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them in my parish; they keep me up to the mark."

HYPERBOLUS. Come, it is time to come to some conclusion. Of what would you have your aristocracy principally to consist?

TLEPOLEMUS. The country is the land, and I would have the land governed by the country. I would have the land governed by those who possess the land (by possession I mean not absolute ownership, but possession in the Roman sense), by those who live from the land, and by those who till the land.

HYPERBOLUS. Before I object to what you say, I want to know what you mean by possession of the land?

TLEPOLEMUS. I mean to say that possession has changed its meaning of late. It meant, under the Roman republic, the right to hold state land for the purpose of grazing, or otherwise, before it was enclosed; and this privilege was always a bone of contention between patricians and plebeians. I would not make the tenure so loose as this; but I would not have men suppose that they can own land as they own their hats or their coats, to have them passed on to "Old Clo!" after they and their servants have worn them out. God made the country as God made man, and the land is a sacred thing. My dear boy, we cannot very well hold the land, our grasp is too small; but somewhat less perhaps than six feet of land will hold us some day; and looking to that, we must look on the land as a thing to be respected and venerated. The fact is, that what is called landed property is a trust which a man receives not only from God, but from the State, and for which he owes duty not only to God but to the State in return. It is so long ago that our landlords received their allotments from the State, that they have forgotten the terms on which they were given. Their lands were won by conquest; they were won by that law of nature which gives to all stronger and fairer races the power, and, it may be, the right, to rule over the weaker and less beautiful-they were, like Jacob's, won by the sword and by the bow. The State conferred them as a reward for military prowess, and in return they ought to be made in perpetuity available for the military ser

vice of the State. Every landholder, whether on a large or small scaleevery country gentleman, farmer, peasant-proprietor-every labourer, ought to be a soldier, as a matter of course, liable to be called upon, not necessarily for foreign service, but certainly for the defence of his country.

It is the extravagance and covetousness of some of the landed classes which have caused the real nature of landed property to be ignored. They have sold, bought, borrowed, and lent land in the spirit of hucksters, and some few of them have thus richly deserved to be superseded by the huckstering classes. I think, for instance, and some may think I am going too far, that a landlord is never justified in cutting off, by consent of his heir, the entail of ancestral land to pay his debts. The land does not belong to him or to the heir-at-law. His family belongs to the land. In abdicating the duties he is born to, he commits a sort of suicide. Suppose an instance of the kind; such instances have happened in our time. The possessor of half a county gets deeply in debt; he feels the weight of debt unpleasant; he thinks land belongs to him as his hat and coat do; and just as if, being a poor mechanic, he would take them to the pawnshop, he pawns his land; and not being able to redeem the pledge, by consent of the next heir, forfeits it. They both imagine they are doing a most honourable and conscientious thing, just as Cato did when he would not survive the republic, and fell on his sword. We will not speak of their heritage divided and frittered away, their old name extinguished, their beautiful collections of pictures and works of art, which are an honour to their country, dispersed to the four winds; but we will speak of the poor who flourished in freedom and happiness under the scions of the great house, and who are now given over from the indulgent tutelage of a gentleman, the son of a gentleman, to the tender mercies of Hebrew moneylenders and speculating agents. How much happiness is blasted by such an act of mistaken conscientiousness! The money obtained by the sale of ancestral land is ill bestowed even when paying just debts, if debts may

be called just which are most of them forced by a speculating creditor on an easy and open-handed debtor; but if this excuse does not exist, and it ministers to mere selfishness, a law of nature is violated, and conscience, when "land is gone and money spent," instead of dwelling on the excellence of learning, will more probably upbraid in words like those of Wordsworth,—

"The fields that with covetous spirit we sold,

Those beautiful fields, the delight of our day,

Would have brought us more good than a burden of gold,

Could we but have lived as contented as they."

But the reason why the law of entail and the right of primogeniture have acquired such a bad name is, that the men to whom they apply have forgotten the duties bound up with them. They do not make such a great difference in the distribution of privilege after all. One has property, the other has not its responsibilities. The possessor of an estate ought to be bound to lie on the bed of debt that he has made for himself, not being able to do anything to the prejudice of the estate which is not his, but to which his family belong. He ought either to live upon it, or to overlook it, and to care as much for it as if he lived on it. The eldest son ought to consider himself a fixture on the land, which, to " young men of a roving disposition," as recruiting sergeants say, must often be a severe trial; and it is his duty to see that every member of his family which belongs to the land, is supported by the land as far as his resources will go, either directly or indirectly. As for the younger Lacklands, they are chartered cosmopolites, and, instead of the onerous duties of landlordism, are free to serve in the standing armies of the State, to see the manners and cities of many men, and to pick out for themselves, if they are minded to cast anchor, the very fairest spot of a very fair earth as a residence. It is through younger sons, and all the landlacking population who are as younger sons, and ought to be as affectionately considered by the State, that all our relations with foreign lands should be

VOL. LXXVII.-NO. CCCCLXXV.

kept up. The first-born is limited and land-locked, the latter-born are chainless as the sea, and free as the winds that blow over it. In their hands is given, as into the hands of the more seemingly favoured brother, the mission to replenish the earth, but not so much at home as abroad. They may say with the German poet,"Behold my soul's inheritance-how spacious, how sublime!

My tenement is boundless Earth, my field is boundless Time."

I am one of Britannia's younger sons, but I must tell you I do not envy Irenæus, or any other of my elder brothers.

HYPERBOLUS. So am I one of Britannia's younger sons-waiting for a commission. It is the aristocracy who keep me out of it.

TLEPOLEMUS. It is not the aristocracy; it is the abominable mercantile spirit which buys and sells commissions as if they were ticketed lots, with a sort of political simony. Commissions ought to be given to merit, and won by valour-not bought like a yard of calico. Gentlemen ought to go and serve in the ranks, and the ranks ought to be made honourable. But the aristocracy are not in fault here; it is the spirit of commerce which is in fault, degrading soldiers into hirelings, and dishonouring military service in general. Under the present system, I know of few more unsatisfactory sights than that of a poor boy waiting for a commission. His mind is running to seed, and he spends time which ought to be spent in a conscientious preparation for a noble calling, in aimless dissipation and the idleness for which some one finds work. Even so does the spirit of commerce enter into the most sacred relations of life and degrade them. No wonder that commissions are bought and sold, where almost every social offence, excepting murder, may be condoned for money. Meet Mr Bull in the street, and kick him; a five-pound note makes all straight. Make a conquest of Mrs Bull, and carry her across to Boulogne; a cheque for a thousand makes all straight. Break Miss Bull's heart; she lives to bring her action, and her affections are valued at a more moderate figure. If a nation will make a

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play thing of wars, and consider military commissions as toys, and the Horse-Guards as a toy-shop, we must not blame the aristocracy for dealing there when they have the means; but we must blame the spirit of the nation which treats with such levity some of its most solemn duties.

HYPERBOLUS. I said a little while ago, that when you had explained what you meant by possession of the land, I had an objection or two to bring against your theory of an aristocracy. It seems to me that it makes no difference whether a man farms or mines, whether he makes wheat or buttons, as far as his political dignity is concerned. What is the farmer but a manufacturer of food? What is a collier but an underground farmer? It is only the difference between horizontal and perpendicular, between tilling the surface of the earth and tilling its interior.

TLEPOLEMUS. Which sort of cultivation does your fair person like best -that of the artist who cuts your hair, of the other artist who cuts your coat, of the still rarer artist who imagines you a French dinner, or such sort of cultivation as a surgeon might make with a dissecting-knife among your viscera? The farmer tills the land, and the land pays him; but he gives more than he receives, and the land is all the better for his tilling. The manufacturer, who may be included with the miner, bores and spoils the earth like a mole, and ought, if he gets his deserts, to be treated as moles are treated. He takes all out of the earth, and puts nothing in. He is all for himself, for what is to become of his posterity when the coal-fields are exhausted, as they of course must be in time?

HYPERBOLUS. Why, then, the agricultural classes will have it all their own way.

TLEPOLEMUS. And the land will revert to its proper owners, or some of their class, as the Jewish lands reverted at the year of jubilee. By the way, you take very little account of the provisions made in the Mosaic dispensation for preventing the alienation of land.

HYPERBOLUS. We are not living under the Mosaic law.

TLEPOLEMUS. But under a law

which at least should be more humane. What would your high farmers say to leaving a few grapes for the thirsty wayfarer, a few stray wheat-ears for the hungry gleaner; to leaving the working ox unmuzzled? "Slovenly farming," they would say; but such precepts were given by the Highest Wisdom, though easily set aside, no doubt, by men who would style themselves manufacturers of food, as being farmers.

HYPERBOLUS. And what else are

farmers?

TLEPOLEMUS. Nothing else, if they manufacture seed, seed-leaves, flowers and fruit. I have learned out of some very old book, when a child, that these things were not made by men at all. It is an atheistic term. Man may make with his hands razors, reaping-hooks, calicoes, even steamengines; but more delicate manipulation than his is wanted for the manufacture of food. The farmer is not a manufacturer, and never will be if he is true to himself. He has too much respect for nature. He helps nature, and nature helps him; the other man is, as far as he can, destroying her inside and disfiguring her outside. One spends the interest which nature yields; the other eats into her capital, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. I esteem the farmer the nobler, and for many reasons I think that the country belongs to him more than to the other.

HYPERBOLUS. You would not, then, have a bureaucracy, but a boorocracy; you would make Roger Chawbacon a king. Roger Chawbacon, when a boy, was once asked what he would do if he were a king. "Swing on a gate and eat fat bacon all day," was his intelligent reply, in the provincial dialect.

TLEPOLEMUS. If the landed are mere boors in these times, they must take the consequences, and let political power go into shrewder hands. There are two antidotes to that rusticity which is apt to grow on all classes, whether high or low, that are purely agricultural; and these are, the drillingground and the school-military organisation and intellectual culture. If the country would hold up its head and broad shoulders above the town, it must attend to this. Above all must the nobility be the precursors of civi

lisation, as many of them are. They must store their minds with knowledge in boyhood and youth, or they will be left in the wake of an advancing age. As for those manly amusements so decried by the utilitarian party — hunting, shooting, and the like they must keep them up, not only for their health and pleasure, but as a duty; because of all preparations for soldiering they are perhaps the best, for they demand the exercise, in a greater or less degree, of all military qualities. And with due respect for the preservation of game, they must not be too hard even on the poor poachers; and they might fitly punish these uncovenanted sportsmen for their irregularities by forming them into Bashi - Bazouks, or irregular cavalry, whose work should be somewhat harder than that of the rest. Many a spirited youth has turned poacher from the mere ennui of rustic society as at present constituted. I have answered you. But why are you waiting, not preparing, for a commission?

HYPERBOLUS. I know I am very idle, but I hope to work up some interest, and then I shall set to work in earnest when I see the commission is to be had.

TLEPOLEMUS. As if a soldier could be made in a day. If it takes two years to make a good soldier, it takes four to make a good officer, fighting being the smallest part of his duties. But the levity with which the aristocracy, and those classes who take their cue from them, regard the preparation for the army, is not to be charged on them so much as on a nation which considers war only fit for the ornamental part of the population, and by no means an earnest business like that of the clergyman or the magistrate. Here is the root of the whole evil. I do not exculpate the aristocracy in this sad Crimean business, but they did their part of the work well,-they did at least the fighting well; where they failed was, seemingly, in entertaining the same contempt for war as a busi

ness which our men of business have always entertained. It is the Peace party, as has been truly observed many times of late, who have done it all, directly or indirectly; their principles have more or less contaminated society, even that part of it which professed no sympathy with them. It was the party who repealed the Corn Laws to make bread cheap, who sent out soldiers and then starved them, for the sake of clinging to a ready-money principle in war; reminding one of the economical gentleman who tried to make his horse live without hay and oats, and then was exceedingly provoked at his dying when he was just beginning to learn the way.

IRENEUS. I have finished my cigar some time ago; you have thrown yours away in the heat of discussion. Hyperbolus still keeps his pipe alight, and is fallen into a brown study, as if to make it appear that his interior is as profound, while his exterior is as showy, as that deep Dresden bowl. Excuse my summing up, for I suppose you have constituted me judge. Our aristocracy have been to blame lately, though not so much as the Times would have it. But they have been to blame, through the desertion of their ancestral principles; at least, this seems to be the drift of Tlepolemus's argument: and we poor men of peace-for I am still not anti-pacific, though I have left the Society-must bear the blame on our broad backs.

TLEPOLEMUS. In fact, it is not the cold shade of our genealogical tree that has stunted and blighted our army; it is the cold shade of the upas of commerce-yet best symbolised not by a tree, but by a ghastly Manchester chimney, vomiting nitric acid, muriatic acid, and a thousand putrid abominations, shutting out the sunbeams from the face of once fair Britain with its o'ershadowing smoke, and making the earth, where grass and wild-flowers grew in the memory of our fathers, into a blackened and blasted wilderness, like the sites of the cities of the plain.

THE STORY OF THE CAMPAIGN.-PART VI.

CHAPTER XVIII. (continued)—PROGRESS OF THE SIEGE.

Ir was rumoured and expected for some days afterwards, that the French would make another effort to take the hill. The Russians placed riflemen behind the work they had thrown up, and in a small enclosure of loose stones near it, who exchanged a brisk fire with the French tirailleurs in the advanced trench, but without much damage to either side. The attack was not renewed by the French, and the enemy proceeded to complete the work unmolested. The French, however, sallied from their lines on two or three successive nights upon the rifle-pits occupied by the Russians towards Inkermann, and on one occasion drove out the occupants of the pits and repulsed the troops supporting them; but neglecting to destroy or occupy the pits themselves, the Russians returned to them when the French withdrew.

At the beginning of March the winter seemed to have departed, leaving only a few cold days lingering, in scattered order, in its rear. The health of the troops was steadily improving; they were in comparative comfort, and their labours were lightened. New batteries, admirably constructed, were in course of completion, far in advance of those used in the first attack, and connected with them by long lines of trenches. Guns for arming them were in our siege depots, those damaged by the longcontinued fire were replaced by others, and we had lent a number to the French. Inkermann was not only defended against a second assault like that of the 5th of November, but was now the most strongly intrenched point of our position. Finally, the supply of ammunition necessary for reopening a general and sustained cannonade was being fast accumulated, while the fire of the enemy, who but lately had returned ten shots for one, was materially slackened.

A Russian steamer, armed with two heavy guns, had for a long time been anchored near the head of the harbour, at a point from whence she

could fire towards Inkermann, and had frequently annoyed our working parties there. On the night of the 6th, the embrasures of three guns in our battery facing Inkermann Lights, 1800 yards from the ship, were unmasked, and shot heated. At daybreak the guns opened; the first shot passed over the vessel, and did not attract the notice of the sentry who was pacing the deck-the second struck the water near, when he jumped on the paddle-box and alarmed the crew. Seven or eight shot struck her, and damaged her machinery so much that, though the steam was got up, the paddles did not revolve, and she was warped round into the shelter of a neighbouring point. Her crew immediately left her, and she was careened over for repair. A deserter told us that three men were killed and three wounded on board.

On the 9th a telegraphic despatch was received at the British headquarters, stating that the Emperor of Russia had died on the 2d, with the words appended, "This may be relied on as authentic." The news spread rapidly through the camp, and, notwithstanding its surprising nature, it was at once believed. Next day the French General received a despatch to the same effect from a different source.

By the construction of the lines and batteries at Inkermann the Allies had to a great extent effected the object of enclosing the defensive works south of the Great Harbour. In front of the Round Tower (called by the Russians Malakoff), and to the right of our right attack, was a hill of the form of a truncated cone, nearly as elevated as that on which the Round Tower stauds, known by us as Gordon's Hill, and by the French as the Mammelon. It had been intended that the French should obtain possession of this hill under cover of a cross-fire, from our right attack and the left Inkermann batteries, upon the ground behind it; and that works should be

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