Nuts And Nutcrackers Part 13

And then, instead of suffering long-winded panegyrics from the member for Tiverton, how easily would the matter be comprehended in one line--"a good servant, lively, and intelligent, but self-sufficient, and apt to take airs. Turned off for quarrelling with the French valet next door, and causing a difference between the families."

Then again, how decisively the merits of a certain ex-chancellor might be measured in reading--"hired as butler, but insisted on cleaning the carriage, and scratched the panels; would dress the dinner, and spoiled the soup and burned the sauce; never attended to his own duties, but spent his time fighting with the other servants, and is in fact a most troublesome member of a household. He is, however, both smart and intelligent, and is allowed a small pension to wait on company days."

Trust me, this plan, if acted on--and I feel it cannot be long neglected--will do more to put pretension on a par with desert, than all the adjourned debates that waste the sessions; it would save a world of unblushing self-praise and laudation, and protect the country from the pushing impertinence of a set of turned-off servants.

A NUT FOR THE LANDLORD AND TENANT COMMISSION.

Every one knows the story of the man who, at the penalty of losing his head in the event of failure, promised the caliph of Bagdad that he would teach his a.s.s to read in the s.p.a.ce of ten years, trusting that, ere the time elapsed, either the caliph, or the a.s.s, or he himself, would die, and the compact be at an end. Now, it occurs to me that the wise policy of this shrewd charlatan is the very essence of all parliamentary commissions. First, there is a grievance--then comes a debate--a very warm one occasionally, with plenty of invective and accusation on both sides--and then they agree to make a drawn game of it, and appoint "a Commission."

Nothing can be more plausible in appearance than such a measure; nor could any man, short of Hume himself, object to so reasonable a proceeding as a patient and searching inquiry into the circ.u.mstances and bearings of any disputed question. The Commission goes to work: if a Tory one, consisting usually of some dumb country gentlemen, who like committee work;--if Whig, the suckling "barristers of six years'

standing:" and at it they go. The newspapers announce that they are "sitting to examine witnesses"--a brief correspondence appears at intervals, to show that they have a secretary and a correspondent, a cloud then wraps the whole concern in its dark embrace, and not the most prying curiosity is ever able afterwards to detect any one feet concerning the commission or its labours, nor could you hear in any society the slightest allusion ever made to their whereabouts.

It is, in feet, the polite mode of interment applied to the question at issue--the Commissioners performing the solemn duties of undertakers, and not even the most reckless resurrectionist being found to disturb the remains. Before the report should issue, the Commissioners die off, or the question has taken a new form; new interests have changed all its bearings; a new ministry is in power, or some more interesting matter has occupied the place it should fill in public attention; and if the Report was even a volume of "Punch," it might pa.s.s undetected.

Now and then, however, a Commission will issue for the real object of gleaning facts and conveying information; and then the duties are most uncomfortable, and but one course is open, which is, to protract the inquiry, like the man with the a.s.s, and leave the result to time.

In a country like ours, conflicting interests and opposing currents are ever changing the landmarks of party; and the commissioners feel that with years something will happen to make their labours of little consequence, and that they have only to prolong the period, and all is safe.

At this moment, we have what is called a "Landlord and Tenant Commission" sitting, or sleeping, as it maybe. They have to investigate diverse, knotty, and puzzling points, about people who want too much for their land, and others who prefer paying nothing for it. They are to report, in some fashion, respecting the prospects of estated gentlemen burdened with rent-charges and mortgages, and who won't improve properties they can scarcely live on--and a peasantry, who must nominally pay an exaggerated rent, depending upon the chance of shooting the agent before the gale-day, and thus obtaining easier terms for the future.

They are to investigate the capabilities of waste lands, while cultivated lands lie waste beside them; they must find out why land-owners like money, and tenants hate paying it; and why a people hold life very cheap when they possess little means to sustain it.

Now these, take them how you will, are not so easy of solution as you may think. The landlord, for his own sake, would like a thriving, well-to-do, contented tenantry; the tenants, for their sakes, would like a fair-dealing, reasonable landlord, not over griping and grabbing, but satisfied with a suitable value for his property. They both have no common share of intelligence and acuteness--they have a soil unquestionably fruitful, a climate propitious, little taxation, good roads, abundant markets; and yet the one is half ruined in his house and the other wholly beggared in his hovel--each averring that the cause lies in the t.i.thes, the tariff, the poor-rate, or popery, the agent or the agitation: in fact, it is something or other which one favours and the other opposes--some system or sect, some party or measure, which one advocates and the other denounces; and no matter though its influence should not, in the remotest way, enter into the main question, there is a grievance--that's something; and as Sir Lucius says, "it's a mighty pretty quarrel as it stands"--not the less, that certain partizans on either side a.s.sist in the _melee_, and the House of Commons or the a.s.sociation Hall interfere with their influence.

If, then, the Commissioners can see their way here, they are smart fellows, and no small praise is due to them. There are difficulties enough to puzzle long heads; and I only hope they may be equal to the task. Meanwhile, depopulation goes on briskly--landlords are shot every week in Tipperary; and if the report be but delayed for some few months longer, a new element will appear in the question--for however there may remain some pretenders to perpetuity of tenure, the landlords will not be there to grant the leases. Let the Commissioners, then, keep a look-out a-head--much of the embarra.s.sment of the inquiry will be obviated by only biding their time; and if they but delay their report till next November, there will be but one party to legislate for in the island.

A NUT FOR THE HUMANE SOCIETY.

If my reader will permit me to refer to my own labours, I would wish to remind him of an old "Nut" of mine, in which I endeavoured to demonstrate the defective morality and economy of our penal code--a system, by which the smallest delinquent is made to cost the state several hundreds of pounds, for an offence frequently of some few pennies in value; and a theft of a loaf is, by the geometrical scale of progressive aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, gradually swelled into a most expensive process, in which policemen, station-houses, inspectors, magistrates, sessions, a.s.sizes, judges, crown prosecutors, gaols, turnkeys, and transports, all figure; and the nation is left to pay the cost of this terrible array, for the punishment of a crime the prevention of which might, perhaps, have been effected for two-pence.

I do not now intend to go over the beaten track of this argument; my intention is simply to refer to it, and adduce another instance of this strange and short-sighted policy, which prefers waiting to acting, and despises cheap, though timely interference with evil, and indulges in the somewhat late, but more expensive process of reparation.

And to begin. Imagine--unhappily you need exercise no great stretch of the faculty, the papers teem with too many instances--imagine a poor, woe-begone, miserable creature, dest.i.tute and friendless, without a home, without a meal; his tattered clothing displaying through every rent the shrunken form and wasted limbs to which hunger and want have reduced him. See him as night falls, plodding onwards through the crowded thoroughfares of the great city; his lack-l.u.s.tre eye glazed and filmy; his pale face and blue lip actually corpse-like in their ghast-liness. He gazes at the pa.s.sers-by with the vacant stare of idiotcy. Starvation has sapped the very intellect, and he is like one in some frightful vision; a vague desire for rest--a dreamy belief that death will release him--lives in the place of hope; and as he leans over the battlements of the tall bridge, the plash of the dark river murmurs softly to his ear. His despair has conjured up a thousand strange and flitting fancies, and voices seem to call to him from the dull stream, and invite him to lie down and be at peace. Meanwhile the crowd pa.s.ses on. Men in all the worldliness of their hopes and fears, their wishes, their expectations, and their dreads, pour by. None regard _him_, who at that moment stands on the very brink of an eternity, whither his thoughts have gone before him. As he gazes, his eye is attracted by the star-like spangle of lights in the water. It is the reflection of those in the house of the Humane Society; and he suddenly remembers that there is such an inst.i.tution; and he bethinks him, as well as his poor brain will let him, that some benevolent people have called this a.s.sociation by this pleasing t.i.tle, and the very word is a balm to his broken heart.

"Humane Society!" Muttering the words, he staggers onwards; a feeling too faint for hope still survives; and he bends his wearied steps towards the building. It is indeed a goodly edifice; Portland stone and granite, ma.s.sive columns and a portico, are all there; and Humanity herself is emblematised in the figures which decorate the pedestal.

The man of misery stands without and looks up at this stately pile; the dying embers emit one sparky and for a second, hope brightens into a brief flicker. He enters the s.p.a.cious hall, on one side of which a marble group is seen representing the "good Samaritan;" the appeal comes home to his heart, and he could cry, but hunger has dried up his tears.

I will not follow him in his weary pilgrimage among the liveried menials of the inst.i.tution, nor shall I hara.s.s my reader by the cold sarcasm of those who tell him that he has mistaken the object of the a.s.sociation: that their care is not with life, but death; that the breathing man, alive, but on the verge of dissolution, has no interest for _them_; for _their_ humanity waits patiently for his corpse. It is true, one pennyworth of bread--a meal your dog would turn from--would rescue this man from death and self-murder. But what of that--how could such humble, un.o.btrusive charity inhabit a palace? How could it pretend to porters and waiting-men, to scores of officials, visiting doctors, and physicians in ordinary? By what trickery could a royal patron be brought to head the list of benefactors to a scheme so una.s.suming? Where would be the stomach-pumps and the galvanic batteries for science?--where the newspaper reports of a miraculous recovery?--where the magazine records of suspended animation?--or where that pride and pomp and circ.u.mstance of enlightened humanity which calls in chemistry to aid charity, and makes electricity the test of benevolence? No, no; the hungry man might be fed, and go his way unseen, untrumpeted--there would be no need of this specious plausibility of humanity which proclaims aloud--Go and drown yourself; stand self-accused and condemned before your Creator; and if there be but a spark of vitality yet remaining, we 'll call you back to life again--a starving suicide! No effort shall be spared--messengers shall fly in every direction for a.s.sistance----the most distinguished physician--processes the most costly--experiments the most difficult--care unremitting--zeal untiring, are all yours.

Cordials, the cost of which had sustained you in life for weeks long, are now poured down your unconscious throat--the limbs that knew no other bed than straw, are wrapped in heated blankets--the hand stretched out in vain for alms, is now rubbed by the jewelled fingers of a west-end physician.

Men, men, is this charity?--is the fellow-creature nought?--is the corpse everything?--is a penny too much to sustain' life?--is a hundred pounds too little to restore it? Away with your stuccoed walls and pillared corridors--support the starving, and you will need but little science to reanimate the suicide.