THE

CHRISTIAN EXAMINER

AND

RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY.

MARCH, 1848.

THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE

FUTURE.*1. Flox.

MR. CAREY'S volume we regard as a valuable contribution of facts and thoughts to the resources out of which, in due time, will be formed a true science of political economy and social order. He concerns himself mainly with the material interests of man, not, however, overlooking their connection with his moral well-being. One thing which we especially like in the work is its strong advocacy, by the application of stubborn facts, of the cause of peace, showing very conclusively that war is a mistake as well as a sin, bad as a matter of policy as well as a violation of the law of God. It is not our purpose to discuss the author's peculiar doctrines, or to decide upon the soundness of the views he takes of the vexed questions of free trade and commercial intercourse. The examination of these questions belongs to journals more exclusively devoted to secular affairs. We refer to the book because it is suggestive of thoughts in harmony with our present design, which is to glance at a few facts and arguments that show the need and may encourage the hope of social progress. In present tendencies we would find a warrant for the anticipation of a better condition of things yet to come. We open our subject by asking our readers to bring be

*

The Past, the Present, and the Future. By H. C. CAREY, Author of "Principles of Political Economy," etc., etc. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart. 1848. 8vo. pp. 474.

VOL. XLIV.

4TH S. VOL. IX. NO. II.

15

fore their minds the picture of an estate in feudal times, a picture of men and things as they then existed, drawn to the life, that shall speak to their senses, giving them a strictly true and living idea of the social system which once prevailed. There is the gloomy castle, with its massive towers, deep moat, heavy drawbridge, and ponderous gates; at the entrance the Herculean warder, on the battlements the steelclad sentinels, within the court-yard rough and rioting menat-arms. There is the oaken hall, where, after the chase or fight, the mad revel runs high and the wildest passions rage. From the tallest turret may be seen dark forests stretching away in the distance, poorly cultivated hills and valleys lying hard by, groups, under the very shadow of the fortress, of dark, cold, damp, mud-walled and thatch-roofed hovels. Let this domain be examined in clear daylight, disrobed of all rainbow-broidered clouds of romance, in all its rugged, comfortless, coarse, and naked reality, just as the stern fidelity of history must describe it, and not as the gorgeous imagination of the novelist paints it. This picture we would have thus seen, in order that the condition of society of which it was the material representative may be better understood. Within and around the feudal domain, speaking comparatively, was superstition and not religion, ignorance and not knowledge, slavery and not freedom, rudeness and not refinement, suffering and not comfort, wealth obtained by violence, poverty caused by direct oppression, man the foe or slave of his brother-man, despotic and lawless force, encumbered with its own iron panoply, ruling herds of human beings collared and driven like the brutes. The facts in the case, could we get at them, would fully bear out this description; because such wretchedness must have been, because history in part so tells the story, and because even now, under similar circumstances, a similar state of things exists. The landholding nobility and the squalid serfs of Russia are, in many respects, living examples of the relations which almost universally obtained, a few centuries since, between lords and peasants, warlike barons and their stolid followers.

Having imagined this picture of the past, let it be contrasted with another, familiar as our own homes, and easily painted, a New England village, with its lines of trees, leafy sentinels guarding each side of the broad street, rows of neat houses, with stores, mechanics' shops, and

1848.]

Life in New England.

163

churches interspersed. The dwellings are all nearly of the same pattern. One or more may boast of three stories; the majority are but one story and a half in height; many of them are embellished with green blinds and verdant or blooming front-yards. In various directions from the main road, winding along valleys and round the hill-sides, other roads lead to well-tilled and productive farms. The truth of the description will not be affected, if a river and a factory or two are introduced, or a locomotive is sent whistling through the fields; and it demands that several free district schools shall be sprinkled over the township. The inhabitants of this small democracy are nearly on a level, well-fed, wellclad, intelligent, and independent. Every adult male is a voter; and almost every adult male may, in turn, aspire to be a selectman or representative to the General Court. A newspaper is printed in the village, of course; and the affairs of the nation are duly discussed by the fireside in winter, by the road-side in sumner, and at the store or post-office usually one and the same place — at all seasons of the year. Among the population there is little crime or poverty. Front-doors are secured by slender bolts, scores of which might be wrought out of the huge bars that fastened the iron-cased gates of ancient castles. Captains by the dozen can be found engaged in a variety of peaceful occupations; and the brigadier-general himself has nothing but his title, and his uniform on muster-day, to distinguish him from other honest citizens. The lawyer must despair of having clients, unless a “smart” man and popular. The doctor may not be very scientific, but he must be sociable and attentive. The preachers are freely criticized in all respects by their parishioners, as if they were public property, and must do their best to perform a miracle and satisfy every body. At Thanksgiving, all the tables smoke with roast turkeys and plum-puddings. Servants are superseded by "help," laborers by “ hired men”; spinners and weavers are turned into “ operatives"; and nobody is a whit superior to any body else. The representative of labor, who pays only a poll-tax, neutralizes the vote of the representative of capital, who pays a tenth part of the municipal expenses. "Squire Hathaway, in the big brick house on the hill, is literally the fellow-citizen of John Smith, who lives in "the ten-footer down the lane "; and it would be a hazardous experiment for Mrs. Hathaway to give herself airs, although she may own a threeply carpet and a piano-forte for her daughters.

That feudal estate once was; this New England village now is. Who can bring them together in his imagination, and not see what an advance the present is on the past? In the gradual transformation of warlike castles into quiet towns, --nay, in the slender bolt taking the place of the ponderous iron bar, as just now suggested, is there not all the evidence a thoughtful mind wants, to prove, that, however the world of matter has continued to revolve on its old axis and in its old orbit, the world of men has neither stood still nor moved in a circle, but gone forward nearer and nearer to the promised land of a Christian civilization? It would be absurd to ask the question, except to introduce another, namely, Is that promised land of a Christian civilization yet reached and settled? Has society grown up to its manhood? Is there no future to come, in which more will be gained on the present than the present has gained on the past? If this inquiry were put to men and women turned of fifty, the majority might doubt whether a century of to-morrows will bring about any salutary changes in the condition of things to-day. Middle age, its own fortune made, its own social position fixed, hooped round by habits and chained down by prejudices, is naturally inclined to be conservative, to shake its head in opposition to all reforms and its warning finger at young hope and sanguine expectation. Now we pay all due respect to those who shrink from progress, because it may seat too large a crowd on the platform they have exclusively occupied. We have a proper regard for the opinion of those who, standing themselves on pleasant elevations, think the restless multitude below had much better stay below and keep quiet. We appreciate the position of the self-appointed brakemen on the car of civilization, so fearful that, if it go farther or faster forward, it will be thrown from the track and broken in pieces. Such conservatives have their office and do their work. They are useful checks. They produce a friction quite favorable to safety; though, as obstacles to the onward movement, they need anticipate little success, for that movement, like the calm, resistless force of the mighty river, cannot be stayed.

More is to be done than has ever yet been done on our globe by this generation and the myriads behind us. The New England village is still but a pioneer, and by no means a specimen of the universal prosperity even of Christendom, or the larger part of Christendom. In numerous and terrific

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Evils of Modern Civilization.

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ways, injustice, misery, and crime still torment the race. Their black and bloody foot-prints stain the fairest fields, and leave marks on the pavement of the noblest cities. Evil, as an argument for constant reform, is everywhere on the very surface of things, and but thinly disguised by garish luxury and artificial refinement.

England and the United States may be taken as, on the whole, the best and most prosperous members of the family of nations; and yet of them what fearful things must be said in sober truth! What a dark as well as bright side, what shame as well as glory, belongs to both! There is the loathsome wretchedness and black depravity of the English mines; a moral night, filling them like the material darkness, for which no "safety-lamp" has been provided. There are the filth and fever, pauperism and sin, crowding the streets of Manchester. There are the Poor-Law Commissioners' Reports to Parliament, in which it is shown how public charity panders to public vice, and legalized relief from starvation operates as a bounty on iniquity. What a land of beggary is Ireland! What a sublime and terrible congregation of contrasts is London, with its royal palaces and its gin-palaces, its cathedrals and its brothels, its St. James's squares and its St. Giles's alleys, its Greenwich hospitals and its gaming hells, its magnificent stables for the queen's horses and its homeless thousands of the queen's subjects, its idle nobility squandering princely revenues and its overworked laborers half dead with hunger, its Italian Operas and its "Songs of the Shirt," its graceful literature and its graceless licentiousness, in a word, its golden splendor which cannot be imagined and its squalid wretchedness which cannot be described !

But this is in the Old World. Coming nearer home, the view is somewhat more favorable, on the whole, but not so bright as national vanity imagines. Our commercial capital, for its size and its age, has no great superiority over the world's commercial capital, if we look at it as exhibiting the permanent condition of human beings. Fearfully large and multiform are the ignorance, the inequality, the iniquity, within its limits. There is no need of quoting here the harsh and melancholy testimony of statistics. It is enough to say, "There is a great and growing city," and instantly all know that streams of moral pollution must flow through it, that the agonies of many innocent and many guilty sufferers, that