Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847.. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ regions are intended for a vast and vigorous change. It may not be a European change. Society may not be cast into the furnace, as it has been by those struggles, wars, and revolutions, which were essential to the working of the iron temperament of Europe. But Providence, if we may so speak without irreverence, evidently delights in the variety, multitude, and novelty of its highest expedients. If no two great portions of the physical world are like in form, climate, product, and even in the colouring of their skies, why are we to insist on uniformity in government, in human feeling, or in those national impulses which shape society? The throne, the constitution, and the laws of England, noble advances as they are to the perfection of the social system, may be unfit for the man sitting under his palm tree within the tropics, the navigator in the summer seas of the Indian Ocean, or even for the rude vigour and roving enterprise of Australia. But we have no fears of the failure of that glorious and beneficent Cycle, by which happiness seems revolving, by whatever slow degree, through every race of mankind. There is but one thing which is indispensable among all, and that one thing is, the only nation on earth qualified to give Christianity; and we, with no presumptuous glance, but with no hesitating belief, regard the almost boundless colonial empire of England as conferred upon our island for the express purpose of spreading pure religion through the various regions of the globe. With all our sense of the caution necessary in struggling against the rude prejudices of the barbarian, and with no inferior sense of the caution necessary in the admixture of human conceptions, with the will of Him who "walketh in clouds;" with all our regret for the extravagance of enthusiasm, and all our conviction of the evil which is daily done to truth by the rashness of conjecture, we yet believe that a time is approaching, when the elements of society will be, at least, partially dissolved, for the sake of their replacement in higher purity and power; when the general frame of dominion throughout the world, will be, at least, dislocated, that it may be renewed in higher activity and beauty; and when a world in which a new obedience, a new integrity, a new beneficence to man, and a new homage to heaven, will be the characteristics, shall be formed to vindicate the justice of Providence, and complete the happiness of man.

      Then we shall see the original powers of those neglected nations brightened, enlarged, and elevated into forms and uses, of which they themselves have been unconscious since their birth. Then shall we see governments on principles adapted to the nature of the dweller in the Asiatic plains, of the hunter of the everlasting Himmalaya, and the navigator of the waveless Pacific; calling out the native faculties of those vast divisions of mankind, raising, the natural products of inexhaustible soils, whose fertility is now buried in their bosom, and sharing with the nations of the earth the countless mineral treasures which have been locked up in their hills since the Creation; the whole being poured out, to meet the new demands, increase the new engagements, and stimulate the new animation of the increasing millions of mankind.

      The observations made by Mr Jukes on the mental effect of the southern climates of Asia, are striking, but they are the same which have been made for thousands of years. The European is not made for those climates. Carrying with him, in his first adventure, his original energy of mind and frame, he is astonished to see the land tenanted by human beings who are content with mere existence. The bold climber of the hills, – the daring mariner, – the intelligent and delighted inquirer into all the wonders of earth and ocean, sees himself surrounded by men lying on sofas, living only to eat, and careless of the whole brilliant profusion which tissues the ground, or fills the forest, or variegates the shore.

      But the second generation inevitably feels the influence, and the son of the sinewy and susceptible European becomes the languid, self-satisfied, and voluptuous Oriental.

      In fact, the two races are totally different. The Asiatic has some noble qualities. The Creator has not altogether effaced his own image in any region of human habitancy. He has fancy, keenness of conception, desperate but unwilling bravery, scientific faculties, and a quiet delight in the richness of his own lovely islands and pyramidal mountains.

      But, to the European alone is allotted the master quality of energy; and by that gift he drives the world before him. This resistless quality he perhaps owes chiefly to his sullen skies and rugged soils. Even in the East, the man of the desert, the son of the storm and the snow, has always been the conqueror of India. The Osmanli sultans were forced to raise the boldest of their battalions among the Christians of the north of Greece. And we shall yet see the Australian sweeping before him the indolence of the Birman and the Javanese. This he will owe to the sterility of his fields and the half European blasts of his more salubrious and stringent atmosphere. The maxim of Montesquieu, that "poverty always conquers wealth," solves but half the problem. The true solution is, that the poverty of the soil compels the exertion of a vigour, which severity of climate alone can generate among a people. For three hundred years the population of Jutland and Denmark almost annually swept the southern shores of Europe itself. The Norman was invincible on land. Even the great barbarian invasions which broke down the Roman empire, were the work of nerves hardened in the forest and in the desert. The same causes have made the storm-beaten Englishman lord of India. But India will never be a British colony. It will never be, like America, a land of Englishmen. The second generation will be Indians, while Australia will be the southern England. This is evidently the law of a Will above man.

      We must congratulate Mr Jukes on the value of his publication. Scientific without being abstruse, and picturesque without being extravagant, he has made his volumes a striking and graceful addition to our knowledge of countries, highly interesting in themselves, and, assuming hourly importance in the eyes of the people of England.

      AMERICAN COPYRIGHT

      New York, August, 1847.

      My Dear Godfrey, – I am sorry to begin my letter with an apology, but I feel that one is due for the very unsatisfactory manner in which, on a former occasion, I answered your grave inquiries about the pirates who thrive on the plunder of Maga. The jocular vein which I incontinently struck and perseveringly followed up, led me very wide of your mark, and I was obliged to leave you quite unsatisfied on another point, about which, for one who is not an author, you seem to be singularly excited. To waive my astonishment at the Benthamism of the phrase, pray what is "International Copyright" to Godfrey, that he should weep for such a Hecuba? I should have been as little surprised, had you asked me to inquire the opinion of the Indians as to the best regimen for infants. A veritable author, suffering by wholesale American rapine, would have commanded my sympathies, and I should have replied instinctively, in that tone of consideration which is always due to dignified misfortune; but when you, with your rod and gun, soberly popped me a query in which I could not see that either widgeon or gudgeon were particularly concerned, I confess I feared you were quizzing me, and was fairly off my guard. Forgive me that I was so slow to appreciate the true state of the case. It has only very lately occurred to me that both you and I are somewhat changed since we placed the summum bonum in Waltonian idleness, and that you have very possibly renounced fly-fishing, and settled down into a literary incubation, likely to bless the world with a brood of booklings. With this consideration, I now again address you, intending to preserve that propriety of thought and speech, which on the subject of literary property, I feel due to the future Great Unknown of Southern Britain. You observe that I take it for granted, you will affect the anonymous; and I would venture to add my counsel to your choice of a course so judicious. You have no idea how great an inconvenience you would suffer, should Godfrey Hall be turned prematurely into another Abbotsford – an event which is certain, should you allow the secret of your new character to transpire. Your comparative nearness to the metropolis would greatly facilitate the irruption of bores; especially as there would probably be a branch railway chartered forthwith, for the express purpose of setting down company at the nearest possible point of access to your venerable gateway. Besides, even you have too much regard to the land of Kit North, to entertain any desire to see its most attractive shrine of pilgrimage too suddenly eclipsed; and why should you court such an exposure of popular fickleness, when about to become yourself "the comet of a season," and to go through that brilliant perihelion, in which, reversing the feat of Horace with his lofty head, you will sweep away all other stars with a swinge of your luminous caudality? Yes, Godfrey – spare СКАЧАТЬ