and houses in the still depths of the country, away from the noise and bluster of railway life and motion, that best represent and perpetuate the primeval characteristics of a nation. These the American traveller will find invested with all the old charm with which his fancy clothed them. It will well repay him for a month’s walk to see and enjoy them thoroughly.
In these days of sun-literature, whose letters are human faces, and whose new volumes are numbered by the million yearly, without a duplicate to one of them, I am confident that a volume of these English village inns of the olden school, in photographs, would command a large sale and admiration in America, merely as specimens of unique and interesting architecture. A thousand might be taken, every one as unlike the other in distinctive form and feature, as every one of the same number of men would be to the other.
The diversification of names, being more difficult, is still more remarkable. Although the spread eagle figures largely as the patron genius of American hotels, still nine-tenths of them bear the names of states, counties, towns, or national or local celebrities. But here natural history comes out strong and wide. The heraldry of sovereigns, aristocracy, gentry, commercial and industrial interests, puts up its various _arms_ upon hundreds of inns in town and country. All occupations and recreations are well represented. Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope and play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity. Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes. Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association. For instance, there is a large, first-class inn right in the very heart of London, which has for a sign, not painted on a board, but let into the wall of the upper story, in solid statuary, a huge human mouth opened to its utmost capacity, and a bull, round and plump, standing stoutly on its four legs between the two distended jaws. Now, the leading idea of this device is involved in a tempting obscurity, which leads one, at first sight, into different lines of conjecture. What did the designer of this group of statuary really intend to represent? Was it to let the outside world know that, in that inn, the “Roast Beef of Old England” was always to be found par excellence? If so, would a man’s mouth swallowing a bull whole, and apparently alive, with hide and horns, tend to stimulate the appetite of a passing traveller, and to draw him into the establishment? But leaving these ambiguous symbols to be interpreted by the passing public according to different perceptions of their meaning, how many in a thousand would guess aright the name given to the tavern by these tokens? Would not ninety-nine in a hundred say, “The Mouth and Bull,” to be sure, not only on the principle that the major includes the minor, but also because the human element is entitled to precedence in the picture? But the ninety-nine would be completely mistaken, if they adopted this natural conclusion. They would find they had counted without their host, who knows better than they the relative position and value of things. What has the law of logic to do with fat beef? The name of his famous hotel is “THE BULL AND MOUTH;” and few in London have attained to its celebrity as a historical building. One is apt to wonder if this precedence given to the beast is really incidental, or adopted to give euphony to the name of an inn, or whether there is a latent and spontaneous leaning to such a method of association, from some cause or other connected with perceptions of personal comfort afforded at such establishments. Accidental or intentional, this form of association is very common. There is no tavern in London better known than The Elephant and Castle, a designation that would sound equally well if the two substantives were transposed. Even the loftiest symbols of sovereignty often occupy the secondary place in these compound titles. There are, doubtless, a hundred inns in Great Britain bearing the name of The Rose and Crown, but not one, to my knowledge, called “The Crown and Rose.” The same order obtains in sporting sections and terminology. It is always “The _Hare_ and Hounds;” never “_Hounds_ and Hare.”
This characteristic in itself is very interesting, and no American, with an eye to the unique, would like to see it changed. But if the more syntax of hotel names in England is so pleasant for him to study, how much more admirable is their variety! He has read at home of many of them in lively romance and grave history but he finds here that not half has been told him. He is familiar with the Lions, Red, White, and Black; the Bulls and Boars of the same colors; the Black and White Swans and Harts; the Crown and Anchor, the Royal George, Queen’s Head, and a few others of similar designation. These names have figured in volumes of English literature which he has perused. But let him travel on the turnpike road through country towns and villages, and he will meet with names he never thought of before, mounted over the doors of some of the most comfortable and delightful houses of entertainment for man and beast that can be found in the world. Here are a few that I have noticed: “The Three Jolly Butchers,” “The Old Mash Tub,” “The Old Mermaid,” “The Old Malt Shovel,” “The Chequers,” “The Dog-in- Doublet,” “Bishop Boniface,” “The Spotted Cow,” “The Green Dragon,” “The Three Horseshoes,” “The Bird-in-Hand,” “The Spare Rib,” “The Old Cock,” “Pop goes the Weasel.” There are wide spaces between these names which may be filled up from actual life with numbers of equal uniqueness. But it is not in architecture nor in name that the country inn presents its most attractive characteristic. These features merely specialise its outward corporeity. The living, brightening, all-pervading soul of the establishment is the LANDLADY. Let her name be written in capitals evermore. There is nothing so naturally, speakingly, and gloriously English in the wide world as she. It is doubtful if the nation is aware of this, but it is the fact. Her English individuality stands out embonpoint, rosy, genial, self-complacent, calm, serene, happyfying, and happy. She is the man and master of the house. She permeates it with her rayful presence, and fills it with a pleasant morning in foggy and blue-spirited days. She it is who greets the coming and speeds the parting guest with a grace which suns, with equal light and warmth, both remembrance and anticipation. It is not put on like a Sunday dress; it is not a thin gloss of French politeness that a feather, blown the wrong way, will brush off. It is not a color; it is a quality. You see it breathe and move in her like a nature, not as an art. Let no American traveller fancy he has seen England if he has not seen the Landlady of the village inn. If he has to miss one, he had better give up his visit to the Crystal Palace, Stratford-upon-Avon, Abbottsford, or even the House of Lords, or Windsor itself. Neither is so perfectly and exclusively English as the mistress of “The Brindled Cow,” in one of the rural counties of the kingdom.
It would be necessary to coin a new word if one were sought to contain and convey the distinctive characteristic of inn-life in England. Perhaps _homefulness_ would do this best, as it would more fully than any other term describe the coziness, quiet, and comfort to be enjoyed at these places of entertainment. Not one in a hundred of them ever heard the sound of the hotel-going bell, as we hear it in America. You are not thundered up or down by a vociferous gong. Then there is no marching nor counter-marching of a long line of waiters in white jackets around the dinner table, laying down plate, knife, fork, and spoon with uniform step and motion, as if going through a dress-parade or a military drill. There is no bustle, no noise, no eager nor anxious look of served or servants. Every one is calm, collected, and comfortable. “The cares that infest the day” do not ride into the presence of that roast beef and plum pudding on the wrinkles of any man’s forehead, however business affairs may go with him outside. No one is in a hurry to sit down or to arise from the table. The whole economy of the establishment is to make you as much at home as possible; to individualise you, as far as it can be done, in every department of personal comfort. You follow your own time and inclination, and eat and drink when and how you please, with others or alone. The congregate system is the exception, not the rule. It seldom ever obtains at breakfast or tea. In many cases you have a little round table all to yourself at these meals. But if there is a common table for half a dozen persons, the tea and toast and other eatables are never aggregated into a common stock. Each person if he is a single guest, has his own allotment, even to a separate tea-pot. The table d’hote, if there be one at all, is made up like a select dinner party, rather early in the morning. If the guests of the house are not directly invited, they are asked, in a tone of hospitality, if they will join in the social meal, the only one got up by the establishment at which the table is not mapped out in separate holdings, or little independencies of dishes, each bounded by the wants and capacities of the individual occupant.
The presiding and working faculty of a common English inn distinguishes it by another salient characteristic from the hotels of other countries. The landlady is, of course, the president of the establishment, whether or not she calls any man lord in the retired and family department of the house. But the actual gerantes, or working corps, with which you have to do immediately, are three independent and distinct personages, called the waiter, chambermaid, and _boots_. If it were respectful to gender, these might be called the great triumvirate of the English inn. No traveller after a night’s lodging and breakfast, will mistake or confound the prerogatives or perquisites of these officials. If he is an American, and it be his first experience of the regime, he will be surprised and puzzled at the imperium in imperio which his bill, presented to him on a tea-tray, seems to represent. In no other business transaction of his life did he ever see the like. It goes far beyond anything in the line of limited partnership he ever saw. There is only one partial parallel that approaches it; and this comes to his mind as he reads the several items on his bill. When made out and interpreted, it comes to this: the proprietor, the waiter, chambermaid, and boots are independent parties, who get up a night’s lodging and two or three meals for you on the same footing as four independent underwriters would take proportionate risks at Lloyd’s in some ship at sea. Or, what would put it in simpler form to an uninitiated guest, he is apparently first charged for the raw provisions he consumes, and for the rent of his bed- room. This is the proprietor’s share. Then, there is a separate charge for each of the remaining items of the entertainment,–for cooking and serving up each meal, for making up your bed, and for blacking your boots; just as distinctly as if you had gone out into the town the previous evening and hired three separate individuals to perform these services for you; and as if you had no right nor reason to expect from the landlord a dinner all cooked and served, but that you only bought it in the larder.
Now, this is a peculiarity of the English hotel system that is apt to embarrass travellers from other countries, especially from America, where no such custom could be introduced. I do not know how old the custom is in Great Britain. Doubtless it originated in the almost universal disposition and habit of Englishmen of dropping gratuities or charity-gifts here and there with liberal hand, either to obtain or reward extra service in matters of personal comfort, or to alleviate some case of actual or stimulated suffering that meets them. It was natural and inevitable that gratuities thus given to hotel servants frequently to stimulate and reward special attention should soon become a rule, acting upon guests like a law of honor. When so many gave, and when the servants of every hotel expected a gift, a man must feel shabby to go away without dropping a few pennies into the hands of eager expectants who almost claimed the gratuity as a right. The worst stage of the system was when the expected gift was measured by your supposed position and ability, or when the waiter or the chambermaid, flattering you with what Falstaff would call an instinctive perception of your dignity, would say with an asking and hopeful smile, “What you please, sir.” Now, that was not the question with you at all. You wanted to know how much each expected, or how much you must give to acquit yourself of the charge of being “a screw,” when they put their heads and gains together in conference and comparison after you were gone. So, on the whole, it was a great relief when all these awkward uncertainties of expectation were cleared up and rectified in the system now usually adopted.
Whether you be rich or poor, or whatever position or pretension be attributed to you, the fees of the universal triumvirate are put down specifically in black and white among the other charges on your bill. As I hope these notes may convey some useful information to Americans who may be about to visit England for the first time, it may be of some use to them to state what is the usual rule in this matter at the middle-class hotels in this country; for with those of the first rank I never have made nor ever expect to make any personal acquaintance. A moderate bill for a day’s entertainment will read thus:–
s.d.
Tea (bread and butter or toast) 1 0 Bed 1 6
Breakfast (rasher of bacon, eggs, or cold meats) 1 6 Dinner 2 6
Waiter 0 9
Chambermaid 0 6 Boots 0 3
—-
Total 8 0
These are about the average charges at the middle-class hotels in Great Britain. Generally the servants’ fees amount to 25 per cent. of the whole bill. These, too, are graduated to parts of days. The waiter expects 3d. for every meal he serves; the chambermaid 6d. for every bed she makes, and the boots 3d. for doing every pair of boots, brogans, or shoes. You will pay these charges with all the better grace and good-will to these servants when you come to learn that these fees frequently, if not always, constitute all the salary they receive for hotel service. Even in a great number of eating- shops the same rule obtains. The penny you give the waiter, male or female, is all he or she gets for serving you. Besides this consideration, you get back much additional personal comfort from these extras. The waiter serves you with extra satisfaction and assiduity under their stimulus. He acts the host very blandly. He answers a hundred questions, extraneous to the meal, with good- natured readiness. He is a good judge of the weather and its signs. He is well “posted-up” in the local histories and sceneries of the place. He can give political information on both sides, incidents and anecdotes to match, whether you are Tory, Whig, or Radical. If you have a bias in that direction, he has or has heard some thoughts on Bishop Colenso and the Tractarians. In short, he caters to the humour and disposition of every guest with a happy facility of adaptation; and the shilling you give him at the end of a day’s entertainment has been pretty well earned, if you have availed yourself of all these extra attentions which he is prepared and expecting to give for it.
The same may be said of the chambermaid. She is not the taciturn invisible that steals in and out of your bed-room, and does it up when you are at breakfast or at your out-door business–whom you never see, except by sheer accident, as in the American hotel. She is an important and prominent personage in the English inn. She is a kind of mistress of the robes, and exercises her prerogative with much conscious dignity and self-satisfaction; and, what is better, with great satisfaction to yourself. No other subordinate official or servant trenches or poaches upon her preserves. She it is who precedes you up stairs with a candle, on a broad-bottomed brass candlestick, polished to its highest lustre. She conducts you to your room as if you were her personal guest, invited and expected a month ago. She opens the door with amiable complacency, as if welcoming you to a hospitality which she had prepared for you with especial care, before she knew you had arrived in town. She invites you, by a movement of her eyes, to glance at the room and see how comfortable it is; how round and soft is the bed, how white and well-aired are the sheets and pillows, how nice the curtains, how clean and tidy the carpet, in short, how everything is fitted to incline you to “rest and be thankful.” And then the cheery “_good night_!” she bids you is said with a tone that is worth the sixpence she expects in the morning; and you pay it, too, with a much better grace than could be expected from an American recently arrived in the country.
And the “boots” is a character, too, unmixedly and interestingly English, in name, person, appearance, and position. In the first of these qualities he is unique, being called after the subject of his occupation. He is an important personage, and generally has his own bell in the dining-room, surmounted by his name, to be called for any service coming within his department. And this is quite a wide one, including a great variety of errandry and porterage, as well as polishing boots and shoes. He is very helpful in a great many different ways, and often very intelligent, and knows all about the streets, the railway trains, the omnibuses, cabs, etc., and will assist you in such matters with good grace and activity. He may have got in the way of putting the H before the eggs instead of the ham; but he is just as good for all that, and more interesting besides. So you do not grudge the 3d. you give him daily for his strictly professional services, or the extra 6d. he expects for carrying your carpet-bag or portmanteau to the railway-station.
Thus, although this feeing of servants may seem at first strange to an American traveller in England, and may occasion him some perplexity and even annoyance, he will soon become accustomed to it; and in making up the balance-sheet of the additional cost on one side and the additional comfort on the other which the system produces, he will come even to the mathematical conclusion, “if to equals you add equals, the sums will be equals.”
CHAPTER VII.
LIGHT OF HUMAN LIVES–PHOTOGRAPHS AND BIOGRAPHS–THE LATE JONAS WEBB, HIS LIFE, LABORS, AND MEMORY.
The next morning I resumed my walk and visited a locality bearing a name and association of world-wide celebrity and interest. It is the name of a small rural hamlet, hardly large enough to be called a village, and marked by no trait of nature or art to give it distinction.
There are conditions and characteristics both in the natural and moral world which can hardly be described fully in Saxon, Latin, or Greek terminology, even with the largest license of construction. There are attributes or qualities attaching to certain locations, of the simplest natural features, which cannot even be hinted at or suggested by the terms, _geography, topography, or biography_. Put the three together and condense or collocate their several meanings in one compound qualification which you can write and another spell, and you do not compass the signification you want to convey. The soul of man has its immortality, and the feeblest-minded peasant believes he shall wear it through the ages of the great hereafter. The literature of human thoughts claims a life that shall endure as long as the future existence of humanity. The memory of many human actions and lives puts in a plea and promise of a duration that shall distance the sun’s, and overlap upon the bright centuries of eternity. The human body, even, is promised its resurrection by the divinest authority and illustration, and waits hopefully, under all its pains and weaknesses, for the glory to be revealed in it when the earth on which it dwells shall have become “a forgotten circumstance.” Human loves, remembrances, faiths, and fellowships lift up all their meek hands to the Father of Spirits, praying to be lifted up into His great immortality, and to be permitted to take with them unbroken the associations that sweetened this earthly life. Many humble souls that have passed through the furnace of affliction, poverty, and trial seven times heated, and heated daily here, have believed that He who went up through the same suffering to His great White Throne, would let them sing beside the crystal waters the same good old psalm tunes and songs of Sion which they sang under the willows of this lower world of tears and tribulation. How all the sparks of the undying life in man fly upward to the zenith of this immortality! You may call the steep flights of this faith pleasant and poetical diversions of a fervid imagination, but they are winged with the pinions that angels lift when they soar; pinions less ethereal than theirs, but formed and plumed to beat upward on the Milky Way to their Source, instead of swimming in the thinly-starred cerulean, in which spirits, never touched with the down or dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had dropped the reins upon his horse’s neck, and sung Old Hundred from the stars, set as notes to that holy tune, when they first sang together in the morning of the creation? What spiritual good or Christian end would be gained, to break up the charm and cheer of this his belief? Or to dispel that other confidence, which so helped him to bear earth’s trials, that one day he should join all the spirits of the just made perfect, and all the high angels in heaven, and, on the plane of that golden gamut, they should sing together their hymns of joy and praise, in that same, good, old tune, from those same star-notes, which a thousand centuries should not deflect nor transpose from their first order within those everlasting staves and bars!
If the spirit’s faith be allowed such wide confidences as these; if it may carry up into the invisible and infinite so many precious relics from the wreck of time, so many human circumstances and associations, why may it not take with it, to hang up in its heaven, photographs of those earthly localities rendered immortal here by the lives of good and great men? Such a life is a sun, and it casts a disk of light upon the very earth on which it shines; not that flashy circle which the lens of the microscope casts upon the opposite wall, to show how scarcely visible mites may be magnified; but a soft and steady illumination that does not dim under the beating storms and bleaching dews of centuries, but grows brighter and brighter, as if the seed-rays that made it first multiplied themselves from year to year. The earth becomes more and more thickly dotted with these permanent disks of light, and each is visited by pilgrims, who go and stand with reverence and admiration within the cheering circle. Shakespeare’s thought-life threw out a brilliant illumination, of wide circumference, at Stratford-upon- Avon, and no locality in England bears a biograph more venerated than the birth-place of the great poet. His thought-life was a sun that will never set as long as this above us shines. It is rising every year to new generations that never saw its rays before. When he laid down his pen, at the end of his last drama, the whole English-speaking race in both hemispheres did not number twice the present population of London. Now, seventy-five millions, peopling mighty continents, speak the tongue he raised to the grandest of all earth’s speeches; and those who people the antipodes claim to offer the best homage to his genius. Thus it will go on to the end of time. As the language he clothed with such power and might shall spread itself over the earth, and be spoken, too, by races born to another tongue, his life-rays will permeate the minds of countless myriads, and the more widely they diverge and the farther they reach, the brighter and warmer will be the glow and the flow of that disk of light that embosoms and illumines his birth-place in England.
What is true of Stratford-upon-Avon is equally true of Abbotsford, of the birth-place of Milton, Burns, Bunyan, Baxter, and other great minds, which have shone each like a sun or star in its sphere. Now, what one word, recognised as legitimate in scientific terminology, would describe fully one of these disks of light cast by a human life upon a certain space of earth, not as a fugitive flash, but as a permanent illumination? _Photograph_ would not do it, because its meaning is fixed and rigidly technical, as simple light-writing, or sun-writing. The term is completely pre-occupied by this signification, and you cannot inject the human life element into it. _Biography_ is universally limited to an operation in which the life is the subject, not the agent. It is simply the writing out of a life’s history by some one with a common goose-quill or steel pen. Still, the word _biograph_ would be the best, of the same length, that we could form to describe one of these disks of light, if it were made the same verb active as _photograph_; or to mean that the life is the agent, as well as the subject,–that it writes itself in light upon a certain locality, just as the sun graves a human face upon glass. Let us then call the bright and quenchless planispheres, which such lives describe and fill around them, _biographs_, assuming that the script is in rays of light. As differ the stars above in glory, so these differ in the qualities of their illumination. The brightest of them, to mere human seeming, are those which shine with the sheer brilliancy of intellect and genius. These chiefly halo the homes of “the grand old masters” of poetry, painting, eloquence, and martial glory. These attract to their disks pilgrims the most numerous and enthusiastic. But, as the nearest stars are brightest, not largest, so these biographs are brightest on their earth-side. There are thousands of less sharp and spangling lustre to the eyes of the multitude, which shine with tenfold more brilliancy from their eternity-face. These are they that halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank in the life of God’s love in perpetual streams, and distilled it like a luminous dew around them; men whose thoughts were not mere scintillations of genius, but living labors of beneficence, bearing the proof as well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the deeds of earth’s saints. If the soul, after such long isolation, is to take again to its embrace so much of the old human corporeity it wore here below, does it transcend the prerogative of hope in the great resurrection to believe that these biographs of God’s loving children on earth shall be taken up whole into the same immortality as the bodies in which they worked His will among men? Is the faith too fanciful or irreverent that believes, that the corridors and inner temples of Heaven’s Glory will be hung with these biographs of His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of His love that radiated from His cross on earth? Is it too presumptuous to think and say, that such pictures will be as precious in His sight as any graven by the lives of angels on their outward or homeward flights of duty and delight? These are they, therefore, that shall give to the earth all the immortality to which it shall attain. These are they that shall take up into the brilliant existence of the hereafter, ten thousand sections of its corporeity; portions of its surface, perhaps, as substantial as the human form that the souls of men shall wear in another world. These are they that shall shine as the stars, when those beaming so brilliantly in our eyes around the shrines of mere intellect and genius, shall have “paled their ineffectual fires” before the efflux of diviner light. Let him, then, of thoughtful and attentive faculties think on these great and holy possibilities, when he treads within the pale of a good man’s life, whose labors for human happiness “follow him” according to divine promise; not out of the world, not down into the grave with his resting body, but out among living generations, breathing upon them and through them a blessed and everlasting influence. Let him tread that disk of light reverentially, for it is the holiest place on the earth’s surface outside the immediate circumference of Cavalry.
This is Babraham; and here lived Jonas Webb; a good man and true, whose influence and usefulness had a broader circumference than the widest empire in the world. A Frenchman has written the fullest history of both, and an American here offers reverentially a tribute to his worth. The light of his life was a soft and gentle illumination on its earth-side; the lustre of the other was revealed only by partial glimpses to those who leaned closest to him in the testing-moments of his higher nature. He was one of the great benefactors, whose lives and labors become the common inheritance of mankind, and whose names go down through long generations with a pleasant memory. To a certain extent, he was to the great primeval industry of the world, what Arkwright, Watts, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse were each to the mechanical and scientific activities of the age. He did as much, perhaps, as any man that ever preceded him, to honor that industry, and lift it up to the level of the first occupations of modern times, which had claimed higher qualities of intelligence, genius and enterprize. He was a farmer, and his ancestors had been farmers from time immemorial. He did not bound into the occupation as an enthusiastic amateur, who had acquired a large fortune by manufacturing or commercial enterprize, which he was eager to lavish upon bold and uncertain experiments. He attained his highest eminence by the careful gradations of a continuous experience, reaching back far into the labors of his ancestors. The science, skill and judgment he brought to bear upon his operations, came from his reading, thinking, observations and experiments as a practical and hereditary farmer. The capital he employed in expanding these operations to their culminating magnitude, he acquired by farming. The mental culture, the generous dispositions, the refined manners, the graceful and manly bearing which made him one of the first gentlemen of the age, he acquired as a farmer. The mansion which welcomed to its easy and large-hearted hospitalities guests of such distinction from his own and other countries, was a farmer’s home, and few ever opened their doors to more urbanity and cordial cheer. This is an aspect of his character which all those who follow the profession he honored should admire with a laudable esprit de corps.
As a back-ground is an important element in the portraiture of human forms or natural scenery, so the ground on which the life and labors of Jonas Webb should be sketched, merits a few preliminary lines. Of all the occupations that employ and sustain the toiling myriads of our race, agriculture leans closest to the bosom of Divine Providence. It is an industry bound to the great and beautiful economics of the creation by more visible and sensible ties than any other worked by human hands. We will not here diverge to dwell upon these high and interesting affiliations. In their place we will give them a little extended thought. There is one feature of agricultural enterprize, however, that should not be overlooked in this connection. All its operations are above-board and open to the wide world, just like the fields to which they are applied. Nothing here is under lock and key. Nothing bears the grim warning over the bolted door, “No admittance here except on business!”–meaning by business, exclusively and sharply, the buying of certain wares of the establishment at a good round profit to the manufacturer, without carrying away a single scintillation or suggestion of his skill. If he has invented or adopted machinery or a process of labor which enables him to turn out cheap muslin at three farthings’ less cost per yard than his neighbors can make it, he seals up the secret from them with the keenest vigilance. Not so in the great and heaven-honored industry of agriculture. Its experiments and improvements upon the earth’s face are all put into the common stock of human knowledge and happiness. They can no more be placed under lock and key, as selfish secrets, than the stars themselves that look down upon them with all their golden eyes. No new implement of husbandry, no new mechanical force or chemical principle, no new process of labor or line of economy is withheld from the great commonwealth of mankind. As the broad skies above, as the sun and moon, and stars, as the winds, the rains, the dews, the birds and bees of heaven over-ride and ignore, in their missions, the boundaries of jealous nations, so all the great activities of agriculture prove their lineage by following the same generous rule. They are bounded by no nationalities. They are shut up in no narrow enclosure of self, but are put out as new vesicles of light to brighten the general illumination of the world.
The department in which Jonas Webb attained to his position and capacity of usefulness was peculiarly marked by this characteristic. In a certain sense, it occupied a higher range of interest than that section of agriculture which is connected solely with the growing of grain, grass, and other crops. His great and distinguishing husbandry was the cultivation of animal life. To make two spires of grass grow where only one grew before has been pronounced as a great benefaction; and greater still are the merit and the gain of making one grow where nothing grew before. To go into the midst of Dartmoor, and turn an acre of its cold, stony, water-soaked waste into a fruitful field of golden grain, is going into co-partnership with Providence in the work of creation to a very large and honored degree. But to put the skilful hand of science upon creatures of flesh and blood, to re-form their physical structures and shapes, to add new inches to their stature, straighten their backs, expand their reins, amplify their chests, reduce all the lines and curves of their forms to an unborn symmetry, and then to give silky softness and texture to their aboriginal clothing–this seems to be mounting one step higher in the attainment and dignity of creative faculties. And this pre-eminently was the department in which Jonas Webb acquired a distinction perhaps unparalleled to the present time. This has made his name familiar all over Christendom, and honored among the world’s benefactors. Never, before him, did a farm-stead become such a centre and have such a wide-sweeping radius as his. None ever possessed such centripetal attractions, or exerted such centrifugal influences for the material well-being of different and distant countries. Indeed, those most remote are most specially indebted to his large and generous operations. America and Australia will ever owe his memory an everlasting homage.
His operations filled and crowned two great departments of improvement seldom, if ever, carried on simultaneously and evenly to a great success by one man. His first distinguishing speciality was sheep-culture. When he had brought this to the highest standard of perfection ever attained, he devoted the surplus capital of skill, experience and pecuniary means he had acquired from the process to the breeding of cattle; and he became nearly as eminent in this field of improvement as in the other. A few facts may serve as an outline of his progress in both to the American reader who is familiar with the general result of his efforts.
Jonas Webb was born at Great Thurlow, Suffolk, on the 10th of November, 1796. His father, who died at the age of ninety-three, was a veteran in agriculture, and had attained to honorable distinction by his efforts to improve the old Norfolk breed of sheep, and by his experiments with other races. The results obtained from these operations convinced his son that more mutton and better wool could be made per acre from the Southdown than from any other breed, upon nine-tenths of the arable land of England, where the sheep are regularly folded, especially where the land is poor. In 1822, he commenced that agricultural career which won for him such a world-wide celebrity, by taking the Babraham Farm, occupying about 1,000 acres, some twelve miles south of Cambridge. In a very interesting letter, addressed to the Farmers’ Magazine, about twenty years since, he gives a valuable resume of his experience up to that time. In this he states several facts that may be especially useful to American agriculturists. Having decided in his own mind that the Southdowns were preferable to every other breed, for the two properties mentioned, he went into Sussex, their native county, and purchased the best rams and ewes that could be obtained of the principal breeders, regardless of expense, and never made a cross from any other breed afterwards. Nor was this all; he never introduced new blood into his stock from flocks of the same breed, but, by a virtually in-and-in process, he was able to produce qualities till then unknown to the race, and to make them permanent and distinctive properties. Now this achievement in itself has an interest beyond its utilitarian value to the agricultural world. To
“Rejoice in the joy of well-created things”
is one of the best privileges and pleasures of a well-constituted mind. But what higher honor can attach to human science or industry than that of taking such a visible and effective part in that creation?–in sending out into the world successive generations of animal life, bearing each, through future ages and distant countries, the shaping impress of human fingers, long since gone back to their dust; features, forms, lines, curves, qualities and characteristics which those fingers, working, as it were, on the right wrist of Divine Providence, gave to the sheep and cattle upon a thousand hills in both hemispheres? There are flocks and herds now grazing upon the boundless prairies of America, the vast plains of Australia, the steppes of Russia, as well as on the smaller and greener pastures of England, France, and Germany, that bear these finger-marks of Jonas Webb, as mindless but everlasting memories to his worth. If the owners of these “well-created things” value the joy and profit which they thus derive from his long and laborious years of devotion to their interests, let them see that these finger-prints of his be not obliterated by their neglect, but be perpetuated for ever, both for their own good and for an ever-living memorial to his name.
It is a fact of instructive suggestion, that although Mr. Webb commenced his operations in 1822, he won his first prize for stock ewes at the meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society at Cambridge in 1840. Here he realised one of the serious disadvantages to which stock-breeders in England are exposed, in “showing” sheep, cattle or swine at these annual exhibitions. The great outside world, with tastes that lean more to fat sirloins or shoulders than to the better symmetries of animated nature, almost demands that every one of these unfortunate beasts should be offered up as a bloated, blowing sacrifice to those great twin idols of fleshy lust, Tallow and Lard. If, therefore, a stock-raiser has not decided to drive his Shorthorn cow or Southdown ewe immediately from the Fair-grounds to the butcher’s shambles, he runs an imminent risk of losing entirely the use and value of the animal. So great is this risk, that much of the stock that would be most useful for exhibition is withheld, and can only be seen by visiting private establishments scattered over the kingdom. They are too valuable to run the terrible gauntlet of oil-cake, bean and barley-meal, through which they must flounder on in cruel obesity to the prize. Especially is this the case with breeding animals. Mr. Webb’s experience at his first trial of the process, will illustrate its tendencies and results. Of the nine shearling ewes he “fed” for the Cambridge Show, he lost _four_, and only raised two or three lambs from the rest. At the Exhibition of 1841, at Liverpool, he won three out of four of the prizes offered by the Royal Agricultural Society for Southdowns, or any other short-woolled sheep; two out of four offered at Bristol, in 1842, and three out of four offered at Derby, in 1843. But here again he over-fed two of his best sheep, under the inexorable rule of fat, which exercises such despotic sway over these annual competitions, and was obliged to kill them before the show. It will suffice to show the loss he incurred by this costly homage to Tallow, to give his own words on the subject:–“I had refused 180 guineas for the hire of the two sheep for the season. I also quite destroyed the usefulness of two other aged sheep by over- feeding them last year. Neither of them propogated [sic] through the season, and I have had each of them killed in consequence, which has so completely tired me of overfeeding that I never intend exhibiting another aged ram, unless I greatly alter my mind, or can find out some method of feeding them which will not destroy the animals, and which I have hitherto failed to accomplish.” The conclusion which he adopted, in view of these liabilities, may be useful to agriculturists in America as well as in England. He says, “What I intend exhibiting in future will be shearlings only, as I believe they are not so easily injured by extra feeding as aged sheep, partly by being more active, and partly by having more time to put on their extra condition, by which their constitutions are not likely to be so much impaired.”
At nearly every subsequent national exhibition, Mr. Webb carried off the best prizes for Southdowns. At Dundee, in 1843, the Highland Society paid him the compliment of having the likenesses of his sheep taken for its museum in Edinburgh. He only received two checks in these competitions after 1840, and these he rectified and overcame in an interesting way. The first took place at the great meeting at Exeter, in 1850, and the second at Chelmsford, in 1856. On both of these occasions he was convinced that the judges had not done justice to the qualities of his animals, and he resolved to submit their judgment to a court of errors, or to the decision of a subsequent meeting of the society. So, in 1851, he presented the unsuccessful candidate at Exeter to the meeting at Windsor, and took the first prize for it. This fully reversed the Exeter verdict. He resorted to the same tribunal to set him right in regard to his apparent defeat at Chelmsford, in 1856. Next year he presented the ram beaten there to the Salisbury meeting, and another jury gave the animal the highest meed of merit.
It was at the zenith of his fame as a sheep-breeder that Mr. Webb “assisted,” as the French say, at the Universal Exposition at Paris, in 1855. Here his beautiful animals excited the liveliest admiration. The Emperor came himself to examine them, and expressed himself highly pleased at their splendid qualities. It was on this occasion that Mr. Webb presented to the Emperor his prize ram, for which, probably, he had refused the largest sum ever offered for a single animal of the same race, or 500 guineas ($2,500). The Emperor accepted the noble present, fully appreciating the spirit in which it was offered, and some time afterwards sent the generous breeder a magnificent candelabra, of solid silver, representing a grand, old English oak, with a group of horses shading themselves under its branches. This splendid token of the Emperor’s regard is only one of the numerous trophies and souvenirs that embellish the farmer’s home at Babraham, and which his children and remoter posterity will treasure as precious heirlooms.
If Mr. Webb did not originate, he developed a system of usefulness into a permanent and most valuable institution, which, perhaps, will be the most novel to American stock-raisers. Having, by a long course of scientific observations and experiments, _fixed_ the qualities he desired to give his Southdowns; having brought them to the highest perfection, he now adopted a system which would most widely and cheaply diffuse the race thus cultivated all over the civilized world. He instituted an annual ram-letting, which took place in the month of July. This occasion constituted an important event to the great agricultural world. A few Americans have been present and witnessed the proceedings of these memorable days, and they know the interest attaching to them better than can be inferred from any description. M. De La Trehonnais, in the “Revue Agricole de l’Angleterre,” thus sketches some of the incidents and aspects of the occasion:–
“It is a proceeding regarded in England as a public event, and all the journals give an account of it with exact care, assembling from every county and even from foreign countries. The sale begins about two o’clock. A circle in formed with ropes in a small field near the mansion, where the rams are introduced, and an auctioneer announces the biddings, which are frequently very spirited. The rams to be let are exposed around the field from the first of the morning, and a ticket at the head of each pen indicates the weight of the fleece of the animal it contains. Every one takes his notes, chooses the animal he approves of, and can demand the last bidding when he pleases. The evening after the letting, the numerous company assembles under a rustic shed, ornamented with leaves and agricultural devices. There tables are laid, around which are placed two or three hundred guests, and then commences one of those antique repasts described by Homer or Rabelais. The tables groan under the enormous pieces of beef, gigantic hams, etc., which have almost disappeared before the commencement of the sale. From eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, tables laid out in the dining-room and hall are furnished, only to be refurnished immediately, the end being equal to the beginning.”
This description refers to the thirty-second letting. Mr. Webb’s flock then consisted of seven hundred breeding ewes, a proportionate number of lambs, and about four hundred rams of different ages. It was from these rams that the animals were selected which were sent into every country in the civilized world. The average price of their lettings was nearly 24 pounds each, although some of the rams brought the sum of 180 pounds, or nearly _nine hundred dollars_! What would some of the old-fashioned farmers of New England, of forty years ago, think of paying nearly a thousand dollars for the rent of a ram for a single year, or even one-tenth of that sum? But this rentage was not a fancy price. The farmer who paid it got back his money many times over in the course of a few years. From this infusion of the Babraham blood into his flock, he realised an augmented production of mutton and wool annually per acre which he could count definitely by pounds. The verdict of his balance-sheet proved the profit of the investment. It would be impossible to measure the benefit which the whole world reaped from Mr. Webb’s labors in this department of usefulness. An eminent authority has stated that “it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a Southdown flock of any reputation, in any country in the world, not closely allied with the Babraham flock.” It is a fact that illustrates the skill and care, as well as demonstrates the value of his system of improvement, that, after thirty-seven years as a breeder, the tribes he founded maintained to the last those distinguishing qualities which gave them such pre-eminence over all other sheep bearing the general name of the Sussex race. So valuable and distinctive were these qualities regarded by the best judges in the country, that the twelfth ram-letting, which took place at the time of the Cambridge Show, brought together 2,000 visitors, constituting, perhaps, the most distinguished assembly of agriculturists ever convened. On this occasion the Duke of Richmond, an hereditary and eminent breeder of Southdowns in their native county, bid a hundred guineas for a ram lamb, which Mr. Webb himself bought in.
Having attained to such eminence as a sheep-breeder, Mr. Webb entered upon another sphere of improvement, in which he won almost equal distinction. In 1837, he laid the foundation of the Babraham Herd of Shorthorn cattle, made up of six different tribes, purchased from the most valuable and celebrated branches of the race bearing that name. An incident attaching to one of these purchases may illustrate the nice care and cultivated skill which Mr. Webb exercised in the treatment of choice animals. He bought out of Lord Spencer’s herd the celebrated cow, “Dodona.” That eminent breeder, it appears, had given her up as irretrievably sterile, and he parted with her solely on that account. Mr. Webb, however, took her to Babraham, and, as a result of the more intelligent treatment he bestowed upon her, she produced successively four calves, which thus formed one of the most valuable families of the Babraham herd. When I visited the scene of his life and labors, all his sheep and cattle had been sold. But two or three animals bought by an Australian gentleman were still in the keeping of Mr. Webb’s son, awaiting arrangements for their transportation. One of these, a beautiful heifer of fourteen months, was purchased at the winding-up sale, for 225 guineas. It was called the “Drawing-room Rose,” from this circumstance, as I afterwards learned. When it was first dropped by the dam, Mr. Webb was confined to the house by indisposition. But he had such a desire to see this new accession to his bovine family, that he directed it to be brought into the drawing-room for that purpose. Hence it received a more elegant and domestic appellation than the variegated nomenclature of high-blooded animals often allows.
When the last volume of the “English Herd-Book” was about to be published, Mr. Webb sent for insertion a list of sixty-one cows, with their products. He generally kept from twenty to thirty bulls in his stalls.
Nor were his labors confined even to the two great spheres of enterprise with which his name has been intimately and honorably associated. If it was the great aim of his intelligent activities to produce stock which should yield the most meat to the acre, he also gave great attention to the augmented production of the land itself. He was the principal originator and promoter of the great Agricultural Hall, in London, for the exhibition of the fat stock for the Smithfield Show. This may be called the Crystal Palace of the animal world. It is the grandest structure ever erected for the exhibition of cattle, sheep, swine, poultry, etc. I will essay no description of it here, but it will carry through long generations the name and memory of Jonas Webb of Babraham. He was chairman of the company that built the superb edifice; also president of the Nitro-phosphate or Blood-manure Company, a fertilizer in which he had the greatest confidence, and which he used in great quantities upon the large farm he cultivated, containing over 2,000 acres.
At the age of nearly sixty-six, Mr. Webb found that his health would no longer stand the strain of the toil, care, and anxiety requisite to keep up the Babraham flock to the high standard of perfection which it had attained. So, after nearly forty years of devotion to this great occupation of his life, he concluded to retire from it altogether, dispersing his sheep and cattle as widely as purchasers might be found. This breaking-up took place at Babraham on the 10th of July, 1862. Then and there the long series of annual re-unions terminated for ever. The occasion had a mournful interest to many who had attended those meetings from year to year. It seemed like the voluntary and unexpected abdication of an Alexander, still able to add to his conquests and trophies. All present felt this; and several tried to express it at the old table now spread for the last time for such guests. But his inherent and invincible modesty waived aside or intercepted the compliments that came from so many lips. With a kind of ingenious delicacy, which one of the finest of human sentiments could only inspire, he contrived to divert attention or reference to himself and his life’s labors. But he could not make the company forget them, even if he gently checked allusion to them.
The company on this interesting occasion was very large, about 1,000 persons having sat down to the collation. Not only were the principal nobility and gentry of Great Britain interested in agricultural pursuits present in large number, but the representatives of nearly every other country in Christendom. Several gentlemen from the United States were among the purchasers. The total number of sheep sold was 969, which fetched under the hammer the great aggregate of 10,926 pounds, or more than $54,000. The most splendid ram in the flock went to the United States, being knocked down to Mr. J. C. Taylor, of Holmdale, New Jersey; who is doing so much to Americanise the Southdowns. Others went to the Canadas, Australia, South America, and to nearly every country in continental Europe.
Thus was formed, and thus was dispersed the famous Babraham flock. And such were the labors of Jonas Webb for the material well-being of mankind. These alone, detached from those qualities and characteristics which make up and reflect a higher nature, entitle his name to a wide and lasting memory among men. And these labors and successes are they that those who have read of them in different countries know him by. These comprise and present the character they honor with respect. What he was in the temper and disposition of his inner life, in daily walk and conversation, in the even and gentle amenities of Christian humility, in sudden trials of his faith and patience; what he was as a husband, father, friend and neighbor, to the poor, to the afflicted in mind, body or estate,– all this will remain unwritten, but not unremembered by those who breathed and moved within that disk of light which his life shed around him.
Few men have lived in whom so many personal and moral qualities combined to command respect, esteem, and even admiration. In stature, countenance, expression, and deportment, he was a noble specimen of fully developed English manhood. To this first, external aspect, his kindly and generous dispositions, his genial manners, his delicate but dignified modesty, his large intelligence and large-heartedness, gave the additional and crowning characteristic of a Christian gentleman. Many Americans have visited Babraham, and enjoyed the hospitalities which such a host could only give and grace. They will remember the paintings hung around the walls of that drawing-room, in which his commanding form, in the strength and beauty of meridian life, towers up in the rural landscape, surrounded by cattle and sheep bearing the impress of his skill and care. A little incident occurred a few years ago, which may illustrate this personal aspect better than any simile of description. On the occasion of one of the great Agricultural Expositions in Paris, a deputation or a company of gentlemen went over to represent the Agricultural Society of England. Mr. Webb was one of the number; and some French nobleman who had known him personally, as well as by reputation, was very desirous of making him a guest while in Paris. To be sure of this pleasure, he sent a special courier all the way to Folkestone, charged with a letter which he was himself to put into the hands of Mr. Webb, before the steamer left the dock. “But how am I to know the gentleman?” asked the courier; “I never saw him in my life.” “N’importe,” was the reply. “Put the letter in the hand of the noblest-looking man on board, and you will be sure to be right.” The courier followed the direction; and, stationing himself near the gangway, he took his master’s measure of every passenger as he entered. He could not be mistaken. As soon as the plank was withdrawn, he approached Mr. Webb, hat in hand, and, with a deferential word of recognition, done in the best grace of French politeness, handed him the letter. One of the deputation, noticing the incident, and wondering how the man knew whom he was addressing without previous inquiry, questioned him afterwards on the subject, and learned from him the ground on which he proceeded. The photographic likeness presented in connection with this notice was taken shortly before his decease, at the age of nearly sixty-six, and when his health was greatly impaired.
Few men ever carried out so fully the injunction, not to let the left hand know what the right hand did, in the quiet and steady outflow of good will and good works, as Mr. Webb. Even those nearest and dearest to him never knew what that right hand did as a help in time of need, what that large heart felt in time of others’ affliction, what those lips said to the sorrowing, in tearful moments of grief, until they had been stilled for ever on earth. Then it came out, act by act, word by word, thought by thought, from those who held the remembrances in their souls as precious souvenirs of a good man’s life. So earnest was his desire to do these things in secret, that his own family heard of them only by accident, and from those whom he so greatly helped with his kindness and generosity. And when known by his wife and children, in this way, they were put under the bann of secrecy. This it is that makes it so difficult to delineate the home and heaven side of his character. Those nearest to him, who breathed in the blessing of its daily odor, so revere his repeated and earnest wish not to have his good works talked of in public, that, even now he is dead and gone, they hold it as a sacred obligation to his memory not to give up these treasured secrets of his life. Thus, in giving a partial coup d’oeil of that aspect of his character which fronted homeward and heavenward, one can only glean, here and there, glimpses of different traits, in acts, incidents, and anecdotes remembered by neighbors and friends near and remote. Were it not that his children are withheld, by this delicate veneration, from giving to the public facts known to them alone, the moral beauty and brightness of his life would shine out upon the outside world with warmer rays and larger rayons. I hope that a single passage from a letter written by one of them to a friend, even under the injunction of confidence, may be given here, without rending the veil which they hold so sacred. In referring to this disposition and habit of her venerated father, she says–
“Often have I been so blessed as to be caused to shed tears of joy and pride at hearing proofs of his tenderness, kindness, and generosity related by the recipients of some token of his nobleness, but of which we never should have heard from himself.”
A little incident may illustrate this trait of his disposition. In 1862, a “Loan Court” was held in London, at which there was a most magnificent display of jewels and plate of all kinds, contributed by their owners to be exhibited for the gratification of the public. A friend, who held him in the highest veneration, returning from this brilliant show, expressed regret that Mr. Webb had not furnished one of the stands, by sending the splendid silver candelabra presented to him by the French Emperor, with the many silver cups and medals he had won. Mr. Webb replied, that the mercies God had blessed him with, and the successes He had awarded to him, might have been sent to teach him humility, and not given to parade before the world.
It is one of the most striking proofs of his great and pure- heartedness, that, notwithstanding nearly forty consecutive years of vigorous and successful competition with the leading agriculturists of Great Britain and other countries, none of the victories he won over them, or the eminence he attained, ever made him an enemy. When we consider the eager ambitions and excited sensibilities that enter into these competitions, this fact in itself shows what manner of man he was in his disposition and deportment. Referring to this aspect of his character, the French writer already cited, M. De La Trehonnais, says of him, while still living–
“There exists no person who has gained the esteem and goodwill of his contemporaries to a higher degree than Mr. Webb. His probity, his scrupulous good faith, his generosity, and the affable equality of his character, have gained for him the respect and affection of every one. Since I have had the honor of knowing him, which is already many years, I have never known of his having a single enemy; and in my constant intercourse with the agricultural classes of England, I have never heard of a single malevolent insinuation respecting him. When we consider how much those who raise themselves in the world above others, are made the butt for the attacks of envy in proportion with their elevation, we may conclude that there are in the character of this wealthy man very solid virtues, well fixed principles, transcendant [sic] merit, to have passed through his long career of success and triumphs without having drawn upon himself the ill-will of a single enemy, or the calumnious shaft of envy.”
Nor were these negative virtues, ending where they begun, or enabling him to go through a long life of energetic activities without an enemy. He not only lived at peace with all men, but did his utmost to make them live at peace with each other. Says one who knew him intimately–“I never heard him express a sentiment savoring of enmity to any person, nor could he bear to see it entertained by any one towards another. Even if he heard of an ill-feeling existing between persons, he would, if possible, effect a reconciliation; and his own bright example, and hearty, kind, genial manners always warmed all hearts towards himself. Notwithstanding the numerous calls upon his time, made by public and private business, he did not lose his sweet cheerfulness of temper, and was ever ready in his most busy moments to aid others, if he saw a possibility of so doing.” Energy, gentleness, conscientiousness and courtesy were seldom, if ever, blended in such suave accord as in him. These virtues came out, each in its distinctive lustre, under the trials and vexations which try human nature most severely. All who knew him marvelled that he was able to maintain such sweetness and evenness of temper under provocations and difficulties which would have greatly annoyed most men. What he was in these outer circles of his influence, he was, to all the centralization of his virtues, in the heart of his family. Here, indeed, the best graces of his character had their full play and beauty. He was the centre and soul of one of the happiest of earthly homes, attracting to him the affections of every member of the hearth circle that moved in the sleepless light of his life. Here he did not rule, but led by love. It alone dictated, and it alone obeyed. It inspired its like in domestic discipline. Spontaneous reverence for such a father’s wish and will superseded the unpleasant necessity of more active parental constraint. To bring a shade of sadness to that venerated face, or a speechless reproach to that benignant eye, was a greater punishment to a temporarily wayward child than any corporal correction could have inflicted.
No one of the hundreds that were present at the sale and dispersion of the Babraham flock could have thought that the remaining days of the great and good man were to be so few on earth. He was then about sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to “the sere and yellow leaf” of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone ages. The incidents and coincidents of the last, great moments of his being here, were remarkable and affecting. Neither he nor his wife died at the home they had made so happy with the beauty and savor of their virtues. Under another and distant roof they both laid themselves down to die. The husband’s hand was linked in his wife’s, up to within a few short steps of the river’s brink, when, touched with the cold spray of the dark waters, it fell from its hold and was superseded by the strong arm of the angel of the covenant, sent to bear her fast across the flood. In life they were united to a oneness seldom witnessed on earth; in death they were not separated except by the thinnest partition. Though her spirit was taken up first to the great and holy communion above, the “ministering angel of God’s love let her body remain with him as a pledge until his own spirit was called to join hers in the joint mansion of their eternal rest. On the very day that her body was carried to its long home, his own unloosed, to its upward flight, the soul that had made it shine for half a century like a temple erected to the Divine Glory. The years allotted to him on earth were even to a day. Just sixty-six were measured off to him, and then “the wheel ceased to turn at the cistern,” and he died on his birthday. An affecting coincidence also marked the departure of his beloved wife. She left on the birthday of her eldest son, who had intended to make the anniversary the dating-day of domestic happiness, by choosing it for his marriage.
A few facts will suffice for the history of the closing scene. About the middle of October, 1862, Mrs. Webb, whose health seemed failing, went to visit her brother, Henry Marshall, Esq., residing in Cambridge. Here she suddenly became much worse, and the prospect of her recovery more and more doubtful. Mr. Webb was with her immediately on the first unfavorable turn of her illness, together with other members of the family. When he realised her danger, and the hope of her surviving broke down within him, his physical constitution succumbed under the impending blow, and two days before her death, he was prostrated by a nervous fever, from which he never rallied, but died on the 10th of November. Although the great visitation was too heavy for his flesh and blood to bear, his spirit was strengthened to drink this last cup of earthly trial with beautiful serenity and submission. It was strong enough to make his quivering lips to say, in distinct and audible utterance, and his closing eyes to pledge the truth and depth of the sentiment, “Thy will be done!” One who stood over him in these last moments says, that, when assured of his own danger, his countenance only seemed to take on a light of greater happiness. He was conscious up to within a few minutes of his death, and, though unable to speak articulately, responded by expressions of his countenance to the words and looks of affection addressed to him by the dear ones surrounding his bed. One of them read to him a favorite hymn, beginning with “Cling to the Comforter!” When she ceased, he signed to her to repeat it; and, while the words were still on her lips, the Comforter came at his call, and bore his waiting spirit away to the heavenly companionship for which it longed. As it left the stilled temple of its earthly habitation, it shed upon the delicately-carved lines of its marble door and closed windows a sweet gleam of the morning twilight of its own happy immortality.
A long funeral cortege attended the remains of the deceased from Cambridge to their last resting place in the little village churchyard of Babraham. Beside friends from neighboring villages, the First Cambridgeshire Mounted Rifle Corps joined the procession, together with a large number of the county police force. His body was laid down to its last, long rest beside that of his wife, who preceded him to the tomb only by a few days. Though Stratford-upon- Avon, and Dryburgh Abbey may attract more American travellers to their shrines, I am sure many of them, with due perception of moral worth, will visit Babraham, and hold it in reverent estimation as the home of one of the world’s best worthies, who left on it a biograph which shall have a place among the human-life-scapes which the Saviour of mankind shall hang up in the inner temple of His Father’s glory, as the most precious tokens and trophies of the earth, on which He shared the tearful experiences of humanity, and bore back to His throne all the touching memories of its weaknesses, griefs, and sorrows.
A movement is now on foot to erect a suitable monument to his memory. It may indicate the public estimation in which his life and labors are held that, already, about 10,000 pounds have been subscribed towards this testimonial to his worth. The monument, doubtless, will be placed in the great Agricultural Hall, which he did so much to found. His name will wear down to coming generations the crystal roofage of that magnificent edifice as a fitting crown of honor.
CHAPTER VIII.
THRESHING MACHINE–FLOWER SHOW–THE HOLLYHOCK AND ITS SUGGESTIONS– THE LAW OF CO-OPERATIVE ACTIVITIES IN VEGETABLE, ANIMAL, MENTAL, AND MORAL LIFE.
“In all places, then, and in all seasons, Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings, Teaching us, by most persuasive reasons, How akin they are to human things.”–LONGFELLOW.
My stay at Babraham was short. It was like a visit to the grave of one of those English worthies whose lives and labors are so well known and appreciated in America. All the external features of the establishment were there unchanged. The large and substantial mansion, with its hall and parlor walls hung with the mementoes of the genius and success that had made it so celebrated; the barns and housings for the great herds and flocks which had been dispersed over the world; the very pens still standing in which they had been folded in for the auctioneer’s hammer; all these arrangements and aspects remained as they were when Jonas Webb left his home to return no more. But all those beautiful and happy families of animal life, which he reared to such perfection, were scattered on the wings of wind and steam to the uttermost and most opposite parts of the earth.
The eldest son, Mr. Samuel Webb, who supervises part of the farm occupied by his father, and also carries on one of his own in a neighboring parish, was very cordial and courteous, and drove me to his establishment near Chesterford. Here a steam threshing machine was at work, doing prodigious execution on different kinds of grain. The engine had climbed, a proprii motu, a long ascent; had made its way partly through ploughed land to the rear of the barn, and was rattlingly busy in a fog of dust, doing the labor of a hundred flails. Ricks of wheat and beans, each as large as a comfortable cottage, disappeared in quick succession through the fingers of the chattering, iron-ribbed giant, and came out in thick and rapid streams of yellow grain. Swine seemed to be the speciality to which this son of Mr. Webb is giving some of that attention which his father gave to sheep. There were between 200 and 300 in the barn- yards and pens, of different ages and breeds, all looking in excellent condition.
From Chesterford I went on to Cambridge, where I remained for the most part of two days, on account of a heavy fall of rain, which kept me within doors nearly all the time. I went out, however, for an hour or so to see a Flower Show in the Town Hall. The varieties and specimens made a beautiful, but not very extensive array. There was one flower that not only attracted especial admiration, but invited a pleasant train of thoughts to my own mind. It was one of those old favorites to which the common people of all countries, who speak our mother tongue, love to give an inalienable English name– The Hollyhock. It is one of the flowers of the people, which the pedantic Latinists have left untouched in homely Saxon, because the people would have none of their long-winded and heartless appellations. Having dwelt briefly upon the honor that Divine Providence confers upon human genius and labor, in letting them impress their finger-marks so distinctly upon the features and functions of the earth, and upon the forms of animal life, it may be a profitable recurrence to the same line of thought to notice what that same genius and labor have wrought upon the structure and face of this familiar flower. What was it at first? What is it now in the rural gardens of New England? A shallow, bell-mouthed cup, in most cases purely white, and hung to a tall, coarse stalk, like the yellow jets of a mullein. That is its natural and distinctive characteristic in all countries; at least where it is best known and most common. What is it here, bearing the fingerprints of man’s mind and taste upon it? Its white and thin-sided cup is brim full and running over with flowery exuberance of leaf and tint infinitely variegated. Here it is as solid, as globe-faced, and nearly as large as the dahlia. Place it side by side with the old, single- leafed hollyhock, in a New England farmer’s garden, and his wife would not be able to trace any family relationship between them, even through the spectacles with which she reads the Bible. But the dahlia itself–what was that in its first estate, in the country in which it was first found in its aboriginal structure and complexion? As plain and unpretending as the hollyhock; as thinly dressed as the short-kirtled daisy in a Connecticut meadow. It is wonderful, and passing wonder, how teachable and quick of perception and prehension is Nature in the studio of Art. She, the oldest of painters, that hung the earth, sea, and sky of the antediluvian world with landscapes, waterscapes, and cloudscapes manifold and beautiful, when as yet the human hand had never lifted a pencil to imitate her skill; she, with the colors wherewith she dyed the fleecy clouds that spread their purple drapery over the first sunset, and in which she dipped the first rainbow hung in heaven, and the first rose that breathed and blushed on earth; she that has embellished every day, since the Sun first opened its eye upon the world, with a new gallery of paintings for every square mile of land and sea, and new dissolving views for every hour–she, with all these artistic antecedents, tastes, and faculties, comes modestly into the conservatory of the floriculturist, and takes lessons of him in shaping and tinting plants and flowers which the Great Master said were “all very good” on the sixth-day morning of the creation! This is marvellous, showing a prerogative in human genius almost divine, and worthy of reverent and grateful admiration. How wide-reaching and multigerent is this prerogative! In how many spheres of action it works simultaneously in these latter days! See how it manipulates the brute forces of Nature! See how it saddles the winds, and bridles and spurs the lightning! See how it harnesses steam to the plough, the flood to the spindle, the quick cross currents of electricity to the newsman’s phaeton! Then ascend to higher reaches of its faculty. In the hands of a Bakewell or Webb, it gives a new and creative shaping to multitudinous generations of animal life. Nature yields to its suggestion and leading, and co- works, with all her best and busiest activities, to realise the human ideal; to put muscle there, to straighten that vertebra, to parallel more perfectly those dorsal and ventral lines, to lengthen or shorten those bones; to flesh the leg only to such a joint, and wool or unwool it below; to horn or unhorn the head, to blacken or blanch the face, to put on the whole body a new dress and make it and its remote posterity wear this new form and costume for evermore. All this shows how kindly and how proudly Nature takes Art into partnership with her, in these new structures of beauty and perfection; both teaching and taught, and wooing man to work with her, and walk with her, and talk with her within the domain of creative energies; to make the cattle and sheep of ten thousand hills and valleys thank the Lord, out of the grateful speech of their large, lustrous eyes, for better forms and features, and faculties of comfort than their early predecessors were born to.
Equally wonderful, perhaps more beautiful, is the joint work of Nature and Art on the sweet life and glory of flowers. However many they were, and what they were, that breathed upon the first Spring or Summer day of time, each was a half-sealed gift of God to man, to be opened by his hand when his mind should open to a new sense of beauty and perfection. Flowers, each with a genealogy reaching unbroken through the Flood back to the overhanging blossoms of Eden, have come down to us, as it were, only in their travelling costume, with their best dresses packed away in stamen, or petal, or private seedcase, to be brought out at the end of fifty centuries at the touch of human genius. Those of which Solomon sang in his time, and which exceeded his glory in their every-day array, even “the hyssop by the wall,” never showed, on the gala-days of his Egyptian bride, the hidden charms which he, in his wisdom, knew not how to unlock. Flowers innumerable are now, like illuminated capitals of Nature’s alphabet, flecking, with their sheen-dots, prairie, steppe, mountain and meadow, the earth around, which, perhaps, will only give their best beauties to the world in a distant age. As the light of the latest-created and remotest stars has not yet completed its downward journey to the eye of man, so to his sight have not these sweet- breathing constellations of the field yet made the full revelation of their treasured hues and forms. Not one in a hundred of them all has done this up to the present moment. When one in ten of those that bless us with their life and being shall put on all its reserved beauty, then, indeed, the stars above and the stars below will stud the firmaments in which they shine with equal glory, and blend both in one great heaven-scape for the eye and heart of man. One by one, in its turn, the key of human genius shall unlock the hidden wardrobe of the commonest flowers, and deck them out in the court dress reserved, for five thousand years, to be worn in the brighter, afternoon centuries of the world. The Mistress of the Robes is a high dignitary in the Household of Royalty, and has her place near to the person of the Queen. But the Floriculturist, of educated perception and taste, is the master of a higher state robe, and holds the key of embroidered vestments, cosmetics, tintings, artistries, hair-jewels, head-dresses, brooches, and bracelets, which no empress ever wore since human crowns were made; which Nature herself could not show on all the bygone birthdays of her being.
This is marvellous. It is an honor to man, put upon him from above, as one of the gratuitous dignities of his being. “An undevout astronomer is mad,” said one who had opened his mind to a broad grasp of the wonders which this upper heaven holds in its bosom. The floriculturist is an astronomer, with Newton’s telescope reversed; and if its revelations do not stir up holy thoughts in his soul, he is blind as well as mad. No glass, no geometry that Newton ever lifted at the still star-worlds above, could do more than _reveal_. At the farthest stretch of their faculty, they could only bring to light the life and immortality of those orbs which the human eye had never seen before. They could not tint nor add a ray to one of them all. They never could bring down to the reach of man’s unaided vision a single star that Noah could not see through the deck-lights of the ark. It was a gift and a glory that well rewarded the science and genius of Newton and Herschel, of Adams and Le Verrier, that they could ladder these mighty perpendicular distances and climb the rounds to such heights and sweeps of observation, and count, measure, and name orbs and orbits before unknown, and chart the paths of their rotations and weigh them, as in scales, while in motion. But this ge-astronomer, whose observatory is his conservatory, whose telescope and fluxions are his trowel and watering-pot, not only brings to light the hidden life of a thousand earth-stars, but changes their forms, colors their rays, half creates and transforms, until each differs as much from its original structure and tinting as the planet Jupiter would differ from its familiar countenance if Adams or Le Verrier could make it wear the florid face of Mars. This man,–and it is to be hoped he carries some devout and grateful thoughts to his work–sets Nature new lessons daily in artistry, and she works out the new ideals of his taste to their joint and equal admiration. He has got up a new pattern for the fern. She lets him guide her hand in the delicate operation, and she crimps, fringes, shades or shapes its leaflets to his will, even to a thousand varieties. He moistens her fingers with the fluids she uses on her easel, and puts them to the rootlets of the rose, and they transpose its hues, or fringe it or tinge it with a new glory. He goes into the fen or forest, or climbs the jutting crags of lava-mailed mountains, and brings back to his fold one of Nature’s foundlings,–a little, pale-faced orphan, crouching, pinched and starved, in a ragged hood of dirty muslin; and he puts it under the fostering of those maternal fingers, guided by his own. Soon it feels the inspiration of a new life warming and swelling its shrivelled veins. Its paralysed petals unfold, one by one. The rim of its cup fills, leaf by leaf, to the brim. It becomes a thing most lovely and fair, and he introduces it, with pride, to the court beauties of his crystal palace.
The agriculturist is taken into this co-partnership of Nature in a higher domain of her activities, measured by the great utilities of human life. We have glanced at the joint-work in her animal kingdom. In the vegetable, it is equally wonderful. Nature contributes the raw material of these great and vital industries, then incites and works out human suggestions. Thus she trains and obeys the mind and hand of man, in this grand sphere of development. Their co-working and its result are just as perceptible in a common Irish potato as in the most gorgeous dahlia ever exhibited. Not one farmer in a thousand has ever read the history of that root of roots, in value to mankind; has ever conceived what a tasteless, contracted, water-soaked thing it was in its wild and original condition. Let them read a few chapters of the early history of New England, and they will see what it was two hundred and fifty years ago, when the strong-hearted men and women, whom Hooker led to the banks of the Connecticut, sought for it in the white woods of winter, scraping away the snow with their frosted fingers. The largest they found just equalled the Malaga grape in size and resembled it in complexion. They called it the _ground-nut_, for it seemed akin to the nuts dropped by the oaks of different names. No flower that breathes on earth has been made to produce so many varieties of form, complexion, and name as this homely root. It would be an interesting and instructive enterprise, to array all the varieties of this queen of esculent vegetables which Europe and America could exhibit, face to face with all the varieties which the dahlia, geranium, pansy, or even the fern has produced, and then see which has been numerically the most prolific in diversification of forms and features. It should gratify a better motive than curiosity to trace back the history of other roots to their aboriginal condition. Types of the original stock may now be found, in waste places, in the wild turnip, wild carrot, parsnip, etc. “Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little,” it may be truly and gratefully said, these roots, internetted with the very life-fibres of human sustenance, have been brought to their present perfection and value. The great governments and peoples of the world should give admiring and grateful thought to this fact. Here nature co-works with the most common and inartistic of human industries, as they are generally held, with faculties as subtle and beautiful as those which she brings to bear upon the choicest flowers. The same is true of grains and grasses for man and beast. They come down to us from a kind of heathen parentage, receiving new forms and qualities from age to age. The wheats, which make the bread of all the continents, now exhibit varieties which no one has undertaken to enumerate. Fruits follow the same rule, and show the same joint-working of Nature and Art as in the realm of flowers.
The wheel within wheel, the circle within circle expand and ascend until the last circumferential line sweeps around all the world of created being, even taking in, upon the common radius, the highest and oldest of the angels. From the primrose peering from the hedge to the premier seraph wearing the coronet of his sublime companionship; from the lowest forms of vegetable existence to the loftiest reaches of moral nature this side of the Infinite, this everlasting law of co-working rules the ratio of progress and development. In all the concentric spheres strung on the radius measured by these extremes, there is the same co-acting of internal and external forces. And mind, of man or angel, guides and governs both. Not a flower that ever breathed on earth, not one that ever blushed in Eden, could open all its hidden treasures of beauty without the co-working of man’s mind and taste. No animal that ever bowed its neck to his yoke, or gave him labor, milk or wool, could come to the full development of its latent vitalities and symmetries without the help of his thought and skill. The same law obtains in his own physical nature. Mind has made it what it is to-day, as compared with the wild features and habits of its aboriginal condition. Mind has worked for five thousand years upon its fellow- traveller through time, to fit it more and more fully for the companionship. It was delivered over to her charge naked, with its attributes and faculties as latent and dormant as those of the wild rose or dahlia. Through all the ages long, she has worked upon its development; educating its tastes; taming its appetites; refining its sensibilities; multiplying and softening its enjoyments; giving to every sense a new capacity and relish of delight; cultivating the ear for music, and ravishing it with the concord of sweet sounds; cultivating the eye to drink in the glorious beauty of the external world, then adding to natural sceneries ten thousand pictures of mountain, valley, river, man, angel, and scenes in human and heaven’s history, painted by the thought-instructed hand; cultivating the palate to the most exquisite sensibilities, and exploring all the zones for luxuries to gratify them; cultivating the fine finger-nerves to such perception that they can feel the pulse of sleeping notes of music; cultivating the still finer organism that catches the subtle odors on the wing, and sends their separate or mingled breathings through every vein and muscle from head to foot.
The same law holds good in the development of mind. It has now reached such an altitude, and it shines with such lustre, that our imagination can hardly find the way down to the morning horizon of its life, and measure its scope and power in the dim twilight of its first hours in time. The simple fact of its first condition would now seem to most men as exaggerated fancies, if given in the simplest forms of truthful statement. With all the mighty faculties to which it has come; with its capacity to count, name, measure and weigh stars that Adam, nor Moses, nor Solomon ever saw; with all the forces of nature it has subdued to the service of man, it cannot tell what simplest facts of the creation had to be ascertained by its first, feeble and confused reasonings. No one of to-day can say how low down in the scale of intelligence the human mind began to exercise its untried faculties; what apposition and deduction of thoughts it required to individualise the commonest objects that met the eye; even to determine that the body it animated was not an immovable part of the earth itself; to obtain fixed notions of distance, of color, light, and heat; to learn the properties and uses of plants, herbs, and fruits; even to see the sun sink out of sight with the sure faith that it would rise again. It was gifted with no instinct, to decide these questions instantly and mechanically. They had all to pass through the varied processes of reason. The first bird that sang in Eden, built its first nest as perfectly as its last. But, thought by thought, the first human mind worked out conclusions which the dullest beast or bird reached instantly without reason. What wonderful co-working of internal and external influences was provided to keep thought in sleepless action; to open, one by one, the myriad petals of the mind! Nature, with all its shifting sceneries, filled every new scope of vision with objects that hourly set thought at play in a new line of reflection. Then, out of man’s physical being came a thousand still small voices daily, whispering, Think! think! The first-born necessities, few and simple, cried, “_Think_! for we want bread, we want drink, we want shelter and raiment against the cold.” The finer senses cried continually, “Give! give thought to this, to that.” The Eye, the Ear, the Palate and every other organ that could receive and diffuse delight, worked the mental faculties by day and night, up to the last sunset of the antediluvian world; and all the intellectual result of this working Noah took with him into the ark, and gave to his sons to hand over to succeeding ages. Flowers that Eve stuck in the hair of the infant Abel are just now opening the last casket of their beauty to the favored children of our time. This, in itself, is a marvellous instance of the law we are noticing. But what is this to the processes of thought and observation through which the mind of man has reached its present expansion; through which it has developed all these sciences, arts, industries and tastes, the literature and the intellectual life of these bright days of humanity! The figure is weak, and every figure would be weak when applied to the ratio or the result of this progression; but, at what future age of time, or of the existence beyond time, will the mind, that has thus wrought on earth, open its last petal, put forth no new breathing, unfold no new beauty under the eye of the Infinite, who breathed it, as an immortal atom of His own essence, into the being of man?
Follow the radius up into the next concentric circle, and we see this law working to finer and sublimer issues in man’s moral nature. We have glanced at what the mind has done for and through his physical faculties and being; how that being has re-acted upon the mind, and kept all its capacities at work in procuring new delight to the eye, ear, palate, and all the senses that yearned for enjoyment. We have noticed how the inside and outside world acted upon his reasoning powers in the dawn of creation; how slowly they mastered the simplest facts and phenomena of life in and around them, how slowly they expanded, through the intervening centuries, to their present development. The mind is the central personage in the trinity of man’s being; linking the mortal and immortal to its life and action; vitalising the body with intelligence, until every vein, muscle, and nerve, and function thrills and moves to the impulse of thought; vitalising the soul with the vigorous activities of reason, giving hands as well as wings to its hopes, faiths, loves, and aspirations; giving a faculty of speech, action, and influence to each, and play to all the tempers and tendencies of its moral nature. Thus all the influences that the mind could inhale from the material world through man’s physical being, and all it could draw out of the depths of Divine revelation, were the dew and the light which it was its mission to bring to the fostering, growth, and glory of the human soul. These were man’s means wherewith to shape it for its great destiny; these he was to bring to its training and expansion; with these he was to co-work with the Infinite Father of Spirits to fit it for His presence and fellowship, just as he co-works with Nature in developing the latent life and faculties of the rose. What distillations of spiritual influence have dropped down out of heaven, through the ages, to help onward this joint work! What histories of human experience have come in the other direction to the same end!–fraught with the emotions of the human heart, from the first sin and sorrow of Adam to our own griefs, hopes, and joys; and all so many lessons for the discipline of this high-born nature with us!
And yet how slow and almost imperceptible has been the development of this nature! How gently and gradually the expanding influences, human and divine, have been let in upon its latent faculties! See with what delicate fostering the petals of love, faith, and hope were taught to open, little by little, their hidden life and beauty,–taking Moses’ history of the process. First, one human being on the earth, surrounded with beasts and birds that could give him no intelligent companionship and no fellow-feeling. Then the beautiful being created to meet these awakening yearnings of his nature; then the first outflow and interchange of human love. The narrative brings us to the next stage of the sentiment. Sin and sorrow afflict, but unite, both hearts in the saddest experience of humanity. They are driven out of the Eden of their first condition, but their very sufferings and fears re-Eden their mutual attachments in the very thorns of their troubles and sorrows. Then another being, of their own flesh, heir to their changed lot, and to these attachments, is added to their companionship. The first child’s face that heaven or earth ever saw, opened its baby eyes on them and smiled in the light of their parental love. The history goes on. In process of time, there is a family of families, called a community, embracing hundreds of individuals connected by ties of blood so attenuated that they possess no binding influence. Common interests, affinities, and sentiments supply the place of family relationship, and make laws of amity and equity for them as a population. Next we have a community of communities, or a commonwealth of these individual populations, generally called a nation. Here is a lesson for the moral nature. Here are thousands and tens of thousands of men who never saw each others’ faces. Will this expanded orb of humanity revolve around the same centre as the first family circle, or the first independent community? How can you give it cohesion and harmony? Extend the radii of family relationship and influence to its circumference in every direction. Throne the sovereign in a parent’s chair, to execute a father’s laws. He shall treat them as children, and they each other as brethren. Here is a grand programme for human society. Here is a vigorous discipline for the wayward will and temper of the human heart. How is a man to feel and act in these new conditions? How is he to regulate his hates and loves, his passions and appetites, to comply properly with these extended and complicated relationships?
About half way from Adam’s day to ours, there came an utterance from Mount Sinai that anticipated and answered these questions once for all, and for one and all. In that august revelation of the Divine Mind, every command of the Decalogue swung open upon the pivot of a _not_, except one; and that one referred to man’s duty to man, and the promise attached to its fulfilment was only an earthly enjoyment. All the rest were restrictive; to curb this appetite, to bar that passion, to hedge this impulse, to check that disposition; in a word, to hold back the hand from open and positive transgression. Even the first, relating to His own Godhead and requirements, was but the first of the series of negatives, a pure and simple prohibition of idolatry. No reward of keeping this first great law, reaching beyond the boundary of a temporal condition, was promised at its giving out. With the headstrong passions, lusts, appetites, and tempers of flesh and blood bridled and bitted by these restrictions, and with no motives to obedience beyond the awards of a short life on earth, the human soul groped its way through twenty centuries after the Revelation of Sinai, feeling for the immortality which was not yet revealed to it, even “as through a glass darkly.” Here and there, but thinly scattered through the ages, divinely illumined men caught, through the parting seams of the veil, a transient glimpse and ray of the life to come. Here and there, obscurely and hesitatingly, they refer to this vision of their faith. Here and there we seem to see a hope climbing up out of a good man’s heart into the pathless mystery of a future existence, and bringing back the fragment of a leaf which it believes must have grown on one of the trees of life immortal. Moses, Job, David, and Isaiah give us utterances that savor of this belief; but they leave us in the dark in reference to its influence upon their lives. We cannot glean from these incidental expressions, whether it brought them any steady comfort, or sensibly affected their happiness.
Thus, for four thousand years, the soul of man dashed its wings against the prison-bars of time, peering into the night through the cold, relentless gratings for some fugitive ray of the existence of which it had such strong and sleepless presentiment. It is a mystery. It may seem irreverent to approach it even with a conjecture. Human reason should be humble and silent before it, and close its questioning lips. It may not, however, transcend its prerogative to say meekly, _perhaps_. Perhaps, then, for two-thirds of the duration that the sun has measured off to humanity, that life and immortality which the soul groped after were veiled from its vision, until all its mental and spiritual faculties had been trained and strengthened to the ability to grasp and appropriate the great fact when it should be revealed. Perhaps it required all the space of forty centuries to put forth feelers and fibres capable of clinging to the revelation with the steady hold of faith. Perhaps it was to prove, by long, decisive probation, what the unaided human mind could do in constructing its idealisms of immortality. Perhaps it was permitted to erect a scaffolding of conceptions on which to receive the great revelation at the highest possible level of thought and instinctive sentiment to which man could attain without supernatural light and help. If this last _perhaps_ is preferable to the others, where was this scaffolding the highest? Over Confucius, or Socrates, or the Scandinavian seer, or Druid or Aztec priest? Was it highest at Athens, because there the great apostle to the Gentiles planted his feet upon it, and said, in the ears of the Grecian sophists, “Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto you?” At that brilliant centre of pagan civilization it might have reached its loftiest altitude, measured by a purely intellectual standard; but morally, this scaffolding was on the same low level of human life and character all the world around. The immortalities erected by Egyptian or Grecian philosophy were no purer, in moral conception and attributes, than the mythological fantasies of the North American Indians. In them all, human nature was to have the old play of its passions and appetites; in some of them, a wider sweep and sway. There was not one in the whole set of Grecian deities half so moral and pure, in sentiment and conduct, as Socrates; nor were Jupiter and his subordinate celestials better than the average kings and courts of Greece. Out of the hay, wood, and stubble of sheer fancy the human mind was left to raise these fantastic structures. They exercised and entertained the imagination, but brought no light nor strength to the soul; no superior nor additional motives to shape the conduct of life. But they did this, undoubtedly, with all their delusions; they developed the _thought_ of immortality among the most benighted races of men. Their most perplexing unrealities kept the mind restless and almost eager for some supplementary manifestation; so that, when the Star of Bethlehem shone out in the sky of Palestine, there were men looking heavenward with expectant eyes at midnight. From that hour to this, and among pagan tribes of the lowest moral perception, the heralds of the Great Revelation have found the _thought_ of another existence active though confused. They have found everywhere a platform already erected, like that on which Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill, and on which they could stand and say to heathen communities, “Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto you! That future life and immortality which your darkened eyes and hungry souls have been groping and hungering for, bring we to you, bright as the sun, in this great gospel of Divine Love.” Had the Star of Bethlehem appeared a century earlier, it might not have met an upturned eye. If the Saviour of Mankind had come into the world in Solomon’s day, not even a manger might have been found to cradle His first moments of human life; no Simeon waiting in the temple to greet the great salvation He brought to our race in His baby hands.
Here, then, commences, as it were, the central era of the soul’s training in time. Here heaven opened upon it the full sunlight and sunwarmth of its glorious life and immortality. Here fell upon its opening faculties the dews and rays and spiritual influences which were to shape its being and destiny. Here commenced such co-working to this end as can find no measure nor simile in any other sphere of co-operative activities in the world below or above. Here the trinity of man and the Trinity of the Godhead came into a co-action and fellowship overpassing the highest outside wonder of the universe. And all this co-working, fellowship, and partnership has been repeated in the experience of every individual soul that has been fitted for this great immortality. Here, too, this co-working is a law, not an incident; most marvellously, mightily, and minutely a law, as legislatively and executively as that which we have seen acting upon the development of the flower. Had not the great apostle, who was caught up into the third heavens and heard things unutterable, spoken of this law in such bold words, it would seem rash and irreverent in us to approach so near to its sublime revelation. Not ours but his they are; and it is bold enough in us to repeat them. He said it: that He, to whose name every knee should bow, and every tongue confess; to whom belonged and who should possess and rule all the kingdoms of the earth, “was made under the law,” not of Moses, not of human nature only, but under this very law of CO-WORKING. Through this the world was to be regenerated and filled with His life and light. Through this a new creation was to be enfolded in the bosom of His glory, of grander dimensions and of diviner attributes than that over which the morning stars sang at the birth of time. Said this law to the individual soul, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do of His own good pleasure.” To will and to do. It is His own good will and pleasure that the soul shall be fitted and lifted up to its high destiny through this co-working. It was His power to raise it to that condition without man’s participation or conscious acquiescence; but it was His will and pleasure to enact this law of salvation. Looking across the circumference of the individual soul, what says this law? “Go ye out into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, and, lo, I am with you unto the end,”–not as an invisible companion, not merely with the still, small voice of the Comforter to cheer you in trial, weakness and privation; but with you as a _co-worker_, with the irresistible energies of the Spirit of Power. He might have done the whole work alone. He might have sent forth twelve, and twelve times twelve legions of angels, and given each a voice as loud as his who is to wake the dead, and bid them preach His gospel in the ears of every human being. He might have given a tongue to every breathing of the breeze, an articulate speech to every ray of light, and sent them out with their ceaseless voices on the great errand of His love. It was his power to do this. He did not do it, because it was His will and pleasure to put Himself under this law we have followed so far; to make men His co- workers in this new creation, and co-heirs with Him in all its joy and glory. So completely has He made this law His rule of action, that, for eighteen hundred years, we have not a single instance in which the life and immortality which He brought to light have been revealed to a human soul without the direct and active participation of a human instrumentality. So completely have His meekest servants on earth put themselves under this law, that not one of them dares to expect, hope, or pray that He will reveal Himself to a single benighted heathen mind without this human co-working.
Thus, begin where you will, in the flower of the field or the hyssop by the wall, and ascend from sphere to sphere, until there is no more space in things and beings created to draw another circumferential line, and you will see the action and the result of this great law of _Co-operative Activities_. When I first looked within the lids of that hollyhock, and was incited to read the rudimental lessons of the new leaves that man’s art had added to its scant, original volume, I had no thought of finding so much matter printed on its pages. I have transcribed it here in the order of its paragraphs, hoping that some who read them may see in this life of flowers an interest they may have partially overlooked.
CHAPTER IX.
VISIT TO A THREE-THOUSAND-ACRE FARM–SAMUEL JONAS–HIS AGRICULTURAL OPERATIONS, THEIR EXTENT, SUCCESS, AND GENERAL ECONOMY.
The rain having ceased, I resumed my walk, in a southerly direction, to Chrishall Grange, the residence of Samuel Jonas, who may be called the largest farmer in England; not, perhaps, in extent of territory occupied, but in the productive capacity of the land cultivated, and in the values realised from it. It is about four miles east of Royston, bordering on the three counties of Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, and Essex, though lying mainly in the latter. It contains upwards of 3,000 acres, and nearly every one of them is arable, and under active cultivation. It consists of five farms, belonging to four different landlords; still they are so contiguous and coherent that they form substantially one great block. No one could be more deeply impressed with the magnitude of such an establishment, and of the operations it involves, than a New England farmer. Taking the average of our agriculturists, their holdings or occupations, to use an English term, will not exceed 100 acres each; and, including woodland, swamp, and mountain, not over half of this space can be cultivated. To the owner and tiller of such a farm, a visit to Mr. Jonas’ occupation must be interesting and instructive. Here is a man who cultivates a space which thirty Connecticut farmers would feel themselves rich to own and occupy, with families making a population of full two hundred souls, supporting and filling a church and school-house. In the great West of America, where cattle are bred and fed somewhat after the manner of Russian steppes or Mexican ranches, such an occupation would not be unusual nor unexpected; but in the very heart of England, containing a space less than the state of Virginia, a tract of such extent and value in the hands of a single farmer is a fact which a New Englander must regard at first with no little surprise. He will not wonder how one man can _rent_ such a space, but how he can _till_ it to advantage; how, even with the help of several intelligent and active sons, he can direct and supervise operations which fill the hands of thirty solid farmers of Massachusetts. Two specific circumstances enable him to perform this undertaking.
In the first place, agriculture in England is reduced to an exact and rigid science. To use a nautical phrase, it is all plain sailing. The course is charted even in the written contract with the landlord. The very term, “_course_,” is adopted to designate the direction which the English farmer is to observe. Skilled hands are plenty and pressing to man the enterprise. With such a chart, and such a force, and such an open sea, it is as easy for him to sail the “Great Eastern” as a Thames schooner. The helm of the great ship plays as freely and faithfully to the motion of his will as the rudder of the small craft. Then the English farmer has a great advantage over the American in this circumstance: he can hire cheaply a grade of labor which is never brought to our market. Men of great skill and experience, who in America would conduct farms of their own, and could not be hired at any price, may be had here in abundance for foremen, at from twelve to sixteen shillings, or from three to four dollars a week, they boarding and lodging themselves. And the number of such men is constantly increasing, from two distinct causes. In the first place there is a large generation of agricultural laborers in England, now in the prime of manhood, who have just graduated, as it were, through all the scientific processes of agriculture developed in the last fifteen years. The ploughmen, cowmen, cartmen, and shepherds, even, have become familiar with the established routine; and every set of these hands can produce one or two active and intelligent laborers who will gladly and ably fill the post of under-foreman for a shilling or two a week of advanced wages. Then, by the constant absorption of small holdings into large farms, which is going on more rapidly from this increased facility of managing great occupations, a very considerable number of small farmers every year are falling into the labor market, being reduced to the necessity of either emigrating to cheaper lands beyond the sea, or of hiring themselves out at home as managers, foremen or common laborers on the estates thus enlarged by their little holdings. From these two sources of supply, the English tenant-farmer, beyond all question, is able to cultivate a larger space, and conduct more extensive operations than any other agriculturist in the world, at least by free labor.
The first peculiarity of this large occupation I noticed, was the extent of the fields into which it was divided. I had never seen any so large before in England. There were only three of the whole estate under 60, and some contained more than 400 acres each, giving the whole an aspect of amplitude like that of a rolling prairie farm in Illinois. Not one of the little, irregular morsels of land half swallowed by its broad-bottomed hedging, which one sees so frequently in an English landscape, could be found on this great holding. The white thorn fences were new, trim, and straight, occupying as little space as possible. The five amalgamated farms are light turnip soil, with the exception of about 200 acres, which are well drained. The whole surface resembles that of a heavy ground swell of the sea; nearly all the fields declining gently in different directions. The view from the rounded crest of the highest wave was exceedingly picturesque and beautiful, presenting a vista of plenty which Ceres of classic mythology never saw; for never, in ancient Greece, Italy, or Egypt, were the crops of vegetation so diversified and contrasting with each other as are interspersed over an English farm of the present day.
It is doubtful if 3,000 acres of land, lying in one solid block, could be found in England better adapted for testing and rewarding the most scientific and expensive processes of agriculture, than this great occupation of Mr. Jonas. Certainly, no equal space could present a less quantity of waste land, or occupy less in hedges or fences. And it is equally certain that no estate of equal size is more highly cultivated, or yields a greater amount of production per acre. Its occupant, also, is what may be called an hereditary farmer. His father and his remote ancestors were farmers, and he, as in the case of the late Mr. Webb, has attained to his present position as an agriculturist by practical farming.
Mr. Jonas cultivates his land on the “Four-course system.” This very term indicates the degree to which English agriculture has been reduced to a precise and rigid science. It means here, that the whole arable extent of his estate is divided equally between four great crops; or, wheat, 750 acres; barley and oats, 750; seeds and pulse, 750; and roots, 750. Now, an American farmer, in order to form an approximate idea of the amount of labor given to the growth of these crops, must remember that all these great fields of wheat, oats, barley, turnips, beans, and peas, containing in all over 2,000 acres, are hoed by hand once or twice. His cereals are all drilled in at seven inches apart, turnips at seventeen. The latter are horse-hoed three or four times; and as they are drilled on the flat, or without ridging the surface of the ground, they are crossed with a horse-hoe with eight V shaped blades. This operation leaves the plants in bunches, which are singled out by a troop of children. One hand-hoeing and two or three more horse-hoeings finish the labor given to their cultivation. It is remarkable what mechanical skill is brought to bear upon these operations. In the first place, the plough cuts a furrow as straight and even as if it were turned by machinery. A kind of esprit de corps animates the ploughmen to a vigorous ambition in the work. They are trained to it with as much singleness of purpose as the smiths of Sheffield are to the forging of penknife blades. On a large estate like that occupied by Mr. Jonas, they constitute an order, not of Odd Fellows, but of Straight Furrow-men, and are jealous of the distinction. When the ground is well prepared, and made as soft, smooth, and even as a garden, the drilling process is performed with a judgement of the eye and skill of hand more marvellous still. The straightness of the lines of verdure which, in a few weeks, mark the tracks of the seed-tubes, is surprising. They are drawn and graded with such precision that, when the plants are at a certain height, a horse-hoe, with eight blades, each wide enough to cut the whole intervening space between two rows, is passed, hoeing four or five drills at once. Of course, if the lines of the drill and hoe did not exactly correspond with each other, whole rows of turnips would be cut up and destroyed. I saw this process going on in a turnip field, and thought it the most skilful operation connected with agriculture that I had ever witnessed.
One of the principal advantages Mr. Jonas realises in cultivating such an extent of territory, is the ability to economise his working forces, of man, beast, and agricultural machinery. He saves what may be called the superfluous fractions, which small farmers frequently lose. For instance, a man with only fifty acres would need a pair of stout horses, a plough, cart, and all the other implements necessary for the growth and gathering of the usual crops. Now, Mr. Jonas has proved by experience, that, in cultivating his great occupation, the average force of two and a quarter horses is sufficient for a hundred acres. Here is a saving of almost one half the expense of horse-force per acre which the small farmer incurs, and full one half of the use of carts, ploughs, and other implements. The whole number of horses employed is about seventy-six; and the number of men and boys about a hundred. The whole of this great force is directed by Mr. Jonas and his sons with as much apparent ease and equanimity as the captain of a Cunarder would manifest in guiding a steamship across the Atlantic. The helm and ropes of the establishment obey the motion of one mind with the same readiness and harmony.
A fact or two may serve an American farmer as a tangible measure whereby to estimate the extent of the operations thus conducted by one man. To come up to the standard of scientific and successful agriculture in England, it is deemed requisite that a tenant farmer, on renting an occupation, should have capital sufficient to invest 10 pounds, or $50, per acre in stocking it with cattle, sheep, horses, farming implements, fertilisers, etc. Mr. Jonas, beyond a doubt, invests capital after this ratio upon the estate he tills. If so, then the total amount appropriated to the land which he _rents_ cannot be less than 30,000 pounds, or nearly $150,000. The inventory of his live stock, taken at last Michaelmas, resulted in these figures:–Sheep, 6,581 pounds; horses, 2,487 pounds; bullocks, 2,218 pounds; pigs, 452 pounds; making a grand total of 11,638 pounds. Every animal bred on the estate is fatted, but by no means with the grain and roots grown upon it. The outlay for oil-cake and corn purchased for feeding, amounts to about 4,000 pounds per annum. Another heavy expenditure is about 1,700 pounds yearly for artificial fertilisers, consisting of guano and blood-manure. Mr. Jonas is one of the directors of the company formed for the manufacture of the latter.
The whole income of this establishment is realised from two sources- -meat and grain. And this is the distinguishing characteristic of English farming generally. Not a pound of hay, straw, or roots is sold off the estate. Indeed, this is usually prohibited by the conditions of the contract with the landlord. So completely has Mr. Jonas adhered to this rule, that he could not give me the market price of hay, straw, or turnips per ton, as he had never sold any, and was not in the habit of noticing the market quotations of those products. I was surprised at one fact which I learned in connection with his economy. He keeps about 170 bullocks; buying in October and selling in May. Now, it would occasion an American farmer some wonderment to be told that this great herd of cattle is fed and fatted almost entirely for the manure they make. It is doubtful if the difference between the cost and selling prices averages 2 pounds, or $10, per head. For instance, the bullocks bought in will average 13 or 14 pounds. A ton of linseed-cake and some meal are given to each beast before it is sent to market, costing from 10 to 12 pounds. When sold, the bullocks average 24 or 25 pounds. Thus the cake and the meal equal the whole difference between the buying and selling price, so that all the roots, chaff, and attendance go entirely to the account of manure. These three items, together with the value of pasturage for the months the cattle may lie in the fields, from October to May inclusive, could hardly amount to less than 5 pounds per beast, which, for 170, would be 850 pounds. Then 1,700 pounds are paid annually for guano and artificial manures. Now add the value of the wheat, oat and barley straw grown on 1,500 acres, and mostly thrown into the barn-yards, or used as bedding for the stables, and you have one great division of the fertilising department of Chrishall Grange. The amount of these three items cannot be less than 3,000 pounds. Then there is another source of fertilisation nearly as productive and valuable. Upwards of 3,000 sheep are kept on the estate, of which 1,200 are breeding ewes. These are folded, acre by acre, on turnips, cole, or trefoil, and those fattened for the market are fed with oil-cake in the field. The locusts of Egypt could not have left the earth barer of verdure than these sheep do the successive patches of roots in which they are penned for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, nor could any other process fertilise the land more thoroughly and cheaply. Then 76 horses and 200 fattening hogs add their contingent to the manurial expenditure and production of the establishment. Thus the fertilising material applied to the estate cannot amount to less than 5,000 pounds, or $24,000, per annum.
Sheep are the most facile and fertile source of nett income on the estate. Indeed, nearly all the profit on the production of meat is realised from them. Most of those I saw were Southdowns and Hampshires, pure or crossed, with here and there a Leicester. After being well fattened, they fetch in the market about double the price paid for them as stock sheep. About 2,000, thus fattened, including lambs, are sold yearly. They probably average about 2 pounds, or $10, per head; thus amounting to the nice little sum of 4,000 pounds a year, as one of the sources of income.
Perhaps it would be easier to estimate the total expenditure than the gross income of such an establishment as that of Mr. Jonas. We have aggregated the former in a lump; assuming that the whole capital invested in rent, live stock, agricultural machinery, manures, labor of man and horse, fattening material, etc., amounts to 30,000 pounds. We may extract from this aggregate several