COLCHESTER IN THE PRESENT DAY. 149 compelled to eat and sleep, and perform every office, perhaps in company with pigs and cattle-but of a kitchen, and often a parlor, and several bedrooms. These rooms are furnished with tables, and chairs, and beds, and cooking utensils. There is ordinarily, too, something for ornament and something for instruction; a piece or two of china, silver spoons, books, and not unfrequently a watch or clock. The useful pottery is abundant, and of really elegant forms and colors; drinking-vessels of glass are universal. The inhabitants are not scantily supplied with clothes. The females are decently dressed, having a constant change of linen, and gowns of various patterns and degrees of fineness. Some, even of the humbler classes, are not thought to exceed the proper appearance of their station if they wear silk. The men have decent working habits, strong shoes and hats, and a respectable suit for Sundays, of cloth often as good as is worn by the highest in the land. Every one is clean; for no house above the few hovels which still deform the country is without soap and bowls for washing, and it is the business of the females to take care that the linen of the family is constantly washed. The children very generally receive instruction in some public establishment; and when the labor of the day is over, the father thinks the time unprofitably spent unless he burns a candle to enable him to read a book or the newspaper. The food which is ordinarily consumed is of the best quality. Wheaten bread is no longer confined to the rich; animal food is not necessarily salted, and salt meat is used principally as a variety; vegetables of many sorts are plenteous in every market, and these by a succession of care are brought to higher perfection than in the countries of more genial climate from which we have imported them; the productions, too, of distant regions, such as spices, and coffee, and tea, and sugar, are universally consumed almost 150 COLCHESTER IN THE PRESENT DAY. by the humblest in the land. Fuel, also, of the best quality, is abundant and comparatively cheap.* If we look at the public conveniences of a modern English town, we shall find the same striking contrast. Water is brought not only into every street, but into every house; the dust and dirt of a family is regularly removed without bustle or unpleasantness; the streets are paved, and lighted at night; roads in the highest state of excellence connect the town with the whole kingdom, and by means of railroads a man can travel several hundred miles in a few hours, and more readily than he could ten miles in the old time; and canal and sea navigation transport the weightiest goods with the greatest facility from each district to the other, and from each town to the other, so that all are enabled to apply their industry to what is most profitable for each and all. Every man, therefore, may satisfy his wants, according to his means, at the least possible expense of the transport of commodities. Every tradesman has a stock ready to meet the demand; and thus the stock of a very moderately wealthy tradesman of the Colchester of the present day is worth more than all the stock of all the different trades that were carried on in the same place in the fourteenth century. The condition of a town like Colchester-a flourishing market-town in an agricultural district-offers a fair point of comparison with a town of the time of Edward III. * This picture of a flourishing English city, and the condition of its population of 19,000 in the middle of the nineteenth century, when contrasted with any flourishing town or village in the northern United States, will show that, so far as regards educational advantages, practical privileges, and a command over the comforts and luxuries of life, the great mass of the English people are yet far less advanced than their most favored transatlantic brethren. CHAPTER XI. CERTAINTY THE STIMULUS TO INDUSTRY.-EFFECTS OF INSECURITY.-INSTANCES OF UNPROFITABLE LABOR.-FORMER NOTIONS OF COMMERCE.-ENGLAND AND HER AMERICAN COLONIES.-NATIONAL AND CLASS PREJUDICES, AND THEIR REMEDY. Two of the most terrific famines that are recorded in the history of the world occurred in Egypt-a country where there is greater production, with less labor, than is probably exhibited in any other region. The principal laborer in Egypt is the river Nile, whose periodical overflowings impart fertility to the thirsty soil, and produce in a few weeks that abundance which the labor of the husbandman might not hope to command if employed during the whole year. But the Nile is a workman that can not be controlled and directed, even by capital, the great controller and director of all work. The influences of heat, and light, and air, are pretty equal in the same places. Where the climate is most genial, the cultivators have least labor to perform in winning the earth; where it is least genial, the cultivators have most labor. The increased labor balances the small natural productiveness. But the inundation of a great river can not be depended upon like the light and heat of the sun. For two seasons the Nile refused to rise, and labor was not prepared to compensate for this refusal; the ground refused to produce; the people were starved. We mention these famines of Egypt to show that certainty is the most encouraging stimulus to every operation of human industry. We know that production as invariably 152 CERTAINTY A STIMULUS TO INDUSTRY. follows a right direction of labor, as day succeeds to night. We believe that it will be dark to-night and light again tomorrow, because we know the general laws which govern light and darkness, and because our experience shows us that those laws are constant and uniform. We know that if we plow, and manure, and sow the ground, a crop will come in due time, varying indeed in quantity according to the season, but still so constant upon an average of years, that we are justified in applying large accumulations and considerable labor to the production of this crop. It is this certainty that we have such a command of the productive powers of nature as will abundantly compensate us for the incessant labor of directing those forces, which has during a long course of industry heaped up our manifold accumulations, and which enables production annually to go forward to an extent which even half a century ago would have been thought impossible. The long succession of labor, which has covered this country with wealth, has been applied to the encouragement of the productive forces of nature, and the restraint of the destructive. No one can doubt that, the instant the labor of man ceases to direct those productive natural forces, the destroying forces immediately come into action. Take the most familiar instance-a cottage whose neat thatch was never broken, whose latticed windows were always entire, whose whitewashed walls were ever clean, round whose porch the honeysuckle was trained in regulated luxuriance, whose garden bore nothing but what the owner planted. Remove that owner. Shut up the cottage for a year, and leave the garden to itself. The thatched roof is torn off by the wind and devoured by mice, the windows are driven in by storms, the walls are soaked through with damp and are crumbling to ruin, the honeysuckle obstructs the entrance which it once adorned, the garden is covered WAR THE DISTURBER OF INDUSTRY. 153 with weeds which years of after-labor will have difficulty to destroy: "It was a plot Of garden-ground run wild, its matted weeds Mark'd with the steps of those whom, as they pass'd, The gooseberry-trees that shot in long lank slips, Or currants, hanging from their leafless stems Apply this principle upon a large scale. Let the productive energy of a country be suspended through some great cause which prevents its labor continuing in a profitable direction. Let it be overrun by a conqueror, or plundered by domestic tyranny of any kind, so that capital ceases to work with security. The fields suddenly become barren, the towns lose their inhabitants, the roads grow to be impassable, the canals are choked up, the rivers break down their banks, the sea itself swallows up the land. Shakspeare, a great political reasoner as well as a great poet, has described such effects in that part of "Henry V." where the Duke of Burgundy exhorts the rival kings to peace: "Let it not disgrace me, If I demand, before this royal view, Should not, in this best garden of the world, Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage? Corrupting its own fertility. Her vine, the merry checrer of the heart, |