How to Observe.

Morals and Manners.




BY

HARRIET MARTINEAU

LONDON:
CHARLES KNIGHT AND CO. 22, LUDGATE STREET.
1838.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY,
Dorset Street, Fleet Street.

ADVERTISEMENT.

"The best mode of exciting the love of observation is by teaching 'How to Observe.' With this end it was originally intended to produce, in one or two volumes, a series of hints for travellers and students, calling their attention to the points necessary for inquiry or observation in the different branches of Geology, Natural History, Agriculture, the Fine Arts, General Statistics, and Social Manners. On consideration, however, it was determined somewhat to extend the plan, and to separate the great divisions of the field of observation, so that those whose tastes led them to one particular branch of inquiry might not be encumbered with other parts in which they do not feel an equal interest."

The preceding passage is contained in the notice accompanying the first work in this series—Geology, by Mr. De la Bèche, published in 1835. Thus, the second work in the series is in continuation of the plan above announced.

CONTENTS.

HOW TO OBSERVE.

MORALS AND MANNERS.

PART I.

REQUISITES FOR OBSERVATION.

INTRODUCTION.

"Inest sua gratia parvis."

"Les petites choses n'ont de valeur que de la part de ceux qui peuvent s'élever aux grandes."—De Jouy.

There is no department of inquiry in which it is not full as easy to miss truth as to find it, even when the materials from which truth is to be drawn are actually present to our senses. A child does not catch a gold fish in water at the first trial, however good his eyes may be, and however clear the water; knowledge and method are necessary to enable him to take what is actually before his eyes and under his hand. So it is with all who fish in a strange element for the truth which is living and moving there: the powers of observation must be trained, and habits of method in arranging the materials presented to the eye must be acquired before the student possesses the requisites for understanding what he contemplates.

The observer of Men and Manners stands as much in need of intellectual preparation as any other student. This is not, indeed, generally supposed, and a multitude of travellers act as if it were not true. Of the large number of tourists who annually sail from our ports, there is probably not one who would dream of pretending to make observations on any subject of physical inquiry, of which he did not understand even the principles. If, on his return from the Mediterranean, the unprepared traveller was questioned about the geology of Corsica, or the public buildings of Palermo, he would reply, "Oh, I can tell you nothing about that—I never studied geology; I know nothing about architecture." But few, or none, make the same avowal about the morals and manners of a nation. Every man seems to imagine that he can understand men at a glance; he supposes that it is enough to be among them to know what they are doing; he thinks that eyes, ears, and memory are enough for morals, though they would not qualify him for botanical or statistical observation; he pronounces confidently upon the merits and social condition of the nations among whom he has travelled; no misgiving ever prompts him to say, "I can give you little general information about the people I have been seeing; I have not studied the principles of morals; I am no judge of national manners."

There would be nothing to be ashamed of in such an avowal. No wise man blushes at being ignorant of any science which it has not suited his purposes to study, or which it has not been in his power to attain. No linguist wrings his hands when astronomical discoveries are talked of in his presence; no political economist covers his face when shown a shell or a plant which he cannot class; still less should the artist, the natural philosopher, the commercial traveller, or the classical scholar, be ashamed to own himself unacquainted with the science which, of all the sciences which have yet opened upon men, is, perhaps, the least cultivated, the least definite, the least ascertained in itself, and the most difficult in its application.

In this last characteristic of the science of Morals lies the excuse of as many travellers as may decline pronouncing on the social condition of any people. Even if the generality of travellers were as enlightened as they are at present ignorant about the principles of Morals, the difficulty of putting those principles to interpretative uses would deter the wise from making the hasty decisions, and uttering the large judgments, in which travellers have hitherto been wont to indulge. In proportion as men become sensible how infinite are the diversities in man, how incalculable the varieties and influences of circumstances, rashness of pretension and decision will abate, and the great work of classifying the moral manifestations of society will be confided to the philosophers, who bear the same relation to the science of society as Herschel does to astronomy, and Beaufort to hydrography.

Of all the tourists who utter their decisions upon foreigners, how many have begun their researches at home? Which of them would venture upon giving an account of the morals and manners of London, though he may have lived in it all his life? Would any one of them escape errors as gross as those of the Frenchman who published it as a general fact that people in London always have, at dinner parties, soup on each side, and fish at four corners? Which of us would undertake to classify the morals and manners of any hamlet in England, after spending the summer in it? What sensible man seriously generalizes upon the manners of a street, even though it be Houndsditch or Cranbourn-Alley? Who pretends to explain all the proceedings of his next-door neighbour? Who is able to account for all that is said and done by the dweller in the same house,—by parent, child, brother, or domestic? If such judgments were attempted, would they not be as various as those who make them? And would they not, after all, if closely looked into, reveal more of the mind of the observer than of the observed?

If it be thus with us at home, amidst all the general resemblances, the prevalent influences which furnish an interpretation to a large number of facts, what hope of a trustworthy judgment remains for the foreign tourist, however good may be his method of travelling, and however long his absence from home? He looks at all the people along his line of road, and converses with a few individuals from among them. If he diverges, from time to time, from the high road,—if he winds about among villages, and crosses mountains, to dip into the hamlets of the valleys,—he still pursues only a line, and does not command the expanse; he is furnished, at best, with no more than a sample of the people; and whether they be indeed a sample, must remain a conjecture which he has no means of verifying. He converses, more or less, with, perhaps, one man in ten thousand of those he sees; and of the few with whom he converses, no two are alike in powers and in training, or perfectly agree in their views on any one of the great subjects which the traveller professes to observe; the information afforded by one is contradicted by another; the fact of one day is proved error by the next; the wearied mind soon finds itself overwhelmed by the multitude of unconnected or contradictory particulars, and lies passive to be run over by the crowd. The tourist is no more likely to learn, in this way, the social state of a nation, than his valet would be qualified to speak of the meteorology of the country from the number of times the umbrellas were wanted in the course of two months. His children might as well undertake to exhibit the geological formation of the country from the pebbles they picked up in a day's ride.

I remember some striking words addressed to me, before I set out on my travels, by a wise man, since dead. "You are going to spend two years in the United States," said he. "Now just tell me,—do you expect to understand the Americans by the time you come back? You do not: that is well. I lived five-and-twenty years in Scotland, and I fancied I understood the Scotch; then I came to England, and supposed I should soon understand the English. I have now lived five-and-twenty years here, and I begin to think I understand neither the Scotch nor the English."

What is to be done? Let us first settle what is not to be done.

The traveller must deny himself all indulgence of peremptory decision, not only in public on his return, but in his journal, and in his most superficial thoughts. The experienced and conscientious traveller would word the condition differently. Finding peremptory decision more trying to his conscience than agreeable to his laziness, he would call it not indulgence, but anxiety; he enjoys the employment of collecting materials, but would shrink from the responsibility of judging a community.

The traveller must not generalize on the spot, however true may be his apprehension—however firm his grasp, of one or more facts. A raw English traveller in China was entertained by a host who was intoxicated, and a hostess who was red-haired; he immediately made a note of the fact that all the men in China were drunkards, and all the women red-haired. A raw Chinese traveller in England was landed by a Thames waterman who had a wooden leg. The stranger saw that the wooden leg was used to stand in the water with, while the other was high and dry. The apparent economy of the fact struck the Chinese; he saw in it strong evidence of design, and wrote home that in England one-legged men are kept for watermen, to the saving of all injury to health, shoe, and stocking, from standing in the river. These anecdotes exhibit but a slight exaggeration of the generalizing tendencies of many modern travellers. They are not so much worse than some recent tourists' tales, as they are better than the old narratives of "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders."

Natural philosophers do not dream of generalizing with any such speed as that used by the observers of men; yet they might do it with more safety, at the risk of an incalculably smaller mischief. The geologist and the chemist make a large collection of particular appearances, before they commit themselves to propound a principle drawn from them, though their subject matter is far less diversified than the human subject, and nothing of so much importance as human emotions,—love and dislike, reverence and contempt, depends upon their judgment. If a student in natural philosophy is in too great haste to classify and interpret, he misleads, for a while, his fellow-students (not a very large class); he vitiates the observations of a few successors; his error is discovered and exposed; he is mortified, and his too docile followers are ridiculed, and there is an end; but if a traveller gives any quality which he may have observed in a few individuals as a characteristic of a nation, the evil is not speedily or easily remediable. Abject thinkers, passive readers, adopt his words; parents repeat them to their children; and townspeople spread the judgment into the villages and hamlets—the strongholds of prejudice; future travellers see according to the prepossessions given them, and add their testimony to the error, till it becomes the work of a century to reverse a hasty generalization. It was a great mistake of a geologist to assign a wrong level to the Caspian Sea; and it is vexatious that much time and energy should have been devoted to account for an appearance which, after all, does not exist. It is provoking to geologists that they should have wasted a great deal of ingenuity in finding reasons for these waters being at a different level from what it is now found that they have; but the evil is over; the "pish!" and the "pshaw!" are said; the explanatory and apologetical notes are duly inserted in new editions of geological works, and nothing more can come of the mistake. But it is difficult to foresee when the British public will believe that the Americans are a mirthful nation, or even that the French are not almost all cooks or dancing-masters. A century hence, probably, the Americans will continue to believe that all the English make a regular study of the art of conversation; and the lower orders of French will be still telling their children that half the people in England hang or drown themselves every November. As long as travellers generalize on morals and manners as hastily as they do, it will probably be impossible to establish a general conviction that no civilized nation is ascertainably better or worse than any other on this side barbarism, the whole field of morals being taken into the view. As long as travellers continue to neglect the safe means of generalization which are within the reach of all, and build theories upon the manifestations of individual minds, there is little hope of inspiring men with that spirit of impartiality, mutual deference, and love, which are the best enlighteners of the eyes and rectifiers of the understanding.

Above all things, the traveller must not despair of good results from his observations. Because he cannot establish true conclusions by imperfect means, he is not to desist from doing anything at all. Because he cannot safely generalize in one way, it does not follow that there is no other way. There are methods of safe generalization of which I shall speak by-and-by. But, if there were not such within his reach, if his only materials were the discourse, the opinions, the feelings, the way of life, the looks, dress, and manners of individuals, he might still afford important contributions to science by his observations on as wide a variety of these as he can bring within his mental grasp. The experience of a large number of observers would in time yield materials from which a cautious philosopher might draw conclusions. It is a safe rule, in morals as in physics, that no fact is without its use. Every observer and recorder is fulfilling a function; and no one observer or recorder ought to feel discouragement, as long as he desires to be useful rather than shining; to be the servant rather than the lord of science, and a friend to the home-stayers rather than their dictator.

One of the wisest men living writes to me, "No books are so little to be trusted as travels. All travellers do and must generalize too rapidly. Most, if not all, take a fact for a principle, or the exception for the rule, more or less; and the quickest minds, which love to reason and explain more than to observe with patience, go most astray. My faith in travels received a mortal wound when I travelled. I read, as I went along, the books of those who had preceded me, and found that we did not see with the same eyes. Even descriptions of nature proved false. The traveller had viewed the prospect at a different season, or in a different light, and substituted the transient for the fixed. Still I think travels useful. Different accounts give means of approximation to truth; and by-and-by what is fixed and essential in a people will be brought out."

It ought to be an animating thought to a traveller that, even if it be not in his power to settle any one point respecting the morals and manners of an empire, he can infallibly aid in supplying means of approximation to truth, and of bringing out "what is fixed and essential in a people." This should be sufficient to stimulate his exertions and satisfy his ambition.

CHAPTER I.

PHILOSOPHICAL REQUISITES.

"Only I believe that this is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher, but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave Ulysses; yet I am withal persuaded that it may prove much more easy in the essay than it now seems at a distance."—Milton.

There are two parties to the work of observation on Morals and Manners—the observer and the observed. This is an important fact which the traveller seldom dwells upon as he ought; yet a moment's consideration shows that the mind of the observer—the instrument by which the work is done, is as essential as the material to be wrought. If the instrument be in bad order, it will furnish a bad product, be the material what it may. In this chapter I shall point out what requisites the traveller ought to make sure that he is possessed of before he undertakes to offer observations on the Morals and Manners of a people.

SECTION I.

He must have made up his mind as to what it is that he wants to know. In physical science, great results may be obtained by hap-hazard experiments; but this is not the case in Morals. A chemist can hardly fail of learning something by putting any substances together, under new circumstances, and seeing what will arise out of the combination; and some striking discoveries happened in this way, in the infancy of the science; though no one doubts that more knowledge may be gained by the chemist who has an aim in his mind, and who conducts his experiment on some principle. In Morals, the latter method is the only one which promises any useful results. In the workings of the social system, all the agents are known in the gross—all are determined. It is not their nature, but the proportions in which they are combined, which have to be ascertained.

What does the traveller want to know? He is aware that, wherever he goes, he will find men, women, and children; strong men and weak men; just men and selfish men. He knows that he will everywhere find a necessity for food, clothing, and shelter; and everywhere some mode of general agreement how to live together. He knows that he will everywhere find birth, marriage, and death; and therefore domestic affections. What results from all these elements of social life does he mean to look for?

For want of settling this question, one traveller sees nothing truly, because the state of things is not consistent with his speculations as to how human beings ought to live together; another views the whole with prejudice, because it is not like what he has been accustomed to see at home; yet each of these would shrink from the recognition of his folly, if it were fully placed before him. The first would be ashamed of having tried any existing community by an arbitrary standard of his own—an act much like going forth into the wilderness to see kings' houses full of men in soft raiment; and the other would perceive that different nations may go on judging one another by themselves till doomsday, without in any way improving the chance of self-advancement and mutual understanding. Going out with the disadvantage of a habit of mind uncounteracted by an intellectual aim, will never do. The traveller may as well stay at home, for anything he will gain in the way of social knowledge.

The two considerations just mentioned must be subordinated to the grand one,—the only general one,—of the relative amount of human happiness. Every element of social life derives its importance from this great consideration. The external conveniences of men, their internal emotions and affections, their social arrangements, graduate in importance precisely in proportion as they affect the general happiness of the section of the race among whom they exist. Here then is the wise traveller's aim,—to be kept in view to the exclusion of prejudice, both philosophical and national. He must not allow himself to be perplexed or disgusted by seeing the great ends of human association pursued by means which he could never have devised, and to the practice of which he could not reconcile himself. He is not to conclude unfavourably about the diet of the multitude because he sees them swallowing blubber, or scooping out water-melons, instead of regaling themselves with beef and beer. He is not to suppose their social meetings a failure because they eat with their fingers instead of with silver forks, or touch foreheads instead of making a bow. He is not to conclude against domestic morals, on account of a diversity of methods of entering upon marriage. He might as well judge of the minute transactions of manners all over the world by what he sees in his native village. There, to leave the door open or to shut it bears no relation to morals, and but little to manners; whereas, to shut the door is as cruel an act in a Hindoo hut as to leave it open in a Greenland cabin. In short, he is to prepare himself to bring whatever he may observe to the test of some high and broad principle, and not to that of a low comparative practice. To test one people by another, is to argue within a very small segment of a circle; and the observer can only pass backwards and forwards at an equal distance from the point of truth. To test the morals and manners of a nation by a reference to the essentials of human happiness, is to strike at once to the centre, and to see things as they are.

SECTION II.

Being provided with a conviction of what it is that he wants to know, the traveller must be furthermore furnished with the means of gaining the knowledge he wants. When he was a child, he was probably taught that eyes, ears, and understanding are all-sufficient to gain for him as much knowledge as he will have time to acquire; but his self-education has been a poor one, if he has not become convinced that something more is needful—the enlightenment and discipline of the understanding, as well as its immediate use. It is not enough for a traveller to have an active understanding, equal to an accurate perception of individual facts in themselves; he must also be in possession of principles which may serve as a rallying point for his observations, and without which he cannot determine their bearings, or be secure of putting a right interpretation upon them. A traveller may do better without eyes, or without ears, than without such principles, as there is evidence to prove. Holman, the blind traveller, gains a wonderful amount of information, though he is shut out from the evidence yielded by the human countenance, by way-side groups, by the aspect of cities, and the varying phenomena of country regions. In his motto, he indicates something of his method.

In order to "judge through judgment's eyes," those eyes must be made strong and clear; and a traveller may gain more without the bodily organ than with an untrained understanding. The case of the Deaf Traveller[A] leads us to say the same about the other great avenue of knowledge. His writings prove, to all who are acquainted with them, that, though to a great degree deprived of that inestimable commentary upon perceived facts—human discourse—the Deaf Traveller is able to furnish us with more knowledge of foreign people than Fine-Ear himself could have done without the accompaniments of analytical power and concentrative thought. All senses, and intellectual powers, and good habits, may be considered essential to a perfect observation of morals and manners; but almost any one might be better spared than a provision of principles which may serve as a rallying point and a test of facts. The blind and the deaf travellers must suffer under a deprivation or deficiency of certain classes of facts. The condition of the unphilosophical traveller is much worse. It is a chance whether he puts a right interpretation on any of the facts he perceives.

Many may object that I am making much too serious a matter of the department of the business of travelling under present notice. They do not pretend to be moral philosophers;—they do not desire to be oracles;—they attempt nothing more than to give a simple report of what has come under their notice. But what work on earth is more serious than this of giving an account of the most grave and important things which are transacted on this globe? Every true report is a great good; every untrue report is a great mischief. Therefore, let there be none given but by persons in some good degree qualified. Such travellers as will not take pains to provide themselves with the requisite thought and study should abstain from reporting at all.

It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the study shown to be requisite is vast and deep. Some knowledge of the principles of Morals and the rule of Manners is required, as in the case of other sciences to be brought into use on a similar occasion; but the principles are few and simple, and the rule easy of application.

The universal summary notions of Morals may serve a common traveller in his judgments as to whether he would like to live in any foreign country, and as to whether the people there are as agreeable to him as his own nation. For such an one it may be sufficient to bear about the general notions that lying, thieving, idleness, and licentiousness are bad; and that truth, honesty, industry, and sobriety are good; and for common purposes, such an one may be trusted to pronounce what is industry and what idleness; what is licentiousness and what sobriety. But vague notions, home prepossessions, even on these great points of morals, are not sufficient, in the eyes of an enlightened traveller, to warrant decisions on the moral state of nations who are reared under a wide diversity of circumstances. The true liberality which alone is worthy to contemplate all the nations of the earth, does not draw a broad line through the midst of human conduct, declaring all that falls on the one side vice, and all on the other virtue; such a liberality knows that actions and habits do not always carry their moral impress visibly to all eyes, and that the character of very many must be determined by a cautious application of a few deep principles. Is the Shaker of New England a good judge of the morals and manners of the Arab of the Desert? What sort of a verdict would the shrewdest gipsy pass upon the monk of La Trappe? What would the Scotch peasant think of the magical practices of Egypt? or the Russian soldier of a meeting of electors in the United States? The ideas of right and wrong in the minds of these people are not of the enlarged kind which would enable them to judge persons in situations the most opposite to their own. The true philosopher, the worthy observer, first contemplates in imagination the area of humanity, and then ascertains what principles of morals are applicable to them all, and judges by these.

The enlightened traveller, if he explore only one country, carries in his mind the image of all; for, only in its relation to the whole of the race can any one people be judged. Almost without exaggeration, he may be said to see what the rhapsodist in Volney saw.

"There, from above the atmosphere, looking down upon the earth I had quitted, I beheld a scene entirely new. Under my feet, floating in empty space, a globe similar to that of the moon, but less luminous, presented to me one of its faces.... 'What!' exclaimed I, 'is that the earth which is inhabited by human beings?'"[B]

The differences are, that, instead of "one of its faces," the moralist would see the whole of the earth in one contemplation; and that, instead of a nebulous expanse here, and a brown or grey speck there,—continents, seas, or volcanoes,—he would look into the homes and social assemblies of all lands. In the extreme North, there is the snow-hut of the Esquimaux, shining with the fire within, like an alabaster lamp left burning in a wide waste; within, the beardless father is mending his weapons made of fishbones, while the dwarfed mother swathes her infant in skins, and feeds it with oil and fat. In the extreme East, there is the Chinese family in their garden, treading its paved walks, or seated under the shade of its artificial rocks; the master displaying the claws of his left hand as he smokes his pipe, and his wife tottering on her deformed feet as she follows her child,—exulting over it if it be a boy; grave and full of sighs if heaven have sent her none but girls. In the extreme South, there is the Colonist of the Cape, lazily basking before his door, while he sends his labourer abroad with his bullock-waggon, devolves the business of the farm upon the women, and scares from his door any poor Hottentot who may have wandered hither over the plain. In the extreme West, there is the gathering together on the shores of the Pacific of the hunters laden with furs. The men are trading, or cleaning their arms, or sleeping; the squaws are cooking, or dyeing with vegetable juices the quills of the porcupine or the hair of the moose-deer. In the intervals between these extremities, there is a world of morals and manners, as diverse as the surface of the lands on which they are exhibited. Here is the Russian nobleman on his estate, the lord of the fate of his serfs, but hard pressed by the enmity of rival nobles, and silenced by the despotism of his prince; his wife leads a languid life among her spinning maidens; and his young sons talk of the wars in which they shall serve their emperor in time to come. There is the Frankfort trader, dwelling among equals, fixing his pride upon having wronged no man, or upon having a son distinguished at the university, or a daughter skilled in domestic accomplishments; while his wife emulates her neighbours in supporting the comfort and respectability of the household. Here is the French peasant returning from the field in total ignorance of what has taken place in the capital of late; and there is the English artizan discussing with his brother-workman the politics of the town, or carrying home to his wife some fresh hopes of the interference of parliament about labour and wages. Here is a conclave of Cardinals, consulting upon the interests of the Holy See; there a company of Brahmins setting an offering of rice before their idol. In one direction, there is a handful of citizens building a new town in the midst of a forest; in another, there is a troop of horsemen hovering on the horizon, while a caravan is traversing the Desert. Under the twinkling shadows of a German vineyard, national songs are sung; from the steep places of the Swiss mountains the Alp-horn resounds; in the coffee-house at Cairo, listeners hang upon the voice of the romance reciter; the churches of Italy echo with solemn hymns; and the soft tones of the child are heard, in the New England parlour, as the young scholar reads the Bible to parent or aged grandfather.

All these, and more, will a traveller of the most enlightened order revolve before his mind's eye as he notes the groups which are presented to his senses. Of such travellers there are but too few; and vague and general, or merely traditional, notions of right and wrong must serve the purpose of the greater number. The chief evil of moral notions being vague or traditional is, that they are irreconcileable with liberality of judgment; and the great benefit of an ascertainment of the primary principles of morals is, that such an investigation dissolves prejudice, and casts a full light upon many things which cease to be fearful and painful when they are no longer obscure. We all know how different a Sunday in Paris appears to a sectarian, to whom the word of his priest is law; and to a philosopher, in whom religion is indigenous, who understands the narrowness of sects, and sees how much smaller even Christendom itself is than Humanity. We all know how offensive the prayers of Mahomedans at the corners of streets, and the pomp of catholic processions, are to those who know no other way than entering into their closet, and shutting the door when they pray; but how felt the deep thinker who wrote the Religio Medici? He was an orderly member of a Protestant church, yet he uncovered his head at the sight of a crucifix; he could not laugh at pilgrims walking with peas in their shoes, or despise a begging friar; he could "not hear an Ave Maria bell without an elevation;" and it is probable that even the Teraphim of the Arabs would not have been wholly absurd, or the car of Juggernaut itself altogether odious in his eyes. Such is the contrast between the sectary and the philosopher.

SECTION III.

As an instance of the advantage which a philosophical traveller has over an unprepared one, look at the difference which will enter into a man's judgment of nations, according as he carries about with him the vague popular notion of a Moral Sense, or has investigated the laws under which feelings of right and wrong grow up in all men. It is worth while to dwell a little on this important point.

Most persons who take no great pains to think for themselves, have a notion that every human being has feelings, or a conscience, born with him, by which he knows, if he will only attend to it, exactly what is right and wrong; and that, as right and wrong are fixed and immutable, all ought to agree as to what is sin and virtue in every case. Now, mankind are, and always have been, so far from agreeing as to right and wrong, that it is necessary to account in some manner for the wide differences in various ages, and among various nations. A great diversity of doctrines has been put forth for the purpose of lessening the difficulty; but they all leave certain portions of the race under the condemnation or compassion of the rest for their error, blindness, or sin. Moreover, no doctrines yet invented have accounted for some total revolutions in the ideas of right and wrong, which have occurred in the course of ages. A person who takes for granted that there is an universal Moral Sense among men, as unchanging as he who bestowed it, cannot reasonably explain how it was that those men were once esteemed the most virtuous who killed the most enemies in battle, while now it is considered far more noble to save life than to destroy it. They cannot but wonder how it was that it was once thought a great shame to live in misery, and an honour to commit suicide; while now the wisest and best men think exactly the reverse. And, with regard to the present age, it must puzzle men who suppose that all ought to think alike on moral subjects, that there are parts of the world where mothers believe it a duty to drown their children, and that eastern potentates openly deride the king of England for having only one wife instead of one hundred. There is no avoiding illiberality, under this belief,—as the philosopher understands illiberality. There is no avoiding the conclusion that the people who practice infanticide and polygamy are desperately wicked; and that minor differences of conduct are, abroad as at home, so many sins.

The observer who sets out with a more philosophical belief, not only escapes the affliction of seeing sin wherever he sees difference, and avoids the suffering of contempt and alienation from his species, but, by being prepared for what he witnesses, and aware of the causes, is free from the agitation of being shocked and alarmed, preserves his calmness, his hope, his sympathy; and is thus far better fitted to perceive, understand, and report upon the morals and manners of the people he visits. His more philosophical belief, derived from all fair evidence and just reflexion, is, that every man's feelings of right and wrong, instead of being born with him, grow up in him from the influences to which he is subjected. We see that in other cases,—with regard to science, to art, and to the appearances of nature,—feelings grow out of knowledge and experience; and there is every evidence that it is so with regard to morals. The feelings begin very early; and this is the reason why they are supposed to be born with men; but they are few and imperfect in childhood, and, in the case of those who are strongly exercised in morals, they go on enlarging and strengthening and refining through life. See the effect upon the traveller's observations of his holding this belief about conscience! Knowing that some influences act upon the minds of all people in all countries, he looks everywhere for certain feelings of right and wrong which are as sure to be in all men's minds as if they were born with them. For instance, to torment another without any reason, real or imaginary, is considered wrong all over the world. In the same manner, to make others happy is universally considered right. At the same time, the traveller is prepared to find an infinite variety of differences in smaller matters, and is relieved from the necessity of pronouncing each to be a vice in one party or another. His own moral education having been a more elevated and advanced one than that of some of the people he contemplates, he cannot but feel sorrow and disgust at various things that he witnesses; but it is ignorance and barbarism that he mourns, and not vice. When he sees the Arab or American Indian offer daughter or wife to the stranger, as a part of the hospitality which is, in the host's mind, the first of duties, the observer regards the fact as he regards the mode of education in old Sparta, where physical hardihood and moral slavery constituted a man most honourable. If he sees an American student spend the whole of his small fortune, on leaving college, in travelling in Europe, he will not blame him as he would blame a young Englishman for doing the same thing. The Englishman would be a spendthrift; the American is wise: and the reason is, that their circumstances, prospects, and therefore their views of duty, are different. The American, being sure of obtaining an independent maintenance, may make the enlargement of his mind, and the cultivation of his tastes by travel, his first object; while the conscientious Englishman must fulfil the hard conditions of independence before he can travel. Capital is to him one of the chief requisites of honest independence; while to the American it is in the outset no requisite at all. To go without clothing was, till lately, perfectly innocent in the South Sea Islands; but now that civilization has been fairly established by the missionaries, it has become a sin. To let an enemy escape with his life is a disgrace in some countries of the world; while in others it is held more honourable to forgive than to punish him. Instances of such varieties and oppositions of conscience might be multiplied till they filled a volume, to the perplexity and grief of the unphilosophical, and the serene instruction of the philosophical observer.

The general influences under which universal ideas and feelings of right and wrong are formed, are dispensed by the Providence under which all are educated. That man should be happy is so evidently the intention of his Creator, the contrivances to that end are so multitudinous and so striking, that the perception of the aim may be called universal. Whatever tends to make men happy, becomes a fulfilment of the will of God. Whatever tends to make them miserable, becomes opposition to his will. There are, and must be, a host of obstacles to the express recognition of, and practical obedience to, these great principles; but they may be discovered as the root of religion and morals in all countries. There are impediments from ignorance, and consequent error, selfishness, and passion: the most infantile men mistake the means of human happiness, and the wisest have but a dim and fluctuating perception of them: but yet all men entertain one common conviction, that what makes people happy is good and right, and that what makes them miserable is evil and wrong. This conviction is at the bottom of practices which seem the most inconsistent with it. When the Ashantee offers a human sacrifice, it is in order to secure blessings from his gods. When the Hindoo exposes his sick parent in the Ganges, he thinks he is putting him out of pain by a charmed death. When Sand stabbed Kotzebue, he believed he was punishing and getting rid of an enemy and an obstacle to the welfare of his nation. When the Georgian planter buys and sells slaves, he goes on the supposition that he is preserving the order and due subordination of society. All these notions are shown by philosophy to be narrow, superficial, and mistaken. They have been outgrown by many, and are doubtless destined to be outgrown by all; but, acted upon by the ignorant and deluded, they are very different from the wickedness which is perpetrated against better knowledge. But these things would be wickedness, perpetrated against better knowledge, if the supposition of a universal, infallible Moral Sense were true. The traveller who should consistently adhere to the notion of a Moral Sense, must pronounce the Ashantee worshipper as guilty as Greenacre: the Hindoo son a parricide, not only in fact, but in the most revolting sense of the term: Sand, a Thurtell: and the Georgian planter such a monster of tyranny as a Sussex farmer would be if he set up a whipping-post for his labourers, and sold their little ones to gipsies. Such judgments would be cruelly illiberal. The traveller who is furnished with the more accurate philosophy of Conscience would arrive at conclusions, not only more correct, but far less painful; and, without any laxity of principle, far more charitable.

So much for one instance of the advantage to the traveller of being provided with definite principles, to be used as a rallying point and test of his observations, instead of mere vague moral notions and general prepossessions, which can serve only as a false medium, by which much that he sees must necessarily be perverted or obscured.

SECTION IV.

The traveller having satisfied himself that there are some universal feelings about right and wrong, and that in consequence some parts of human conduct are guided by general rules, must next give his attention to modes of conduct, which seem to him good or bad, prevalent in a nation, or district, or society of smaller limits. His first general principle is, that the law of nature is the only one by which mankind at large can be judged. His second must be, that every prevalent virtue or vice is the result of the particular circumstances amidst which the society exists.

The circumstances in which a prevalent virtue or vice originates, may or may not be traceable by a traveller. If traceable, he should spare no pains to make himself acquainted with the whole case. If obscure, he must beware of imputing disgraces to individuals, as if those individuals were living under the influences which have made himself what he is. He will not blame a deficiency of moral independence in a citizen of Philadelphia so severely as in a citizen of London; seeing, as he must do, that the want of moral independence is a prevalent fault in the United States, and that there must be some reason for it. Again, he will not look to the Polish peasant for the political intelligence, activity, and principle which delight him in the log-house of the American farmer. He sees that Polish peasants are generally supine, and American farmers usually interested about politics; and that there must be reasons for the difference.

In a majority of cases such reasons are, to a great extent, ascertainable. In Spain, for instance, there is a large class of wretched and irretrievable beggars; and their idleness, dirt, and lying trouble the very soul of the traveller. What is the reason of the prevalence of this degraded class and of its vices? A Court Lady[C] wrote, in ancient days, piteous complaints of the poverty of the sovereign, the nobility, the army, and the destitute ladies who waited upon the queen. The sovereign could not give his attendants their dinners; the nobility melted down their plate and sold their jewels; the soldiers were famishing in garrison, so that the young deserted, and the aged and invalids wasted away, actually starved to death. The lady mentions with surprise, that a particularly large amount of gold and silver had arrived from the foreign possessions of Spain that year, and tries to account for the universal misery by saying that a great proportion of these riches was appropriated by merchants who supplied the Spaniards with the necessaries of life from abroad; and she speaks of this as an evil. She is an example of an unphilosophical observer,—one who could not be trusted to report—much less to account for—the morals and manners of the people before her eyes. What says a philosophical observer?[D] "Spain and Portugal, the countries which possess the mines, are, after Poland, perhaps the two most beggarly countries in Europe."—"Their trade to their colonies is carried on in their own ships, and is much greater" (than their foreign commerce,) "on account of the great riches and extent of those colonies. But it has never introduced any considerable manufactures for distant sale into either of those countries, and the greater part of both remains uncultivated."—"The proportion of gold and silver to the annual produce of the land and labour of Spain is said to be very considerable, and that you frequently find there a profusion of plate in houses where there is nothing else which would in other countries be thought suitable or correspondent to this sort of magnificence. The cheapness of gold and silver, or, what is the same thing, the dearness of all commodities, which is the necessary effect of this redundance of the precious metals, discourages both the agriculture and manufactures of Spain and Portugal, and enables foreign nations to supply them with many sorts of rude, and with almost all sorts of manufactured produce, for a smaller quantity of gold and silver than what they themselves can either raise or make them for at home."—When it is considered that in Spain gold and silver are called wealth, and that there is little other; that manufactures and commerce scarcely exist; that agriculture is discouraged, and that therefore there is a lack of occupation for the lower classes, it may be fairly concluded that the idle upper orders will be found lazy, proud, and poor; the idle lower classes in a state of beggary; and that the most virtuous and happy part of the population will be those who are engaged in tilling the soil, and in the occupations which are absolutely necessary in towns. One may see with the mind's eye the groups of intriguing grandees, who have no business on their estates to occupy their time and thoughts; or the crowd of hungry beggars, thronging round the door of a convent, to receive the daily alms; or the hospitable and courteous peasants, of whom a traveller[E] says, "There is a civility to strangers, and an easy style of behaviour familiar to this class of Spanish society, which is very remote from the churlish and awkward manners of the English and German peasantry. Their sobriety and endurance of fatigue are very remarkable; and there is a constant cheerfulness in their demeanour which strongly prepossesses a stranger in their favour."—"I should be glad if I could, with justice, give as favourable a picture of the higher orders of society in this country; but, perhaps, when we consider their wretched education, and their early habits of indolence and dissipation, we ought not to wonder at the state of contempt and degradation to which they are reduced. I am not speaking the language of prejudice, but the result of the observations I have made, in which every accurate observer among our countrymen has concurred with me, in saying that the figures and countenances of the higher orders are as much inferior to those of the peasants, as their moral qualities are in the view I have given of them."—All this might be foreseen to be unavoidable in a country where the means of living are passively derived from abroad, and where the honour and rewards of successful industry are confined to a class of the community. The mines should bear the blame of the prevalent faults of the saucy beggars and beggarly grandees of Spain.

To any one who has at all considered at home the bearings of a social system which is grounded upon physical force, or those of the opposite arrangements which rely upon moral power, it can be no mystery abroad that there should be prevalent moral characteristics among the subjects of such systems; and the vices which exist under them will be, however mourned, leniently judged. Take the Feudal System as an instance, first, and then its opposite. A little thought makes it clear what virtues and vices will be almost certain to subsist under the influences of each.

The baron lives in his castle, on a rock or some other eminence, whence he can overlook his domains, or where his ancestor reared his abode for purposes of safety. During this stage of society there is little domestic refinement and comfort. The furniture is coarse; the library is not tempting; and the luxurious ease of cities is out of the question. The pleasures of the owner lie abroad. There he devotes himself to rough sports, and enjoys his darling luxury,—the exercise of power. Within the dwelling the wife and her attendants spend their lives in handiworks, in playing with the children and keeping them in order, in endless conversation on the few events which come under their notice, and in obedience to and companionship with the priest. While the master is hunting, or gathering together his retainers for the feast, the women are spinning or sewing, gossiping, confessing, or doing penance; while the priest studies in his apartment, shares in the mirth, or soothes the troubles of the household, and rules the mind of the noble by securing the confidence of his wife. Out of doors, there are the retainers, by whatever name they may be called. Their poor dwellings are crowded round the castle of the lord; their patches of arable land lie nearest, and the pastures beyond; that, at least, the supply of human food may be secured from any enemy. These portions of land are held on a tenure of service; and, as the retainers have no property in them, and no interest in their improvement, and are, moreover, liable to be called away from their tillage at any moment, to perform military or other service, the soil yields sorry harvests, and the lean cattle are not very ornamental to the pastures. The wives of the peasantry are often left, at an hour's warning, in the unprotected charge of their half-clothed and untaught children, as well as of the cattle and the field.—The festivals of the people are on holy days, and on the return of the chief from war, or from a pre-eminent chase.

Now, what must be the morals of such a district as this? and, it may be added, of the whole country of which it forms a part? for, if there be one feudal settlement of the kind, there must be more; and the society is in fact made up of a certain number of complete sets of persons,—of establishments like this.—There is no need to go back some centuries for an original to the picture: it exists in more than one country in Europe now.

This kind of society is composed of two classes only; those who have something, and those who have nothing. The chief has property, some knowledge, and great power. With individual differences, the chiefs may be expected to be imperious, from their liberty and indulgence of will; brave, from their exposure to toil and danger; contemptuous of men, from their own supremacy; superstitious, from the influence of the priest in the household; lavish, from the permanency of their property; vain of rank and personal distinction, from the absence of pursuits unconnected with self; and hospitable, partly from the same cause, and partly from their own hospitality being the only means of gratifying their social dispositions.

The clergy will be politic, subservient, studious, or indolent, kind-hearted, effeminate, with a strong tendency to spiritual pride, and love of spiritual dominion. It will be surprising, too, if they are not driven into infidelity by the credulity of their pupils.

The women will be ignorant and superstitious, for want of varied instruction; brave, from the frequent presence or promise of danger; efficient, from the small division of labour which is practicable in the superintendence of such a family; given to gossip and uncertainty of temper, from the sameness of their lives; devoted to their husbands and children, from the absence of all other important objects; and vain of such accomplishments as they have, from an ignorance of what remains to be achieved.

The retainers must be ignorant,—physically strong and imposing, perhaps, but infants in mind, and slaves in morals. Their worship is idolatry—of their chief. The virtues permitted to them are fidelity, industry, domestic attachment, and sobriety. It is difficult to see what others are possible. Their faults are all comprehended in the word barbarism.

These characteristics may be extended to the divisions of the nation corresponding to those of the household: for the sovereign is only a higher feudal chief: his nobles are a more exalted sort of serfs; and those who are masters at home become slaves at court. Under this system, who would be so hardy as to treat brutality in a serf, cunning in a priest, prejudice in a lady, and imperiousness in a lord, as any thing but the results—inevitable as mournful—of the state of society?

Feudalism is founded upon physical force, and therefore bears a relation to the past alone. Right begins in might, and all the social relations of men have originated in physical superiority. The most prevalent ideas of the feudal period arise out of the past; what has been longest honoured is held most honourable; and the understanding of men, unexercised by learning, and undisciplined by society and political action, falls back upon precedent, and reposes there. The tastes, and even the passions, of the feudal period bear a relation to antiquity. Ambition, prospective as it is in its very nature, has, in this case, a strong retrospective character. The glory that the descendant derives from his fathers, he burns to transmit. The past is everything: the future, except in as far as it may resemble the past, is nothing.

Such, with modifications, have been the prevalent ideas, tastes, and passions of the civilized world, till lately. The opposite state of society, which has begun to be realized, occasions prevalent ideas, and therefore prevalent virtues and vices, of an opposite character.

As commerce enlarges, as other professions besides the clerical arise, as trades become profitable, as cities swell in importance, as communication improves, raising villages into towns, and hamlets into villages, and the affairs of central communities become spread through the circumference, the lower classes rise, the chiefs lose much of their importance, the value of men for their intrinsic qualifications is discovered, and such men take the lead in managing the affairs of associated citizens. Instead of all being done by orders issued from a central power,—commands carrying forth an imperious will, and bringing back undoubting obedience,—social affairs begin to be managed by the heads and hands of the parties immediately interested. Self-government in municipal affairs takes place; and, having taken place in any one set of circumstances, it appears likely to be employed within a wider and a wider range, till all the government of the community is of that character. The United States are the most remarkable examples now before the world of the reverse of the feudal system,—its principles, its methods, its virtues and vices. In as far as the Americans revert, in ideas and tastes, to the past, this may be attributed to the transition being not yet perfected,—to the generation which organized the republic having been educated amidst the remains of feudalism. There are still Americans who boast of ancestors high in the order of birth rather than of merit; who in talking of rank have ideas of birth in their minds, and whose tastes lie in the past. But such will be the case while the literature of the world breathes the spirit of former ages, and softens the transition to an opposite social state. A new literature, new modes of thought, are daily arising, which point more and more towards the future. We have already records of the immediate state of the minds and fortunes of men and of communities, and not a few speculations which stretch far forward into the future. Every year is the admission more extensively entered into that moral power is nobler than physical force; there is more earnestness in the conferences of nations, and less proneness to war. The highest creations of literature itself, however long ago produced, are now discovered to bear as close a relation to the future as the past. They are for all time, through all its changes. While pillars of light in the dim regions of antiquity, they pass over in the dawn, and are still before us, casting their shadows to our feet as guides into the dazzling future. Pre-eminent among them is the Book which never had any retrospective character in it. It never sanctioned physical force, pride of ancestry, of valour, of influence, or any other pride. It never sanctioned arbitrary division of ranks. It never lauded the virtues of feudalism in their disconnection with other virtues; it never spared the faults of feudalism, on the ground of their being the necessary product of feudal circumstances; neither does it now laud and tolerate the virtues and vices developed by democracy. This guide has never yet taken up its rest. It is in advance of all existing democracies, as it ever was of all despotisms. The fact is, that, while all manifestations of eminent intellectual and moral force have an imperishable quality, this supreme book has not only an immortal freshness, but bears no relation to time:—to it "one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

What are the prevalent virtues and faults which are to be looked for in the future,—or in those countries which represent somewhat of the future, as others afford a weakened image of the past? What allowance is the traveller in America to make? Almost precisely the reverse of what he would make in Russia.

In-door luxury has succeeded to out-door sports: the mechanical arts flourish from the elevation of the lower classes, and prowess is gone out of fashion. The consequence of this is that the traveller sees ostentation of personal luxury instead of retinue. In the course of transition to the time when merit will constitute the highest claim to rank, wealth succeeds to birth: but even already, the claims of wealth give way before those of intellect. The popular author has more observance than the millionaire in the United States. This is honourable, and yields promise of a still better graduation of ranks. Where moral force is recognized as the moving power of society, it seems to follow that the condition of Woman must be elevated; that new pursuits will be opened to her, and a wider and stronger discipline be afforded to her powers. It is not so in America; but this is owing to the interference of other circumstances with the full operation of democratic principles. The absence of an aristocratic or a sovereign will impels men to find some other will on which to repose their individual weakness, and with which to employ their human veneration. The will of the majority becomes their refuge and unwritten law. The few free-minded resist this will, when it is in opposition to their own, and the slavish many submit. This is accordingly found to be the most conspicuous fault of the Americans. Their cautious subservience to public opinion,—their deficiency of moral independence,—is the crying sin of their society. Again, the social equality by which the whole of life is laid open to all in a democratic republic, in which every man who has power in him may attain all to which that power is a requisite, cannot but enhance the importance of each in the eyes of all; and the consequence is a mutual respect and deference, and also a mutual helpfulness, which are in themselves virtues of a high order, and preparatives for others. In these the Americans are exercised and accomplished to a degree never generally attained in any other country. This class of virtues constitutes their distinguishing honour, their crowning grace in the company of nations.—Activity and ingenuity are a matter of course where every man's lot is in his own hands. Unostentatious hospitality and charity might, in some democracies, be likely to languish; but the Americans have the wealth of a young country, and the warmth of a young national existence, as stimulus and warrant for pecuniary liberality of every kind.—Popular vanity, and the subservience of political representatives, are the chief dangers which remain to be alluded to; and there will probably be no republic for ages where these will not be found in the form of prevalent vices.—If, under a feudal system, there is a wholesome exercise of reverence in the worship of ancestry, there is, under the opposite system, a no less salutary and perpetual impulse to generosity in the care for posterity. The one has been, doubtless, a benignant influence, tempering the ruggedness and violence of despotism; the other will prove an elevating force, lifting men above the personal selfishness and mutual subservience which are the besetting perils of equals who unite to govern by their common will.

Whatever may be his philosophy of individual character, the reflective observer cannot travel, with his mind awake, without admitting that there can be no question but that national character is formed, or largely influenced, by the gigantic circumstances which, being the product of no individual mind, are directly attributable to the great Moral Governor of the human race. Every successive act of research or travel will impress him more and more deeply with this truth, which, for the sake of his own peace and liberality, it would be well that he should carry about with him from the outset. He will not visit individuals with any bitterness of censure for participating in prevalent faults. He will regard social virtues and graces as shedding honour on all whom they overshadow, from the loftiest to the lowliest; while he is not disposed to indulge contempt, or anything but a mild compassion, for any social depravity or deformity which, being the clear result of circumstances, and itself a circumstance, may be considered as surely destined to be remedied, as the wisdom of associated, like that of individual man, grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.

CHAPTER II.

MORAL REQUISITES.

"I respect knowledge; but I do not despise ignorance. They think only as their fathers thought, worship as they worshipped. They do no more."—Rogers.

The traveller, being furnished with the philosophical requisites for the observation of morals and manners,

1stly. With a certainty of what it is that he wants to know,—

2ndly. With principles which may serve as a rallying point and test of his observations,—

3rdly. With, for instance, a philosophical and definite, instead of a popular and vague, notion about the origin of human feelings of right and wrong,—

4thly. And with a settled conviction that prevalent virtues and vices are the result of gigantic general influences,—is yet not fitted for his object if certain moral requisites be wanting in him.

An observer, to be perfectly accurate, should be himself perfect. Every prejudice, every moral perversion, dims or distorts whatever the eye looks upon. But as we do not wait to be perfect before we travel, we must content ourselves with discovering, in order to avoidance, what would make our task hopeless, and how we may put ourselves in a state to learn at least something truly. We cannot suddenly make ourselves a great deal better than we have been, for such an object as observing Morals and Manners; but, by clearly ascertaining what it is that the most commonly, or the most grossly, vitiates foreign observation, we may put a check upon our spirit of prejudice, and carry with us restoratives of temper and spirits which may be of essential service to us in our task.

The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled and unreserved. If a traveller be a geological inquirer, he may have a heart as hard as the rocks he shivers, and yet succeed in his immediate objects: if he be a student of the fine arts, he may be as silent as a picture, and yet gain his ends: if he be a statistical investigator, he may be as abstract as a column of figures, and yet learn what he wants to know: but an observer of morals and manners will be liable to deception at every turn, if he does not find his way to hearts and minds. Nothing was ever more true than that "as face answers to face in water, so is the heart of man." To the traveller there are two meanings in this wise saying, both worthy of his best attention. It means that the action of the heart will meet a corresponding action, and that the nature of the heart will meet a corresponding nature. Openness and warmth of heart will be greeted with openness and warmth:—this is one truth. Hearts, generous or selfish, pure or gross, gay or sad, will understand, and therefore be likely to report of, only their like:—this is another truth.

There is the same human heart everywhere,—the universal growth of mind and life,—ready to open to the sunshine of sympathy, flourishing in the enclosures of cities, and blossoming wherever dropped in the wilderness; but folding up when touched by chill, and drooping in gloom. As well might the Erl-king go and play the florist in the groves and plains of the tropics, as an unsympathizing man render an account of society. It will all turn to stubble and sapless rigidity before his eyes.

There is the same human heart everywhere; and, if the traveller has a good one himself, he will presently find this out, whatever may have been his fears at home of checks to his sympathy from difference of education, objects in life, &c. There is no place where people do not suffer and enjoy; where love is not the high festival of life; where birth and death are not occasions of emotion; where parents are not proud of their boy-children; where thoughtful minds do not speculate upon the two eternities; where, in short, there is not broad ground on which any two human beings may meet and clasp hands, if they have but unsophisticated hearts. If a man have not sympathy, there is no point of the universe—none so wide even as the Mahomedan bridge over the bottomless pit—where he can meet with his fellow. Such an one is indeed floundering in the bottomless pit, with only the shadows of men ever flitting about him.

I have mentioned elsewhere, what will well bear repetition,—that an American merchant, who had made several voyages to China, dropped a remark by his own fire-side on the narrowness which causes us to conclude, avowedly or silently, that, however well men may use the light they have, they cannot be more than nominally our brethren, unless they have our religion, our philosophy, and our methods of attaining both. He said he often recurred, with delight, to the conversations he had enjoyed with his Chinese friends on some of the highest speculative, and some of the deepest and widest practical subjects, which his fellow-citizens of New England were apt to think could be the business only of Protestant Christians. This American merchant's observations on oriental morals and manners had an incalculable weight after he had said this; for it was known that he had seen into hearts, as well as met faces, and discovered what people's minds were busy about, as their hands were pursuing the universal employment of earning their subsistence.

Unless a traveller interprets by his sympathies what he sees, he cannot but misunderstand the greater part of that which comes under his observation. He will not be admitted with freedom into the retirements of domestic life; the instructive commentary on all the facts of life,—discourse,—will be of a slight and superficial character. People will talk to him of the things they care least about, instead of seeking his sympathy about the affairs which are deepest in their hearts. He will be amused with public spectacles, and informed of historical and chronological facts; but he will not be invited to weddings and christenings; he will hear no love-tales; domestic sorrows will be kept as secrets from him; the old folks will not pour out their stories to him, nor the children bring him their prattle. Such a traveller will be no more fitted to report on morals and manners than he would be to give an account of the silver mines of Siberia by walking over the surface, and seeing the entrance and the product.

"Human conduct," says a philosopher, "is guided by rules." Without these rules, men could not live together, and they are also necessary to the repose of individual minds. Robinson Crusoe could not have endured his life for a month without rules to live by. A life without purpose is uncomfortable enough; but a life without rules would be a wretchedness which, happily, man is not constituted to bear. The rules by which men live are chiefly drawn from the universal convictions about right and wrong which I have mentioned as being formed everywhere, under strong general influences. When sentiment is connected with these rules, they become religion; and this religion is the animating spirit of all that is said and done. If the stranger cannot sympathize in the sentiment, he cannot understand the religion; and without understanding the religion, he cannot appreciate the spirit of words and acts. A stranger who has never felt any strong political interest, and cannot sympathize with American sentiment about the majesty of social equality, and the beauty of mutual government, can never understand the political religion of the United States; and the sayings of the citizens by their own fire-sides, the perorations of orators in town-halls, the installations of public servants, and the process of election, will all be empty sound and grimace to him. He will be tempted to laugh,—to call the world about him mad,—like one who, without hearing the music, sees a room-full of people begin to dance. The case is the same with certain Americans who have no antiquarian sympathies, and who think our sovereigns mad for riding to St. Stephen's in the royal state-coach, with eight horses covered with trappings, and a tribe of grotesque footmen. I have found it an effort of condescension to inform such observers that we should not think of inventing such a coach and appurtenances at the present day, any more than we should the dress of the Christ-Hospital boys. If an unsympathizing stranger is so perplexed by a mere matter of external arrangement,—a royal procession, or a popular election,—what can he be expected to make of that which is far more important, more intricate, more mysterious,—neighbourly and domestic life? If he knows and feels nothing of the religion of these, he could learn but little about them, even if the roofs of all the houses of a city were made transparent to him, and he could watch all that is done in every parlour, kitchen, and nursery in a circuit of five miles.

What strange scenes and transactions must such an one think that there are in the world! What would he have thought of the spectacle one day seen in Hayti, when Toussaint L'Ouverture ranged his negro forces before him, called out thirteen men from the ranks by name, and ordered them to repair to a certain spot to be immediately shot? What would he have thought of these thirteen men for crossing their arms upon their breasts, bowing their heads submissively, and yielding instant obedience? He might have pronounced Toussaint a ferocious despot, and the thirteen so many craven fools: while the facts wear a very different aspect to one who knows the minds of the men. It was necessary to the good-will of a society but lately organized out of chaos, to make no distinction between negro and other insurgents; and these thirteen men were ringleaders in a revolt, Toussaint's nephew being one of them. This accounts for the general's share in the transaction. As for the negroes, the General was also the Deliverer,—an object of worship to people of his colour. Obedience to him was a rule, exalted by every sentiment of gratitude, awe, admiration, pride, and love, into a religion; and a Haytian of that day would no more have thought of resisting a command of Toussaint, than of disputing a thunder-stroke or an earthquake.—What would an unsympathizing observer make of the Paschal supper, as celebrated in the houses of Hebrews throughout the world,—of the care not to break a bone of the lamb,—of the company all standing, the men girded and shod as for a journey, and the youngest child of the household invariably asking what this is all for? What would the observer call it but mummery, if he had no feeling for the awful traditional and religious emotion involved in the symbol?—What would such an one think of the terrified flight of two Spanish nobles from the wrath of their sovereign, incurred by their having saved his beloved queen from being killed by a fall from her horse? What a puzzle is here,—even when all the facts of the case are known;—that the king was looking from a balcony to see his queen mount her Andalusian horse: that the horse reared, plunged, and bolted, throwing the queen, whose foot was entangled in the stirrup: that she was surrounded with gentlemen who stood aloof, because by the law of Spain it was death to any but her little pages to touch the person, and especially the foot of the queen, and her pages were too young to rescue her; that these two gentlemen devoted themselves to save her; and having caught the horse, and extricated the royal foot, fled for their lives from the legal wrath of the king! Whence such a law? From the rule that the queen of Spain has no legs. Whence such a rule? From the meaning that the queen of Spain is a being too lofty to touch the earth. Here we come at last to the sentiment of loyal admiration and veneration which sanctifies the law and the rule, and interprets the incident. To a heartless stranger the whole appears a mere solemn absurdity, fit only to be set aside, as it was apparently by pardon from the king being obtained by the instant intercession of the queen. But in the eyes of every Spaniard the transaction was, in all its parts, as far from absurdity as the danger of the two nobles was real and pressing.—Again, what can a heartless observer understand by the practice, almost universal in the world, of celebrating the naming of children? The Christian parent employs a form by which the infant is admitted as a lamb of Christ's flock: the Chinese father calls his kindred together to witness the conferring first of the surname, and then of "the milk-name,"—some endearing diminutive, to cease with infancy: the Moslem consults an astrologer before giving a name to his child: and the savage selects a name-sake for his infant from among the beasts or birds, with whose characteristic quality he would fain endow his offspring. What a general rule is here, exalted by a universal sentiment into an act of religion! The ceremonial observed in each case is widely different in its aspect to one who sees in it merely a cumbrous way of transacting a matter of convenience, and to another who perceives in it the initiation of a new member into the family of mankind, and a looking forward to,—an attempt to make provision for, the future destiny of an unconscious and helpless being.

Thus it will be through the whole range of the traveller's observation. If he be full of sympathy, every thing he sees will be instructive, and the most important matters will be the most clearly revealed. If he be unsympathizing, the most important things will be hidden from him, and symbols (in which every society abounds) will be only absurd or trivial forms. The stranger will be wise to conclude, when he sees anything seriously done which appears to him insignificant or ludicrous, that there is more in it than he perceives, from some deficiency of knowledge or feeling of his own.

The other way in which heart is found to answer to heart is too obvious to require to be long dwelt upon. Men not only see according to the light they shed from their own breasts,—whether it be the sunshine of generosity or the hell-flames of bad passions,—but they attract to themselves spirits like their own. The very same persons appear very differently to a traveller who calls into exercise all their best qualities, and to one who has an affinity with their worst: but it is a yet more important consideration that actually different elements of society will range themselves round the observer according to the scepticism or faith of his temper, the purity or depravity of his tastes, and the elevation or insignificance of his objects. The Americans, somewhat nettled with the injustice of English travellers' reports of their country, have jokingly proposed to take lodgings in Wapping for some thorough-bred American vixen, of low tastes and coarse manners, and employ her to write an account of English morals and manners from what she might see in a year's abode in the choice locality selected for her. This would be no great exaggeration of the process of observation of foreigners which is perpetually going on.

What should gamesters know of the philanthropists of the society they pass through? or the profligate, of the real state of domestic life? What can the moral sceptic report of religious or philosophical confessorship in any nation? or the sordid trader, of the higher kinds of intellectual cultivation? or the dandy, of the extent and administration of charity? It may be said that neither can the philanthropic traveller—the missionary—see otherwise than partially for want of "knowledge of the world;" that persons of sober habits can learn nothing that is going on in the moral depths of society; and the good are actually scoffed at for their absence from many scenes of human life, and their supposed ignorance of many things in human nature. But it is certain that the best part of every man's mind is far more a specimen of himself than the worst; and that the characteristics of a society, in like manner, are to be traced in the wisest and most genial of its pervading ideas and common transactions, instead of those disgraceful ones which are common to all. Swindlers, drunkards, people of low tastes and bad passions, are found in every country, and nowhere characterise a nation; while the reverence of man in America, the pursuit of speculative truth in Germany, philanthropic enterprise in France, love of freedom in Switzerland, popular education in China, domestic purity in Norway,—each of these great moral beauties is a star on the forehead of a nation. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united. The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over; and the good the least. It may be taken as a rule that the best qualities of a people, as of an individual, are the most characteristic—(what is really best being tested, not by prejudice, but principle). He has the best chance of ascertaining these best qualities who has them in himself; and he who has them not may as well pretend to give a picture of a metropolitan city by showing a map of its drainage, as report of a nation after an intercourse with its knaves and its profligates. To stand on the highest pinnacle is the best way of obtaining an accurate general view, in contemplating a society as well as a city.

CHAPTER III.

MECHANICAL REQUISITES.

"Thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one."—King Henry V.

No philosophical or moral fitness will qualify a traveller to observe a people if he does not select a mode of travelling which will enable him to see and converse with a great number and variety of persons. An ambassador has no chance of learning much of the people he visits anywhere but in a new country like America. While he is en route, he is too stately in appearance to allow of any familiarity on the part of the people by the road-side. His carriages might almost as well roll through a city of the dead, for anything he will learn from intercourse with the living. The case is not much better when a family or a party of friends travel together on the Continent, committing the business of the expedition to servants, and shrinking from intercourse, on all social occasions, with English shyness or pride.

The behaviour of the English on the Continent has become a matter of very serious consequence to the best informed and best mannered of their countrymen, as it has long been to the natives into whose society they may happen to fall. I have heard gentlemen say that they lose half their pleasure in going abroad, from the coldness and shyness with which the English are treated; a coldness and shyness which they think fully warranted by the conduct of their predecessors in travel. I have heard ladies say that they find great difficulty in becoming acquainted with their neighbours at the tables-d'hôte; and that, when they have succeeded, an apology for the reluctance to converse has been offered, in the form of explanation that English travellers generally "appear to dislike being spoken to" so much as to render it a matter of civility to leave them alone. The travelling arrangements of the English seem designed to cut them off from companionship with the people they go to see; and they preclude the possibility of studying morals and manners in a way which is perfectly ludicrous to persons of a more social temperament and habits.

A good deal may be learned on board steam-boats, and in such vehicles as the American stages; and when accommodations of the kind become common, it will be difficult for the sulkiest Englishman to avoid admitting some ideas into his mind from the conversation and actions of the groups around him. When steam-boats ply familiarly on the Indus, and we have the rail-road to Calcutta which people are joking about, and another across the Pampas,—when we make trips to New Zealand, and think little of a run down the west coast of Africa,—places where we shall go for fashion's sake, and cannot go boxed up in a carriage of Long Acre origin,—our countrymen will, perforce, exchange conversation with the persons they meet, and may chance to get rid of the unsociability for which they are notorious, and by which they cast a veil over hearts and faces, and a shadow over their own path, wherever they go.

Meantime, the wisest and happiest traveller is the pedestrian. If gentlemen and ladies want to see pictures, let them post to Florence, and be satisfied with learning what they can from the windows by the way. But if they want to see either scenery or people, let all who have strength and courage go on foot. I prefer this even to horseback. A horse is an anxiety and a trouble. Something is sure to ail it; and one is more anxious about its accommodation than about one's own. The pedestrian traveller is wholly free from care. There is no such freeman on earth as he is for the time. His amount of toil is usually within his own choice,—in any civilized region. He can go on and stop when he likes: if a fit of indolence overtakes him, he can linger for a day or a week in any spot that pleases him. He is not whirled past a beautiful view almost before he has seen it. He is not tantalized by the idea that from this or that point he could see something still finer, if he could but reach it. He can reach almost every point his wishes wander to. The pleasure is indescribable of saying to one's self, "I will go there,"—"I will rest yonder,"—and forthwith accomplishing it. He can sit on a rock in the midst of a rushing stream as often in a day as he likes. He can hunt a waterfall by its sound; a sound which the carriage-wheels prevent other travellers from hearing. He can follow out any tempting glade in any wood. There is no cushion of moss at the foot of an old tree that he may not sit down on if he pleases. He can read for an hour without fear of passing by something unnoticed while his eyes are fixed upon his book. His food is welcome, be its quality what it may, while he eats it under the alders in some recess of a brook. He is secure of his sleep, be his chamber ever so sordid; and when his waking eyes rest upon his knapsack, his heart leaps with pleasure as he remembers where he is, and what a day is before him. Even the weather seems to be of less consequence to the pedestrian than to other travellers. A pedestrian journey presupposes abundance of time, so that the traveller can rest in villages on rainy days, and in the shade of a wood during the hours when the sun is too powerful. And if he prefers not waiting for the rain, it is not the evil to him that it would be in cities and in the pursuit of business. The only evil of rain that I know of, to healthy persons in exercise, is that it spoils the clothes; and the clothes of a pedestrian traveller are not usually of a spoilable quality. Rain does not deform the face of things everywhere as it does in a city. It adds a new aspect of beauty occasionally to a wood, to mountains, to lake and ocean scenery. I remember a hale, cheerful pedestrian tourist whom we met frequently among the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and whom we remarked as being always the briskest of the company at the hotel table in the evening, and the merriest at breakfast. He had the best of it one day, when we passed him in Franconia Defile, after a heavy rain had set in. We were packed in a waggon which seemed likely to fill with water before we got to our destination; and miserable enough we looked, drenched and cold. The traveller was marching on over the rocky road, his book safe in its oil-skin cover, and his clothes-bag similarly protected; his face bright and glowing with exercise, and his summer jacket of linen feeling, as he told us, all the pleasanter for being wet through. As he passed each recess of the defile, he looked up perpetually to see the rain come smoking out of the fissures of the rocks; and when he reached the opening by which he was to descend to the plain, he stood still, to watch the bar of dewy yellow light which lay along the western sky where the sun had just set. He looked just as happy on other days. Sometimes we passed him lying along on a hill side; sometimes talking with a family at the door of a log-house; sometimes reading as he walked under the shade of the forest. I, for one, often longed to dismiss our waggon or barouche, and to follow his example.

One peculiar advantage of pedestrian travelling is the pleasure of a gradual approach to celebrated or beautiful places. Every turn of the road gains in interest; every object that meets the eye seems to have some initiative meaning; and when the object itself at last appears, nothing can surpass the delight of flinging one's self on the ground to rest upon the first impression, and to interpose a delicious pause before the final attainment. It is not the same thing to desire your driver to stop when you come to the point of view. The first time that I felt this was on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, when I was at length to see mountains. The imagination of myself and my companion had fixed strongly on Dunkeld, as being a scene of great beauty, and our first resting-place among the mountains. The sensation had been growing all the morning. Men, houses, and trees had seemed to be growing diminutive,—an irresistible impression to the novice in mountain scenery: the road began to follow the windings of the Tay, a sign that the plain was contracting into a pass. Beside a cistern, on a green bank of this pass, we had dined; a tract of heath next lay before us, and we traversed it so freshly and merrily as to be quite unaware that we were getting towards the end of our seventeen miles, though still conscious that the spirit of the mountains was upon us. We were deeply engaged in talk, when a winding of the road brought us in full view of the lovely scene which is known to all who have approached Dunkeld by the Perth road. We could scarcely believe that this was it, so soon. We turned to our map and guide-book, and found that we were standing on the site of Birnam wood; that Dunsinane hill was in sight, and that it was indeed the old cathedral tower of Dunkeld that rose so grandly among the beeches behind the bridge. We took such a long and fond gaze as I never enjoyed from a carriage window. If it was thus with an object of no more importance or difficulty of attainment than Dunkeld, what must it be to catch the first view of the mysterious temples that

or to survey from a height, at sunrise, the brook Kedron and the valley of Jehoshaphat!

What is most to our present purpose, however, is the consideration of the facilities afforded by pedestrian travelling for obtaining a knowledge of the people. We all remember Goldsmith's travels with his flute, his sympathies, his cordiality of heart and manner, and his reliance on the hospitality of the country people. Such an one as he is not bound to take up with such specimens as he may meet with by the side of the high road; he can penetrate into the recesses of the country, and drop into the hamlet among the hills, and the homesteads down the lanes, and now and then spend a day with the shepherd in his fold on the downs; he can stop where there is a festival, and solve many a perplexity by carrying over the conversation of one day into the intercourse of the next, with a fresh set of people; he can obtain access to almost every class of persons, and learn their own views of their own affairs. His opportunities are inestimable.

If it were a question which could learn most of Morals and Manners by travel,—the gentleman accomplished in philosophy and learning, proceeding in his carriage, with a courier,—or a simple pedestrian tourist, furnished only with the language, and with an open heart and frank manners,—I should have no doubt that the pedestrian would return more familiar with his subject than the other. If the wealthy scholar and philosopher could make himself a citizen of the world for the time, and go forth on foot, careless of luxury, patient of fatigue, and fearless of solitude, he would be not only of the highest order of tourists, but a benefactor to the highest kind of science; and he would become familiarized with what few are acquainted with,—the best pleasures, transient and permanent, of travel. Those who cannot pursue this method will achieve most by laying aside state, conversing with the people they fall in with, and diverging from the high road as much as possible.

Nothing need be said on a matter so obvious as the necessity of understanding the language of the people visited. Some familiarity with it must be attained before anything else can be done. It seems to be unquestioned, however, that a good deal of the unsociability of the English abroad is owing not so much to contempt of their neighbours, as to the natural pride which makes them shrink from attempting what they cannot do well. I am confident that we say much less than we feel about the awkwardness and constraint of our first self-committals to a foreign language. It is impossible but that every one must feel the weight of the penalty of making himself ridiculous at every step, and of presenting a kind of false appearance of himself to every one with whom he converses. A German gentleman in America, who has exactly that right degree of self-respect which enabled him to set strenuously about learning English, of which he did not understand a word, and who mastered it so completely as to lecture in faultless English at the end of two years, astonished a party of friends one day, persuaded as they were that they perfectly knew him, and that the smooth and deliberate flow of his beautiful language was a consequence of the calmness of his temper, and the philosophical character of his mind. A German woman with children came begging to the house while the party were at their dessert. The professor caught her tones when the door of the dining-room was open; he rushed into the hall, presently returned for a dish or two, and emptied the gingerbread, and other material of the dessert, into her lap. The company went out to see, and found the professor transformed; he was talking with a rapidity and vehemence which they had never supposed him capable of; and one of the party told me how sorry she felt, and has felt ever since, to think of the state of involuntary disguise in which he is living among those who would know him best. Difference of language is undeniably a cause of great suffering and difficulty, magnificent and incalculable as are its uses. It is no exception to the general rule that every great good involves some evil.

Happily, however, the difficulty may be presently so far surmounted as not to interfere with the object of observing Morals and Manners. Impossible as it may be to attain to an adequate expression of one's self in a foreign tongue, it is easy to most persons to learn to understand it perfectly when spoken by others. During this process, a common and almost unavoidable mistake is to suppose a too solemn and weighty meaning in what is expressed in an unfamiliar language. This arises partly from our having become first acquainted with the language in books; and partly from the meaning having been attained with effort, and seeming, by natural association, worth the pains. The first French dialogues which a child learns, seem more emphatic in their meanings than the same material would in English; and the student of German finds a grandeur in lines of Schiller, and in clauses of Herder's and Krummacher's Parables, which he looks for in vain when he is practised in the language. It is well to bear this in mind on a first entrance into a foreign society, or the traveller may chance to detect himself treasuring up nonsense, and making much of mere trivialities, because they reached him clothed in the mystery of a strange language. He will be like lame Jervas, when he first came up from the mine in which he was born, caressing the weeds he had gathered by the road side, and refusing till the last moment to throw away such wonderful and beautiful things. The raw traveller not only sees something mysterious, picturesque, or classical in every object that meets his eye after passing the frontier, from the children's toys to palaces and general festivals, but is apt to discern wisdom and solemnity in everything that is said to him, from the greeting of the landlord to the speculations of the politician. If not guarded against, this natural tendency will more or less vitiate the observer's first impressions, and introduce something of the ludicrous into his record of them.

From the consideration of the requisites for observation in the traveller himself, we now proceed to indicate what he is to observe, in order to inform himself of foreign Morals and Manners.

PART II.

WHAT TO OBSERVE.

"Nous nous en tiendrons aux mœurs, aux habitudes extérieures dont se forme, pour les differentes classes de la société, une sorte de physionomie morale, où se retracent les mœurs privées."

De Jouy.

It is a perpetual wonder to an inexperienced person that the students of particular classes of facts can learn so much as they do from a single branch of inquiry. Tell an uninformed man of the daily results of the study of Fossil Remains, and he will ask how the student can possibly know what was done in the world ages before man was created. It will astonish a thoughtless man to hear the statements about the condition of the English nation which are warranted by the single study of the administration of the Poor Laws, since their origin. Some physiognomists fix their attention on a single feature of the human face, and can pretty accurately interpret the general character of the mind from it: and I believe every portrait painter trusts mainly to one feature for the fidelity of his likenesses, and bestows more study and care on that one than on any other.

A good many features compose the physiognomy of a nation; and scarcely any traveller is qualified to study them all. The same man is rarely enlightened enough to make investigation at once into the religion of a people, into its general moral notions, its domestic and economical state, its political condition, and the facts of its progress;—all which are necessary to a full understanding of its morals and manners. Few have even attempted an inquiry of this extent. The worst of it is that few dream of undertaking the study of any one feature of society at all. We should by this time have been rich in the knowledge of nations if each intelligent traveller had endeavoured to report of any one department of moral inquiry, however narrow; but, instead of this, the observations offered to us are almost purely desultory. The traveller hears and notes what this and that and the other person says. If three or four agree in their statements on any point, he remains unaware of a doubt, and the matter is settled. If they differ, he is perplexed, does not know whom to believe, and decides, probably, in accordance with prepossessions of his own. The case is almost equally bad, either way. He will hear only one side of every question if he sees only one class of persons,—like the English in America, for instance, who go commonly with letters of introduction from merchants at home to merchants in the maritime cities, and hear nothing but federal politics, and see nothing but aristocratic manners. They come home with notions which they suppose to be indisputable about the great Bank question, the state of parties, and the relations of the General and State governments; and with words in their mouths of whose objectionable character they are unaware,—about the common people, mob government, the encroachment of the poor upon the rich, and so on. Such partial intercourse is fatal to the observations of a traveller; but it is less perplexing and painful at the time than the better process of going from one set of people to another, and hearing what all have to say. No traveller in the United States can learn much of the country without conversing equally with farmers and merchants, with artizans and statesmen, with villagers and planters; but, while discharging this duty, he will be so bewildered with the contrariety of statements and convictions, that he will often shut his note-book in a state of scepticism as to whether there be any truth at all shining steadily behind all this tempest of opinions. Thus it is with the stranger who traverses the streets of Warsaw, and is trusted with the groans of some of the outraged mourners who linger in its dwellings; and then goes to St. Petersburg, and is presented with evidences of the enlightenment of the Czar, of his humanity, his paternal affection for his subjects, and his general superiority to his age. At Warsaw the traveller called him a miscreant; at Petersburg he is required to pronounce him a philanthropist. Such must be the uncertainty of judgment when it is based upon the testimony of individuals. To arrive at the facts of the condition of a people through the discourse of individuals, is a hopeless enterprise. The plain truth is—it is beginning at the wrong end.

The grand secret of wise inquiry into Morals and Manners is to begin with the study of THINGS, using the DISCOURSE OF PERSONS as a commentary upon them.

Though the facts sought by travellers relate to Persons, they may most readily be learned from Things. The eloquence of Institutions and Records, in which the action of the nation is embodied and perpetuated, is more comprehensive and more faithful than that of any variety of individual voices. The voice of a whole people goes up in the silent workings of an institution; the condition of the masses is reflected from the surface of a record. The Institutions of a nation,—political, religious, or social,—put evidence into the observer's hands as to its capabilities and wants which the study of individuals could not yield in the course of a lifetime. The Records of any society, be they what they may, whether architectural remains, epitaphs, civic registers, national music, or any other of the thousand manifestations of the common mind which may be found among every people, afford more information on Morals in a day than converse with individuals in a year. Thus also must Manners be judged of, since there never was a society yet, not even a nunnery or a Moravian settlement, which did not include a variety of manners. General indications must be looked for, instead of generalizations being framed from the manners of individuals. In cities, do social meetings abound? and what are their purposes and character? Are they most religious, political, or festive? If religious, have they more the character of Passion Week at Rome, or of a camp-meeting in Ohio? If political, do the people meet on wide plains to worship the Sun of the Celestial Empire, as in China; or in town-halls, to remonstrate with their representatives, as in England; or in secret places, to spring mines under the thrones of their rulers, as in Spain? If festive, are they most like an Italian carnival, where everybody laughs; or an Egyptian holiday, when all eyes are solemnly fixed on the whirling Dervishes? Are women there? In what proportions, and under what law of liberty? What are the public amusements? There is an intelligible difference between the opera at Milan, and the theatre at Paris, and a bull-fight at Madrid, and a fair at Leipzig, and a review at St. Petersburg.—In country towns, how is the imitation of the metropolis carried on? Do the provincials emulate most in show, in science, or in the fine arts?—In the villages, what are the popular amusements? Do the people meet to drink or to read, to discuss, or play games, or dance? What are the public houses like? Do the people eat fruit and tell stories? or drink ale and talk politics or call for tea and saunter about? or coffee and play dominoes? or lemonade and laugh at Punch? Do they crowd within four walls, or gather under the elm, or spread themselves abroad over the cricket-field or the yellow sands?—There is as wide a difference among the humbler classes of various countries as among their superiors in rank. A Scotch burial is wholly unlike the ceremonies of the funeral pile among the Cingalese; and an interment in the Greek church little resembles either. A conclave of White Boys in Mayo, assembled in a mud hovel on a heath, to pledge one another to their dreadful oath, is widely different from a similar conclave of Swiss insurgents, met in a pine wood on a steep, on the same kind of errand: and both are as little like as may be to the heroes of the last revolution in Paris, or to the companies of Covenanters that were wont to meet, under a similar pressure of circumstances, in the defiles of the Scottish mountains.—In the manners of all classes, from the highest to the lowest, are forms of manners enforced in action, or dismissed in words? Is there barbarous freedom in the lower, while there is formality in the higher ranks, as in newly settled countries? or have all grown up together to that period of refined civilization when ease has superseded alike the freedom of the Australian peasantry, and the etiquette of the court of Ava?—What are the manners of professional men of the society, from the eminent lawyer or physician of the metropolis down to the village barber? The manners of the great body of the professional men must indicate much of the requisitions of the society they serve.—So, also, must every circumstance connected with the service of society: its character, whether slavish or free, abject or prosperous, comprehensive or narrow in its uses, must testify to the desires and habits, and therefore to the manners of a community, better than the conversation or deportment of any individual in the society can do. A traveller who bears all this in mind can hardly go wrong. Every thing that he looks upon will instruct him, from an aqueduct to a punch-bowl, from a penitentiary to an aviary, from the apparatus of a university to the furniture of an alehouse or a nursery. When it was found that the chiefs of the Red men could not be impressed with any notion of the civilization of the Whites by all that many white men could say, they were brought into the cities of the Whites. The exhibition of a ship was enough for some. The warriors of the prairies were too proud to utter their astonishment,—too noble to hint, even to one another, their fear; but the perspiration stood on their brows as they dumbly gazed, and no word of war passed their lips from that hour. Another, who could listen with calmness to the tales of boastful traders in the wilderness, was moved from his apathy by seeing a workman in a glasshouse put a handle upon a pitcher. He was transported out of his silence and reserve: he seized and grasped the hand of the workman, crying out that it was now plain that he had had intercourse with the Great Spirit. By the evidence of things these Indians had learned more of the manners of the Whites than had ever been taught them by speech.—Which of us would not learn more of the manners of the Pompeians by a morning's walk among the relics of their abodes and public halls than by many a nightly conference with certain of their ghosts?

The usual scholastic division of Morals is into personal, domestic, and social or political morals. The three kinds are, however, so apt to run into one another,—so practically inseparable,—that the traveller will find the distinction less useful to him than some others which he can either originate or adopt.

It appears to me that the Morals and Manners of a nation may be included in the following departments of inquiry—the Religion of the people; their prevalent Moral Notions; their Domestic State; their Idea of Liberty; and their Progress, actual or in prospect.

CHAPTER I.

RELIGION.

Of religion, in its widest sense, (the sense in which the traveller must recognize it,) there are three kinds; not in all cases minutely distinguishable, but bearing different general impress; viz. the Licentious, the Ascetic, and the Moderate. These kinds are not divided from each other by the boundaries of sects. We cannot say that pagan religions come under one head, and Mahomedanism under another, and Christianity under a third. The difference lies not in creeds, but in spirit. Many pagans have been as moderate as any Christians; many Christians as licentious as any pagans; many Mahomedans as licentious, and many as ascetic, as any pagans or Christians. The truer distinction seems to be that the licentious religions of the world worship unspiritualized nature,—material objects and their movements, and the primitive passions of man: that the ascetic despises nature, and worships its artificial restraints: and that the moderate worships spiritualized nature,—God in his works, both in the material universe and in the disciplined human mind, with its regulated affections.

The Licentious religion is always a ritual one. Its gods are natural phenomena and human passions personified; and, when once the power of doing good or harm is attributed to them, the idea of propitiation enters, and a ritual worship begins. Earthquakes, inundations, the chase, love, revenge,—all these agents of evil and good are to be propitiated, and sacrifices and prayers are to be offered to them; in these rites alone religious acts are supposed to be performed. This, however modified, is a low state of religious sentiment. It may show itself among the Hindoos dipping in the Ganges, or among Christians who accept absolution in its grossest sense. In either case its tendency is to render the worshipper satisfied with a low moral state, and to perpetuate his taste for selfish indulgence.

The Ascetic religions are ritual also. The Pharisees of old need but be cited to show why; and there is a set of people in the Society Islands now who seem to be spiritually descended from the ascetic priests of Judaism. The inhabitants of the Society Islands are excluded from many innocent privileges and natural pleasures by the Tabu; and the Pharisees in just the same manner laid burdens upon men's shoulders too heavy to be borne, ordaining irksome ceremonies to be proofs of holiness, and extravagant self-denial to be required by devotion. Spiritual licence has always kept pace with this extravagance of self-denial. Spiritual vices,—pride, vanity, and hypocrisy,—are as fatal to high morals under this state of religious sentiment as sensual indulgence under the other: and it does not matter much to the moral welfare of the people sunk in it, whether they exist under a profession of Christianity, or of Mahomedanism, or of paganism. The morals of those people are low who engage themselves to serve God by a slothful life in monastic celibacy, no less than those of the Fakîrs, who let their nails grow through the backs of their hands, or those of the wretched mothers in the islands of the Pacific, who strangle their infants, and cast them at the feet of their grinning idol.

The Moderate is the least of a ritual religion of the three, and drops such rites as it has in proportion to its advance towards purity. Religion in its purity is not a pursuit, but a temper; and its expression is not by sacrifices, by prayers in the corners of the streets, by fasts or public exhibitions. The highest manifestations of this order of religion are found in Christian countries; though in others there are individuals, and even orders of men, who understand that the orderly enjoyment of all blessings that Providence has bestowed, and the regulated workings of all human affections, are the truest homage to the Maker of all. As there are Christians whose reliance is upon their ritual worship, and who enter upon a monastic life, so there are Mahomedans and pagans whose high religious aim is self-perfection, sought through the free but disciplined exercise of their whole nature.

The dependence of morals upon the character of the religion is clear. It is clear that among a people whose gods are supposed to be licentious, whose priests are licentious, and where worship is associated with the indulgence of the passions, political and domestic morals must be very low. What purity can be expected of a people whose women are demanded in turn for the obscene service of the Buddhist temple; and what humanity from the inhabitants of districts whose dwellings are necessarily closed against the multitudes flocking to the festivals of Juggernaut,—multitudes from amidst which thousands annually drop down dead, so that their skeletons strew the road to the abominable temple?—Where asceticism is the character of the religion, the natural and irrepressible exercise of human affections becomes licentiousness, so called; and, of consequence, it soon becomes licentiousness in fact, according to the general rule that a bad name changes that to which it is affixed into a bad quality.—Hannah and Philip grew up in a Moravian settlement; and, Moravians as they were, they loved. The days came when the destiny of each was decided by lot. It was scarcely possible that they should draw a lot to marry each other; yet both secretly hoped to the last. Philip drew a missionary lot, and Hannah another husband. They were allowed to shake hands once before parting. "Good-bye, Hannah!" "Good-bye, Philip!" was all that was said. If Hannah had gone off with Philip, it would have been called a profligate act; and, if they were sound Moravians, it would in fact have been so: whereas, in a community of really high morals, the profligacy would have been seen to lie in Hannah's marrying a man she did not love.

To proceed with the dependence of the morals on the character of the religion,—it is clear that in proportion as any religion encourages licentiousness, either positively or negatively,—encourages, that is to say, the excess of the passions, might will have the victory over right; the weak will succumb to the strong; and thus the condition of the poorer classes depends on the character of the religion of their country. In proportion as the religion tends to licentiousness, will the poorer classes be liable to slavery. In proportion as the religion tends to asceticism, will be the amount (other things being equal) of the hardship and want which they must sustain. In proportion as the religion approximates to the moderate, (the use without the abuse of means of enjoyment,) will the poorer classes rise to a condition of freedom and comfort.

The character of the religion serves, in like manner, as an index to that of the government. A licentious religion cannot be adopted by a people who are so moderate in their passions as to be able to govern themselves. One would not look for a display of meats offered to idols in the Capitol of the American Congress. An ascetic religion, too, inflicts personal and mutual wrongs which could never be endured among a people who agree to govern one another. There is no power which could induce such to submit to privations and sufferings which can be tolerable to none but devotees,—a small fraction of every society. Absolutism is commonly the character of the government of any country where either of these religions prevails;—a despotism more or less tempered by a variety of influences. It is the observer's business to bring the religion and the government into comparison, and to see how the latter is modified by the coexistence of the former.

The friendly, no less than the domestic and political relations of society, are dependent upon the prevailing religion. Under the licentious, the manners will be made up of the conventional and the gross. A Burmese minister was sitting on the poop of a steam-vessel when a squall came on. "I suggested to his Excellency," says Mr. Crawford, "the convenience of going below, which he long resisted, under the apprehension of committing his dignity by placing himself in a situation where persons might tread over his head; for this singular antipathy is common both to the Burmese and Siamese. The prejudice is more especially directed against the fair sex,—a pretty conclusive proof of the estimation in which they are held. His Excellency seriously demanded to know whether any woman had ever trod upon the poop; and, being assured in the negative, he consented at length to enter the cabin." The house fixed for the residence of an American missionary was not allowed to be fitted up, as it stood on ground which was higher than the king's barge as it lay in the river; and such a spectacle would not become the king's dignity. The prime minister of this same king was one day, for absence from his post at a fire, "spread out in the hot sun." He was extended on his back in the public road for some hours in the most sultry part of the day, with a heavy weight upon his chest,—the public executioners being employed to administer the punishment. Nor is the king alone authorized to perpetrate such barbarisms. A creditor is permitted to seize the wife, children, and slaves of a debtor, and bind them at his door to broil in the sun of Ava. Here we see in perfection the union of the conventional and the gross in manners; and such manners cannot be conceived to coexist with any religion of a higher character than Buddhism.

Under ascetic forms, what grossness there is will be partially concealed; but there will be no nearer an approach to simplicity than under the licentious. The religion being made still to consist much in observances, the society becomes formal in proportion as it believes itself growing pure. We must again take an extreme case for an example. The Shakers of America are as sophisticated a set of persons as can be found; with their minds, and even their public discourses, full of the one subject of their celibacy, and their intercourse with each other graduated according to strict rules of etiquette. So extreme an asceticism can never now spread in any nation to such an extent as to bear a relation to its general government: but it is observable that such societies of ascetics live under a despotism;—one of their own appointment, if the general will has not furnished them with one.

Under the moderate aspect of religion is an approximation towards simplicity of social manners alone to be found. There is as yet only a remote anticipation of it in any country in the world; only a remote anticipation of that ease of social manners which must exist there alone where the enjoyments of life are freely used without abuse. It matters not that the licentious and the ascetic parties each boast of having attained this consummation,—the one under the name of ease, and the other of simplicity. There is too much pain attendant upon grossness to justify the boast of ease; and too much effort in asceticism to admit of the grace of simplicity. It is the observer's business to mark, wherever he goes, the degree in which the one is chastened and the other relaxed, giving place to the higher form of the moderate, which, if society learns from experience, as the individual does, must finally prevail. When many individuals of a society attain that self-forgetfulness which is promoted by a high and free religious sentiment, but which is incompatible with either licentious or ascetic tendencies, the tone of manners in that society will be much raised. When, free from the grossness of self-indulgence, and from the constraint of self-denial, every one spontaneously thinks more of his neighbour than of himself, the world will witness, at last, the perfection of manners. It is clear that the high morals of which such refined manners will be the expression, must greatly depend on the exaltation of the religious sentiment from which they emanate.

The traveller may possibly object the difficulty of classing societies by their religious tendencies, and ask whether minds of every sort are not to be found in all numerous assemblages of persons. This is true: but yet there is a prevailing religious sentiment in all communities. Religious, like other sentiment, is modified by the strong general influences under which each society lives; and in it, as in other kinds, there will be general resemblance, with particular differences under it. It is well known that even sects, exclusive in their opinions and straitened by forms, differ in different countries almost as much as if there were no common bond. Not only is episcopacy not the same religion among born East Indians as in England, but the Quakers of the United States, though like the English in doctrine and in manners, are easily distinguishable from them in religious sentiment: and even the Jews, who might be expected to be the same all over the world, differ in Russia, Persia, and Great Britain as much as if a spirit of division had been sent among them. They not only appear here in furs, there in cotton or silk, and elsewhere in broadcloth; but the hearts they bear beneath the garments, the thoughts that stir under the cap, the turban, and the hat, are modified in their action as the skies under which they move are in aspect. They are strongly tinctured with the national sentiment of Russia, Persia, and England; and if the fond dream of some of them (in which, by the way, large numbers of their body have ceased to sympathize,) could come true, and they should ever be brought together within their ancient borders, they would find that their religion, so unique in its fixedness, though one in word, is many in spirit.—Much more easy is the assimilation between different forms of Christianity, and between Christianity and an elevated natural religion: and the search can never therefore be in vain for a pervading religious sentiment among the various religious institutions of any and every people.

It is, of course, more difficult to discover this religious sentiment among a nation enlightened enough to be divided in theological matters, than among a rude people who regulate their devotions by the bidding of a single order of priests. The African traveller, passing up the Niger, sees at a glance what all the worshippers on the banks feel, and must feel, towards the deities to whom their temples are erected. A rude shed, with a doll,—an image of deformity,—perched on a stand, and supposed to be enjoying the fumes of the cooking going on before his face;—a place of worship like this, in its character of the habitation of a deity, and of a sensual deity, leaves no doubt as to what the religious sentiment of a country must be where there is no dissent from such a worship. In such a society there are absolutely none to feel that their deep palm groves are a nobler temple than human hands can rear. There are none who see that it is by a large divine benignity that all the living creatures of that region are made happy in their rank seclusion. There is no feeling of gratitude in the minds of those who see the myriads of gay butterflies that flit in the glare of noon, and the river-horse which bathes in the shady places of the mysterious great stream. There a god is seen only in his temple, and there is nothing known of any works of his. That he is great, is learned only through the word of his priests, who say that yams are too common a food for him, and that nothing less than hippopotamus' flesh must be cooked beneath his shrine. That he is good is an idea which has not yet entered any mind.—In other places, the religious sentiment is almost equally unquestionable; as when every man in Cairo is seen in his turn to put on the dress of pilgrimage, and direct his steps to Mount Arafat. Here the sentiment is of a higher order, but equally evident and uniform.—A further advance, with somewhat less uniformity of sentiment, is found among the followers of the Greek church in a Russian province. The peasants there make a great point of having time for their devotions; and those who have the wherewithal to offer some showy present at a shrine are complacent. They make the sign of the cross, and have therein done their whole duty: and if some speculative worshipper of the Virgin with Three Hands is not satisfied about the way in which his patroness came by her third hand, he keeps his doubts to himself when he tells his sins to his confessor.—A still further advance, with an increased diversity, may be met with among the simple Vaudois, the general characteristics of whose faith are alike, but who entertain it, some more in the spirit of fear, others more in the spirit of love. The prevailing sentiment among them is of the ascetic character, as the stranger may perceive, who sees the peasantry marching in serene gravity to their plain places of worship on the mountain pinnacle, or under the shelter yielded by a clump of black pines amidst a waste of snow: but here the clergy are more guides than dictators; and not a few may be found who doubt their opinions, and find matter for thoughtless delight, rather than religious awe, when they follow the echoes from steep to steep, and watch for the gleams of the summer lightning playing among the defiles.—The diversity grows more striking as civilization advances; but it has not yet become perplexing in the most enlightened nations in the world. In England, in France, in America, there is a distinct religious sentiment: in England, where there is every variety of dissent from the established faith; in America, where there is every variety of opinion, and no establishment at all; and in France, now in that state which most baffles observation,—a state of transition from an exaggerated superstition to a religious faith which is being groped for, but is not yet found. Even in this uncertain state, no one can confound the religious sentiment of New England and of France; and an observation of their places of worship will indicate their differences. In New England, the populous towns have their churches in the midst, spacious and conspicuous,—not exhibiting any of the signs of antique origin which are impressed on those of Europe, and to be accounted for only by the immediate religious tastes of the people. In new settlements, the church rises side by side with the house of entertainment, and is obviously considered one of the necessaries of social life. The first thing to be learned about a fresh inhabitant is, how he stands disposed towards the church, whatever may be its denomination. In France, such of the old churches as are still used for their ancient purpose, bespeak a ritual religion, and therefore a religion light and gay in its spirit; all religions being so which cast responsibility into outward observances, especially where the outward observances are not of a very burdensome character. If nuns in their cloister, and Jews in their synagogues, have been characterized by the lightness of their religious spirit, well may the Catholics of an enlightened country be so, discarding the grossest and most burdensome of their rites, and retaining the ritual principle. The searchers after a new faith in France must increase by millions before they can change the character of the religious sentiment of the country; and perhaps before that which is now gross can be elevated into what is genial, and before a mixture of levity and fear can be changed into the cheerful earnestness of a moderate or truly catholic religious conviction, the ancient churches of France may be standing in ruins,—objects for the research of the antiquary.

The rule of examining things before persons must be observed in ascertaining the religious sentiment of any country. A stranger in England might interrogate everybody he saw, and be little wiser at the end of a year. He might meet a fanatic one day, an indifferent person the next, and a calmly convinced one the third: he might go from a Churchman to a Jew; from a Jew to a Quaker; from a Quaker to a Catholic; and every day be farther from understanding the prevailing religious sentiment of the country. A much shorter and surer method is, to examine the Places of Worship, the condition of the Clergy, the Popular Superstitions, the observance of Holy Days, and some other particulars of the kind.

First, for the Churches. There is that about all places of worship which may tell nearly as plain a tale as the carved idols, with messes of rice before them, in Hindoo temples; or as the human bones hung round the hut of an African god. The proportion and resemblance of modern places of worship to those which were built in dark times of superstition; the suitability or incongruity of all that is of late introduction into their furniture and worship with what had its origin in those dim ages;—such circumstances as these cannot but indicate whether the common religious sentiment is as nearly as possible the same as in centuries past, or whether it is approximating, slowly or rapidly, towards the ascetic or the moderate.

There is evidence in the very forms of churches. The early Christian churches were in the basilica form,—bearing a resemblance to the Roman courts of justice. This is supposed to have arisen from the churches being, in fact, the courts of spiritual justice, where penance was awarded by the priest to the guilty, and absolution granted to the penitent. From imitation, the Christian churches of all Europe for centuries bore this form; and even some built since the Reformation preserve it. But they have something of their own which serves as a record of their own times. The history of the Crusades does not present a more vivid picture of feudal society than shines out from the nooks of our own cathedrals. The spirit of monachism is as distinguishable as if the cowled ghosts of the victims were actually seen flitting along the aisles. What say the chantries ranged along the sides? There perpetual prayers were to be kept up for the prosperity of a wealthy family and its retainers in life, and for their welfare after death. What says the chapter-house? There the powerful members of the church hierarchy were wont to assemble, to use and confirm their rule. What say the cloisters? Under their shelter did the monks go to and fro in life; and in the plot of ground enclosed by these sombre passages were they laid in death. What says the Ladye chapel? What say the niches with their stone basins? They tell of the intercessory character of the sentiment, and of the ritual character of the worship of the times when they were set up. The handful of worshippers here collected from among the tens of thousands of a cathedral town also testify to the fact that such establishments could not be originated now, and are no longer in harmony with the spirit of the multitude.—The contrast of the most modern sacred buildings tells as plain a tale:—the red-brick meeting-house of the Friends; the stone chapel of the less rigid dissenters, standing back from the noise of the busy street; the aristocratic chapel nestling amidst the shades of the nobleman's park; and the village church in the meadow, with its neighbouring parsonage. These all tell of a diversity of opinion; but also of something else. The more ancient buildings are scantily attended; the more modern are thronged;—and indeed, if they had not been wanted by numbers, they would not have been built. This speaks the decline of a ritual religion, and the preference of one which is more exclusively spiritual in its action.

In Scotland the kirks look exactly suitable to the population which throngs towards them, with sober dress and gait, and countenances of solemnity. These edifices stand in severe simplicity, whether on the green shore of a lake, or in the narrow street of a town; and asceticism is marked on every stone of the walls, and every article of their decorations.

No one who has travelled in Ireland can forget the aspect of its places of worship,—the lowly Catholic chapels, with their beggarly ornaments of lace and crucifixes, placed in the midst of villages, the whole of whose inhabitants crowd within those four walls; and a little way off, in a field, or on an eminence by the road side, the Protestant church, one end in ruins, and with ample harbourage for the owl, while the rest is encompassed with nettles and thorns, and the mossy grave-stones are half hidden by rank grass. In a country where the sun rises upon contrasts like these, it is clear in what direction the religious sentiment of the people is indulged.

What the stranger may thus learn in our own country, we may learn in his, whatever it be. The large plain churches of Massachusetts, their democratic benches (in the absence of aristocratic pews) silently filled for long hours of a Sabbath, as still as a summer noon, by hundreds and thousands who restore the tones of their pilgrim ancestors in their hymn-singing, and seem to carry about their likeness in their faces, cannot fail to instruct the observer.—Then there is the mosque at Cairo, with its great tank or fountain of ablution in the midst; and its broad pavement spread out for men of every degree to kneel on together; its doors standing wide from sunrise to sunset, for the admission of all but women and strangers; its outside galleries, from which the summons to prayer is sounded;—these things testify to the ritual character of the worship, and to the low type of the morals of a faith which despises women and strangers, giving privileges to the strong from which the weak are excluded.—Then there is the Buddhist temple, rearing its tapering form in a recess of the hills, with its colossal stone figures guarding the entrance, and others sanctifying the interior,—all eloquently explaining that physical force is worshipped here: its images of saints show that the intercessory superstition exists; and the drum and gong, employed to awaken the attention of the gods, can leave little danger of misapprehension to the observer. There are lanterns continually burning, and consecrated water, sanctified to the cure of diseased eyes.—Such places of worship tell a very plain tale; while there is not perhaps a church on earth which does not convey one that is far from obscure.

The traveller must diligently visit the temples of nations; he must mark their locality, whether placed among men's dwellings or apart from them; their number, whether multiplied by diversity of theological opinion; and their aspect, whether they are designed for the service of a ritual or a spiritual religion. Thus he may, at the same time, ascertain the character of the most prominent form of religion, and that of the dissent from it; which must always illustrate each other.

Next to the Churches comes the consideration of the Clergy. The clergy are usually the secondary potentates of a young country. In a young country, physical force, and that which comes to represent it, is the first great power; and knowledge is the next. The clergy are the first learned men of every nation; and when the streams of knowledge are only just issuing from the fountain, and the key is in the hands of the clergy, they enjoy, rightly and unavoidably, a high degree of consequence. Knowledge spreads abroad; and it is as impossible for man to dam it up as for the fool to stop the Danube by filling the narrow channel at its source with his great boots,—crying out the while, "How the people will wonder when the Danube does not come!" As knowledge becomes diffused, the consequence of the clergy declines. If that consequence is to be preserved, it must be by their attaining the same superiority in morals which they once held in intellect. Where the clergy are now a cherished class, it is, in fact, on the supposition of this moral superiority,—a claim for whose justification it would be unreasonable to look, and for the forfeiture of which the clergy should be less blamed than those who expect that, in virtue of a profession, any class of men should be better than others. Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions; and religion, being not a pursuit but a temper, cannot, in fact, be professionally cultivated with personal advantage. It will be for the traveller to note whether this is more or less understood where he travels; whether the clergy are viewed with indifference as mere professional men; or whether they are reverenced for their supposed holiness; or for their real superiority in learning; or whether the case wears the lowest aspect of all—when the clergy are merely the jugglers and puppet-masters of the multitude. A patient consideration of this will lead to a pretty safe conclusion as to the progress the people have made in knowledge, and the spiritual freedom which it brings;—a freedom which is at once a virtue and a cause of virtue.

The observer must note what the clergy themselves consider their function to be;—whether to guide individual minds; or to cultivate theological and other studies, in order to place their results at the disposal of the minds with which they have to deal; or to express in worship the feelings of those minds; or to influence the social institutions by which the minds of the people are modified; or to do any other of the many things which the priests of different countries, and ages, and faiths, have in turn included in their function. He will note whether they are most like the tyrannical Brahmins, who at one stroke—by declaring the institution of Caste to be of divine authority—obtained boundless control over a thousand generations, subjecting all intellects and all hands to a routine which could be easily superintended by the forty thousand of the favoured priestly race; or whether they are like the Christian clergy of the dark ages, a part of whose duty it was to learn the deepest secrets of the proudest and lowliest,—thus obtaining the means of bringing to pass what events they wished, both in public and private life;—or whether they are like such students as have been known in the theological world,—men who have not crossed the threshold of their libraries for eighteen years, and who are satisfied with their lives, if they have been able to elevate Biblical science, and to throw any new light on sacred history;—or whether they are like the American clergy of the present day, whose exertions are directed towards the art of preaching;—or whether they are like the ministers of the Established Church in England, who are politically represented, and large numbers of whom employ their influence for political purposes. Each of these kinds of clergy must be yielded by a particular state of society, and could not belong to any other. The Hindoos must be in a low degree of civilization, and sunk in a deadly superstition, or they would tolerate no Brahmins. The people of four centuries ago must have depended solely upon their priests for knowledge and direction, or they would not have submitted to their inquisitorial practices. Germany must have advanced far in her appreciation of philosophical and critical research in theology, or she would not have such devoted students as she can boast of. The Americans cannot have attained to any high practice of spiritual liberty, or they could not follow preaching so zealously as they do. The English cannot have fully understood, or taken to heart the principles of the Reformation, which have so long been their theme of eulogy, or they would not foster a political hierarchy within the bosom of their church.

As the studies of the clergy lie in the past, as the days of their strongest influence are behind, and as the religious feelings of men have hitherto reposed on the antique, and are but just beginning to point towards the future, it is natural, it is unavoidable, that the clergy should retard rather than aid the progress of society. A disposition to assist in the improvement of institutions is what ought not to be looked for from any priestly class; and, if looked for, it will not be found. Such a mode of operation must appear to them suicidal. But much may be learned by comparing the degree of clerical resistance to progression with the proportion of favour in which the clergy are held by the people. Where that resistance is greatest, and a clerical life is one of peculiar worldly ease, the state of morals and manners must be low. Where that resistance is least, where any social improvement whatever is found to originate with the clergy, and where they bear a just share of toil, the condition of morals and manners cannot be very much depressed. Where there is an undue partition of labour and its rewards among the clergy themselves,—where some do the work and others reap the recompence,—the fair inference is that morals and manners are in a state of transition. Such a position of affairs cannot be a permanent one; and the observer may be assured that the morals and manners of the people are about to be better than they have been.—The characteristics of the clergy will indicate, or at least direct attention to, the characteristics of dissent: and any extensive form of dissent is no other than the most recent exposition of the latest condition of morals among a large, active, and influential portion of the people. A foreign traveller in Germany, in Luther's time, could learn but little of the moral state of that empire, if he shut his eyes to the philosophy and the deeds of the reformers. If he saw nothing in the train of nuns winding down into the valleys from their now unconsecrated convent on the steep; if the tidings of the marriage of Catherine de Boria came to him like any other wedding news; if he did not mark the subdued triumph in family faces when the Book—Luther's Bible—was brought out for the daily lecture; if the decrees of Worms seemed to him like the common orders of the church, and the levelling of altars and unroofing of crypts was in his eyes but masons' work, he was not qualified to observe the people of Germany, and had no more title to report of them than if he had never left home. Thus it is now, in less extreme cases. The traveller in Spain knows little of the Spaniards unless he is aware of the theological studies, and the worship without forms, which are carried on in private by those who are keeping alive the fires of liberty in that priest and tyrant-ridden country. The foreigner in England will carry away but a partial knowledge of the religious sentiment of the people if he enters only the cathedrals of cities and the steepled churches in the villages, passing by the square meeting-houses in the manufacturing towns, and hearing nothing of the conferences, the assemblies, and the missionary enterprises of the dissenters. The same may be said of observation in every country enlightened enough to have shaken off its subservience to an unquestioned and irresponsible priesthood: that is, of every country advanced enough to maintain dissent.

The expressions of established forms of prayer convey more information as to the state of the clergy than of the people; since these expressions are furnished by the clergy, and continue to be prompted by them, while the people have no means of dismissing or changing the words of their framed prayers for long after the words may have ceased to represent the feeling. The traveller will receive such objectionable expressions as he may hear, not as indications of the then present sentiments of the crowd of worshippers, but rather as evidencing the disinclination of the clergy to change. It would be hard, for instance, to impute to Moslem worshippers in general the formation of such desires as are uttered by the school-boys of Cairo at the close of their daily attendance. "O God! destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion! O God! make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families, and their households, and their women, and their children, and their relations by marriage, and their brothers, and their friends, and their possessions, and their race, and their wealth, and their lands, as booty to the Moslems! O Lord of all creatures!"—It would be unjust to impute a horror of "sudden death" to all who use the words of prayer against it which are found in the Litany of the Church of England. Sudden death deserved to be classed among the most deadly evils when the Litany was framed,—in the days of the viaticum; but now it would be unjust to a multitude of worshippers who use the Litany to suppose that they are afraid to commit themselves to the hands of their Father without a passport from a priest; and that they are not willing to die in the way which pleases God,—some rather preferring, probably, a mode which will save those who are nearest and dearest to them the anguish of suspense, or of witnessing hopeless decline. In all antique forms of devotion there must be expressions which are inconsistent with the philosophy and the tastes of the time; and these are to be regarded therefore as no indications of such philosophy and taste, but as an evidence, more or less distinct, of the condition of the clergy in enlightenment and temper.

The splendid topic of human Superstitions can be only just touched upon here. In this boundless field, strewn with all the blossoms of all philosophy, the human observer may wander for ever. He can never have done culling the evidence that it presents, or enjoying the promise which it yields. All that we can now do is just to suggest that as the superstitions of all nations are the embodiment of their idealized convictions, the state of religious sentiment may be learned from them almost without danger of mistake.

No society is without its superstitions, any more than it is without its convictions and its imaginations. Even under the moderate form of religion, there is room for superstition; and the ascetic, which glories in having put away the superstitions of the licentious forms, has superstitions of its own.—The followers of an ascetic religion have more or less belief in judgments,—in retributive evils, arbitrarily inflicted. Among them may be gathered a harvest of tales of divine interference,—from the bee stinging the tip of the swearer's tongue to the sudden death of false witnesses. Among them do superstitions about times and seasons flourish, even to the forgetfulness that the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Some ascetics have faith in the lot,—like the Moravians in ordering marriage, or Wesley in opening his Bible to light upon texts. Others believe in warnings of evil; and most dread the commission of ritual fully as much as of moral sins. To play even a hymn tune on the piano on Sundays is an offence in the Highlands of Scotland; and to miss prayers is a matter of penance in a convent. The superstitions of the ascetic are scarcely fewer or more moderate than those of the licentious form of religion; the chief difference between the two lies in the spirit from which they emanate. The superstitions of the ascetic arise from the spirit of fear; those of the heathen arise perhaps equally from the spirit of love and the spirit of fear.

It seems as if the portents which present themselves to ascetic minds must necessarily be of evil, since the only good which their imaginations admit is supposed to be secured by grace, and by acts of service or self-denial. To the Fakîr, to the Shaker, to the nun, no good remains over and above what has been long claimed, while punishment may follow any breach of observance. On the other hand, before one who makes himself gods of the movements of inanimate nature and human passions, the two worlds of evil and good lie open, and he is perpetually on the watch for messengers from both. The poor pagan looks for tokens of his gods being pleased or angry; of their intentions of giving him a good or a bad harvest; or of their sending him a rich present or afflicting him with a bereavement. Whatever he wants to know, he seeks for in portents;—whether he shall live again,—whether his departed friends think of him,—whether his child shall be fortunate or wretched,—whether his enemy or he shall prevail. It is open to the traveller's observation whether these superstitions are of a generous or selfish kind,—whether they elevate the mind with hope, or depress it with fear,—whether they nourish the faith of the spirit, or extort merely the service of the lip and hand.

The Swiss herdsmen believe that the three deliverers (the founders of the Helvetic Confederacy) sleep calmly in a cave near the Lake of Lucerne; and that, whenever their country is in her utmost need, they will come forth in their antique garb, and assuredly save her. This is a superstition full of veneration and hope.—When the Arabs see a falling star, they believe it to be a dart thrown by God at a wanderer of the race of the genii, and they exclaim, "May God transfix the enemy of the faith!" Here we find in brief the spirit of their religion.—In Brazil, a bird which sings plaintively at night is listened to with intent emotion, from its being supposed to be sent with tidings from the dead to the living. The choice of a bird with a mournful instead of a lively note speaks volumes.—The three angels in white that come to give presents to good children in Germany at Christmas, come in a good spirit.—There is a superstition in China which has a world of tenderness in it. A father collects a hundred copper coins from a hundred families, and makes the metal into a lock which he hangs, as a charm, round his child's neck, believing that he locks his child to life by this connection with a hundred persons in full vigour.—But, as is natural, death is the region of the Unseen to which the larger number of portents relates. The belief of the return of the dead has been held almost universally among the nations; and their unseen life is the grand theme of speculation wherever there are men to speculate. The Norwegians lay the warrior's horse, and armour, and weapons, beside him. The Hindoos burn the widow. The Malabar Indians release caged birds on the newly-made grave, to sanction the flight of the soul. The Buccaneers (according to Penrose) concealed any large booty that fell into their hands, till they should have leisure to remove it,—murdering and burying near it any helpless wretch whom they might be able to capture, in order that his spirit might watch over the treasure, and drive from the spot all but the parties who had signed their names in a round-robin, in claim of proprietorship. The professors of many faiths resemble each other in practices of propitiation or atonement laboriously executed on behalf of the departed. Some classes of mourners act towards their dead friends in a spirit of awe; some in fear; but very many in love. The trust in the immortality of the affections is the most general feature in superstitions of this class; and it is a fact eloquent to the mind of the observer.—An only child of two poor savages died. The parents appeared inconsolable; and the father soon sank under his grief. From the moment of his death, the mother was cheerful. On being asked what had cheered her, she said she had mourned for her child's loneliness in the world of spirits: now he had his father with him, and she was happy for them both. What a divine spirit of self-sacrifice is here! but there is scarcely a superstition sincerely entertained which does not tell as plain a tale. Those which express fear indicate moral abasement, greater or less. Those which express trust and love indicate greater or less moral elevation and purity.

The practice of Suicide is worth the contemplation of a traveller, as affording some clear indications as to religious sentiment. Suicide in the largest sense is here intended,—the voluntary surrender of life from any cause.

There has been a stage in the moral advancement of every nation when suicide, in one form or another, has been considered a duty; and it is impossible to foresee the time when it will cease to be so considered. It was a necessary result from the idea of honour once prevalent in the most civilized societies, when men and women destroyed themselves to avoid disgrace. The defeated warrior, the baffled statesman, the injured woman, destroyed themselves when the hope of honour was gone. In the same age, as in every succeeding one, there have been suicides who have devoted themselves for others, presenting a series of tales which may almost redeem the disgraces which darken the annals of the race.—The most illustrious of the Christian Fathers, immersed in the superstitions about the transcendent excellence of the virtue of chastity which have extinguished so many other virtues, and injured the morals of society to this day, by sacrificing other principles to fanaticism on this, permitted women to kill themselves to escape from violence which left the mind in its purity, and the will in its rectitude.—Martyrdom for the truth existed also before the venerating eyes of men,—the noblest kind of suicide: it attracted glory to itself from the faithful heart of the race; and, from its thus attracting glory, it became a means of gaining glory, and sank from being martyrdom to be a mere fanatical self-seeking. While the spirit of persecution was roaming abroad, seeking whom it might devour, there were St. Theresas roaming abroad, seeking to be devoured, from a spirit of cupidity after the crown of martyrdom.—Soldiers, in all times and circumstances, pledge themselves to the possible duty of suicide by the very act of becoming soldiers. They engage to make the first charge, and to mount a breach if called upon. And there have been found soldiers for every perilous service that has been required, throughout all wars. There have been volunteers to mount the breach, solitary men or small bands to hold narrow bridges and passes, from the first incursion of tribe upon tribe in barbarous conflict, up to the suicide of Van Speyk, whose monument is still fresh from the chisel in the Nieuw Kerk of Amsterdam. Van Speyk commanded a gun-boat which was stranded in a heavy gale, and boarded by the Belgians,—the foe. Van Speyk had sworn never to surrender his boat, and his suicide was a point of military honour. He seems to have considered the matter thus; for he prayed for pardon of his crime of self-destruction after laying his lighted cigar on the open barrel of powder which blew up the boat. The remaining suicides (except, of course, the insane,) are justified by none. Persons who shrink from suffering so far as to withdraw from their duties, and to forsake those to whom their exertions are due, are objects of contemptuous compassion in the present day, when, moral having succeeded to physical force in men's esteem, it is seen to be nobler to endure evils than to hide one's spirit from them.

Every society has its suicides, and much may be learned from their character and number, both as to the notions on morals which prevail, and the religious sentiment which animates to or controls the act. It is with the last that we now have to do.—The act of laying down life is one thing among a people who have dim and mournful anticipations of a future life, like the ancient Greeks; and quite another among those who, like the first Christians, have a clear vision of bliss and triumph in the world on which they rush. Suicide is one thing to a man who is certain of entering immediately upon purgatory; and to another whose first step is to be upon the necks of his enemies; and to a third who believes that he is to lie conscious in his grave for some thousands of years; and to a fourth who has no idea that he shall survive or revive at all. When Curtius leaped into the gulf, he probably leaped into utter darkness, other than physical; but when Guyon of Marseilles sunned himself for the last time in the balcony of the house where he was shut up with the plague-spotted body which he was to die in dissecting, he had faith that he should step out of a waxing and waning sunlight into a region which "had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, the glory of God being the light of it." The sick Moslem who, falling behind his troop, and fearing to lie unburied, scoops his grave and lies down in it, wrapped in his grave-clothes, and covers himself up, except the face, leaving it to the winds to heap sand upon it, trembles the while at the thought of the two examining angels, who are this night to prove and perhaps torture him. The English lady who took laudanum on learning that she had a fatal disease, from fear of becoming loathsome to a husband for whom she had lived, had before her the prominent idea of reunion with him; so that life in one world presented as much of hope as in the other of despair.—Nations share in differences like these, according to the prevalent religious sentiment; and from this species of act may the sentiment be more or less correctly inferred.

Suicide is very common among a race of Africans who prefer it to slavery. They believe in a life of tropical ease and freedom after death, and rush into it so eagerly on being reduced to slavery, that the planters of Cuba refuse them in the market, knowing that after a few hours, or days, in spite of all precautions, nothing but their dead bodies will remain in the hands of their masters. The French have, of late years, abounded in suicides, while there are few or none in Ireland. The most vain and the most sympathetic part of the French multitude were found to be the classes which yielded the victims. If a young lady and her lover shot one another with pistols tied with pink ribbons, two or three suicides amidst blue and green ribbons were sure to follow the announcement of the first in the newspaper, till a sensible physician suggested that suicides should not be noticed in newspapers, or should be treated with ridicule: the advice was acted upon, and proved by the result to be sound. This profusion of self-murders could not have taken place amidst a serious belief of an immediate entrance upon purgatory, such as is held by the majority of the Irish. Only in a state of vague speculation as to another life could the future have operated as so slight a check upon the rash impulses of the present. The Irish, an impetuous race, like the French, and with a good share of vanity, of sympathy, and of sentiment, are probably deterred from throwing away life by those religious convictions and sentiments which the French once held in an equal degree, but from which they are now passing over into another state.

A single act of suicide is often indicative, negatively or positively, of a state of prevalent sentiment. A single instance of the Suttee testifies to the power of Brahmins, and the condition of Hindoo worshippers, in a way which cannot be mistaken. An American child of six years old accidentally witnessed in India such a spectacle. On returning home, she told her mother she had seen hell, and was whipped for saying so,—not knowing why, for she spoke in all earnestness, and, as it seems to us, with eloquent truth.—The somewhat recent self-destruction of an estimable English officer, on the eve of a court-martial, might fully instruct a stranger on the subject of military honour in this country. This officer fell in the collision of universal and professional principles. His justice and humanity had led him to offer a kindly bearing towards an irresolute mob of rioters, in the absence of authority to act otherwise than as he did, and of all co-operation from the civil power; his military honour was placed in jeopardy, and the innocent man preferred self-destruction to meeting the risk; thus testifying that numbers here sustain an idea of honour which is at variance with that which they expect to prevail elsewhere and hereafter.—Every act of self-devotion for others, extending to death, testifies to the existence of philanthropy, and to its being regarded as an honour and a good. Every voluntary martyrdom tells a national tale as plain as that written in blood and spirit by Arnold Von Winkelried, in 1386. When the Swiss met their oppressors at the battle of Sempach, it appeared impossible for the Swiss to charge with effect, so thick was the hedge of Austrian lances. Arnold Von Winkelried cried, "I will make a lane for you! Dear companions, remember my family!" He clasped an armful of the enemy's lances, and made a sheaf of them in his body. His comrades entered the breach, and won the battle. They remembered his family, and their descendants commemorate the sacrifice to this day; thus bearing testimony to the act being a trait of the national spirit.

By observations such as these, may the religious sentiment of a people be ascertained. While making them, or struggling with the difficulties of opposing evidence, the observer has to bear in mind,—first, that the religious sentiment does everywhere exist, however low its tone, and however uncouth its expression; secondly, that personal morals must greatly depend on the low or high character of the religious sentiment; and, thirdly, that the philosophy and morals of government accord with both,—despotism of some sort being the natural rule where licentious and ascetic religions prevail; and democratic government being possible only under a moderate form of religion, where the use without the abuse of all blessings is the spirit of the religion of the majority.

CHAPTER II.

GENERAL MORAL NOTIONS.

"Une différente coutume donnera d'autres principes naturels. Cela se voit par expérience; et s'il y en a d'ineffaçables à la coutume, il y en a aussi de la coutume ineffaçables à la nature."—Pascal.

Next to the religion of a people, it is necessary to learn what are their Ideas of Morals. In speaking of the popular notion of a Moral Sense, it was mentioned that, so far from there being a general agreement on the practice of morals, some things which are considered eminently right in one age or country are considered eminently wrong in another; while the people of each age or country, having grown up under common influences, think and feel sufficiently alike to live together in a general agreement as to right and wrong. It is the business of the traveller to ascertain what this general agreement is in the society he visits.

In one society, spiritual attainments will be the most highly honoured, as in most religious communities. In another, the qualities attendant upon intellectual eminence will be worshipped,—as now in countries which are the most advanced in preparation for political freedom,—France, Germany, and the United States. In others, the moral qualities allied to physical or extrinsic power are chiefly venerated,—as in all uncivilized countries, and all which lie under feudal institutions.

The lower moral qualities which belong to the last class have been characteristics of nations. The valour of the Spartans, the love of glory of the Romans and the French, the pride of the Spaniards,—these infantile moral qualities have belonged to a people as distinctly as to an individual.—Those which are in alliance with intellectual eminence are not so strikingly characteristic of entire nations; though we praise the Athenians for their love of letters and honour of philosophy; the Italians for their liberality towards art, and their worship of it while a meaner glory was the fashion of the world; the Germans for their speculative enterprise, and patience of research; and the Americans for their reverence for intellect above military fame and the splendour of wealth.—No high spiritual qualities have ever yet characterized a nation, or even—in spite of much profession—any considerable community. Hospitality and beneficence have distinguished some religious societies: the non-resistance of Quakers, the industry of Moravians, and of several kinds of people united on the principle of community of property, may be cited: but this seems to be all. The enforced temperance, piety, and chastity of monastic societies go for nothing in this view; because, being enforced, they indicate nothing of the sentiment subsequent to the taking of the vow. The people of the United States have come the nearest to being characterized by lofty spiritual qualities. The profession with which they set out was high,—a circumstance greatly to their honour, though (as might have been expected) they have not kept up to it. They are still actuated by ambition of territory, and have not faith enough in moral force to rely upon it, as they profess to do. The Swiss, in their unshaken and singularly devoted love of freedom, seem to be spiritually distinguished above other nations: but they have no other strong characteristic of this highest class.

The truth is that, whatever may be the moral state of nations when the human world emerges hereafter from its infancy, high spiritual qualities are now matters of individual concern, as those of the intellectual class were once; and their general prevalence is a matter of prospective vision alone. Time was when the swampy earth resounded with the tramp and splash of monstrous creatures, whom there was no reason present to classify, and no language to name. Then, after a certain number of ages, the earth grew drier; palm-groves and tropical thickets flourished where Paris now stands; and the waters were collected into lakes in the regions where the armies of Napoleon were of late encamped. Then came the time when savage, animal man appeared, using his physical force like the lower animals, and taught by the experience of its deficiency that he was in possession of another kind of force. Still, for ages, the use he made of reason was to overcome the physical force of others, and to render available his own portion. On this principle, and for this object, variously modified, and more or less refined, have societies been formed to this day; though, as morals are the fruit of which intellect is the blossom, spiritualism—faith in moral power—has existed in individuals ever since the first free exercise of reason. While all nations were ravaging one another as they had opportunity, there were always parents who did not abuse their physical power over their children. In the midst of a general worship of power, birth, and wealth, the affections have wrought out in individual minds a preference of obscurity and poverty for the sake of spiritual objects. Amidst the supremacy of the worship of honour and social ease, there have always been confessors who could endure disgrace for the truth, and martyrs who could die for it.—Such individual cases have never been wanting: and, in necessary connexion with this fact, there has always been a sympathy in this pure moral taste,—an appreciation which could not but help its diffusion. Thence arose the formation of communities for the fostering of holiness,—projects which, however mistaken in their methods and injurious in their consequences, have always commanded, and do still command, sympathy, from the venerableness of their origin. Not all the stories of the abuses of monastic institutions can destroy the respect of every ingenuous mind for the spiritual preferences out of which they arose. The Crusades are still holy, notwithstanding all their defilements of vain-glory, superstition, and barbarism of various kinds. The retreat of the Pilgrim Fathers to the forests of the New World silences the ridicule of the thoughtless about the extravagances of Puritanism in England.

Thus far has the race advanced; and, having thus advanced, there is reason to anticipate that the age may come when the individual worship of spiritual supremacy may expand into national; when a people may agree to govern one another with the smallest possible application of physical force; when goodness shall come to be naturally more honoured than birth, wealth, or even intellect; when ambition of territory shall be given up; when all thought of war shall be over; when the pursuit of the necessaries and luxuries of external life shall be regarded as means to an end; and when the common aim of exertion shall be self and mutual perfection. It does not seem to be rash to anticipate such a state of human affairs as this, when an aspiration like the following has been received with sympathy by thousands of republicans united under a constitution of ideas. "Talent and worth are the only eternal grounds of distinction. To these the Almighty has affixed his everlasting patent of nobility; and these it is which make the bright, 'the immortal names,' to which our children may aspire, as well as others. It will be our own fault if, in our land, society as well as government is not organized on a new foundation."—"Knowledge and goodness,—these make degrees in heaven, and they must be the graduating scale of a true democracy."[F]

Meantime, it is the traveller's business to learn what is the species of Moral Sentiment which lies deepest in the hearts of the majority of the people.

He will find no better place of study than the Cemetery,—no more instructive teaching than Monumental Inscriptions. The brief language of the dead will teach him more than the longest discourses of the living.

He will learn what are the prevalent views of death; and when he knows what is the common view of death, he knows also what is the aspect of life to no small number;—that is, he will have penetrated into the interior of their morals.—If it should ever be fully determined that the pyramids of Egypt were designed solely as places of sepulture, they will cease to be the mute witness they have been for ages. They will tell at least that death was not regarded as the great leveller,—that kings and peasants were not to sleep side by side in death, any more than in life. How they contrast with the Moravian burial-grounds, where all are laid in rows as they happen to be brought to the grave, and where memorial is forbidden!—The dead of Constantinople are cast out from among the living in waste, stillness, and solitude. The cemeteries lie beyond the walls, where no hum from the city is heard, and where the dark cypresses overhanging the white marble tombs give an air of mourning and desolation to the scene. In contrast with these are the church-yards of English cities, whose dead thus lie in full view of the living; the school-boy trundles his hoop among them, and the news of the day is discussed above their place of rest. This fact of where the dead are laid is an important one. If out of sight, death and religion may or may not be connected in the general sentiment; if within or near the places of worship, they certainly are so connected. In the cemeteries of Persia, the ashes of the dead are ranged in niches of the walls: in Egypt we have the most striking example of affection to the body, shown in the extraordinary care to preserve it; while some half-civilized people seem to be satisfied with putting their dead out of sight, by summarily sinking them in water, or hiding them in the sand; and the Caffres throw their dead to the hyenas,—impelled to this, however, not so much by disregard of the dead, as by a superstitious fear of death taking place in their habitations, which causes them to remove the dying, and expose them in this state to beasts of prey. The burial of the dead by the road-side by some of the ancients, seems to have brought death into the closest relation with life; and when the place chosen is taken in connexion with the inscriptions on the tombs,—words addressed to the wayfarer as from him who lies within,—from the pilgrim now at rest to the pilgrim still on his way, they give plain indications of the views of death and life entertained by those who placed them.

Much may be learned from the monumental inscriptions of all nations. The first epitaph is supposed to be traced back to the year of the world 2700, when the scholars of Linus, the Theban poet, bewailed their master in verses which were inscribed upon his tomb. From that day to this, wherever there have been letters, there have been epitaphs; and, where letters have been wanting, there have been symbols. Mysterious symbolic arrangements are traced in the monumental mounds in the interior of the American continent, where a race of whom we know nothing else flourished before the Red man opened his eyes upon the light. One common rule, drawn from a universal sentiment, has presided at the framing of all epitaphs for some thousands of years. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" is the universal agreement of mourners.[G] It follows that epitaphs must everywhere indicate what is there considered good.

The observer must give his attention to this. Among a people "whose merchants are princes," the praise of the departed will be in a different strain from that which will be found among a warlike nation, or a community of agriculturists. Here one may find monumental homage to public spirit, in the form of active citizenship; there to domestic virtue as the highest honour. The glory of eminent station, of ancient family, of warlike deeds, and of courtly privileges may be conspicuously exhibited in one district; while in another the dead are honoured in proportion to their contempt of human greatness, even when won by achievements; to their having lived with a sole regard "to things unseen and eternal." An inscription which breathes the pride of a noble family in telling that "all the sons were brave, and all the daughters chaste," presents a summary of the morals of the age and class to which it belongs. It tells that the supreme honour of men was to be brave, and of women to be chaste; excluding the supposition of each sharing the virtue of the other: whereas, when courage and purity shall be understood in their full signification, it will have become essential to the honour of a noble family that all the sons should be also pure, and all the daughters brave. Then bravery will signify moral rather than physical courage, and purity of mind will be considered no attribute of sex.

Even the nature of the public services commemorated, where public service is considered the highest praise, may indicate much. It is a fact of no small significance whether a man is honoured after death for having made a road, or for having founded a monastery, or endowed a school; whether he introduced a new commodity, or erected a church; whether he marched adventurously in the pursuit of conquest, or fought bravely among his native mountains to guard the homes of his countrymen from aggression. The German, the French, the Swiss monuments of the present century all tell the common tale that men have lived and died: but with what various objects did they live! and in what a variety of hope and heroism did they die! All were proud of their respective differences while they lived; and, now that their contests are at an end, they afford materials of speculation to the stranger who ponders upon their tombs.

A variety, perhaps a contrariety of praise, may be found in the epitaphs of a country, a city, or a single cemetery. Where this diversity is found, it testifies to the diversity of views held, and therefore to the freedom of the prevailing religious sentiment. Everywhere, however, there is an affection and esteem for certain virtues. Disinterestedness, fidelity, and love are themes of praise everywhere. Some may have no sympathy for the deeds of the warrior, and others for the discoveries of the philosopher and the adventurer; but the honoured parent, the devoted child, the philanthropic citizen, are sure of their tribute from all hearts.

Even if there were a variety of praise proportioned to the diversity of hearts and minds that utter it, the inscriptions of a cemetery cannot but breathe a spirit which must animate, more or less, the morals of the society. For instance, the cemetery of Père la Chaise utters, from end to end, one wail. It is all mourning, and no hope. Every expression of grief, from tender regret to blank despair, is to be found there; but not a hint of consolation, except from memory. All is over, and the future is vacant. A remarkable contrast to this is seen in the cemetery of Mount Auburn, Massachusetts. The religious spirit of New England is that which has hope for one of its largest elements, and which was believed by the Puritan fathers to forbid the expression of sorrow. One of those fathers made an entry in his journal, in the early days of the colony, that it had pleased God to take from him by an accident his beloved son Henry, whom he committed to the Lord's mercy;—and this was all. In a similar spirit are the epitaphs at Mount Auburn framed. There is a religious silence about the sorrows of the living, and every expression of joy, thanksgiving, and hope for the dead. One who had never heard of death, might take this for the seed-field of life; for the oratory of the happy; for the heaven of the hopeful. Parents invite their children from the grave to follow them. Children remind their parents that the term of separation will be short; and all repose their hopes together on an authority which is to them as stable and comprehensive as the blue sky which is over all.—What a contrast is here! and how eloquent as to the moral views of the respective nations! There is not a domestic attachment or social relation which is not necessarily modified, elevated, or depressed by the conviction of its being transient or immortal,—an end or means to a higher end. Though human hearts are so far alike as that there must be a hope of reunion, more or less defined and assured, in all who love, and a practical falling below the elevation of this hope in those even who enjoy the strongest assurance,—yet the moral notions of any society must be very different where the ground of hope is taken for granted, and where it is kept wholly out of sight.

The observer may obtain further light upon the moral ideas of a people by noting the degree of their Attachment to Kindred and Birth-place. This species of attachment is so natural, that none are absolutely without it; but it varies in degree, according as the moral taste of the people goes to enhance or to subdue it. The Swiss and the American parent both send their children abroad; but with what different feelings and views! The Swiss father dismisses his daughter to teach in a school at Paris or London, and his sons to commerce or war. He resigns himself to a hard necessity, and supports them with suggestions of the honour of virtuous independence, and of the delight of returning when it is achieved. They, in their exile, can never see a purple shade upon a mountain side, a gleaming sheet of water, or a nestling village, without a throb of the heart, and a sickening longing for home.—The New England mother, with her tribe of children around her on her hill-side farm, nourishes them with tales of the noble extent of their country,—how its boundary is ever shifting westwards, and what a wild life it is there in the forest, with the Red men for neighbours, and inexhaustible wealth in the soil, ready for the hand which shall have enterprise to work for it. She tells of one and another, but lately boys like her children, who are now judges and legislators,—founders of towns, or having counties named after them. As her young people grow up, they part off eagerly from the old farm,—one into a southern city, another into the western forest, a third to a prairie in a new territory; and the daughters marry, and go over the mountains too. The mother may have sighs to conceal, but she does conceal them; and the sons, so far from lingering,—are impatient till they are gone. Their idea of national honour,—both their patriotic and their personal ambition,—is concerned; and they welcome the hour of dispersion as the first step towards the great objects of their life. Some return to the old neighbourhood to take a wife; but they do not think of passing their second childhood where they spent their first,—any more than the Greek colonists who swarmed from their narrow native districts. The settlers of the west go there, not to obtain a certain amount of personal property, but land, station, and power.—How different again are the Scotch—the people of the strongest family attachments! In the modified and elevated feudalism of clanship, pride and love of kindred constitute the animating social principle. Their clan-music is to them what the Ranz de Vaches is to the Swiss: the one echoing the harmonics of social intercourses, as the other revives the melodies of mountain life. Through the love of kindred, the love of birth-place flourishes among the Scotch. The Highland emigrants in Canada not only clasp hands when they hear played the march of their clan, but wept when they found that heather would not grow in their newly-adopted soil.

The traveller must talk with Old People, and see what is the character of the garrulity of age. He must talk with Children, and mark the character of the aspirations of childhood. He will thus learn what is good in the eyes of those who have passed through the society he studies, and in the hopes of those who have yet to enter upon it. Is it the aged mother's pride that her sons are all unstained in honour, and her daughters safe in happy homes? or does she boast that one is a priest, and another a peeress? Does the grandmother relate that all her descendants who are of age are "received church-members"? or that her favourite grandchild has been noticed by the emperor? Do the old men prose of a single happy love, or of exploits of gallantry? or of commercial success, or of political failure? What is the section of life to which the greatest number of ancient memories cling? Is it to struggles for a prince in disguise, or to a revolutionary conflict? Is it to the removal of a social oppression, or to a season of domestic trial, or to an accession of personal consequence? Is it the having acquired an office or a title? or the having assisted in the abolition of slavery? or the having conversed with a great author? or the having received a nod from a prince, or a curtsey from a queen? or have you to listen to details of the year of the scarcity, or the season of the plague?—What are the children's minds full of? The little West Indian will not talk of choosing a profession, any more than the infant Portuguese will ask for books. One nation of children will tell of the last saint's day, and another will refer every thing to the emperor. Elsewhere you will be treated with legends without end; or you will be instructed about bargains and wages; or the boys will ask you why a king's son should be king whether the people like him or not; and the girls will whisper something to you about their brother being President some day. As the minds of the young are formed, generally speaking, to an adaptation to the objects presented to them, their preference of warlike to commercial, or literary to political honour, is an eloquent circumstance: and so of their sense of greatness in any direction,—whether it be of the physical order, or the intellectual, or the spiritual.

From this, the transition is natural to the study of the character of the Pride of each nation. Learn what people glory in, and you learn much of both the theory and practice of their morals. All nations, like all individuals, have pride, sooner or later, in one thing or another. It is a stage through which they have to pass in their moral progression, and out of which the most civilized have not yet advanced, nor discerned that they will have to advance, though the passion becomes moderated at each remove from barbarism. It is by no means clear that the essential absurdity of each is relieved by its dilution. Hereafter, the most modern pride of the most civilized people may appear as ridiculous in its nature as the grossest conceit of utter barbarians now appears to us; but, still, the direction taken by the general pride must show what class of objects is held in most esteem.

The Chinese have no doubt that all other countries are created for the benefit of theirs; they call their own "the central empire," as certain philosophers once called our earth the centre round which everything else was to revolve. They call it the Celestial Empire, of which their ruler is the Sun: "they profess to rule barbarians by misrule, like beasts, and not like native subjects." Here we have the extreme of national pride, which must involve various moral qualities;—all the bad ones which are the consequence of ignorance, subservience to domestic despotism, and contempt of the race of man; and the good ones which are the consequence of national seclusion,—cheerful industry, social complacency, quietness, and order.—The Arab pride bears a resemblance to the Chinese, but is somewhat refined and spiritualized. The Arabs believe that the earth, "spread out like a bed," and upheld by a gigantic angel (the angel standing upon a rock, and the rock upon a bull, and the bull upon a fish, and the fish floating upon water, and the water upon darkness,)—that the earth, thus upheld, is surrounded by the Circumambient Ocean; that the inhabited part of the earth is to the rest but as a tent in the desert; and that in the very centre of this inhabited part is—Mecca. Their exclusive faith makes a part of their nationality, and their insolence shows itself eminently in their devotions. Their spiritual supremacy is their strong point; and they can afford to be somewhat less outwardly contemptuous to the race at large, from the certainty they have that all will be made plain and indisputable at last, when the followers of the Prophet alone will be admitted to bliss, and the punishments of the future world will be eternal to all but wicked Mahomedans. There will be found among the Arabs, in accordance with this pride, a strong mutual fidelity; and, among the best class of believers, a real devotion and a kindly compassion towards outcasts; while, among lower orders of minds, we may expect to witness the extreme exasperation of vindictiveness, insult, and rapacity.—We may pass over the pride of caste in India, of royal race in Africa, and the wild notions of Caribbean and Esquimaux dignity, which are almost as painful to contemplate as the freaks of pride in Bedlam. There is quite enough to look upon in the most civilized parts of the earth.—The whole national character of the Spaniards might be inferred from their particularly notorious pride; the quarterings of German barons are a popular joke; the French pride of military glory is an index to the national morals of France; while, in the United States, the pride of Washington and of territory is oddly combined and contrasted. Nothing can be more indicative of the true moral state of the Americans; they hang between the past and the future, with many of the feudal prepossessions of the past, mingled with the democratic aspirations which relate to the future. The ambition and pride of territory belong to the first, and their pride in the leader of their revolution to the last: he is their personification of that moral power to which they profess allegiance. The consequences of this arbitrary union of two kinds of national pride may be foreseen. The Americans unite some of the low qualities of feudalism with some of the highest of a more equal social organization. Without the first, slavery, cupidity, and ostentation could not exist to any great extent; without the others, there could not be the splendid moral conflict which we now see going on in opposition to slavery, nor the reverence for man which is the loveliest feature of American morals and manners.

From the aristocratic pride of the English the stranger might draw inferences no less correct. If it is found that there is scarcely a gamekeeper or a tradesman among us who is not stiffened with prejudices about rank; that gossips can tell what noblemen pay, and which do not pay, their tradesmen's bills; that persons who have never seen a lord can furnish all information about the genealogy and intermarriages of noble families; that every class is emulating the manners of the one above it; and that democratic principles are held chiefly in the manufacturing districts, or, if in country regions, among the tenantry of landlords of liberal politics;—the moral condition of such a people lies, as it were, mapped out beneath the eye of the observer. They must be orderly, eminently industrious, munificent in their grants to rulers, and mechanically oppressive to the lowest class of the ruled; nationally complacent, while wanting in individual self-respect; reverentially inclined towards the lofty minority, and contemptuously disposed towards the lowly majority of their race; a generous devotion being advantageously mingled, however, with the select reverence, and a kindly spirit of protection with the gross contempt. Such, to the eye of an observer, are the qualities involved in English pride. Upon this moral material, everywhere diffused, should the traveller observe and reflect.

Man-worship is as universal a practice as that of the higher sort of religion. As men everywhere adore some supposed agents of unseen things, they are, in like manner, disposed to do homage to what is venerable when it is presented to their eyes in the actions of a living man. This man-worship is one of the most honourable and one of the most hopeful circumstances in the mind of the race. An individual here and there may scoff at the credulity of others, and profess unbelief in human virtue; but no society has ever yet wanted faith in man. Every community has its saints, its heroes, its sages,—whose tombs are visited, whose deeds are celebrated, whose words have become the rules by which men live.

Now, the moral taste of a people is nowhere more clearly shown than in its choice of idols. Of these idols there are two kinds;—those whose divinity is confirmed by the lapse of time, like Gustavus Adolphus among the Swedes, Tell in Switzerland, Henri IV. among the French, and Washington among the Americans; and those who are still living, and upon whose daily doings a multitude of eyes are fixed.

Those of the first class reign singly; their uncontested sway is over national character, as well as the affections of individual minds; and from their character may that of the whole people be, in certain respects, inferred. Who supposes that the Swiss would have been the same as they are, if Tell's character and deeds could have been hidden in oblivion from the moment those deeds were done? What would the Americans have been now if every impression of Washington could have been effaced from their minds fifty years ago? This is not the place in which to enlarge on the power—the greatest power we know of—which man exercises over men through their affections; but it is a fact which the observer should keep ever in view. The existence of a great man is one of those gigantic circumstances,—one of those national influences,—which have before been mentioned as modifying the conscience—the feelings about right and wrong—in a whole people. The pursuits of a nation for ever may be determined by the fact of the great man of five centuries being a poet, a warrior, a statesman, or a maritime adventurer. The morals of a nation are influenced to all eternity by the great man's being ambitious or moderate, passionate or philosophical, licentious or self-governed. Certain lofty qualities he must have, or he could not have attained greatness,—energy, perseverance, faith, and consequently earnestness. These are essential to his immortality; upon the others depends the quality of his influence; and upon these must the observer of the present generation reflect.

It is not by dogmas that Christianity has permanently influenced the mind of Christendom. No creeds are answerable for the moral revolution by which physical has been made to succumb to moral force; by which unfortunates are cherished by virtue of their misfortunes; by which the pursuit of speculative truth has become an object worthy of self-sacrifice. It is the character of Jesus of Nazareth which has wrought to these purposes. Notwithstanding all the obscuration and defilement which that character has sustained from superstition and other corruption, it has availed to these purposes, and must prevail more and more now that it is no longer possible to misrepresent his sayings and conceal his deeds, as was done in the dark ages. In all advancing time, as corruption is surmounted, there are more and more who vividly feel that life does not consist in the abundance that a man possesses, but in energy of spirit, and in a power and habit of self-sacrifice: there are perpetually more and more who discern and live by the persuasion that the pursuit of worldly power and ease is a matter totally apart from the function of Christianity; and this persuasion has not been wrought into activity by declarations of doctrine in any form, but by the spectacle, vivid before the eye of the mind, of the Holy One who declined the sword and the crown, lived without property, and devoted himself to die by violence, in an unparalleled simplicity of duty. The being himself is the mover here; and every great man is, in a similar manner, however inferior may be the degree, a spring by which spirits are moved. By the study of them may much of the consequent movement be understood. The observer of British morals should gather up the names of their idols; he will hear of Hampden, Bacon, Shakspeare, Newton, Howard, and Wesley. In Scotland, he will hear of Bruce and Knox. What a flood of light do these names shed on our morale! It is the same with the Englishman abroad when his attention is referred in France to Henri IV, Richelieu, Turenne, and Napoleon, to Bossuet and Fenelon, to Voltaire, and their glorious list of natural philosophers: in Italy, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Galileo, and their constellations of poets and artists: in Germany, to Charles V, Luther, Schwartz, Göthe, Copernicus, Handel, and Mozart. There is in every nation a succession of throned gods, each of whom is the creator of some region of the national mind, and has formed men into more or less of his own likeness.

The other kind of idols are those who are still living, and whose influence upon morals and manners is strong, but may or may not be distinguishably permanent. These afford a less faithful evidence,—but yet an evidence which is not to be neglected. The spirit of the times is seen in the character of the idols of the day, however the nation may be divided in its choice of idols, and however many sects there may be in the man-worship of the generation. In our own day, for instance, how plainly is the movement of society discerned, from the fact of the eminence of philanthropists in many countries! Whether they presently sink, or continue to rise, they testify to a prevailing feeling in society. Père Enfantin in France, Wilberforce in England, Garrison in America,—these are watchmen set on a pinnacle (whoever may object to their being there) who can tell us "what of the night," and how a new morning is breaking. Whether they may be most cause or effect, whether they have more or less decidedly originated the interest of which they are the head, it is clear that there is a certain adaptation between themselves and the general mind, without which they could not have risen to be what they are.—Every society has always its idols. If there are none by merit, at any moment, station is received as a qualification. Large numbers are always worshipping the heads of the aristocracy, of whatever kind they may be; and there is rarely a long interval in which there is not some warrior, some poet, artist, or philanthropist on whom the multitude are flinging crowns and incense. The popularity of Byron testified to the existence of a gloomy discontent in a multitude of minds, as the adoration of De Béranger discloses the political feelings of the French. Statesmen rarely command an overwhelming majority of worshippers, because interest enters much more than sentiment into politics: but every author, or other artist who can reach the general mind,—every preacher, philanthropist, soldier, or discoverer, who has risen into an atmosphere of worship in pursuit of a purpose, is a fresh Peter the Hermit, meeting and stimulating the spirit of his time, and exhibiting its temper to the observer,—foreign as to either clime or century. The physical observer of a new region might as well shut his eyes to the mountains, and omit to note which way the streams run, as the moral observer pass by the idols of a nation with a heedless gaze.

Side by side with this lies the inquiry into the great Epochs of the society visited. Find out what individuals and nations date from, and you discover what events are most interesting to them. A child reckons from his first journey, or his entrance upon school: a man from his marriage, his beginning practice in his profession, or forming a fresh partnership in trade; if he be a farmer, from the year of a good or bad crop; if he be a merchant, from the season of a currency pressure; if he be an operative, from the winter of the Strike: a matron dates from the birth of her children; her nursemaid from her change of place. Nations, too, date from what interests them most. It is important to learn what this is. The major date of American citizens is the Revolution; their minor dates are elections, and new admissions into the Union. The people at Amsterdam date from the completion of the Stadt Huis; the Spaniards from the achievement of Columbus; the Germans from the deed of Luther; the Haytians from the abduction of Toussaint L'Ouverture; the Cherokees from treaties with the Whites; the people of Pitcairn's Island from the mutiny of the Bounty; the Turks, at present, from the massacre of the Janissaries; the Russians from the founding of St. Petersburgh and the deaths of its monarchs; the Irish (for nearer times than the battle of the Boyne) by the year of the fever, the year of the rebellion, the year of the famine. There is a world of instruction in this kind of fact; and if a new species of epoch, of which there is a promise, should arise,—if the highest works of men should come to be looked upon as the clearest operations of Providence,—if Germany or Europe should date from Göthe as the civilized world does from Columbus,—this sole test might reveal almost the entire moral state of society.

The treatment of the Guilty is all-important as an index to the moral notions of a society. This class of facts will hereafter yield infallible inferences as to the principles and views of governments and people upon vice, its causes and remedies. At present, such facts must be used with great caution, because the societies of civilized countries are in a state of transition from the old vindictiveness to a purer moral philosophy. The ancient methods, utterly disgraceful as they are, must subsist till society has fully agreed upon and prepared for better ones; and it would be harsh to pronounce upon the humanity of the English from their prisons, or the justice of the French from their galley system. The degrees of reliance upon brute force and upon public opinion are yet by no means proportioned to the civilization of respective societies, as at first sight might be expected, and as must be before punishments and prisons can be taken as indications of morals and manners.

The treatment of the guilty in savage lands, and also in countries under a despotism, indicates the morals of rulers only,—except in so far as it points out the political subservience of the people. It is true that the Burmese must needs be in a deplorable social state, if their king can "spread out" his prime minister in the sun, as formerly described: but the mercy or cruelty of his subjects can be inferred only from the liberty they may have and may use to treat one another in the same manner. In their case, we see that such a power is possessed and put to use. The creditor exposes his debtor's wife, children, and slaves, to the same noon-day sun which broils the prime minister. In Austria, it would be harsh to suppose that subjects have any desire to treat one another as the Emperor and his minister treat political offenders within the walls of the castle of Spielburg. The Russians at large are not to be made answerable for the transportation of coffles of nobles and gentlemen to the silver mines of Siberia, and the regiments on the frontier. It is only under a representative government that prisons, and the treatment of criminals under the law, can be fairly considered a test of the feelings of the majority.

It is too true, however, that punishments are almost everywhere vindictive in their character; and have more relation to some supposed principle of "not letting vice go unpunished," than either to the security of society, or the reformation of the offender. The few exceptions that exist are a far more conclusive testimony to an advancing state of morals than the old methods are to the vindictiveness of the mind of the society which they corrupt and deform. The Philadelphia penitentiary is a proof of the thoughtful and laborious humanity of those who instituted it; but Newgate cannot be regarded as the expressed decision of the English people as to how criminals should be guarded. Such a prison would not now be instituted by any civilized nation. Its existence is to be interpreted, not as a token of the cruelty and profligacy of the mind of society, but of its ignorance of the case, or of its bigoted adherence to ancient methods, or of its apathy in regard to improvements to which there is no peremptory call of self-interest. Any one of these is enough, Heaven knows, for any society to have to answer for; enough to yield, by contrast, surpassing honour to the philanthropy which has pulled down the pillory, and is labouring to supersede the hangman, and to convert every prison in the civilized world into an hospital for the cure of moral disease. But the reform has begun; the spirit of Howard is on its pilgrimage; and barbarous as is still our treatment of the guilty, better days are in prospect.

What the traveller has to observe then is, first, whether there has been any amelioration of the treatment of criminals in countries where the people have a voice upon it: and, in countries despotically ruled, whether public sentiment is moved about the condition of state criminals, and whether men treat one another vindictively in their appeals to the laws of citizenship: whether there is a Burmese cruelty in the exercise of the legal rights of the creditor; whether there is a reluctance to plunge others into the woes of legal penalties; or whether offenders are considered as beyond the pale of sympathy. It may thus appear whether the people entertain the pernicious notion that there is a line drawn for human conduct, on one side of which all is virtue, and on the other all vice; or whether they are approximating to the more philosophical and genial belief that all wickedness is weakness and woe, and that therefore the guilty need more care and tenderness in the arrangement of the circumstances under which they live than those who enjoy greater strength against temptation, and an ease of mind which criminals can never know. In some parts of the United States this general persuasion is remarkably evident, and is an incontestable proof of the advanced state of morals there. In some prisons of the United States, as much care is bestowed on the arrangements by which the guilty are preserved from contaminating one another, are exposed to good influences and precluded from bad, as in any infirmary on the ventilation of the wards, and the diet and nursing of the sick. In such a region, vindictiveness in social punishments must be going out, and Christ-like views of human guilt and infirmity beginning to prevail.

The same conclusions may be drawn from an observation of the methods of legal punishment. Recklessness of human life is one of the surest symptoms of barbarism, whether life is taken by law or by assassination. As men grow civilized, and learn to rate the spiritual higher and higher above the physical life, human life grows sacred. The Turk orders off the head of a slave almost without a serious thought. The New Zealanders have murdered men by scores, to supply their dried and grinning heads to English purchasers, who little imagined the cost at which they were obtained. This is the way in which life is squandered in savage societies. Up to a comparatively high point of civilization, the law makes free with life, long after the private expenditure of it has been checked or has ceased. Duels, brawls, assassinations, have nearly been discontinued, and even war in some measure discountenanced, before the law duly recognises the sacredness of human life. But the time comes. One generation after another grows up with a still improving sense of the majesty of life,—of the mystery of the existence of such a being as man,—of the infinity of ideas and emotions in the mind of each, and of the boundlessness of his social relations. These recognitions may not be express; but they are sufficiently real to hold back the hand from quenching life. The reluctance to destroy such a creation is found to be on the increase. Men prefer suffering wrong to being accessary to so fearful an act as what now appears a judicial murder: the law is left unused,—is evaded,—and it becomes necessary to alter it. Capital punishments are restricted,—are further restricted,—are abolished. Such is the process. It is now all but completed in the United States: it is advancing rapidly in England. During its progress further light is thrown on the moral notions of a represented people by a change in the character of other (called inferior) punishments. Bodily torments and disfigurements go out. Torture and mutilation are discontinued, and after a while the grosser mental inflictions. The pillory (as mere ignominious exposure) was a great advance upon the maiming with which it was once connected; but it is now discontinued as barbarous. All ignominious exposure will ere long be considered equally barbarous,—including capital punishment, of which such exposure is the recommendatory principle. To refer once more to the Pennsylvania case,—these notions of ignominious exposure are there so far outgrown, that avoidance of it is the main principle of the management. Seclusion, under the guardianship of the law, is there the method,—on the principle of consideration to the weak, and of supreme regard to the feeling of self-respect in the offender,—the feeling in which he is necessarily most deficient. When we consider the brutalizing methods of punishment in use in former times, and now in some foreign countries, in contrast with the latest instituted and most successful, we cannot avoid perceiving that such are indications of the moral notions of those at whose will they exist, be they a council of despots, or an association of nations. We cannot avoid perceiving from them what barbarism is held to be justice in some ages and countries; and how that which would then and there be condemned as culpable leniency, comes elsewhere to be considered less than justice. The treatment of the guilty is one of the strongest evidences as to the general moral notions of society, when it is evidence at all; that is, when the guilty are in the hands of society.