346 TRUTH AND TORYISM. the education of the "labouring" classes is avowedly political; and despicable as in itself it is, most of the instruction diffused is at this crisis perilous; for wiser and better men than were ever found among the Apostles of Infidelity———— North. Now, "See the deep fermenting tempest brew'd In the grim evening sky." Tickler. Knowledge! Oh, dear! Listen for two minutes to a political pauper, who at the Chequers runs up a score for the sponge, the best-informed and the most acute of the coterie, that chuckles as he crows, and in what nook of Cimmeria gabbles a naked wretch, that lives in an earth-hole, and, in Nature's destitution, almost "wants discourse of reason,' such a hideous hubbub of disordered savageness, which, as it foams or slavers from the lips of the truculent drunkard, is deemed "knowledge" by his long-eared audience, whose shallow brains are obfuscated by the fumes of ignorance and gin!" North. And there are thousands of such bestial. But more lamentable far than such brutalities are to me the miserable mistakings of minds by no means depraved, on subjects that lie far beyond their comprehension, and with which, were they allowed to obey the dictates of their own reason and their own conscience, they would know and feel they had nothing to do-nothing but to follow the guidance and perform the mandates of those whose business it is to understand, to direct, to rule, and to govern-their own duty being not to scrutinise but to serve, not to expound but to obey. Tickler. Truth and Toryism. North. Yes-doctrine, which, when wisely acted on by rulers and by subjects, has saved those from becoming tyrants, and these from being slaves. Tickler. And the "miserable mistakings" you speak of are part and parcel of that "Knowledge which is Power ?" 1 For further elucidation of the popular, though very ambiguous, aphorism "Knowledge is Power," the reader is referred to Sir E. B. Lytton's admirable dialogue on that text in My Novel, book iv. chaps. xix. xx. The general tenor of the discussion is in harmony with the opinions expressed in the Noctes. The following are some of its points :-"This aphorism has been probably assigned to Lord Bacon upon the mere authority of the index to his works. It is the aphorism of the index-maker, certainly not of the great master of induc NO HELOTS IN SCOTLAND. 347 North. They talk of a state of transition. From what to what? From helotism to freedom? I ask you, Timothy, were the companions of our boyhood, among the rural villages and farms, the children of Helots? No-bold-faced boys and meek-eyed girls were they-with whom Tickler. Especially the girls- "Round stacks at the gloaming at bogles to play!" Tickler. Sweet creatures-many of them-even "The lass with the gowden hair." North. Would you or I, and we were no windlestraes then, Tim, but two young oaks, have dared to insult, had the devil entered us, the sister before her brother's face Tickler. Thank Heaven, no such devil ever entered into either of us. No, no, Kit, fair play's a jewel, and honour bright was the pole-star of our youthful days. North. It was. But would not the callant whose home was a hovel, and his Saturday's and Sunday's breeches one and the same, have smashed his fist in the nose of any Aristocrat (Heaven bless the mark!) who dared to dishonour the pretty tive philosophy. just-nothing at all. This aphorism either says a great deal too much, or Is not ignorance "power" too? And a power that has had much the best end of the quarter-staff. All evil is power, and does its power make it any the better? Fanaticism is power-and a power that has often swept away knowledge like a whirlwind. The Mussulman burns the library of a world and forces the Koran and the sword from the schools of Byzantium to the colleges of Hindostan. Hunger is power. The barbarians, starved out of their forests by their own swarming population, swept into Italy and annihilated letters. The Romans, however degraded, had at least more knowledge than the Goth and the Visigoth. And even in Greece, when Greek met Greek, the Athenians- our masters in all knowledge—were beat by the Spartans, who held learning in contempt. Wherefore you see that though knowledge be power, it is only one of the powers of the world; that there are others as strong, and often much stronger; and the assertion either means but a barren truism, not worth so frequent a repetition, or it means something which you would find it very difficult to prove. Your knowledge-mongers at present (that is, during the peace-agitation), call upon us to discard military discipline, and the qualities that produce it, from the list of the useful arts. And you insist upon knowledge as the great disbander of armies, and the foe of all military discipline! Even granting that the power of a class is therefore proportioned to its knowledge-pray, do you suppose that while your order, the operatives, are instructing themselves, all the rest of the community are to be at a stand-still? Diffuse knowledge as you may, you will never produce equality of knowledge. Those who have most leisure, ap. plication, and aptitude for learning, will still know the most. Nay, by a very 348 SCOTTISH RURAL LIFE. flower that grew beside his father's humble door? Had he not pride in his sister's innocence; and is such pride the virtue of a helot, is such innocence a jewel worn on the forehead of a slave? Tickler. Your loquacity borders on eloquence. Fire away. North. Did we find ignorance in "the huts where poor men lie ?" No-the "auld clay biggins," dim as they were with peat-reek, were illuminated with knowledge Tickler. Illuminated! somewhat too fine a word—but I must not be too critical on the extemporaneous orator of the human Fire away, Kit. race. North. You and I have stood at the ELDER'S DEATH-BED.' - Tickler. We have some threescore years ago — and yet there were a hundred good as he in the same wild moorland parish. North. We could remind one another of many a high history of humble worth, were we to stroll for an hour or two over that kirkyard! Tickler. Ay-that we could, Kit. Let us go next summer, and meditate among the tombs. North. That parish was, as it were, an epitome Tickler. No-not an epitome, a fair specimen North. Of Scottish rural life. And is there at this hour a natural law, the more general the appetite for knowledge, the more the increased competition will favour those most adapted to excel by circumstance and nature. At this day there is a vast increase of knowledge spread over all society, compared with that in the Middle Ages; but is there not still greater distinction between the highly-educated gentleman and the intelligent mechanic, than there was then between the baron who could not sign his name, and the churl at the plough ?-between the accomplished statesman, versed in all historical lore, and the voter whose politics are formed by the newspaper, than there was between the legislator who passed laws against witches, and the burgher who defended his guild from some feudal aggression ?-between the enlightened scholar of to-day, than there was between the monkish alchemist and the blockhead of yesterday? Peasant, voter, and dunce of this century are no doubt wiser than the churl, burgher, and blockhead of the twelfth. But the gentleman, statesand scholar of the present age are at least quite as favourable a contrast to the alchemist, witch-burner, and baron of old. As the progress of enlightenment has done hitherto, so will it ever do. Knowledge is like capital: the more there is in a country, the greater the disparities in wealth between one man and another. Therefore, if the working class increase in knowledge, so do the other classes; and if the working class rise peacefully and legitimately into power, it is not in proportion to their own knowledge alone, but rather as it seems to the knowledge of the other orders of the community, that such augmentation of proportional power is just, and safe, and wise." man, 1 One of the tales in Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. single parish in braid Scotland, more virtuous than was the beautiful wilderness in which thou and I, Tim, learned poetry and religion, to understand and to venerate the liberty of Nature, as it breathed and broke forth from the peasant's heart? Tickler. Not one. It's own dear self, I fear, is not what it was in that refulgent time North. Refulgent! Somewhat too strong a word, Timothy; but I must not be too critical Tickler. Yes-refulgent. And it is by far too weak a word. North. God bless you-it is. Many of its black bright mosses are drained now, they say; and I cannot well deny that no rational objection can be made to the change of heathermoor into clover-meadow ;-thorn-hedges, in pretty circles, and squares, and oblongs, are green and bright now, I am told, where of old not so much as a crumbling grey stone-wall enclosed the naked common; nor in spite of the natural tears shed from the poor widow's eyes, can I for more than a minute at a time seriously lament that deep-uddered kine should now lazily low and browse where ragged sheep did once perseveringly bleat and nibble;-single trees, that seem to have dropped from the sky, so quick their growth, now here and there hang their shadows, I have heard, over the band of reapers at their mid-day meal, where, when our "auld cloak was new," one single sickle sufficed for the sma' barley-rig, and the "solitary lowland lass" had to look for shelter from the sunshine beneath some rock in the desert; and to that change, too, can I conform the feelings of my somewhat saddened heart;-nay, groves and woods, the story goes, have girdled the stony hills where we two used to admire, all brightening by itself, the glorious Rowan-Tree, independent of the sun in its own native lustre; and may never the swinging axe be heard in that sylvan silence, for I confess the superior beauty, too, of the vesture that now decks the sides of those pastoral pyramids ;-the shielings that we used to come upon, like birds' nests, far up near the heads of the glens where the curlew bred among the rushes, have "been a' red awa;" nor is their place, if sought for, to be found in the solitude; and farmhouses, slated too I hear-for thatch, wae's me! is fast falling out of fashion-now stand where no smoke was then seen but the morning mist; and God forbid I should grieve that suchlike spots as these should have their permanent human dwellings ;-mansions, in which rich men live, from upland swells overlook the low country far as the dimseen spires of towns and cities that divide without diminishing the extent of the Great Plain through which rivers roll; and of a surety pleasant 'tis to think of honest industry finding its reward in well-used wealth, that builds up the stately structure on the site of the cottage where its possessor was born in poverty ;-gone, I know, is the old House of God, walls, roof, spire, and all-spire not so tall as its contemporary Pine-Tree,-and the heritors have done well in erecting in its stead another larger kirk—with a tower—since they preferred a tower to a spire,-nor could they be wrong in widening the burial-ground, that had become crowded with graves-though methinks they might have preserved, for sake of the memorials sunk far within it, some sacred stones of the south wall;-Oh, Friend of my soul! though all these changes seem to have been from good to better, and some of them such as in the course of time must almost of themselves have taken place, men only letting the laws of Nature have "their own sweet will," yet such is the profound affection I bear to the past, and such the tenderness with which my heart regards all that appertained to the scenes where it first enjoyed all its best emotions, that I could almost weep to think that my beloved parish is not now, even to the knoll of broom and the rill of hazels, in all the self-same place which it was of old, when we walked in it up and down, through all seasons of the year to us equally delightful, as perfectly happy as spirits in Paradise!1 Tickler. North, your picturesque is always pathetic; but now for the practical application. North. I hate practical applications except in cases of tetanus, a cataplasm to the soles of the feet, of Tickler. Mustard, and so forth. North. The virtues which we loved and admired during those happy days, were rooted ineradicably in the characters which sometimes they somewhat severely graced, by the power of causes which had not any alliance, however remote, with 1 This paradise was the parish of the Mearns, near Paisley, with the minister of which (the Rev. Dr George Maclatchie) Professor Wilson was boarded in his early years. |