The Rev. Dr. Opindan. That is something, but it does not turn the scale.

_Mr. Gryll._ If they have given us no good, we have given them none.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ We have given them wine and cla.s.sical literature; but I am afraid Bacchus and Minerva have equally "Scattered their bounty upon barren ground."

On the other hand, we have given the red men rum, which has been the chief instrument of their perdition. On the whole, our intercourse with America has been little else than an interchange of vices and diseases.

_Lord Curryfin._ Do you count it nothing to have subst.i.tuted civilised for savage men?

_The Rev, Dr. Opimian._ Civilised. The word requires definition. But looking into futurity, it seems to me that the ultimate tendency of the change is to subst.i.tute the worse for the better race; the Negro for the Red Indian. The Red Indian will not work for a master. No ill-usage will make him. Herein he is the n.o.blest specimen of humanity that ever walked the earth. Therefore, the white man exterminates his race. But the time will come when by mere force of numbers the black race will predominate, and exterminate the white. And thus the worse race will be subst.i.tuted for the better, even as it is in St. Domingo, where the Negro has taken the place of the Caraib. The change is clearly for the worse.

_Lord Curryfin._ You imply that in the meantime the white race is better than the red.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I leave that as an open question. But I hold, as some have done before me, that the human mind degenerates in America, and that the superiority, such as it is, of the white race, is only kept up by intercourse with Europe. Look at the atrocities in their ships.

Look at their Congress and their Courts of Justice; debaters in the first; suitors, even advocates, sometimes judges, in the second, settling their arguments with pistol and dagger. Look at their extensions of slavery, and their revivals of the slave-trade, now covertly, soon to be openly. If it were possible that the two worlds could be absolutely dissevered for a century, I think a new Columbus would find nothing in America but savages.

_Lord Curryfin._ You look at America, doctor, through your hatred of slavery. You must remember that we introduced it when they were our colonists. It is not so easily got rid of. Its abolition by France exterminated the white race in St. Domingo, as the white race had exterminated the red. Its abolition by England ruined our West Indian colonies.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Yes, in conjunction with the direct encouragement of foreign slave labour, given by our friends of liberty under the pretext of free trade. It is a mockery to keep up a squadron for suppressing the slave-trade on the one hand, while, on the other hand, we encourage it to an extent that counteracts in a tenfold degree the apparent power of suppression. It is a clear case of false pretension.

_Mr. Gryll._ You know, doctor, the Old World had slavery throughout its entire extent; under the Patriarchs, the Greeks, the Romans; everywhere in short. Cicero thought our island not likely to produce anything worth having, excepting slaves;{1} and of those none skilled, as some slaves were, in letters and music, but all utterly dest.i.tute of both. And in the Old World the slaves were of the same race with the masters. The Negroes are an inferior race, not fit, I am afraid, for anything else.

1 Etiam illud jam cognitum est, neque argenti scripulum esse ullum in ilia insula, neque ullam spem praedae, nisi ex mancipiis: ex quibus nullos puto te literis aut musicis eruditos expectare.--Cicero: ad Attic.u.m, iv. 16.

A hope is expressed by Pomponius Mela, 1. iii, c. 6 (he wrote under Claudius), that, by the success of the Roman arms, the island and its savage inhabitants would soon be better known. It is amusing enough to peruse such pa.s.sages in the midst of London.--Gibbon: c. i.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Not fit, perhaps, for anything else belonging to what we call civilised life. Very fit to live on little, and wear nothing, in Africa; where it would have been a blessing to themselves and the rest of the world if they had been left unmolested; if they had had a Friar Bacon to surround their entire continent with a wall of bra.s.s.

_Mr. Falconer._ I am not sure, doctor, that in many instances, even yet, the white slavery of our factories is not worse than the black slavery of America. We have done much to amend it, and shall do more. Still, much remains to be done.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimiun._ And will be done, I hope and believe. The Americans do nothing to amend their system. On the contrary, they do all they can to make bad worse. Whatever excuse there may be for maintaining slavery where it exists, there can be none for extending it into new territories; none for reviving the African slave-trade. These are the crying sins of America. Our white slavery, so far as it goes, is so far worse, that it is the degradation of a better race. But if it be not redressed, as I trust it will be, it will work out its own retribution.

And so it is of all the oppressions that are done under the sun. Though all men but the red men will work for a master, they will not fight for an oppressor in the day of his need. Thus gigantic empires have crumbled into dust at the first touch of an invader's footstep. For petty, as for great oppressions, there is a day of retribution growing out of themselves. It is often long in coming. _Ut sit magna, tamen eerie lenla ira Deoruni est._{1} But it comes.

Raro anteccdentem scelestum Deseruit pede poena claudo.{2}

1 The anger of the G.o.ds, though great, is slow.

2 The foot of Punishment, though lame, O'ertakes at last preceding Wrong.

_Lord Curryfin._ I will not say, doctor, 'I've seen, and sure I ought to know.' But I have been in America, and I have found there, what many others will testify, a very numerous cla.s.s of persons who hold opinions very like your own: persons who altogether keep aloof from public life, because they consider it abandoned to the rabble; but who are as refined, as enlightened, as full of sympathy for all that tends to justice and liberty, as any whom you may most approve amongst ourselves.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Of that I have no doubt But I look to public acts and public men.

_Lord Curryfin._ I should much like to know what Mr. MacBorrowdale thinks of all this.

_Mr. MacBorrowdale._ Troth, my lord, I think we have strayed far away from the good company we began with. We have lost sight of Jack of Dover. But the discussion had one bright feature. It did not interfere with, it rather promoted, the circulation of the bottle: for every man who spoke pushed it on with as much energy as he spoke with, and those who were silent swallowed the wine and the opinion together, as if they relished them both.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ So far, discussion may find favour. In my own experience I have found it very absorbent of claret. But I do not think it otherwise an incongruity after dinner, provided it be carried on, as our disquisitions have always been, with frankness and good humour.

Consider how much instruction has been conveyed to us in the form of conversations at banquet, by Plato and Xenophon and Plutarch. I read nothing with more pleasure than their _Symposia_: to say nothing of Athenaeus, whose work is one long banquet.

_Mr. MacBorrowdale._ Nay, I do not object to conversation on any subject. I object to after-dinner lectures. I have had some unfortunate experiences. I have found what began in conversation end in a lecture. I have, on different occasions, met several men, who were in that respect all alike. Once started they never stopped. The rest of the good company, or rather the rest which without them would have been good company, was no company. No one could get in a word. They went on with one unvarying stream of monotonous desolating sound. This makes me tremble when a discussion begins. I sit in fear of a lecture.

_Lord Curryfin._ Well, you and I have lectured, but never after dinner.

We do it when we have promised it, and when those who are present expect it. After dinner, I agree with you, it is the most doleful blight that can fall on human enjoyment.

_Mr. MacBorrowdale._ I will give you one or two examples of these postprandial inflictions. One was a great Indian reformer. He did not open his mouth till he had had about a bottle and a half of wine. Then he burst on us with a declamation on all that was wrong in India, and its remedy. He began in the Punjab, travelled to Calcutta, went southward, got into the Temple of Juggernaut, went southward again, and after holding forth for more than an hour, paused for a moment. The man who sate next him attempted to speak: but the orator clapped him on the arm, and said: 'Excuse me: now I come to Madras.' On which his neighbour jumped up and vanished. Another went on in the same way about currency.

His first hour's talking carried him just through the Restriction Act of ninety-seven. As we had then more than half-a-century before us, I took my departure. But these were two whom topography and chronology would have brought to a close. The bore of all bores was the third. His subject had no beginning, middle, nor end. It was education. Never was such a journey through the desert of mind: the Great Sahara of intellect. The very recollection makes me thirsty.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ If all the nonsense which, in the last quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate.

_Lord Curryfin._ We have had through the whole period some fine specimens of nonsense on other subjects: for instance, with a single exception, political economy.

_Mr. MacBorrowdale._ I understand your lordship's politeness as excepting the present company. You need not except me. I am 'free to confess,' as they say 'in another place,' that I have talked a great deal of nonsense on that subject myself.

_Lord Curryfin._ Then, we have had latterly a mighty ma.s.s on the purification of the Thames.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Allowing full weight to the two last-named ingredients, they are not more than a counterpoise to Compet.i.tive Examination, which is also a recent exotic belonging to education.

_Lord Curryfin._ Patronage, it used to be alleged, considered only the fitness of the place for the man, not the fitness of the man for the place. It was desirable to reverse this.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ True: but--

'dum vitant stulli vitium, in contraria currunl.' {1}

1 When fools would from one vice take flight. They rush into its opposite.--Hor. Sal. i. 2, 24.

Questions which can only be answered by the parrotings of a memory crammed to disease with all sorts of heterogeneous diet can form no test of genius, taste, judgment, or natural capacity. Compet.i.tive Examination takes for its _norma_: 'It is better to learn many things ill than one thing well'; or rather: 'It is better to learn to gabble about everything than to understand anything.' This is not the way to discover the wood of which Mercuries are made. I have been told that this precious scheme has been borrowed from China: a pretty fountain-head for moral and political improvement: and if so, I may say, after Petronius: 'This windy and monstrous loquacity has lately found its way to us from Asia, and like a pestilential star has blighted the minds of youth otherwise rising to greatness.'{1}

1 Nuper ventosa isthaec et enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia commigravit, animosque juvenum, ad magna surgentes, veluti pestilenti quodam sidere afflavit.

_Lord Curryfin._ There is something to be said on behalf of applying the same tests, addressing the same questions, to everybody.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I shall be glad to hear what can be said on that behalf.

Lord Curryfin (after a pause). 'Ma.s.s,' as the second grave-digger says in _Hamlet_, 'I cannot tell.'

A chorus of laughter dissolved the sitting.

CHAPTER XX

ALGERNON AND MORGANA--OPPORTUNITY AND REPENTANCE--THE FOREST IN WINTER

Les violences qu'on se fait pour s'empecher d'aimer sont souvent plus cruelles que les rigueurs de ce qu'on aime.

--La Rochefoucauld.

The winter set in early. December began with intense frost. Mr.