Evolution of Expression, Volume 2—Revised

THE ANTIQUITY OF FREEDOM

NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY

1. I hear much said of patriotism, appeals to patriotism, transports of patriotism. Gentlemen, why prostitute this noble world? Is it so very magnanimous to give up a part of your income in order to save your whole property? This is very simple arithmetic; and he that hesitates, deserves contempt rather than indignation.

2. Yes, gentlemen, it is to your immediate self-interest, to your most familiar notions of prudence and policy that I now appeal. I say not to you now, as heretofore, beware how you give the world the first example of an assembled nation untrue to the public faith.

3. I ask you not, as heretofore, what right you have to freedom, or what means of maintaining it, if, at your first step in administration, you outdo in baseness all the old and corrupt governments. I tell you, that unless you prevent this catastrophe, you will all be involved in the general ruin; and that you are yourselves the persons most deeply interested in making the sacrifices which the government demands of you.

4. I exhort you, then, most earnestly, to vote these extraordinary supplies; and God grant they may prove sufficient! Vote, then, I beseech you; for, even if you doubt the expediency of the means, you know perfectly well that the supplies are necessary, and that you are incapable of raising them in any other way. Vote them at once, for the crisis does not admit of delay; and, if it occurs, we must be responsible for the consequences.

5. Beware of asking for time. Misfortune accords it never. While you are lingering, the evil day will come upon you. Why, gentlemen, it is but a few days since, that upon occasion of some foolish bustle in the Palais Royal, some ridiculous insurrection that existed nowhere but in the heads of a few weak or designing individuals, we were told with emphasis, "Catiline is at the gates of Rome, and yet we deliberate."

6. We know, gentlemen, that this was all imagination. We are far from being at Rome; nor is there any Catiline at the gates of Paris. But now are we threatened with a real danger; bankruptcy, national bankruptcy, is before you; it threatens to swallow up your persons, your property, your honor, – and yet you deliberate.

THE LANTERN BEARERS

1. These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town.

2. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas – enough for the boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene; a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets; to the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between – now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea – in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.

3. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colors of King James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell – the – Cat.

4. … But what my memory dwells upon the most was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months' holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knuckle-bones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States.

5. It may still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweed-side, and was defeated lamentably; its charm being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

6. The idle manner of it was this: Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more.

7. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive, and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

8. When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth, and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern bearer, unless (like the pole-cat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them – for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sands of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate talk.

9. Woe is me that I may not give some specimens – some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk at any rate was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

TARPEIA

THE BELLS

THE TEMPERANCE QUESTION

1. Some men look upon this temperance cause as a whining bigotry, narrow asceticism, or a vulgar sentimentality, fit for little minds, weak women, and weaker men. On the contrary, I regard it as second only to one or two others of the primary reforms of the age, and for this reason: every race has its peculiar temptation; every clime has its specific sin.

2. The tropics and tropical races are tempted to one form of sensuality; the colder and temperate regions, and our Saxon blood, find their peculiar temptation in the stimulus of drink and food. In old times our heaven was a drunken revel. We relieve ourselves from the over-weariness of constant and exhausting toil by intoxication. Science has brought a cheap means of drunkenness within the reach of every individual.

3. National prosperity and free institutions have put into the hands of almost every workman the means of being drunk for a week on the labor of two or three hours. With that blood and that temptation, we have adopted democratic institutions, where the law has no sanctions but the purpose and virtue of the masses. The statute book rests not on bayonets, as in Europe, but on the hearts of the people.

4. A drunken people can never be the basis of a free government. It is the corner-stone neither of virtue, prosperity, nor progress. To us, therefore, the title-deeds of whose estates, and the safety of whose lives depend upon the tranquility of the streets, upon the virtue of the masses, the presence of any vice which brutalizes the average mass of mankind, and tends to make it more readily the tool of intriguing and corrupt leaders, is necessarily a stab at the very life of the nation. Against such a vice is marshalled the Temperance Reformation.

5. That my sketch is no fancy picture every one of you knows. Every one of you can glance back over your own path, and count many and many a one among those who started from the goal at your side, with equal energy and perhaps greater promise, who has found a drunkard's grave long before this. The brightness of the bar, the ornament of the pulpit, the hope and blessing and stay of many a family – you know, every one of you who has reached middle life, how often on your path you set up the warning, "Fallen before the temptations of the street!"

6. Hardly one house in this city, whether it be full and warm with all the luxury of wealth, or whether it find hard, cold maintenance by the most earnest economy; no matter which – hardly a house that does not count among sons or nephews some victim of this vice. The skeleton of this warning sits at every board. The whole world is kindred in this suffering. The country mother launches her boy with trembling upon the temptations of city life; the father trusts his daughter anxiously to the young man she has chosen, knowing what a wreck intoxication may make of the house-tree they set up.

7. Alas! how often are their worst forebodings more than fulfilled! I have known a case – probably many of you recall some almost equal to it – where one worthy woman could count father, brother, husband, and son-in-law all drunkards – no man among her near kindred, except her son, who was not a victim of this vice. Like all other appetites, this finds resolution weak when set against the constant presence of temptation.

SHERIDAN'S RIDE

TO A PUPIL

CHAPTER IV.

FORMING PICTURES