English Pharisees and French Crocodiles Part 12

Never did Horace or Bourdaloue utter such anathemas against the vices of the day.

"My dear brethren," he cried, "is it possible that you can thus place the love of filthy lucre above the love of virtue?"

And, after a few generalities, he came straight to the point; he accused the tradesmen of making too large profits, and of caring more for the things of this world than for the things of the next.

A few days later, it being the 5th of November, the curate was burnt in effigy.

His paris.h.i.+oners having rendered his life not worth living in the pretty little town of X----, the young reverend gentleman lost no time in packing up his traps and quitting the neighborhood, with the firm resolution never to preach any more sermons _ad hominem_.

The Anglican, or State Church of England is a Tory inst.i.tution, that is to say, an eminently Conservative one. It is also a great school of discipline for the people. As an Englishman of much good sense said to me one day, the clergyman of a small town advantageously replaces half a dozen policemen.

The Anglican Church is the Church of English good society.

In my quality of Frenchman, I confess to having a partiality for this church, and of dreading the time when she will be separated from the state.

This is why.

If we have many sympathizers in England, they must not be looked for, as a rule, among the bigots of all the little conventicles, who vie with one another in presenting the most striking appearance of virtue and piety.

By these pretentious, narrow-minded folk, the French are more or less looked upon as children of the Evil One. The intelligent Englishmen of good society, who know and often admire us, generally belong to the Anglican Church, which takes care of their future "by special appointment," and allows them to relax a little from their natural austerity.

Nature has made the Englishman a Puritan. Churchman or not, stir him up, and it is the Puritan which rises to the surface. The day on which the Church of England is disestablished, England will be all Puritan.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE WORs.h.i.+P OF THE GOLDEN CALF.

Nothing is done for mere glory in England, every undertaking has a practical aim.

In France, every intelligent boy of the middle cla.s.s goes through his cla.s.sical studies; even though he may only be intended for a commercial career, his father makes him try to pa.s.s his B. A. or B. Sc. In England, boys learn Latin and Greek in order to pa.s.s examinations, which lead to certain positions. With us, education is an indispensable ornament; here, it is a means to an end. Thus, though primary education may be much more widely spread in England, higher education is much more widely spread in France.

It is at school that young England begins to learn to make genuflections before the Golden Calf. The best prizes awarded in the large public schools are prizes of money. These establishments grant exhibitions of from 40 to 100 a year, during four or five years, to the best of the pupils who leave them to go to the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge.

This scholars.h.i.+p system would be admirable if its object was to help the sons of poor[4] parents to continue their studies at the Universities; but such is not the case; these scholars.h.i.+ps are constantly awarded, either through compet.i.tive examination, or through the personal interest of a governor, to sons of rich parents. And yet, these scholars.h.i.+ps were founded by charitable persons, who bequeathed money to be applied to the education of the intelligent sons of poor parents. At present, the scholars.h.i.+ps of the great schools of the City are at the disposal of the City Companies, who have monopolized them for their families and friends, for charity is organized on an immense scale in England, especially that well-ordered kind which begins at home.

The consequence of this state of things is that John Bull, that unsurpa.s.sed payer of taxes, is obliged to keep up Board schools in London at an enormous expense. If the great City schools fulfilled the purpose for which they were established by their "pious founders,"

school rates would be reduced by one-half.

"No money, no Englishman."

The Royal Academy is closed on Sundays; no free day.

The now annual exhibitions at South Kensington are closed on Sundays.

No free entry during the week.

The Zoological Gardens are, as a matter of fact, open free on Sundays ... but only for the well-to-do cla.s.ses, who may obtain special orders from the Fellows of the Zoological Society.

All the museums are closed on Sundays.

There is no place for the poor at the banquet of life in England. For them, beer and Bible, only.

They take beer.

Not even at church is there room for them; for I maintain that the man or woman whose clothes were not what is called here _decent_, would be turned away from the door; what the pastors want are sheep who will take a pew by the year, and put silver pieces on the plate.

And people marvel, or rather lament, that the workman, who has worked all the week, and has no home fit to spend his Sunday in, spends it at the public house.

But where is he to go? The English, who are generally so sensible, are curiously inconsistent in this matter.

I have seen, in English ill.u.s.trated papers, pictures of Sunday in London and Sunday in Paris. The first represented a dirty mob of men and women, drinking, quarreling, and fighting; the second, groups of workmen, accompanied by their wives, their children, and their old parents, in contemplation before the pictures in the Louvre Museum.

This was doing us justice for once.

Intelligent and liberal England is moving heaven and earth to get the museums thrown open to the people on Sundays. The Prince of Wales, and the leaders of all the aristocracies of the country, are at the head of the movement; but all the little narrow-minded and bigoted world is leagued against them, and it is not probable that they will succeed.

Meanwhile, the London taverns remain open, which proves that the English bigots consider gin and beer more powerful moral stimulants than the masterpieces of great artists; such appears also to be the decided opinion of the bishops, who never fail to attend at the House of Lords in full force when the subject is coming on for discussion.

England erects her statues to the n.o.bility and to finance. You see, England's great literary men were so numerous, that they had to be relegated to a corner of Westminster Abbey, for fear they should hinder circulation in the streets. With the aid of a guidebook, you may succeed in discovering the tablets erected to their memory by a not too grateful country.

Thackeray, the immortal author of "Vanity Fair," is rewarded with a tablet about a foot square. But, then, if you will take a walk around the Stock Exchange, you will see the third statue of the Duke of Wellington, and one of Peabody, the millionaire. In a little narrow City street, a bust of Milton, in an obscure niche, reminds the pa.s.ser-by that the author of "Paradise Lost" was born in that place. It is comparatively unnoticed. In the wild, headlong, guinea chase, there is no time for trifling! Paris has a _Rue Milton_ to make up for it.

Yet this thirst for gold has been the greatest civilizing power of modern times. It is this which has opened up new markets for commerce in the remotest corners of the world. This British Empire, which has been called a brazen colossus with feet of clay, is the greatest empire it was ever given to man to found.

In a hundred years' time, Australia will probably be a strong and independent Republic, a second America; but the separation will mean no loss of prestige or of profit to England; her commerce will not suffer; her steamboats will continue to ply between London and Sydney, as they do between Liverpool and New York.

Who would dare to compare the greater number of England's conquests to those sterile ones that only survive in man's memory by the tears and blood that they have caused to flow?

"We are a wonderful people," cries General Gordon, in his _Diary at Khartoum_; "it was never our Government which made us a great nation; our Government has ever been the drag on our wheels. England was made by adventurers, not by her Government; and I believe she will only hold her place by adventurers."

This is true enough.

They were adventurers, who were the first to set foot on the soil of those remote regions which have been added one by one to the lists of England's colonies; but if England is a great nation, it is thanks to heroic deeds, such as thine, great advanced sentinel of modern civilization, who for months couldst unaided keep hordes of barbarians in check; it is thanks to heroes of thy stamp, poor Gordon!

England conquers by the railway. She imposes her civilization and her commerce in the countries she subdues, puts the natives in the way of earning money, and sensibly takes care to make her yoke felt as little as possible. Her commercial power makes her indispensable to the rest of the world, including the shareholders of the Suez Ca.n.a.l Company, to whom she pays more than three times as much as all the other powers put together.

That which makes the strength of this colonial empire, is that each colony, like each child in the mother-country, serves the apprentices.h.i.+p of life in the enjoyment of liberty.

As each colony becomes rich enough to suffice unto itself, and strong enough to defend itself, England says to the colonists: "You are now big enough to manage for yourselves, it is time you learnt to do without my help." This is what the Englishman says to his sons, as they come to man's estate. The colony forms its government, chooses its ministers, and its parliament; sends representatives to England to watch over its interests there, and becomes, as it were, a branch house of that immense firm, known in every lat.i.tude, under the name of "John Bull and Company."[5]

All forms of wors.h.i.+p will lend themselves to exaggeration and develop eccentricities, and most certainly it is not the wors.h.i.+p of the Golden Calf that is an exception to the rule. Let us look at the question from this side as well as the other.