[42: 618–25] A few days after my arrival in California I fell in with a man who had been one of the first to emigrate after the discoveries of gold were made known. Having failed in business fifteen years before, he had left a wife and children in the East and come hither to make a fortune. Of his own accord he narrated much of his subsequent life. After listening for some time, I asked:

“How many times have you taken up a new business and failed in it since you came to California?”

“I have been dead broke six times.”

“And how many times have you changed your business?”

“I’m sure I can’t tell; I always change when I see a better chance.”

A few weeks afterwards he made another change and leaving the part of the country where I was, I lost sight of him. Yet experience afterwards led me to regard the man as one much more likely to be successful in the long run, than most of those with whom I became acquainted, who had yielded to the California fever of 1849.

Some time afterwards a company of twenty four working men [654]proposed to me to give them a lease of certain property in consideration of some desireable improvements which they proposed to make upon it. In drawing up a form of agreement for the purpose I assumed that each one of these men would do his part of the work, during the whole period required for the service, which was estimated at three months. But this was objected to on the ground that though they all now intended to continue at the work for that period, some would be sure to get tired of it and wish to quit and it would be necessary to provide for supplying their places.

“Do you not think,” then said I, “that you could all depend on each other to go through with it?“

“No sir,” replied their spokesman, who was the master workman,“I don’t believe you could find twenty four men in California who could be depended on to stick together at any job for three months. There will always be some who will take a sudden start and when they do there’s no reasoning with them. When they once get their heads set on it they are bound to go, no matter what they lose by it. I have known many men strike off and leave five or six hundred dollars that would have been coming to them soon if they had kept on where they were.“To this there was a unanimous expression of assent from all present, of whom nine-tenths were European born and fully one half Englishmen.

What are called in California, Forty-niners, that is, early emigrants, frequently apply to me for employment, representing themselves to be of most industrious disposition but the victims of singular misfortune which has hitherto followed them wherever they have turned. They want to be tried in humble capacities, only asking that they may have before them a chance of working up to something better by hard labor and the exercise of the severest virtue. Generally, however, if successful in their application, they soon find some occasion for resigning the opportunity, often frankly avowing that they find it impossible to hold themselves steadily to any drudgery. Upon enquiry I find that this is a common experience and that the“forty niners” are good for nothing in any undertaking which requires long, plodding, steadfast application is generally understood. But it has occurred to me to question and the more I have thought of it, the more reason I have found to question whether the earliest emigrants are defective in this respect in a degree more marked when compared with the great body of emigrants who now occupy California than this body is itself defective in the same respect, compared with the population as a whole of New England, or of any part of Europe. The region about me has been “settled,” as they say, more than fifteen years. For more than ten years its whole population has been covered by the forms of systematic civilized government, has had its`actual courts of law, elections, taxes, sheriffs, post-offices with mails from San Francisco three times a week. It has its schools and churches, its [655]dozen of lawyers’ offices, its jail, its free hospital; temperance societies, Odd-Fellows and Masonic lodges, two newspapers and a brass band_ Much more than a million dollars in gold has been invested here in buildings, bridges, mill dams, fences and other substantial means of providing for civilized requirements. Nevertheless the people are very strikingly more shifting and consequently shiftless than those of any part of the Eastern states or of Europe. Since I have been here (two years) the District Attorney’s office has been twice vacated by resignation and is now filled by the third incumbent The two leading lawyers in the county have left it; four other lawyers have changed their residence. Three citizens previously engaged in other occupations have entered upon the practice of law. The principal capitalist, the largest merchant and three other leading merchants have left the county; at least a dozen other storekeepers have sold out and as many more come in. Ten men of my acquaintance who were running mills of various kinds (saw, grain and stamp), when I came here, have left them. In one case a mill has changed hands three times, in several others twice; I know of not one which has not changed hands. The Justice of the peace; the seven successive school-committeemen; three out of four of the physicians; the five butchers; the five innkeepers, eight out of twelve of the tradesmen and their assistants; the blacksmith; the two iron-founders; the two barbers; the daguerrotypist; the bathing-house keeper; the seven livery-stable-keepers; the three principal farmers; the three school-teachers and about seventy out of a hundred of the miners and laboring men who have lived nearest me or who have been most readily accessible and observable to me, have moved from one house, office or shop to another, or have left the county within two years. I count in this village forty-seven separate places of residence and of business which have been occupied by eighty-seven persons, not including housewives or children. Of these eighty-seven, eighty-five have changed their residences or place of business within two years. This has not been on account of a destructive fire or any extraordinary occurrence; population on the whole has not decreased, and so far as I can ascertain the changes have not been markedly greater than at previous periods of the early history of the district

In 1850 the population of San Francisco was thirty thousand (30,000). Twelve years afterwards it had advanced to 90,000. Distant from the mines, possessing the only good harbor in a coastline of fifteen hundred miles and being the centre of finance and wholesale commerce for nearly a third part of the United States and much of Mexico, this population was one of more steadfast character than any other on the Pacific coast, yet of five thousand five hundred of the more important merchants, [656] tradesmen and manufacturers who were registered in the San Francisco Directory of 1861 only three thousand four hundred remained in 1862, and of the smaller dealers it is estimated by the compiler of the Directory that at least forty per cent had “declined business” during the same year. This was during a period of general prosperity and when the total number of business firms greatly increased.

An agricultural population is almost necessarily [a] more abiding one in its habits than any other, but the same characteristic unsteadiness is observable among the farmers of California, comparing them with farmers elsewhere. Of the agriculturists among my neighbors, seven out of twelve have moved within two years and those who have not are men who were originally bred for different callings & have late in life taken to farming. Going out of the county on the only road which I have had occasion to travel over enough to gain an acquaintance with the farmers on it, I have noticed that seven out of twelve properties have changed hands within two years, one of them twice.

[The general fact thus illustrated is to be partly attributed to the experimental character of all industrial undertakings in new settlements and especially in California, owing to the variableness of its seasons and to the capricious distribution of its primary source of wealth in deposits of gold. But careful study has satisfied me that this is not the main cause of the more shifting character of its population compared with that of established civilized communities. The main cause is independent of all local and temporary conditions: it lies in the natal character of the pop] [42: 87] ulation and in those qualities of character which govern the circumstances under which members of civilized communities most readily yield to the temptations to break loose from the opportunities and the duties in which they have become established.

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[42: 626–37] I trust I have made it obvious to the reader that the organization of society here, however advanced from what it has been at an earlier period, is yet very crude and that the reason why it is so is that the people are generally unprepared to take part in a higher organization. [but something more—] There is nothing which has been more strongly impressed upon me than the absence of a desire for a more coherent community on the part of the more intelligent, and the feeling, which is more than one of indifference, of the greater number in regard to what should be the common concerns of all. The explanation is a simple one, more personal concern in common affairs would be equivalent to a loss of the enjoyment of personal independence. Men do not constrain others or influence others because to do so would be to invite constraints upon their own caprice or judgment.

Most men who leave the old communities of the East for the pioneer settlements do so with the hope of returning when they shall have acquired a certain amount of wealth. This hope they retain for [657]many years more or less distinctly. It is nevertheless notorious that most of those who succeed in returning are not satisfied to remain long. They say that it appears to them that the character of the old community has changed. It is not what they had remembered it to be and there is something very oppressive to them in it. No doubt old communities do change; old friends pass away or new interests and habits are taken on, but in most of these cases the greatest change is that which has occurred in the emigrant himself. In a frontier or immature state of society, each individual becomes connected by ties of interest or otherwise with a certain number of others who are of distinct importance to him and to whom he is of distinct importance. He knows what he has to do with everyone about him and what everyone about him has to do with him. When he comes into the midst of an older or more fully organized community, he finds individuals comparatively unimportant and a large part of every man’s interest in others so indirect, attenuated, ramified and subtle that it appears to him that there is no genuine friendship, trust or truth, any more than there is thorough-going hatred, enmity or manly courage in regard to injuries. The fact is that friendship, the obligation of truth and trust or dependence on others is exercised in a much more extended and elaborate way, the heart and mind are both more liberal than he is able to appreciate, and in truth it is he who has been growing contracted, concentrated and direct in the exercise of his natural qualifications for helping and being helped by his fellow-men otherwise.

Notwithstanding the constant changes which I have described, the immediate community about me is so small, and my business responsibility has been of such a character, that I have taken an interest more or less active in the condition, the habits and tendencies of nearly every individual sojourner near me. I have been anxious for the introduction of conditions favorable to progress toward a thriftier state of things, toward a community of larger and steadier commercial demands, larger and steadier productive power. On this account, it has naturally become a habit with me to weigh the value of individuals, with reference to the general end which I should like to feel that I am aiding my neighbors to approach, and I find that whenever my attention is called to a man I at once rank him according to an intuitive estimate of the part he is likely to bear, if any, in this respect. I find that for convenience of thinking I habitually classify my neighbors according to my estimate of their measurement by some scale which exists in my mind. I have never to this moment attempted to define clearly to myself what this scale is, but looking out the window as I write, I see two men and I know that both stand near the bottom notch and that the scale is too rude to show any difference between them. It interests me to find that this is the case because there are striking differences between them.

One stands idle but erect, and though of feeble form, with the [658]pose of a noble statue; his face is streaked with vermilion; a quiver of undressed fox skin, full of arrows, hangs over one naked shoulder, a ragged blanket over the other and there is a bow in his hand. I saw him standing within six feet of where he now is an hour ago and with no difference of position except that his vacant eyes were directed toward the other end of the village. He is a dull, silent, stupid savage. He was born near here and when he was born his mother had never seen a white man.

The other reclines near the tavern-door. He has a cigar in his mouth, a Colt’s revolver in one pocket, a Geneva watch in another and scores of machines and many hundreds of hands have been employed in preparing his apparel. When freshly and mildly stimulated, he has a very active mind and a ready utterance. It is not unlikely that tomorrow morning, after he has taken a warm bath, his cognac and soda water, coffee and one or two after breakfast drams, [I shall] again hear him discoursing, as I did this morning, with indignant eloquence on “the mockery of justice, the debasement of the ermine, the ignorance of law, the degrading demagogueism, the abominable infidelity by——!” of a recent decision of a Court with regard to the rights of colored people in public conveyances, reported in a San Francisco newspaper. In twenty minutes he will have made use of words primarily prepared for him by Saxon, Roman, Greek, Sanscrit and I know not what other brains. Then again he will pass under my window humming a hymn of Handel, or I shall find him at the Post Office sitting in an arm chair, made for him in New Hampshire, and reading a novel first written in France, translated in England and printed for him in Boston. He will have been served before the day is over by your work and by mine and by that of thousands of other men, and yet will think of nothing so often or so intensely as the “cursed luck” by which he is served no better. And what will he do for us? Playa game of billiards with you or take a hand at cards if you want amusement, and if he wins money in this or any other way of speculating he will use it “generously.” Within a year by pledging his word to drink no more he induced a poor hard worked widow to become his wife, having been previously the father of several children of different colors for [whose] maintenance or education he has never worked an hour or concerned himself a moment. He is [a] tall and large framed white man of English stock, born in a state of society which he speaks of [as] “the highest reach of civilization.”

While I see no other men but these, I am reminded of two others by hearing the strokes of an axe and the dull rap of a hammer. The first comes from a Chinese servant preparing wood for the baker’s oven over the way, the other from a crippled German shoemaker. These two men again I at once range together and very far above the Indian and the Fruit of civilization—not, perhaps more than half way to the higher [659]notches—yet, not a majority of my neighbors stand higher than these two steady, plodding, short-sighted, frugal workers. But it is not industry, nor well-balanced demand and supply, nor sobriety and inoffensiveness only that I lay to the scale. There is some general quality which these lie back of and support perhaps, but which I look most for and find feeble in the stolid German and weazen Chinaman.

Trying one man and another and reflecting upon what it is in each that sets him high or low in my scale, I come to the conclusion that the highest point on my scale can only be met by the man who possesses a combination of qualities which fit him to serve others and to be served by others in the most intimate, complete and extend[ed] degree imaginable. Shall we call it communitiveness? Then I find not merely less of a community but less possibility of community, of communitiveness, here among my neighbors of all kinds than in any other equal body of men, I ever saw. And the white men, the Englishmen, the Germans, and other civilized men do not possess [it] often in as high degree as the Mexicans, Chinese and negroes—nor do the good men always possess as much of it as the rogues, the wild-fellows.

Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, says Mr Mayhew in London Labor & London Poor, there are but two distinct and broadly marked races, namely, the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen, the nomadic and the civilized tribes.

I believe this in the main to be a true statement and that a similar division may be made of every so called civilized community. Every now and then we find in an Eastern society an Indian who lives peaceably and industriously, who has adopted the usual fashions and manners of the community very closely and who respects and obeys the laws as a good citizen. Yet those who know this man thoroughly are generally aware that the Indian propensities and habits remain and are really stronger than usual with him because of the prolonged suppression to which they have been subject. Occasionally in a furtive solitary way he gives rein to them. After a time, in many cases, he will suddenly, at what appears to be a great sacrifice, abandon whatever he has gained as a citizen, part from his friends, make his way to the frontier or to some other opportunity for escaping from the restraints of organized society and for the indulgence of his independent, vagabond, deep seated proclivities. White men brought up in mature communities are to be found with much the same proclivities. Under favorable circumstances they may be controlled and obtain little attention; under other circumstances they make men gamesters, filibusters and, whatever their ostensible profession or calling, speculators. If they are industrious it is in some irregular, unmethodic way, involving so much risk, guess work and shifts that on the whole it causes more embarrassment than it contributes assistance to the methods by [660]which the community altogether advances in prosperity.

Such men are not solitary in their habits, they are by no means incapable of love, of generosity, of magnanimity; of staunch fidelity to friends or to the trusts which they assume. They enjoy the fruits of civilization, and are often extraordinarily covetous of them. But they seem to be incapable of catholic relationships or of faith in the existence of a unity of interests between themselves and any others to whom they are not bound by some special tie or assurance of sympathy. They are not disinclined to have a few chums; they can extend their chumming for special purposes so as to include a band. They are most thorough-going partisans. They are capable of strong family attachments and they can extend the chumming relation and the family relation and the partisan relation so as to include their tribe, clan or race, so far as the interests of tribe, clan or race may appear to be in conflict with those of others with whom they have no similar relationships. But aside from these ties which are all commonly very strong with the lowest savages, their instincts or intuitions toward other men seem to be those of beasts toward other beasts, as if their only interest in them could be as towards objects of prey or of preying.

I have been most struck by evidences of this characteristic in men who were most attractive from their boldness, tender heartedness and general natural nobleness.

This quality is the result of education and being transmitted like other educated intuitions from parent to child constantly gains ground in communities which are advancing in civilization. In communities falling back in civilization it diminishes.

It is very strongly impressed upon me that the representatives of all the older communities whom I find living together and constituting whatever there is that can be properly called a new community here were much behind the general state of advancement of those older communities when they came out from them, in respect to this quality, and that the most advanced are here falling back very rapidly.

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[The following section is an alternate—and probably earlier—version of Olmsted’s discussion of the Kentucky gambler,. the Indian, and the German shoemaker in relation to his standard for measuring civilization.]

[42: 292–300] . . . And I see a roof under which there lives a crippled German shoemaker with a dark haired wife and one little girl who has learned to read English and who speaks three languages brokenly—a man who renders more good service to the rest of the world in a day than the Kentuckian in a year, yet the shoemaker is the more [661]contented and his requirements appear to be less than those of the gambler.

[The red-man is a better man physically than the German; he is a better man morally than the Kentuckian, idle but less idle, treacherous but less sophistical.]

The Indian has choice in his food, preferring to drive the dogs away from the carcass of a mule and to take the trouble to tear off the less tough parts wherewith to satisfy his hunger, rather than to stuff his stomach with clover heads or acorns or clay, either of which he will do if no dead mule or other matter of preference is conveniently near when hunger comes upon him. He has a choice where he shall sit; he has a choice in what shelter he shall lodge; he has a choice as to his garments, he measures time by moons and days and more vaguely, by the eighth part of days, holding his hand toward one or another quarter of the heavens, he even has a choice in colors, as his painted face shows, he will make a noise and move his legs for a glass of whiskey, in a manner that shows he has ideas of tones and of movements which are vaguely elemental to the civilized ideas of music and dancing. In all these matters he takes some trouble and does a little work on account of his choice. He will spend an hour or two in building a hut, he will turn over a stone to get a smoother seat, and there are several days’ labor and skill that must have been acquired by somewhat careful practice, shown in his bow and arrows.

Thus I see even in the savage the germ of the same requirements which in their more mature & elaborate form are met by civilized homes, by the raiment, the easy chairs, the food, the picture galleries, the opera houses, the chronometers and the ironclad-armed steamships of civilization. In his few words and in his “blazes” on the tree trunks whereby he shows those who follow him whither he has gone, I see the germ of the printing press and the telegraph.

It is plain that the requirements and impulses or motives to exertion of the civilized man are the same with those of the savage but the former have been educated or drawn out more elaborately than the latter.

But why do we regard the shoemaker as a more civilized man than the gambler, when the gambler’s requirements have evidently been educated more elaborately than those of the shoemaker? The most obvious difference between them is that while the gambler’s requirements are more fully educated than that of the shoemaker, the shoemaker’s capacity for serving other men is more fully educated than that of the gambler.

Yet in knowledge, in knowledge of history for example, in knowledge of the laws, in knowledge of theology, the gambler’s education has been much more elaborate than the shoemaker’s. In capacity to make rapid calculations, to average chances; in capacity of memory, in capacity [662]of language, the gambler is far more educated than the shoemaker. The gambler has skill which rightly directed would enable him to serve others more than the shoemaker.

Again the shoemaker could not as well resist the attack of a bear, or of cold or heat, as the Indian; and with the bow and arrow the Indian has far greater skill or more educated capacity than the shoemaker.

Shall we say that in applying the scale of civilization to these three men then, we measure their capacities with relation to their effectiveness in serving civilized requirements?

Our analysis is still obviously incomplete. For example; by perjury or other means, the gambler might have the shoemaker sent to jail, or the Indian might set his house on fire, and destroying the tools and materials with which he works render his capacities in a great degree ineffective for serving civilized requirements, yet we should not then at once consider him less civilized than before.

It also appears that the faculties of our more advanced example of civilization are educated less effectively even than those of the savage in this respect. Detach them both from all other men and the shoemaker would be in want of food under circumstances wherein the savage would have plenty. It is in effectiveness for meeting certain requirements of other men, that is to say in making shoes for them, that the civilization appears. And it is by means of this service of the civilized requirements of others that the shoemaker’s own civilized requirements are served.

The shoemaker’s effectiveness in meeting civilized requirements then could not be measured if the requirements of his community were insufficient to test his effectiveness in supplying shoes. Nor again could the education of his own requirements be tested if the community was ineffective to provide him with the means of meeting his requirements, in exchange for that which he offered for the supply of the requirements of the community.

The civilization of a community then is to be tested by the effectiveness with which the means of satisfying the educated requirements of men are offered to each individual in exchange for the means of satisfying those requirements which each individual offers the community.

Whatever then interferes either with the education of individuals in civilized requirements, whatever interferes with the effectiveness of individuals in meeting the civilized requirements of the community or of the community in meeting the civilized requirements of individuals, interferes with civilization and is uncivilized. Whatever destroys means of [663]satisfying civilized requirements is uncivilized, unless by the destruction of these means others are formed of equal effectiveness. Whatever hinders the exchange of means of satisfying the civilized requirements between those producing them and those requireing them, is uncivilized. Thus it is the want of civilization of the indians that so frequently interrupts the overland mails, that decimates the emigrant parties, that destroys the merchants’ trains and that prevents agricultural settlements in large districts of Northern Mexico.

But let us take a case or two less generally recognized in our common talk. We have here a class of men called Pikes, so denominated from a frontier county of that name in Missouri, which has been a chief nursery of them, though many of ours come from Arkansas and Texas. They are mostly teamsters and are universally regarded by other white men as of the lowest measure of civilization among our white population. A few months after I came here I was driving with a Virginian in a light carriage along a road which for a distance of a mile passed through a gulch or gorge of the hills with precipitous banks on each side. Here we overtook two waggons each drawn by six pair of half starved oxen, moving at a snail’s pace, but raising such clouds of dust as I have seen nowhere else in the world but in the slate districts of California. It was late in the day and we had yet thirty miles to make before we could feed our horses. Following us and soon coming up there came another light carriage in which was a woman taking her first airing after a severe illness of several months. There were frequent openings where, if the cattle had been stopped or turned a little one side, we might have passed. As the wind now and then whiffed aside the dust, we could see the teamsters and it was plain they saw us sometimes holding back for fresh air, sometimes driving up in hopes of getting by them, but not the slightest move did they make to enable us to get by so that we had to follow them for fully twenty minutes, till we reached a fork where we could turn away.

“Now those fellows are Pikes,” said my companion, “and they would let us follow them all day before they would stop a moment to accommodate us.”

“Can’t we make them turn out for a moment in some way?”

“There is only one way to do it, and I reckon they carry more guns than we do.”

Once when arriving from Europe in New York, I was driving in a hackney coach up the wharf at which the steamer landed, I was stopped by a drayman who had just turned his horse’s head so as to obstruct the narrow way. I, at once, stepped out and going to him, said,“Will you oblige me turning your horse so that I can pass?”

“No, I won’t.”

“I have just landed off the steamer from Liverpool, and am anxious [664]to get to the four o’clock boat for ——, so that I can reach my family tonight. It is now ten minutes to four, and if I am delayed I shall be obliged to remain here twenty four hours.“

“What the hell is that to me.”

“You refuse to do it?”

“Of course I do.” I looked in vain for a policeman.

“Then you will allow me to do it.”

“I’ll knock your head off if you do.”

What we call the manners of the Pike and the New York “rowdy,” as thus illustrated, are uncivilized for the same reason that arson and burglary, Indian robbery and Malay piracy are uncivilized. And so, if we apply this rule, always, in all society, whether of the wigwam or the drawing room, the dead-fall or the House of Lords, arrogance and servility, cautious reserve and careless presumption, are alike uncivilized, in so far as they have the effect of restricting or increasing the difficulties of a free exchange of services whether of commerce, or friendship, or civility, and thus of restraining the development of individual capacities of service and of the education of the requirements of service.

A rich miser in London is likely to be a less civilized and a more barbarous man than most savages in the wilderness. A despot, a tyrant, a swindler, a gambler, a tradesman who gives short measure, a thief, a demagogue, each in his way lacks civilization, and obstructs civilization. The laws, the customs, the churches, the schools, the roads, the houses, the books, the professions, the trades, the “classes” of any people, are more or less civilized in proportion to their effectiveness in leading to the development and useful appropriation of each man’s special combination of faculties and to his facility of imparting the results thereof to others and receiving and making use for the satisfaction of his own requirements of the results of other men’s doings, past and cotemporary.

Thus in all communities, even in those most civilized, besides the men who are recognized as active enemies of civilization and whose attacks are resisted by that part of the machinery of civilization, termed the law, there are also many more who are less distinctly the enemies of civilization, men who aid in supplying the wants of the community but who do so dishonestly, unfairly, takeing or trying to take more than a fair compensation for their services. Such are all men who give false measure, or who adulterate or hide the defects of their goods or who render eye-service. As men advance in the education of civilization, the law of competition acts in counteraction of these evils, and the tendency of civilization is on the whole to honesty and fair dealing. That honesty is the best policy, in all civilized dealings between men, is a maxim, faith in which grows with civilization. But as the advance of a nation in civilization tends to diffuse wealth and knowledge and to remove the distinctive lines between the more and the less civilized classes, the more civilized [665]classes suffer more directly from the dishonesty of the less civilized, and thus there appears to be the anomaly of an advancing civilization with an increase of fraudulent practices. The appearance is deceptive, however; it is simply an evidence of the increasing community of interests.

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[42: 303–5] One measure of civilization is a measure of the extent and diversity of the civilized communication. Two men, living together and having no intercourse with others, cannot live in a highly civilized way because the division of employment between them cannot be great enough to provide employment for each fitting to his peculiar natural assortment of faculties. But in any thousand men, there may be one fit for some peculiar employment wherein he can be of peculiar service to all the others, as by inventing an engine or composing a story or a song. He may be qualified but very poorly for anything else, and it may be disagreeable to him and to them that he should be employed in anything else. He may be quite unfit and sure to be unsuccessful and to work mischief in any of the employments in which the others can be useful and happy. If then these thousand men are well-civilized, it will be easy for him to make his way in that peculiar employment for which he alone is peculiarly fitted. If they are barbarous, he will be despised and starve. The more men are constrained by others or by difficulties of intercourse with others from following their natural bent, the cruder is the civilization. [Hence in proportion as a community is civilized each member of it does that by which he can best meet the general demand and the general demand is met by those best able to meet it, while those who do most to meet the general demand find their own individual demands, however complex, best supplied.] Thus civilization requires men to forecast carefully the course by which each can best serve others and to keep steadily to that course; hence one of the chief distinctive habits of the civilized man is that of providing for himself by a sustained and prearranged method of providing something for others. Hence men who live in an uncivilized manner within a civilized community are termed vagabonds or vagrants, that is wanderers who do not provide for themselves by any fixed or sustained method of providing something for others. Their talents, whatever they are, are not under civilized control. They are dissipated in the attempt to live without thought of other men’s wants or fixed method of providing for them.

Intemperance (I do not mean intemperance in the use of stimulants merely, but including that form of intemperance) is characteristic of uncivilized men; temperance, of civilized men. The aboriginal savage of America, and I believe of all other kinds, is more like a wild beast than a civilized man in his habits of eating. He suffers less when straitened for [666]food, is less nice in his selection and puts no constraint upon his feeding when opportunity offers until his stomach will contain no more. With all his natural desires he is commonly equally intemperate. So when he has once acquired the appetite for intoxicating drinks, he makes himself dead drunk at every opportunity. He has no conception of the proper use of stimulants, but only asks for them that he may abuse them. Among men growing in civilization, habits of self constraint and temperance—of useing good things without abusing them—become stronger and stronger. With men lapsing from civilization, intemperance, imprudence and laxity of self control increase. This is generally most readily seen in the disposition to intoxication, but not only in that. It may [be] observed in language, in manners, & in all the habits.

[42: 307] The reverse of this is found where men by excessive application of certain means of giving & receiving what is desirable of others, give and receive less than they otherwise might do on the whole of that which is desireable, waste by suppression being equally uncivilized with waste by dissipation. The degree of civilization which exists with any people corresponds with the degree of economy with which the natural capacities of that people are used. Civilized men are, therefore, more virtuous than barbarians, for the economical exercise of any quality is a virtue, the improvident exercise of any quality, a vice. The virtues of firmness and self-control, for instance, are the prudent exercise of qualities, in the imprudent exercise of which consists the vices of obstinacy and insensibility. As abstinence from the use of anything which when prudently used is gratifying, deducts from the total amount of that which is desireable which men are qualified to make use of, asceticism and profligacy are alike wasteful and defalcative, alike barbarous or uncivilized.

[42: 303] A savage is not suited with the customs of civilization because they require of him a power of self restraint in the exercise of his inclinations, in a manner or under circumstances which would make their exercise directly or indirectly inconsistent with what is desireable for others. For the same reason a thief or a bigamist when sent to prison by civilization, or a vagrant when sent to the workhouse, a demagogue when beaten at the ballot, an ambitious rebel when brought to the gallows, an impertinent dandy when snubbed, all are dissatisfied with the requirements of civilization. So too the lazy school-boy, the indolent housemaid, the careless workman, are apt to be discontented with the requirements of civilization.

On the other hand a woman sickened by a smoker with whom she is compelled to travel in a stage coach may properly complain of his want of civility or civilization. But if both are on a railway train, the [667]smoker may himself properly complain of the lack of civilized accommodation which compels him either to deny himself the gratification of his inclination to smoke or to sicken a woman. Thus the introduction of smoking apartments on railway trains marks an advance in civilization, if the comfort or free exercise of the inclinations of all is on the whole increased by it.

[42: 308–11] The wants of the savage are simple and he is able to supply them with little assistance from others. What he requires from others he obtains by compulsion more than by exchange of service. The first influence of civilization upon the savage is seen in the increase of his wants and by his offers of service in exchange for the supply of his wants.

The wants of the civilized man are complex and he is able to supply but few of them without assistance from others. What he requires from others he obtains by offering some service which he is more able than they to perform.

The requirements or impulses of the civilized man have been educated more elaborately than those of the savage, while his capacities for meeting the human requirements and answering to the human impulses have also been more elaborately educated than those of the savage.

But how can we measure degrees of education? I find myself regarding the German shoemaker as a more civilized man than the Kentucky gambler, though the demands of the latter seem to be much greater than those of the former. The difference between them is that the shoemaker regularly gives in exchange for what he demands of others a return of his own services. His disposition manifests itself not merely in having his wants more completely satisfied but in working more completely for that satisfaction by methods which tend to the greater satisfaction of other men’s wants.

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[42: 107–10] There are many cases in which men exhibit extraordinary capacity in certain respects for serving their community, who yet fail to serve it or be served by it as well as others simply because they are themselves not civilized. Civilization is not moral disposition but a condition of mind and of circumstances favorable to the development of this disposition in wise industry, benevolence and the working out of happiness extensively and soundly. In other words, civilization is or leads to a wise education or drawing out and making available of the natural capacities or virtuous disposition.

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For instance, a man was once pointed out to me as being gifted with extraordinary taste and skill in the arrangement of colors. He was employed in making designs for a manufacturer. “No other man I have tried,” said his employer, “can combine colors, with ever so much study, as pleasingly as he can apparently without any deliberation at all, but he can never be made to be careful in measurements; his work has constantly to be done over after him by others; he never finishes it well; he is never punctual or exact; nor can he be depended on to keep his promises; he is tricky.” So infact he earns much less than any man of ordinary taste in colors and facility of working who is disposed to work steadily, honestly and painstakingly. This was in England. The man afterwards came to America, leaving a wife and child unprovided for, and had not been long here before he was arrested for obtaining money on false pretences from a gentleman who, from regard to his artistic ability, had helped him to obtain employment.

So some lawyers have a gift of eloquence who are not at all successful in their profession because they habitually neglect to thoroughly study their cases or because they lack persistent method in their service to others.

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[42: 643–74] The experience and reflection spoken of in the last chapter has led me to enquire as far as the means here at my command would allow me to go, what has been the general average condition in respect to those qualities which mark advancement in the scale of civilization of the emigrants from whose loins this nation has sprung. In the light of what I have seen here and in Texas it appears to me that it has been much lower than is generally realized.

The whole number of emigrants may be considered under two heads; those who have been driven out of their fatherlands and those who have chosen to go from them.

Withdrawing from the class of voluntary emigrants those who soon returned or for other reasons failed to leave families in the permanent settlements, nothing is more certain than that the voluntary emigrants were generally from the poorer classes of English Society, that they were mostly very ignorant and credulous and were often moved by romantic and fallacious expectations. In this respect we must remember that while we are still subject to crazy schemes and wild excitements, on the whole the civilized world is constantly growing less exciteable, less prone to yield to tides of the imagination and that nothing has occurred in our time which will enable us to fully realize how crazy men were made a few hundred years ago by dreaming of what might be found in “the New World.” A large fleet of vessels was once fitted out to bring the soil of Labrador to London because it was rumored to be full of gold and whole shiploads of dirt were actually brought to London from various points in New England and the Southern colonies under the conviction that a proper apparatus was only needed to get out of it untold wealth to the speculators. Among thousands of ridiculous phantasies which passed current for years as sober facts even among men of substance and learning, one was the story that the river Roanoke had its rise on the banks of [670] the Pacific Ocean; that it flowed through a country abounding in gold and inhabited by a nation of gold refiners who possessed a stately capital city surrounded by a glistening wall inlaid with pearls. So firmly grounded was this notion that Sir Ralph Lane sent out a company expressly to go up the Roanoke, and find the city, and although it was with the greatest difficulty any headway could be made against its current, the adventurers persevered until, after having eaten their dogs, they were forced by starvation to return. Even Governor Smith once pushed his way as far as possible up the Chickahominy Creek, imagining that it was a channel of approach to a mythical land of gold in the South Seas. Sir Thomas Dale, even after he had passed through great hardships, was so far from being cured of the American fever that he deliberately and formally reported to a council in London in regard [to] the James River country, “Take four of the best Kingdoms in Christendom and put them all together, they may no way compare with this country, either for commodities or goodness of soil.” And Lord Deleware and Sir Thomas Gates “earnestly confirmed” all that Dale wrote. The nasty, brutal and treacherous savages were described as “gentle, loving and faithful” men, “void of all guile, such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”

Such being the accounts published and credited by the wealthy and more educated, sober, cautious and respectable adventurers, the delusions of the smaller fry were of course much more preposterous. Nothing indeed was too absurd to be asserted and credited, and the mines of Peru and Mexico, associated with the fruits of the West Indies and the fisheries of New Foundland, were all placed together in New England, Virginia, Carolina or Georgia by the enterprising emigrant agents of those days, as it successively suited their purpose, according to the destination of the ship next to sail.

It must be considered that in the seventeenth century, when more than in any other period the character of the population of the Atlantic Colonies was established, the ordinary home condition of the larger part of the English people, was much more wretched and their ignorance, excitability and vice much greater than at present and that they were correspondingly more easily induced to take the risks of any enterprise that promised a great change.

Macaulay says that “the greater part of the people lived on rye, barley and oats.” Laboring men could earn only from sixpence to ten-pence a day without food, and great numbers were forced to depend on * [671]begging, gambling, thieving or robbing, for the means of supporting life. A large part of all the North of England, including Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, “was down to the eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism.” And of Northumberland he says that within the memory of some whom this generation has seen the sportsman who wandered there found “a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of California,” and though these terms barbarous and savage would be much too strong to apply to the great majority of the industrious classes who formed the bulk of the rest of the nation, it would be equally an error to regard them as advanced above the simplest elementary steps of civilization.

Under the head of involuntary emigrants come the Plymouth Pilgrims, the Roman Catholic settlers of Maryland, the earlier Quakers, and a few Huguenots and others. I have no means of estimating the number of all those who actually came to America because of the persecution to which they were subject at home, but I think their importance numerically, when compared with those who were driven out for reasons which justified their being dealt with as pests of society, is commonly very greatly exaggerated. The exportation of criminals to America began before the first Pilgrims embarked, the first hundred having been drafted from the Bridewell prison by order of the King in 1619 and shipments having been subsequently made at frequent intervals down to the period of the revolution. The number sent to Maryland alone in a single year is mentioned at three hundred and fifty. But if we had full statistics of all those regularly transferred from the prisons to the ships by formal order of the authorities, it would give us little idea of the whole number of those driven out on account of their offences against society. It was only a small portion of these who passed through the jails. For every crime that is formally punished there are even now hundreds probably of which the law takes no formal account, and this was formerly much more the case. In all old communities there is a large class of people who, because they have been brought up to no regular means of serving the community, or, if they have, have abandoned it, are justly considered as disreputable and suspicious, although they do not follow what in the eye of the law are distinctly criminal occupations, like the regular thieves. Such are many of the London “Swell-mob,” “horse’ chaunters,” fair and race-course swindlers, blacklegs, persons who aid in the disposal of stolen and smuggled goods and poachers’ game, thimble riggers and other gamblers, prize-fighters, quacks and other imposters, pawn-brokers and disreputable insurers, prostitutes and procuresses. These people, so long as they are deterred from crime, are so mainly from a consideration of the risks of engaging in it. Only when opportunities are presented to them which they think quite safe, or where the prospect of an extraordinary reward for a crime overweighs their caution, do they become legal criminals. Probably most crimes are committed by this class, its members being so [672]much more numerous than the “professional criminals.” In a great many cases such cautious and irregular criminals, immediately upon the commission of a crime, turn emigrants and many of them, though few in proportion to all, thus escape the police. Mr. Dickens in “Great Expectations” shows how such persons, in very many cases, manage even if arrested to avoid the penalty of the law by perjury and other means.

When they do so, however, they return to their old occupations, if at all, at disadvantage. Thenceforth they really stand in the criminal class before society and in the convictions of the officers of the law. They are watched therefore and guarded against; others have taken their places in their various disreputable occupations, which it thus becomes more difficult for them to resume, and for these reasons if for no others they are often forced to look to fields where they can “begin life” again free from these inconveniences. Of such fields, those presented in America have been the most cheaply and quickly reached. The same influences have always acted in still stronger degree to favor emigration to America, with such of these occasional and accidental lawbreakers as are convicted, when they escape or are discharged from jail, prison, convict ship or colony.

A convict writing for the Cornhill Magazine says of professional thieves:

Just consider the position of one of these men on leaving prison, what modes of life present themselves to him? Too-regular employment, which, hateful in itself, promises the most galling annoyances, coupled with returns quite inadequate to his wants; and his old loved familiar employment of skilled theft, which presents to him a picture of easy circumstances, unrestrained self-indulgence, and pleasant approving companionship, And will this man, the very curse of whose life is, that he has never restrained himself in the least thing from his childhood—the whole of whose life is the weakest self-indulgence—choose what is difficult and hateful, and unremunerative, when he can obtain what is in his idea the most enjoyable life, by a few successful strokes in a game in which defeat is so rare with him as to be hardly worth a thought? It cannot be expected. . . . What he looks at is, not the penalty of the law, but the activity of the police, He leaves off garrotting, not because of the Act of 1863, but because so much public attention has been called to it; just as he studiously avoids committing murder, not because the penalty is death, but because the police will be more active in pursuit; because, in short, he knows that twenty burglars escape for one murderer. He may, as he grows older, if he has sufficient self-restraint to amass capital enough to set up in business, retire from the more active line of the profession, because he well knows that either for his own crime or that of others he is sure to suffer in the long run; but in the meantime he pays no regard to increased penalties for one offence or [673]another. He simply calculates the chances of success, and acts on his calculation without looking beyond. Mere accumulation of penalties is therefore idle; and with the skilled town thief, with London at his feet, you must trust for success to moral influences alone.

Think what the attractions of a country supposed to be wonderfully rich, yet in which law & social order are scarcely begun to be established, are to such a man. But if so to him, how much greater to a man who has long been thoroughly criminal in character but who has for years avoided provoking the action of the law, when at last having placed himself in danger he finds he has slipped through the hands of those he considers his natural enemies. Says the writer last quoted: “There is only one sort of life from which they have ever found any enjoyment. . . and to that life they will assuredly return.” Nearly all of that which is essential to this enjoyment is offered them in the excitement of pioneer adventure in countries where law & social order are not yet established at least not rigidly effective, and for every convicted criminal who resorts to these, there are hundreds who do so to avoid conviction, or to follow their inclinations free from the caution which the fear of conviction before the law inspires.

Mr. Sala, in Captain Dangerous{?), says of the 18th century. “In those days all our plantations were full of the scum and riff-raff of our English towns. ’Twas as though you had let Fleet Ditch, dead dogs and all, loose.”

De Foe in Moll Flanders says of the 17th century that “the greatest part of the inhabitants” of Virginia were of two sorts, “either first, such as are brought over by Masters of Ships to be sold as servants, or, second, such as are transported after having been found guilty of crimes punishable with death.” “ ’Tis that cursed place [Newgate] that half peoples this colony.”

Smith says in his autobiography, that in the first three ship loads of emigrants to Virginia there were not two dozen men who had ever done an honest day’s work in their lives, and in a letter to the treasurer of his Company in London he tells him that he would rather have thirty working men than “a thousand of such as we have.” Again he says: “They desired but to pack over so many as they could, saying necessity would make them get victuals for themselves, as for good laborers they were more useful in England.”

The first charter of the Colony of Georgia was granted expressly for the purpose of providing a place of refuge for the poor and unfortunate, but more especially for discharged prisoners, and Hewitt says:

The first embarkations of poor people from England, being collected from towns and cities, were found equally idle and useless members of society abroad as they had been at home.

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That the earlier emigration to the Carolinas was of the same character is well known.

The same qualities so distinctly predominate in the less vicious of the criminal class and the more forlorn of the voluntarily emigrating class, that it is evident that a large body of emigrants can be placed with neither class with any exactness. Take many petty defaulters, poor debtors, smugglers, poachers &c. for example. It is probably on account of the respite it has offered to the penalties of insolvency that for more than two centuries America has obtained the largest part of all the intelligent consideration it has had in Europe, but most debtors emigrating have given no more intelligent consideration to what the consequences were to be than Mr. Micawber gave to his prospects of being able to meet the obligations of his promissory notes at the moment of signing them.

It is an everyday occurrence in England, and in many other parts of Europe, that men guilty of crime, or hopelessly bankrupt, are saved from their legally appointed punishment, on condition of their emigration. Not only merciful individuals who have personally suffered, stay the hands of justice in this way, but magistrates themselves frequently do so; benevolent associations make a constant practice of it, and there are, I believe, even at this very day, societies in existence for the especial purpose.

That the ostensibly voluntary emigration from England has been recently influenced in this way, in any very important degree I will not undertake to say, but that both the ostensibly voluntary as well as the forced emigration of the earlier colonial period was largely made up from a class which failed to live in complete harmony with the laws through weakness and impersistency of purpose, I think that no one can doubt [675]who is acquainted with the ferocious character of the criminal jurisprudence of that period and who will take the trouble to imagine what must have been the influence upon most persons who were guilty of slight trespasses, of the terrible punishments which they knew that they were liable to be brought to suffer, so long as they remained in England.

A late English writer has said:—“If the French courts tortured criminals with fiendish violence and ingenuity for real crimes, the English courts put men to death for trifles with as much indifference as if they were drowning blind puppies in a stableyard.” Yet those who suffered death were a comparatively small number and men were committed to prison with even greater recklessness, while life in prison was often worse than death. Persons convicted of the smallest possible peculations or defalcations, or who, under whatever unexpected misfortune found themselves not able all at once to pay the smallest debts, were crowded into filthy dungeons in which the most frightful pestilences raged without check along with the most abandoned criminals. From these horrors not only were bankrupts saved in large numbers, by the influence of humane men who happened to know them, & who obtained their discharge upon condition that their immediate emigration to America should be provided for, but shoals of common criminals were also allowed to go on the same condition, without undergoing the forms of trial. Both classes rank in the records as voluntary emigrants. Every humane person who found another wronging him, was apt to say: “I want not to see you hanged or sent to jail to die of the plague; get you gone beyond seas, and I will forgive you.” And there were offices all over the Kingdom at which anyone, under these circumstances, could at once obtain board and lodging and early passage to America, on his simple obligation to work out the debt after reaching America, as a servant or “redemptioner,” for all the American colonies were bidding against each other for them and pressing inducements, honest and dishonest, to effect their purpose. A large number of men known as “spirits” were constantly employed in this duty who used unscrupulously all the arts of modern “emigrant runners” to excite the imagination and play upon the vagrant and gambling disposition of those whose attention they could engage. Their profit was the same whether they enlisted a good man or what Smith calls “a roarer” and their chief stations were naturally the gaming houses and tap-rooms.

The consequences of the methods used to stimulate emigration in the seventeenth century were certainly least deplorable in New England, but the wiser heads even there regarded them with grave apprehension. Governor Winslow, for instance, enumerated the chief sources of danger to be; “The vain expectation of present profit,” the ambition of [676]rulers, and “the lawlessness of those that send over supplies of men, not caring how they be qualified.”

Much that we call crime, and of that which, in self protection, civilized society deems it necessary to punish as crime, is, as we all acknowledge, simply the outworking and necessary result of a feeble will to live by what we call honest means. To steal or starve is often the alternative placed before a man and woman, not because of any positive viciousness, but because of ignorance, want of skill, or want of that degree of power in and balance of the intellectual faculties which makes the acquisition of skill and wisdom unusually difficult to them. Thus it is that in the criminal classes, and especially in those who are associated and treated by society with reluctance as a part of the criminal classes because of the conviction that they are less criminal than unfortunate, the qualities which I have asserted to be more commonly found with the voluntary emigrating classes than with the stable classes, are found in a particularly strongly marked degree. Whoever has had experience with them will at once recognize this fact. The same habits which distinguish the weaker criminal class, and which lead to their emigration, forced or voluntary, are the same habits which distinguish the milder savage tribes, and which prevent the possibility of their being allowed to live in the neighborhood of communities possessing a moderate degree of civilization.

An intelligent surgeon after having during a long voyage on a convict ship bound to Australia, made a professional study of the mental and moral condition of the prisoners, has stated his conclusions as follows:

The mental condition of a considerable number was certainly defective in a varying degree, from some slight aberration to nearly absolute imbecility. The ignorance and depravity of others, who had been reared to crime, were so great as almost to abrogate the power of conscience, or so to pervert its indications as to destroy all rule of life. A few had been driven, by excited passions, through a series of follies—too mild a term—until accident rather than inherent vice precipitated them into some criminal action. By far the largest proportion, however, had first acquired habits of intemperance, which, unsettling the reason in a similar degree to the physical structure, left no sound protecting power. If we add to the above a small number who were forced into crime by want of the necessaries of life, or by temptation in a moment of forgetfulness, we shall probably have a classification in which every convict could be arranged, in some degree, as the inmates of a lunatic asylum, according to their mental defects. There is this important difference, however, that while a majority of the patients in the one case are incurable, in the other they are nearly all susceptible of being restored to a correct frame of mind, by restraint and education.

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Whoever will examine a large collection of the photographic likenesses of criminals, as may be easily done at any Metropolitan Police centre, cannot but be struck with the evident intellectual debility expressed in their features. There is no quality so generally found among the criminal class as that sort of feebleness of will which prevents the acquirement or the practice of a regular civilized method of securing a livelihood by good offices to the community.

Hence I say that the fountain head of the American stream of civilization, to recur to the figure of Guizot, was not in the civilization of Europe, but in the uncivilization of Europe, that the stream drew off chiefly those elements of the European populations which were most inharmonious and unmanageable in its civilization—just as the streams setting to Texas in 18— and to California in 1850 drained off similar elements from our own Atlantic society, only in a greater degree.

Not that this stream of European barbarism was unmixed—that I do not say—but I do say that the more civilized elements of European society mingled in it very little, much less than seems to be generally assumed. How many of the middle and upper classes came to and became permanent settlers and fathers of America I know not, but take what estimate we may of it, we must still consider that it does not follow that men are civilized because they are of the middle and upper classes of English society even nowadays. The temptation to emigration operated also most strongly and readily upon the less civilized of these, and what these are we may form some idea by recurring to Macaulay: he says of the smaller gentry:

The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to a mittimus. If he went to school and to college he generally returned before he was twenty. . . . His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. . . . His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day.

This was the heir, the younger sons were less favored. The more fortunate of the latter, (of course the larger part of the “class”) were provided for with places in the church, and the army and navy. The parsons are described by Macaulay as generally miserably sycophantic servants of the squires.

What standing in civilization was needed in the army Mr. Sala shows in his account of the officers of a garrison in the West Indies. [678]

Captain This had been kicked out of a Charing Cross coffee-house for pocketing a punch-ladle while the drawer was not looking; Lieutenant That, who had been caned on the Mall for cheating at cards; and Ensign Tother who had been my lord’s valet, and married his madam [cast off mistress] for enough cash to buy a pair of colours withal. Military gentlemen of this feather used to serve in the West Indies in those days, and swagger about Kingston, as proud as peacocks.

Only when the doors to such society as this were closed upon them would even the younger sons of the country gentry be likely to begin to think of becoming colonists.

Men who have had the necessary qualities of character and ability to secure for themselves a moderately good education in old England or who had the good fortune to be educated by the will and at the expense of others seldom felt the temptation to emigrate. Those who did were mostly scapegraces, spendthrifts, gamblers and broken-down roues, incapable of governing themselves, wholly unfit to govern others.

Mr. Lever in Barrington represents two fortune hunters conversing in a London coffee-house. One proposes to go abroad,—he don’t much care whither—“to Persia, or perhaps to the Yankees.” “I always keep America for the finish,” says the other. “It is to the rest of the world, what the copper hell is to Crockford’s—the last refuge when one walks in broken boots and with low company.” And such has been the view of America taken by most young men of the higher class.

In the earlier condition of all the colonies & settlements, the choice of men fitted to undertake the simplest governmental duties was limited, but although the important offices consequently devolved for a period to some extent upon men not of the common quality; that it was notoriously to a very limited extent, even at the outset we must suppose from such statements as that of De Foe, who says that in Virginia: “Many a Newgate Bird becomes a Great Man, and we have several Justices of the Peace, Officers of the Train Bands and Magistrates of the Towns they live in that have been burned in the hand.””

Gradually individuals of the lower class were educated in sufficient numbers to perform all the duties of legislation and government, and the lower class of Englishmen and their children became more & more seperate and independent in this as in other respects of the higher class. In all the history of America to this day there have been few leaders of the people in Government, War, Art, Science, Literature, Benevolence or any other way, who have sprung from the educated, wealthy or gentle classes, or even the respectable common people of Europe. It appears to me that this fact has too much escaped consideration, that the United States has not only been mostly peopled by the offspring of a selection of [679]the weaker, the poorer, the more vagrant, the least valuable and the least civilized of the English people, but that this class has supplied its own leaders and led itself to be whatever it is. For whatever it is, small thanks will ever be due to the good offices of the gentlemen of England.