they undertake to build a system, and run it up in too great haste. Had he just glanced at the account of a journey round the shores of the Syrtis, by the two Beecheys, instead of consulting Solinus, he would have found that those 'plashy quicksands,' and the terrible objects which this and other ancient writers have described, are absolutely non-entities, as far as the shores are concerned; the dangers were in the Gulph. The elder Beechey traversed every foot of the shore, and assures us that the idea which appears to have been entertained by the ancients of the soil of the Greater Syrtis is not confirmed by an inspection of the country.'* At the bottom of this gulf the two brothers found no sandy plains—no river-no 'plashy quicksands'-no' perflabilem terram'-no creek-nor inlet towards the desert, but a straight line of coast, for a whole day's journey, of hard ground, with a good firm footing; the only sand, that which was blown up from the beech into ridges; and beyond these, on the skirts of the desert, a range of hills of solid stone from four to six hundred feet in height.' Thus, then, perishes that mighty subarenaceous stream, by the help of which all our geographical difficulties,' with regard to the termination of the Niger, were to be settled. 6 In assiguing to this fourth-rate river, not only a circuitous, but circular course, we are somewhat surprised that the ridicule our author bestows on poor Park for his fancy that the Niger runs to the south, and becomes the Congo or Zaire,' did not occur to him, as being applicable also to other persons besides Park, -particularly when he was writing the following paragraph. This notion is repugnant to all that is known of the courses of all the great rivers in the world, as well as against all that can be inferred by analogy; by which we may and do infer that, as we have seen nothing of the kind before, so we are not likely to see in the Niger the phenomenon of a great river first of all taking one decided course for a great many hundred miles in one direction, and then turning back towards the very point of the compass from which it had started,-so as to enter the ocean by a sort of Bousteopηdov process, by a course parallel to and the very reverse of its original one: but this is what the Niger must do, if it enters the Atlantic by the Congo or Zaire.'— p. 110. and, we may add, what it must do, if it enters the Syrtis," which, however, we think we have clearly shown it does not. We feel how ungracious a task it is to hamper the flight of a fervid imagination by cold realities. Of the former kind we consider the concluding passage of Sir Rufane's Dissertation' to be a specimen : I do indeed feel that the attempt I have made to unveil the myste * Expedition to explore the Northern Coast of Africa, &c. p. 222. ries which have hung over the Niger in its passage through western Æthiopia, and the sands of the Libyan desert, is a bold attempt, but I hope it will not be called a presumptuous one; nor could I deny to myself an indulgence in the dream, if dream it be,-which presented to me the great Nile of Central Africa rolling forwards majestically to the shores of the Mediterranean, through countries then swarining with people, and animated by intelligence; and through vallies either bespangled by cities, or enamelled by the varied productions of a luxuriant soil, fertilized by the waters of a noble stream whose very existence has been for centuries forgotten; in a climate too, where nature was ever bursting with spontaneousness, and yielding forth a perpetual round of productions, combining throughout the year, the infant delicacy of vernal freshness with the luscious fulness of autumnal maturity.'pp. 134, 135. Alas! alas how directly the reverse of this fascinating picture is the dry fact! The African Zahara was, and ever will be, what it now is--a wide interminable waste of rocky hills, rearing their naked heads out of moving sands; of arid, stony plains, unrefreshed by a shower of rain, on which, for a hundred miles together, no drop of water is met with to quench the traveller's thirst, and where no human beings venture to reside, except a few miserable wretches digging up flakes of natron, or collecting salt from the marshy pools; or the still more miserable robber, who derives a scanty and precarious subsistence from the plunder of the wayworn traveller. Such is the real and appalling picture of that solitary sadness and dreary desolation that pervade the great African desert! One word more, and we have done. The river of Timbuctoo, which the moderns have been pleased to call the Niger, (but which was utterly unknown to the ancients by that or any other name,) we now know does run to the south' as far as the ninth degree of latitude, and does not, as Sir Rufane says, flow into the Tchad, under the name of the Yeou,' (p. 87.) as he will find by consulting the published account of Clapperton's second journey this southerly course he has wholly omitted, and covered the ground it occupies with a ridge of mountains, placed many degrees to the northward of their real situation. Having reached the ninth parallel, however, without obstruction, the Quorra, for that is its native name, either turns to the eastward and becomes the Shary, or continues to the southward and falls into the Bight of Benin. There is no other alternative; and while testimonies are in favour of the former, appearances would incline us to adopt the latter. ART. ART. IX.-1. The Abolition of Slavery in England. By C. Scrope, Esq. London. 1829. 2. Third Letter on the Means of improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes. By Samuel Banfill. Exeter. 1829. 3. Address to the Society for the Encouragement of Industry. By John Denson, of Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire. THERE HERE are changes which take place gradually, and all but imperceptibly, in the bosom of society-in the interior arrangements of communities-affecting far more powerfully and permanently the happiness of mankind, than those political revolutions which, for the most part, engross the attention of historians. The feuds of venal, profligate, and selfish factions, the tracasseries of courts, and the contests of turbulent and ambitious nations, are the materials of which the annalist delights to form his web. He notes down, with painful and scrupulous exactness, what cabal prevailed in the senate; what hollow-hearted intriguer supplanted his rival in the cabinet; what haughty chief overcame his antagonist in the field. And here he generally stops: having detailed the follies, the frailties, the treachery, or the ferocity of mankind-having described the froth and foam which float on the surface of society, he rarely condescends to examine the understratum, and contemplate the slow and silent revolutions which are brought about in the industry, the domestic habits, and the social arrangements of the great body of the people. But this fashion, we suspect, is near its end: and, perhaps, the silence of grave historians as to such subjects may, hereafter, be looked back upon with about as much admiration as we now bestow on the candour of that ancient Fablier, who commences his lai with the following concise confession of his economical faith :- Priests are set apart for prayer; but it is fit that noble chevaliers should enjoy all ease, and taste all pleasures-while the labourer toils, in order that they may be nourished in abundance-they, and their horses, and their dogs." Among the revolutions which have taken place in the circumstances, feelings, and views of the various classes of which society is composed in this country, there is none which merits more careful examination than the momentous change which has been brought about in the condition of our rural peasantry. That an all but universal change for the worse has taken place in the condition and habits of this most important class, is a lamentable and admitted fact;—that honesty, sobriety, industry, and contentment have disappeared almost entirely among a body of men once remarkable for these virtues, is a truth which no person conversant with * Legrand, vol. i., p. 219., (third edition.) the the present state of our country parishes will venture to controvert. The wealth of the country, the productive capacity of the soil, has been constantly and steadily increasing; while the condition of those who till our fields of those who may, in one sense, be said to create this wealth-seems to be daily retrograding. Most of the writers who undertake to account for this deterioration, ascribe it to the introduction of our present system of poor-laws. In this we think them mistaken; and as the subject is in the highest degree important, both on the score of humanity and of policy, we shall make no apology for going a little into detail, in order to justify our dissent from the opinions of those modern economists who adopt, in regard to it, the old sophism, post hoc ergo propter hoc. During the prevalence of the feudal system, from the period of the Conquest to the accession of Henry VII., the population of this country was purely agricultural. The barons and chief landed proprietors possessed a certain number of slaves, who were employed generally in domestic offices, and in the manual fabrication of the wearing apparel and household furniture which they required; and who, like the negroes of the West India islands, were, during infancy and old age, maintained at the expense of their owners. There is no ground, however, for thinking that this class was at any period very considerable in this country. The great body of the peasantry was composed-first, of persons who rented small farms, seldom exceeding twenty or thirty acres, and who paid their rent either in kind or in agricultural labour and services performed on the demesne of the landlord secondly, of cottagers, each of whom had a small croft or parcel of land attached to his dwelling, and the privilege of turning out a cow, or pigs, or a few sheep, into the woods, commons, and wastes of the manor. During the whole of this period, the entire population of England derived its subsistence immediately from the land; the landowner from the produce of his demesne, cultivated partly by his domestic slaves, but principally by the labour of the tenants and cottiers attached to the manor; the tenants from the produce of their little farms; and the cottiers from that of their cows and crofts, except while working upon the demesne, when they were generally fed by the landlord. The mechanics of each village, not having time to cultivate a sufficient quantity of land to yield them a maintenance, received annually a fixed allowance of agricultural produce from each tenant. When the population increased, and a new couple required accommodation, a cottage or a farm-house, according to the circumstances of the parties, was built, and a proportionate allotment abstracted from the common. The condition of the VOL. XLI. NO. LXXXI. R peasantry peasantry of this country resembled, in many respects, that of the Highland peasantry at a much more recent period. Every married peasant occupied some portion of land, and enjoyed a right of common; no class of persons existed, either engaged solely in manufactures, or subsisting solely upon the wages of daily labour. These peasantry, it is true, worked hard, and fared scantily enough; but still they were never in absolute want of foodnever dependant upon charity. The whole body was poor, but it contained no paupers. In the course of the fourteenth century, the demand for wool, to supply not only the markets of the Netherlands, but also the infant manufactures of our own country, rapidly increased. This circumstance brought about an important change in the distribution of the population; the owners of land, finding sheepfeeding more profitable than husbandry, commenced the same system which we have all witnessed in full operation in the Highlands of Scotland. The peasantry previously employed in tillage were turned adrift upon the world; the allotments of arable land, which had afforded them and their families the means of subsistence, were inclosed, consolidated, and converted into sheep-walks; and the policy of Henry VII. greatly accelerated a social revolution which had commenced before his accession. The misery and suffering which this change of system inflicted upon the ejected peasantry, have been depicted in beautiful and glowing language by Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, 'Your sheep,' says he, that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities; for look in what part of the realm doth grow the finest, and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men, God wot, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure-nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the weal publick-leave no ground for tillage; they enclose all into pastures, they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And, as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands, and parks, those good holy men turn all dwelling places, and all glebe lands, into desolation and wilder ness. Therefore, that one covetous and unsatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together, within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by coven and fraud, or by violent oppression, they be put beside it, or by wrongs and inju |
