Monthly Supplement to "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," Conducted by CHARLES DICKENS.

THE

HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE

1850.]

THE

OF CURRENT EVENTS.

FROM THE 1ST TO THE 30TH JANUARY.

THE THREE KINGDOMS.

[PRICE 2d.

NEW YEAR has opened with a discussion which would seem to exhibit the world getting suddenly too old to remember rightly its own age. Whether or not the first half of the century is completed, or must wait another year, has been the subject of this eager dispute; and it is not yet by any means settled. One set of disputants maintain that the year One is completed before it begins, the other would more reasonably suggest that it must begin before it is completed. But then, retorts the logical dealer in subtleties, there is a zero year before the absolute year can count, which explains the apparent discrepancy; just as there is a zero pound while the shillings that compose it are being counted, and not till the twentieth shilling is flung down does the pound absolute make its appearance. Whereto the practical man replies, that whether the year One is to be counted at the end or beginning of its months, is all the same to him; but that he clearly declines to count number Two till he has had the full value of it, and that no conceivable number of unsubstantial shillings could ever produce to his satisfaction any one substantial pound. Supposing a baby born on the first year of a century, he may have been clearly a nothing baby for nine months preceding; but would anybody therefore call him nine months old at his birth? The logician again responding not less learnedly, the question is left a profound puzzle, and as such must probably remain; but we are decidedly of opinion that for common-life purposes the practical view is the more convenient one, and that if we bargained to subscribe for fifty copies of Household Words we would by no means be content with forty-nine plus nothing.

Though the memory of the century is thus decrepit, however, let it not be supposed that it has not vigour of life notwithstanding. There is nothing so common now-a-days as all kinds of professed ailments in midst of the sturdiest evidences of health and strength. Nothing can equal the energy and vitality, for example, with which the protectionists have been proclaiming all over England the entire collapse and absolute decease of agricultural prosperity. In Worcester, Nottinghamshire, Edenbridge, Ross, Devonshire, York, Kent, Waltham, and Northampton; in Bucks, Leicester, Horsham, Ely, and Stafford; they have daily, within the past month, exhibited the activity and energy of a more than mortal despair. But it is plainly a case of Killing No Murder, and the public look on enjoying the joke, as much as ever they enjoyed the venerable farce of that name. No year has opened during the present century with more unequivocal indications on every side of extraordinary commercial prosperity. In spite of such adverse events as the war in India, the Danish blockade, and the cholera, trade has made unequalled progress during the year past, and the condition of the Dulk of the people has been proportionately improved. Shipping, too, has increased, as a matter of course, with the increase of imports and exports; the building yards are at present as full as the mills and factories; and the first year of the repeal of the navigation laws sees apparently firmer than ever the wooden walls of Old England. Let the wooden heads take comfort, therefore; and listen, with what patience they may, to the admissions which Mr. Disraeli has again during the past month more than once emphatically repeated, as to the utter impossibility of a present or speedy restoration of protection. Is it not strange, by the way, that so clever a person as the protectionist orator cannot perceive, that in proportion as his own hopes of seeing protection restored have been declining (and less and less hopeful, from year to year, has his language gradually become), there must be a reason in the growing satisfaction of the people with the system that displaced it? Would it be possible to maintain free trade for a day beyond the time that the really preponderating interests of the country demanded a re-imposition of protection? The real truth is, that the instinct of the difficulty of returning to the old system possessed by all men out of top-boots and leathers, or in the least degree above the lowest range of the bucolic intellect, is substantially a confession of the abuse which free trade had thrown down. If the new arrangement were not just, or if the old one had not involved what was the reverse of just, change would not now be so difficult or distant as it is confessed by Mr. Disraeli and the most ardent protectionists to be. In a few more years, it is to be hoped, this instinct will ripen into the sensible resolve of not desiring to resume swaddling-clothes at all; in which case we shall have a manly effort to dispense altogether with petting and coddling, and, after the fashion of Mr. Cobden at his farm in Sussex, shall see rents reduced, game surrendered, land drained, trees cleared, fences moved, and, amidst all this, not only both farmers and labourers employed and contented, but landlords cheerful and hopeful. Mr. Cobden went the other day to Aylesbury, to give the farmers the benefit of that quite unprecedented strange agricultural experience; whereat the honest farmers at first began to hiss, then to laugh, and then to cheer. It is clear that even their's is not a case for despair. Even by them the signs of the times do not pass utterly disregarded; and such signs, adverse to their wishes, have lately been more than usually abundant. Protection has been within these few days defeated in what was supposed to be its metropolitan stronghold, among the weavers of Stepney; at a meeting invoked against "the present unfair and ruinous system of competition," backed by all the pretences most likely to gull the well-meaning but half-informed artisan, and presided over by the great guns of the "great central protection society itself." Against all these influences the working men stood firm; supported their own views; flung plentiful cold water over a notorious oratorical firebrand, Mr. Oastler; carried a series of sensible resolutions, to the effect that the best protection they desired to

b

have was the non-interference of Government with trade, and the removal of all remaining impediments to the free exercise of industry; and politely deposed the protectionist chairman.

It is to be regretted that this example of politeness, however, has not as yet told generally on the great body of the farmers. At Stafford, for instance, they enforced their differences of opinion with the loaded ends of heavy riding-whips on the skulls of a party of radical shoemakers, who had mustered somewhat strongly in the Town Hall. Indeed that sort of argument would appear, upon the whole, to have been the most powerful reasoning employed by the farmers as a body, during the late meetings. The consequence of its partial success at Stafford was its subsequent adoption, with various fortune, at Hinckley in Leicestershire, and at Reading, Croydon, and Worcester; for though both at Hinckley and in the latter city the top-boots and leathers underwent decisive rout, and at Croydon it was a drawn battle, at Reading they as clearly got uppermost, and indeed came off with quite a triumphant victory. Their newspapers complacently record it. To the spectators not engaged nothing whatever was audible, and nothing visible but a sea of hats bobbing up and down like chopping waves in a tide-way, fists whirling in the air, and incidental glimpses of hand to hand encounters in which bulky gentlemen in white top-coats "appeared to great advantage." To much more advantage, be it at least admitted, than the Lord Stanhopes, Mr. Newdegates, Lord Henry Bentincks, and others, supposed to be their betters, who, instead of gallantly whirling fists in the air, have been basely levelling vulgar imputations against Sir Robert Peel; accusing him of having taken up free trade for no higher motive than his own benefit, and reminding him that liars should have good memories. For the latter saying Lord Stanhope more particularly is responsible.

The apophthegm, vulgar, false, and misplaced in that case, is not without point and application to another incident of the month. Restless in his exile, the ex-railway monarch has made an attempt to emerge into the world once again; but a too manifestly indiscreet one. His memory seems painfully short. He should have waited quietly, used advantageously what he has not been obliged to regorge (and what could a hundred thousand pounds matter out of such ill-gotten heaps as his), kept his kitchen warm, and sunk all further allusions to reputation or character. With such props and supports he may still recommend himself as by far too useful an instrument to a large class of "society" to be left to rust quite out of fashion. But foolishly rejecting them, he now, forsooth, petitions the public for all sorts of consideration, on the ground of the excited period in which the equivocal transactions occurred, the multiplicity of concerns he had to superintend and direct, the brief opportunities he had for reflection, and the impossibility of giving sufficient attention to public duties and private matters-as if the public memory were as convenient as his own, or the world could have forgotten that the attention he had given out of his public duties to his private matters had been only too sufficient! Such pleas ad misericordiam might have been somewhat less ridiculous, if the result had been less exclusively in Mr. Hudson's own favour; but when a man, in the extreme of excitement, with horribly brief opportunities for reflection, and with concerns to superintend and direct which occupy all his energies, is nevertheless proved to have been continually filling his own pockets while he was emptying those of others, "the impossibility of his giving sufficient attention to public duties" can hardly be admitted to excuse his having somewhat over-attended to private ones. Mr. Hudson takes nothing by his motion. It was a blunder.

So proved, most unexpectedly (to return to the theme of the month which has been oftenest renewed and harped upon), the appeal of the protectionists to Ireland. One would have expected the Irish to cleave to the fortunes of protection, as in former days the country stood by James the Second, and other exploded things; but the genius of blundering itself could not discover any possible supply of its wants in the certain creation of a scarcity, and the attempted reaction has been generally a failure. Truly, the virtues of protection are so written on the face of Ireland that he who runs may read; and if success might have been counted upon anywhere for unreasonable opinions, certainly that was the place for it-that generous but unhappy land of delusions, that second enchanted island, so long under the spell of selfish enchanters. Yet, strange to say, we have to repeat that even here, where the cap and bells belong to reason, and wisdom is the national Tom o' Bedlam, our protectionist friends make little or no advance. They succeeded in Kilmainham and Dublin only by carefully shutting out the public. At Dunmanway, and in Cork, Cavan, and Donegal, free-trade resolutions were carried at the protectionist meetings; in the very pattern county of Down the protectionists were beaten on their own ground, at the meeting they had themselves summoned; and one of the speakers, an ardent repealer, sensibly explained in what way free-trade had benefited Ireland, by stimulating English manufactures and so giving English employment to numbers of starving Irish, without the least apparent notion that the argument told quite as forcibly against repeal as against protection. Thus, even while in a rational and sensible course, the country still keeps up its character; and when things go right, they go, as Gonzalo says, by contraries. At Wexford and Longford, as in Down, there were meetings to which protectionists were summoned, and free-traders came; and at Galway there suddenly rose such a storm of contending motions and resolutions, that the leader of the protectionists forgot to make any motion at all! However, if common sense is arrived at thus nonsensically in Ireland, it is surprising, on the other hand, with what sensible and passionate earnestness nonsense is at the same time pursued. The movement against rent, for example, becomes daily more and more formidable, and threatens to assume the worst character of socialism. Being impracticable in its objects, its organisation is proportionately powerful. If it had been limited to the better guardianship and security of the tenant, in all to which his labour and sacrifices might justly entitle him, it would have been a practicable, obtainable, common-place thing, and nobody would have lifted up his finger for it. As it is, it will doubtless attract and occupy all the disengaged enthusiasm of the country, turn it into every kind of dangerous channel, and obstruct statesman-like exertion in every other scund or beneficial direction.

But as little in England as in Ireland is there lack of matter for either censure or scorn. We have heard too much lately of those disastrous cases which are so bitter a reproach to our civilization, where neglect and actual starvation are left to murder the wretched, while officers, appointed by law to arrest such instruments of murder, stare indifferently on. A miserable single woman, with her unborn child, dies of hunger and cold at Southampton; a married woman, poor and industrious but most unhappy, dies of absolute want and neglect in Manchester; while the parish authorities, in both populous civilized cities, are no less than actual parties, it may be said, to these horrible calamities. More horrible still is the certainty, however, that such cases, unseen, unheard of, silently suffered and undergone, are, in London, of even common occurrence.

It