But what, then, is man, whom mere accidental association for a few years can strip of the faculties inherent in his race and convert into a wolf? The lower animals retain their instincts in all circumstances. The kitten, brought up from birth on its mistress's lap, imbibes none of her tastes in food or anything else. It rejects vegetables, sweets, fruits, all drinks but water or milk, and although content to satisfy its hunger with dressed meat, darts with an eager growl upon raw flesh. Man alone is the creature of imitation in good or in bad. His faculties and instincts, although containing the germ of everything noble, are not independent and self-existing like those of the brutes. This fact accounts for the difference observable, in an almost stereotyped form, in the different classes of society; it affords a hint to legislators touching their obligation to use the power they possess in elevating, by means of education, the character of the more degraded portions of the community; and it brings home to us all the great lesson of sympathy for the bad as well as the afflicted—both victims alike of circumstances, over which they in many cases have nearly as little control as the wild children of the desert.
THE LITERATURE OF PARLIAMENT
The Imperial Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, in addition to its other varied and important functions, fulfils, through one of its branches, that of a great national book manufactory. Every session, the House of Commons issues a whole library of valuable works, containing information of the most ample and searching kind on subjects of a very miscellaneous character. These are the Blue-books, of which everybody has heard: many jokes are extant as to their imposing bulk and great weight, literally and figuratively; and a generation eminently addicted to light reading, may well look with horror on these thick and closely-printed folios. But, in truth, they are not for the mere reader: they are for the historian, and student of any given subject; they are storehouses of material, not digested treatises. True it is, that their great size sometimes defeats its object—the valuable portion of the material is sometimes buried under the comparatively worthless heap that surrounds it—the golden grains lost amid the chaff. But in a case of this kind, the error of redundancy is one on the safe side; let a subject in all its bearings be thoroughly and fully brought up, and it is the fault or failing of him who sets about the study of it, if he is appalled at the amount of information on which he has to work, or cannot discriminate and seize upon the salient points, or on those which are necessary for his own special purposes.
Few persons, we believe, who have not had occasion to consult these parliamentary volumes in a systematic manner, are at all aware of the immense labour that is bestowed upon them, and the care and completeness with which they are compiled and arranged. Indeed, we daresay few readers have any accurate notions of the actual number of parliamentary papers annually issued, or of the nature of their contents. From even a very cursory examination of the literary result of a parliamentary session, the previously uninformed investigator could not fail to rise with a greatly augmented estimate of the functions of the great ruling body of the state—the guarding and directing power in the multitudinous affairs of the British Empire—an empire that extends over every possible variety of country and climate, and includes under its powerful, yet mild and beneficent sway, tribes of every colour of skin, and of every shade of religious belief. Such a survey, in fact, tends to impress one more fully and immediately than could well be fancied, with the magnitude of the business of the British legislature, and the consequent weighty responsibilities imposed upon its members. But, great as the burden is, it is distributed over so many shoulders, that it appears to press heavily, and really does so, only on a few who support it at the more trying points.
The session 1851 is the latest of whose labours, as they appear in the form of parliamentary records, an account can be given. By the admirable system of arrangement we have referred to, each parliamentary 'paper,' whether it issues in the shape of a bulky Blue-book—that is to say, as a thick, stitched folio volume, in a dark-blue cover—or as a mere 'paper'—an uncovered folio of a single sheet of two or four pages, or several stitched together, but not attaining the dignity of the blue cover—is marked as belonging to a certain class; and when the issue of the session is complete, a full set of 'Titles, Contents, and Indexes' to the whole is supplied, so that they can all be classified and bound up in due order with the utmost ease and celerity. The Titles, Contents, and Indexes to the Sessional Printed Papers of Session 1851 are at present before us, in the shape of a folio Blue-book about an inch and a half thick, from which we think we may pick some facts of interest.
It must be premised, that the session 1851 was considered by politicians a peculiarly barren and unfruitful one, as the Great Exhibition, in conjunction with ministerial difficulties, and the monster debates on the Ecclesiastical Titles' Bill, tended greatly to impede the ordinary business of the Houses, and gave an air of tedium and languor to the whole proceedings. Nevertheless, the papers for the year amount to no less than sixty volumes! Of these, the first six contain Public Bills. A bill, as most of our readers must be aware, is a measure submitted to the consideration of parliament with the view of its being adopted into the legal code of the country, for which it must receive the sanction of both Houses and the assent of the crown. When a bill has 'passed' through the Lords and Commons, and received the royal assent, it becomes an 'act'—that is, a law. A bill, in passing through the Houses, is subjected to numerous amendments and alterations in form, and is often printed, for the use of members and other parties interested, three or four times after such alterations, before it comes forth in its final and permanent form as an act. Thus, the famous Ecclesiastical Titles' Bill is to be found in three several shapes among the bills before it reappears for the fourth time as an act. Again, the word 'public' prefixed to these six volumes of bills, reminds us of the vast amount of business that comes before parliament and its committees in the shape of 'private' bills, of which no record appears here. These are bills of special and individual application, such as when a public company seeks an act of incorporation, the possessor of an entailed estate desires to sell a portion of ground, a railway directory asks for powers of various kinds, and so on.
An examination of the contents of these six volumes would shew how many and diverse are the subjects that turn up in parliament in the course of a single and brief session; but to enter on it satisfactorily would require a great amount of space, and might, after all, be more tedious than profitable. A glance at those actually passed may suffice. These were 106 in number: the first is, 'An Act to amend the Passengers' Act of 1849;' and the hundred and sixth, 'An Act to appoint Commissioners to inquire into the Existence of Bribery in St Albans.' Besides the acts of an ordinary or routine character, we find the following among the subjects legislated on:—The Marine Forces, Leases for Mills in Ireland, Protection of Original Designs, the Protection of Servants and Apprentices, the Sale of Arsenic, Highways in Wales, Sites for Schools, Herring-Fishery, Prisons in Scotland, Common Lodging-Houses, Window and House Duties, Marriages in India, Ecclesiastical Titles, Smithfield Market, Settlement of the Boundaries of Canada and New Brunswick, Highland Roads and Bridges, Gunpowder Magazine at Liverpool, Management of the Insane in India, Lands in New Zealand, Representative Peers of Scotland, Emigration, Law of Evidence, Criminal Justice, &c.
Following the six volumes of bills, are fifteen volumes of Reports from Committees, which are again succeeded by nine volumes of Reports from Commissioners. These two sections of the literature of parliament form vast stores of material on an immense number of subjects, into which he who digs laboriously is sure to be rewarded in the end. They contain great masses of 'evidence,' extracted by the examinations of committees and commissioners from the parties believed to be best qualified to give correct and full information on the various subjects on which they are examined, and these opinions are supported by facts and authentic statements and statistics, invaluable to the investigator. The first volume of last year's Reports from Committees opens with that on the Edinburgh Annuity Tax, the fifteenth contains that on Steam Communications with India. There are four volumes on Customs, two on Ceylon, one on Church-rates, one on the Caffre Tribes, one on Newspaper Stamps, &c.; while other volumes contain Reports on the Property Tax, the Militia, the Ordnance Survey, Public Libraries, Law of Partnership, &c. From commissioners, we have Reports on Fisheries, Emigration, National Gallery, Public Records, Board of Health, Factories, Furnaces, Mines and Collieries, Education, Maynooth College, Prisons, Public Works, &c.
The fourth section of these parliamentary papers for 1851 amounts to thirty volumes, and consists of Accounts and Papers. It is in these that the statist finds inexhaustible wealth of material, long columns of figures with large totals, tables of the most complicated yet the clearest construction, containing a multiplicity of details bearing on the riches and resources of the empire in its most general and most minute particulars. Thus the first volume relates to 'Finance,' and includes the accounts of the Public Income and Expenditure, Public and National Debt, Income Tax, Public Works, and a vast variety of other subjects. The second volume is made up of the 'Estimates' for the Army, Navy, Ordnance, and 'Civil Services,' which includes Public Works, Public Salaries, Law and Justice, Education, Colonial and Consular Services, &c. The third volume is filled with Army and Navy Accounts and Returns. The next six volumes refer to the colonies, and consist of Accounts, Dispatches, Correspondence. The tenth is occupied with the subject of Emigration; and the eleventh with the Government of our Eastern Empire in all its vast machinery and complicated relations. The remaining volumes—for space would fail us to enumerate them in detail—treat of such subjects as the Census, Education, Convict Discipline, Poor, Post-office, Railways, Shipping, Quarantine, Trade and Navigation Returns, Revenue, Population and Commerce, Piracy, the Slave Trade, and Treaties and Conventions with Foreign States. Last of all, as volume sixty of the set, we have the Numerical List and General Index, itself a goodly tome of nearly 200 pages, compiled with immense care, and arranged so perspicuously as to afford the utmost facilities for reference.
These papers, as we have said, differ greatly in size. Some consist of but a single page, others swell up to volumes two or three inches thick, and of perhaps 2000 pages. As to the contents, the majority display a mixture of letterpress with tabular matter; and while some are wholly letterpress, others present an alarming and endless array of figures—filing along, page after page, in irresistible battalions. In many, valuable maps and plans are incorporated, with occasional designs for public works, &c.
Besides these returns and papers of permanent value, there are daily issued during the session programmes of the business of the day, entitled Votes and Proceedings, and containing a list of the subjects, the motions, petitions, bills, &c., that are to be brought before the House, according to 'the orders of the day.' These, and all the other papers issued by parliament, may be obtained regularly through 'all the booksellers,' by any person desiring to have them. Their prices are fixed; and in the case of the larger papers, the price is printed on the back of each. Copies of bills and returns may be had separately, on payment of these affixed prices; and indeed few parties require complete sets. Some public libraries take them, as do most of the London, and one or two provincial newspapers, by which the gentlemen of the press are enabled to compile the numerous articles and paragraphs with which all newspaper readers are familiar, and which usually begin: 'By a return just issued, we learn,' &c.; or: 'From a parliamentary paper recently printed, it appears,' &c. The public is often considerably indebted to the labours of newspaper men in regard to these papers, for the exigence of space, and the necessity of beating everything into a readable shape, require them to condense the voluminous details of the returns; and their sum and substance is thus given without any encumbering extraneous matter.
The cost of complete series of the papers varies from session to session, according to the number issued, ranging usually about L.12 or L.14.
LIGHTS FOR THE NIGHT
Unquestionably, darkness is disagreeable. Whether to manhood hoary-headed in wisdom, or to childhood yet in soft-brained ignorance, darkness is an unpleasant fact, to be got over in the best way possible—to be got over at all events, and at any cost, and to be turned into luminosity by every expedient that can be used. Wax-tapers, to throw their soft, luxurious light on my lady's delicate face, as she lies like a beautiful piece of marble-work on her dreamy couch; shaded lamps for the grave merchant, the virtual king of the present, as he sits in his still office, ruling nations by bale and bond, and guiding the tide of events by invoices and ship's papers; Palmer's candles, under green pent-houses, for students and authors, whose eyes must withstand a double strain; the mild house-light, with a dash of economy in the selection, whether of oil, sperm, long-fours, or short-sixes, for the family group; the white camphene flame for the artist: strange mechanisms for the curious; the flaunting brilliancy of the coloured chandeliers and cut-glass shades for our English Bedouins in the gin-palace; the flaring jet of the open butchers' shops; the paper-lantern of the street-stalls; the consumptive dip of the slop-worker; the glimmering rush-light for the sick-room; the resin torch for the midnight funeral: these, and countless other inventions—not to mention the universal gas—assert man's disinclination to transact his life in the dark, or to bound his powers by the simple arrangements of nature. There are better lights, though, than any of these, and a worse than mere physical night, be it the blackest with which romancer ever stained his innocent paper, when describing those dark deeds on desolate moors which all romancers delight in, and which send young ladies pale to bed. The night of the mind is worse than the night of time; and lamps which can dispel this are more valuable than any which make up for the loss of the sun only, though these are grand undertakings too.
Most people know what a Child's night-light is, and most people have heard of Belmont Wax, and Price's Patent Candles, though few would be able to explain exactly what the warrant guards. But who ever pretends to understand patents? The 'Belmont' every one knows; it is a mere ordinary wax-candle, which perhaps does not 'gutter' so much as others, and with wick more innocent of 'thieves' than most, but with nothing more wonderful in appearance than an ordinary candle. A Child's night-light, too, has nothing mysterious in its look. It greatly resembles the thick stumpy end of a magnificent mould, done up in a coloured card-jacket, and with a small thin wick, that gives just a point of flame, and no more, by which to light another candle, if necessary—of admirable service for this and all other purposes of a common-place bedroom. Eccentric sleepers, who write Greek hexameters, and fasten on poetic thoughts while the rest of the world are in rational slumber, might object to the feebleness of this point of light; but eccentricities need provisions of their own, and comets have orbits to which the laws of the stars do not apply. For all ordinary people, this thick candle-end is a delicious substitute for the ghastly rush-light in its chequered cage, which threw strange figures on wall and curtain, and gave nervous women the megrims. But nothing more is known of Belmonts or night-lights; their birthplace, and the manner of their making, are alike hidden from the outer world; the uninitiated accept the arcana of tallow only in the positive form. It is generally presumed that candles, in the abstract, come from some unknown place in 'the City;' but how they are made, or who is employed in their making, or how the workmen live in the grease-laden steam of the factory, not one in a thousand would know if he could certainly none would give himself any trouble to find out. Neither should we ourselves have known, had not a little pamphlet, bearing the heading, Special Report by the Directors to the Proprietors of Price's Patent Candle Company, fallen into our hands. Holding the Report open on the desk before us, we will now give to our readers the net result of the moral doings of the factory.
In the winter of 1848, half-a-dozen of the boys employed in the candle manufactory used to hide themselves behind a bench two or three times a week, when work and tea were over, to practise writing on useless scraps of paper picked up anyhow, and with worn-out pens begged from the counting-house. Encouraged by the foreman of their department, who begged some rough, movable desks for them, and aided by timely but not oppressive prizes from the Messrs Wilson, and by the presence of Mr J. P. Wilson, the little self-constituted school progressed considerably, until it reached the number of thirty; then a large old building was cleared out, a rickety wooden staircase taken down, an iron one put up in its stead, and a lofty school-room, capable of holding about 100 or more, made in the place of two useless lumber-rooms. The making and furnishing that room amounted to L.172. The school for some time held to its first principles of self-government. All the instruction, discipline, and management were supplied by the boys themselves; and when a number of elder boys joined, a committee, appointed by themselves, regulated the affairs of the community. However, this did not last long. The hot young blood and immature young brain needed a stronger curb than self-appointed committees could supply; and by a general request, the school has since been worked by authority—this authority itself guided by a general vote in many matters of choice immediately concerning the scholars. In the following summer—we are still in '48—a day-school was held in the room, to which the younger boys who were wanted in the factory at uncertain times and for indefinite periods, were sent when not employed—drafted from school to work, and from work to school, as the necessities of the factory required. The annual cost of this day-school is L.130; the total cost from the commencement, L.327.
Amusements must now be provided. The first and most obvious were tea-parties, the usual rewards to school-children, and often made very tedious affairs by the enormous quantity of talk inflicted on them. However, Mr Wilson managed better. To the first, many of the boys came dirty and untidy; the second shewed a great improvement; the third, one still greater; until now, most of the factory-boys assemble to chapel, and other places where they ought to be decent, in plain suits of black, which give them a neat and even gentlemanlike appearance: yes, though the word applied to a set of factory-boys, candlemakers, may make many of our readers smile. But for all that constitutes real gentlemanlike feeling for order, obedience to authority, courtesy of manner, the absence of rudeness, quarrelling, and other petty vices of school-boys—these factory lads, taken from the very heart of a low population, shine pre-eminently, or rather have shone, since Mr Wilson has taken their educational training so much to heart. The first tea-party was held on Easter-Monday, as a counterpoise to the attractions of Greenwich and Camberwell fairs; and it succeeded in that object, evidencing that vice is not that necessary ingredient in the pleasures of the people which some people think.
In 1849, the cholera came, peculiarly severe about Lambeth and Battersea Fields, where many of the candlemakers lived. Mr Wilson's first thought was for the young people in the factory. He consulted with his brother, and they took additional counsel of first-rate medical men, and then added to the committee a Mr Symes, a gentleman holding a field that was waiting to be built on. The result of these consultations was, that Mr Symes giving them temporary possession of the field, the night-school was closed entirely, and all the boys set to work to learn cricket—cricket as the best antidote to cholera the directors of Price's Patent could devise. Wise men these directors, with some sterling common sense and rare old hearty benevolence mixed up with their generous Saxon blood! Mr Symes was not the only stranger—for stranger he was—eager to help the directors. A Mr Graham came forward, and many others joined in offering; and altogether, as Mr J. P. Wilson says, 'everybody's heart seemed to warm up to their object.' The plan was a success. Of the whole crowd of cricket-players, only one, an interesting lad of seventeen, was lost, though most of them had kinspeople dying and dead in their own homes. That cricket-ground was not, however, useful only for physical health; it presented a beautiful and striking scene, which must have carried home to every heart deep thoughts and holy purposes to strengthen the soul as well.