344 KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. Tickler. A creeshy periodical, price a penny, takes precedence of a black-pudding of strong bull's blood and the generous suet แ North. The age of Haggis is gone! Tickler. And Journeymen Tailors having discovered that Knowledge is Power," starve on half-commons of this earth's cabbage, that they may feed on celestial custocks from a circulating library. Yes, North, Knowledge is Power. He who knows to cut out and stitch, and sew, and with unbaffled art, in defiance of nature's spite, to make a fit of it even on my amiable and most ingenious friend Sheridan Knowles's Hunchback-he-tailor though he be-is a MAN of Power, and is entitled at a Jubilee to unfold, emblazoned with that illustrious motto, the Standard of the Snips, to all the winds of heaven. North. It is leze majestie now to speak of the "lower orders." But that is their right name, and they hold it from heaven. The "labouring classes" is a foolish form of speech. All that live labour. Tickler. The Mite-the Mouse-and the Monarch. North. The very Drone labours-in his own vocation-for soon as the Queen Bee is impregnated in the sunny air—all her stingless paramours are put to death. Tickler. The Bee is a most inexplicable creature. North. Who labours harder than I? Tickler. I. North. You-you Dragon-Fly? Tickler. Yes-I-you Midge. North. Whereas "lower" expresses the everlasting position of the classes to which it is in all honour applied; and he who pales or reddens at the epithet is a radical and a slave. Tickler. Bravo! North. And to them what knowledge is power? Of themselves and their duties, and where they shall find it? Tickler. Why, in our farthing—and if our more ambitious modern circulating medium did not disdain that coin diminutive-in our doit political literature, that through lanes and alleys flutters its ephemeral life away on wings of whiteybrown. North. Such are the means which sage philosophy doth IMPORTANCE OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 345 now employ for the regeneration of fallen man! The lower classes-I love the word- for it carries with it a calm humble meaning that speaks of Christian contentment—may still read the Bible if they will-Heaven forbid that the philosophers should prevent or dissuade them from so doing as often as they choose!-for the philosophers are occasionally of opinion that the Bible should be included in the School of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. Tickler. Are they? North. But the Bible, according to their creed, is not in itself an all-in-all. The poor creature that reads but it, or even it chiefly, must be miserably ignorant-and all unfit to walk with anything like the dignity of a Reformer in a processional jubilee. Tickler. Nor must he hope ever to rise into a Ten-Pounder.1 North. And millions on millions never can-nor could they though all the rags of all the beggars in Ireland were manufactured into paper, and when printed, strewed over the entire earth as thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. Tickler. The forced-pumped waters will subside. North. And leave the soil unenriched by any deposit. Tickler. But not unencumbered with sand, gravel, and stones. North. Which, however, will in good time be cleared away; and flowers and herbage, under a better system of culture, will be reinduced over the land. Tickler. The people of Scotland-I leave you to speak of the English-are not more intelligent, and they certainly are less moral and religious, than they were even a quarter of a century ago. North. I would fain hope that education with us is in much improved, though I fear in not a little deteriorated; but the people themselves, except in our large towns, or our small manufacturing ones, are still deeply impressed with a belief of the paramount importance of moral and religious instruction over every other kind; and while that is the case, let every other kind be encouraged in due subordination to that, without which no man's soul is safe, and the heart within him, overcome by this world's troubles, pines and dies. Tickler. The object of almost all the paltry preaching about 1 Householders who paid £10 a-year in rent had the elective franchise conferred on them by the Reform Bill of 1832. 346 TRUTH AND TORYISM. the education of the "labouring" classes is avowedly political; and despicable as in itself it is, most of the instruction diffused is at this crisis perilous; for wiser and better men than were ever found among the Apostles of InfidelityNorth. Now, "See the deep fermenting tempest brew'd In the grim evening sky." Tickler. Knowledge! Oh, dear! Listen for two minutes to a political pauper, who at the Chequers runs up a score for the sponge, the best-informed and the most acute of the coterie, that chuckles as he crows, and in what nook of Cimmeria gabbles a naked wretch, that lives in an earth-hole, and, in Nature's destitution, almost "wants discourse of reason,' such a hideous hubbub of disordered savageness, which, as it foams or slavers from the lips of the truculent drunkard, is deemed "knowledge" by his long-eared audience, whose shallow brains are obfuscated by the fumes of ignorance and gin!" North. And there are thousands of such bestial. But more lamentable far than such brutalities are to me the miserable mistakings of minds by no means depraved, on subjects that lie far beyond their comprehension, and with which, were they allowed to obey the dictates of their own reason and their own conscience, they would know and feel they had nothing to do-nothing but to follow the guidance and perform the mandates of those whose business it is to understand, to direct, to rule, and to govern-their own duty being not to scrutinise but to serve, not to expound but to obey. Tickler. Truth and Toryism. North. Yes-doctrine, which, when wisely acted on by rulers and by subjects, has saved those from becoming tyrants, and these from being slaves. Tickler. And the "miserable mistakings" you speak of are part and parcel of that "Knowledge which is Power ?"1 1 For further elucidation of the popular, though very ambiguous, aphorism "Knowledge is Power," the reader is referred to Sir E. B. Lytton's admirable dialogue on that text in My Novel, book iv. chaps. xix. xx. The general tenor of the discussion is in harmony with the opinions expressed in the Noctes. The following are some of its points :-"This aphorism has been probably assigned to Lord Bacon upon the mere authority of the index to his works. It is the aphorism of the index-maker, certainly not of the great master of induc NO HELOTS IN SCOTLAND. 347 North. They talk of a state of transition. From what to what? From helotism to freedom? I ask you, Timothy, were the companions of our boyhood, among the rural villages and farms, the children of Helots? No-bold-faced boys and meek-eyed girls were they-with whom Tickler. Especially the girls- "Round stacks at the gloaming at bogles to play!" North. Would you or I, and we were no windlestraes then, Tim, but two young oaks, have dared to insult, had the devil entered us, the sister before her brother's face Tickler. Thank Heaven, no such devil ever entered into either of us. No, no, Kit, fair play's a jewel, and honour bright was the pole-star of our youthful days. North. It was. But would not the callant whose home was a hovel, and his Saturday's and Sunday's breeches one and the same, have smashed his fist in the nose of any Aristocrat (Heaven bless the mark!) who dared to dishonour the pretty tive philosophy. This aphorism either says a great deal too much, or just-nothing at all. Is not ignorance "power" too? And a power that has had much the best end of the quarter-staff. All emil is power, and does its power make it any the better? Fanaticism is power-and a power that has often swept away knowledge like a whirlwind. The Mussulman burns the library of a world — and forces the Koran and the sword from the schools of Byzantium to the colleges of Hindostan. Hunger is power. The barbarians, starved out of their forests by their own swarming population, swept into Italy and annihilated letters. The Romans, however degraded, had at least more knowledge than the Goth and the Visigoth. And even in Greece, when Greek met Greek, the Athenians—our masters in all knowledge—were beat by the Spartans, who held learning in contempt. Wherefore you see that though knowledge be power, it is only one of the powers of the world; that there are others as strong, and often much stronger; and the assertion either means but a barren truism, not worth so frequent a repetition, or it means something which you would find it very difficult to prove. Your knowledge-mongers at present (that is, during the peace-agitation), call upon us to discard military discipline, and the qualities that produce it, from the list of the useful arts. And you insist upon knowledge as the great disbander of armies, and the foe of all military discipline ! Even granting that the power of a class is therefore proportioned to its knowledge-pray, do you suppose that while your order, the operatives, are instructing themselves, all the rest of the community are to be at a stand-still? Diffuse knowledge as you may, you will never produce equality of knowledge. Those who have most leisure, application, and aptitude for learning, will still know the most. Nay, by a very 348 SCOTTISH RURAL LIFE. flower that grew beside his father's humble door? Had he not pride in his sister's innocence; and is such pride the virtue of a helot, is such innocence a jewel worn on the forehead of a slave? Tickler. Your loquacity borders on eloquence. Fire away. North. Did we find ignorance in "the huts where poor men lie ?" No-the "auld clay biggins," dim as they were with peat-reek, were illuminated with knowledge Tickler. Illuminated! somewhat too fine a word—but I must not be too critical on the extemporaneous orator of the human Fire away, Kit. race. North. You and I have stood at the ELDER'S DEATH-BED.1 Tickler. We have- some threescore years ago—and yet there were a hundred good as he in the same wild moorland parish. North. We could remind one another of many a high history of humble worth, were we to stroll for an hour or two over that kirkyard! Tickler. Ay-that we could, Kit. Let us go next summer, and meditate among the tombs. North. That parish was, as it were, an epitome Tickler. No-not an epitome, a fair specimen North. Of Scottish rural life. And is there at this hour a natural law, the more general the appetite for knowledge, the more the increased competition will favour those most adapted to excel by circumstance and nature. At this day there is a vast increase of knowledge spread over all society, compared with that in the Middle Ages; but is there not still greater distinction between the highly-educated gentleman and the intelligent mechanic, than there was then between the baron who could not sign his name, and the churl at the plough?-between the accomplished statesman, versed in all historical lore, and the voter whose politics are formed by the newspaper, than there was between the legislator who passed laws against witches, and the burgher who defended his guild from some feudal aggression ?-between the enlightened scholar of to-day, than there was between the monkish alchemist and the blockhead of yesterday? Peasant, voter, and dunce of this century are no doubt wiser than the churl, burgher, and blockhead of the twelfth. But the gentleman, statesman, and scholar of the present age are at least quite as favourable a contrast to the alchemist, witch-burner, and baron of old. As the progress of enlightenment has done hitherto, so will it ever do. Knowledge is like capital: the more there is in a country, the greater the disparities in wealth between one man and another. Therefore, if the working class increase in knowledge, so do the other classes; and if the working class rise peacefully and legitimately into power, it is not in proportion to their own knowledge alone, but rather as it seems to the knowledge of the other orders of the community, that such augmentation of proportional power is just, and safe, and wise.” 1 One of the tales in Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. |