pleasantly dreams of in Ireland. "Those large-farmer nations alone are able to repair the losses in men, horses, provisions, and materials, which long and disastrous wars occasion. England, Italy, Austria, show this, particularly the latter power. Insensible to twenty years of defeat and discouragement, Austria has always recommenced the conflict, and has provided abundance of commissariat supplies and of horses. As to France, a single reverse sufficed, after many years of success, to render her completely inert."

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