The Express.
London, England, 1849-01-13 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, SATURDAY EVENING, JANUARY 13, 1849.

an• d ee Suede to the peejedice of even moderate I
and Mina One Of the great results et
the past year, however, hts bees to ese discredit epos
these ileittriess. sod are the Falidusi Plac"FilY of
••••=dmi and setialum,-iven in the minds of that
which was most fascinated by them The
people which
socialists in the presidential simian evidently
deserted, in great numbers, &SPAM and LEDRU for
Louis NAPOLEON—a plain confession that their faith
in the social religion had evaporated. And if any-
thing was wanting to dissipate completely the illusion
created by the socialist pseachme, the accounts ads.
unfortunate emigrants to Icaria have come to overwhelm
?Lesser and his school with flagrant proofs not merely
of utter folly, but of something egregiously worse.
M. Louis BLANC and his friends may plead,
indeed, that they had not a fair trial.
The former denies being answerable for the
scheme of the national workshops, and one and
all of his rivals can no doubt urge, that, in no cam
were the precise schemes of any duly carried out. Bat,
nevertbelesa, they cannot deny that the political sect
got possession of the French government in February,
that it outvoted and overawed, even in the executive
council, the opposition of its practical and unphi-
losophic members; that their proselyte, Mind!,
as home minister, was master of domed° policy ;
and that M. Louis BLANC himself had a ministry
Teeialven4. LAHARMTlNflrhimthseelf, in seisavetiron
ajfhislapbublic.
orations, announced himself as the enemy of the school
of political economy, and at least a semi-believer in
the new doctrines, according to which the people
were to choose and name the chiefs of the state, for
the especial purpose of those chiefs of the state find-
ing the people in employment and wages.
There is, however, some excuse for the ultra-demo-
cratic politicians glling into this error. This
excuse is, that their scheme was a mere imitation
of the maxim of all the governments, which went
before them—to rale by a class and for a class, which
has unfortunately been the rule even of too many re-
presentative systems. There have been governments
of this kind, as in England, which have for upwards
of a century conducted tLe business of the state for
the interests of the aristocracy, and through the in-
strumentality of its sons. In France, the avowed
principle of Louis PHILIPPE'S government was to
conduct the administration by means of the middle
clam for the benefit of the middle the bout,

class, or

At
geoisie, as it is called.
The great mistake in this was, to suppose that the
middle class can have exclusive interests or selfish
greediness. The middle class in a developed country
is much too vast to be bribed by any number of
places, or even by any amount of privileges. The
middle class, in fact, constitutes the nation, and
cannot be separated from it. Louis PHILIPPE
made the mistake of selecting certain nota-
bles of the middle and commercial class. By
satisfying them he thought be satisfied all, whilst
in fact he was creating more ecemies than friends. He
szonsulted his chosen notables for the feelings of the man
of citizens, which were consequently misrepresents d to
him. And the poor monarch imagined himself the
mow& of the middle-classes, at the very moment
that the middle-classes were kicking him out.

M. Louis Bum wrote a book against the middle
or bourgeois class, and throughout it made just the
same mistake as Louis PHILIPPE. He took the
larger capitalists and notables, which formed Louis
PHILIPPE'S aristocracy, to mean the bourgeoisie,
leaving out of sight that large, industrious class,
which had acquired property by earning and fru-
gality, and which, sprung from the people, were the
true representatives and Elite of the people. Louis
BLANC'S aim was. however, to separate them from
the people, to demonstrate that they were
distinct classes having distinct interests. lie
appealed to the young and uaprovided earner
against the old earner, whose economy had already
secured his subsistence, and he promised the former
that he should live, not by his own foresight and ex-
ertior, bat by his elders' past foresight and exertion.
The state, in the person of M. Louis BLANC, took
the result of the past industry of one to feed the
future idleness of the other.

It is fortunate that this preposterous philo-
sophy was put to the trial—fortunate that its
preachers were allowed full power and oppor-
tunity to realise it fortunate that the peo-
ple, as well as the class just risen from the un-
provided people, know what such a system means,
and what it leads to. As long as such a doctrine
had votaries, and as long as it animated party, so
long were the interests of all classes of society,
except the lowest, banded against that lowest,
the removal of which would have been bat
the most cruel oppression, or the most san-
guinary civil war. We have seen the last
result in the fearful days of June in Paris. But
the evaporation of communism, es a sane political
doctrine, has restored to the middle classes their
security and composure, ard, at the same time, re-
stored to the working classes their national motives
and incentives to active industry, without which so-
ciety becomes a lazar-house, or a den of wild beasts.
Such has been one of the salutary results of 1848.

THE condition and management of the PROUST
establishment at Tooting, as described in Mr. Gum-
GEM'S report to the Board of Health, forcibly recall
the condition and management of the Fleet and Mar-
shalsea prisons, as described in the reports of General
OGLETHORPE'S committee in 1729. Not one point
of the parallel fails, as far as the treatment of the
sufferers u conoetned. The inmates of the Fleet and
Marshalsea were forced to inhabit ill-ventilated and
damp buildings, erected amid common sewers and
lay-stalls; the inmates of the Tooting Asylum have
been lodged in damp, ill-ventilated, overcrowded
rooms erected amid pigsties and pestiferous ditches.
The inmates of the Fleet and Marshalsea were forced
by the wardens into contact with small-pox patients;
the inmates of the Tooting Asylum, in a state
of predisposition to cholera, have been com-
pelled to attend patients aff-cted with the
disease. The wardens of the Fleet and Mar-
shalsea claimed a kind of proprietary right in the pri-
soners; Mr. Dnourr formed the children—had • lease-
hold estate in them. Lastly. BAMBRIDGE, HUGGINS,
and their associates, obstructed and bullied the con-
ductors of the investigation to which they were sub-
jtcted. Mr. GRAINGER says, with reference to his
Tooting scrutiny, " the proprietor obstructed my in-
quiry by sharply rebuking one of the under-masters,
whom I was questioning respecting the prevalence of
cholera among the boys."
In other respects it would be injustice to the BAM-
BRIDGES and Httconteas to say the parallel holds.
The tone of their age was near eer and less h 'maned=
our own. OGLETBORPE was only the precursor of
HOWARD, and HOWARD at first stood almost alone in
entertaining and expressing sentiments of disinter-
ested compassion, which it is now considered a re-
mach to a man to be deficient in. The victims of
BANBRIDGE were full-grows men and women whom
thoughtlessness or vice had brought to penury, and
whom penury had hardened and degraded, not re-
claimed. The Tooting sufferers are children whose
tender years, innocence, and friecdlessness, give them
the strongest claims to kind and careful tending. For
the recklessness of human suffering which pervaded
the management of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons
in 1729 some palliation maybe found; for that evinced
in the Tooting Asylum in 1849 there is none.
The whole arrangements of the institution might
almost appear to have been made with a view to
invite a visitation of pestilence. "In the immediate
neighbourhood of the establishment," Nays Mr.
GRAINGER, " and intersecting the land in all direc-
tions, are numerous open ditches of the most offensive
charLter." Mr. SEMPLE, one of the medical officers of

Islington, stated to Mr. GRAINGER "that he had com-
plained ofthe wet and damp condition of the premises."
The ventilation of the building is most defective. We
again quote from Mr. GRAINGER : "The dormitories
are greatly overcrowded, and in those for the younger
children the arrangement was that three children
should sleep in one bed. In the schoolroom for boys
the master informed me there were, wlen all were
present, 500; the length of this room being 94 feet,
the width 21 feet, and the height 11 feet" Again,
160 children were placed in a low room, erected about
six months ago, "in the immediate vicinity of a yard
in which a large number of pigs, cows, horses, and
poultry are kept," and" placed very near to two foul
and open ditches or drains." "The clothing is insuffi-
cient, particularly as regards the provision of
flannel next to the skin." AS to the diet,
Mr. GRAINGER says: "On inquiring and questioning
a considerable number of the children, I am bound
to state that in many instances it bas beendefective in
quantity ; the kind and quality of the diet also
have been of an objectionable character." That die-
eans—gaseral sad fatal diatase—ahaald some day

break out in an esttilisiosent so conducted wee to be
foi.—what prowl/ions were made to meet it ?
There wee ope inexper practitioner, 26 years of
age, whoreservices w assialed tuella a year, with
board ea lodging, to thine of 1,360 children.
In the surgery ' there was only one piir of scales,
one spatula, and some of the mediednes were not la-
belled at all." _

We confine our remark, at t to the state of
affairs which existed before at the time the dis-
ease broke out, and which obviously rendered some
such fearful visitation inevitable. For the manner in
which the epidemic was met we refer to Mr.
GRAINGER'S report, published in this day's paper.
We can only say of its details that the horrors of the
Tooting cholera wards are not surpassed by those of
MILTON'S law -home ; that the sordid callousness
which prevented due and effective measures being
adopted is worthy of the worst times of the African
slave trade; and we again remind the reader that the
suff.rers are innocent and friendless children.

We confine our remarks at present to the state of
affairs which preceded and caused the epidemic, for
the purpose of bringing home the culpability
to the quarters where it is justly chargeable.
Let publio indignation visit with full force
the speculator in nursing on a wholesale
male, who sought to wring a profit out of a
scanty remuneration for feeding, clothing, and lodg-
ing nearly 1,400 children—the master of this mam-
moth Dotheboys' HasL But he must not be allowed
to serve as a lightning conductor, to draw off the
stroke of public reprobation from the responsible offi-
cials who farmed the children to him. The gross and
glaring defects of the establishment in which the
epidemic has had its origin would have been visible
had any real supervision been exercised by the
Boards of Guardians who sent the children there.
In this respect there has been a cruel neglect of duty
on the part of these officials. The pother they are
making now that the mischief has been done cannot
extenuate their remissness in time past.
The massacre of the innocents at Tooting is the
result of a system. And we are not certain that any
one of us in this great community of London can
entirely wash our hands of being accessary to it. There
is an inveterate selfishness in the fine feeling of the pre-
sent day. No small part of that loud and ostentatious
humanity which declaims against capital and corporal
punishment proceeds quite as much from a desire to
spare the nerves of the declaimers the disagreeable
necessity of witnessing orsmagining harrowing
spectacles as from sympathy with the sufferers. And
what is called charity too often rests contented
with removing misery oat of sight instead of re-
lieving it. Hence the disposition to cast the whole
burden of relieving want and suffering upon an
organised system and officials ; and hence again the
readiness of officials to shift the ostensible re-
sponsibility of providing for the poor and their
children upon speculators who are ready to farm
them. The farming system—in which the prcfits of
the undertaker must depend upon the margin be-
tween what he receives and what he lays out—has
an inevitable tendency to such results as have been
witnessed at Tooting. Boards of guardians soothe their
consciences when any harm comes of thissystem by lay-
ing the whole blame on the farmer. The rate-payers
soothetheir consciences by laying the blame on the guar-
dians or the poor-law commissioners. But in the eye
of omnipotence the crime rests upon tl'e officers who
accept employments which they are too indolent or
incapable to discharge efficiently, and upon the pub-
lic which places and keeps, or even tolerates, such
faineants in office.

" Tons again Whittington." Poor Dick, when
he left his native village expecting to find the streets
of London paved with gold, did not make such a
grievous blunder se his countrymen who are now
shipping themselves for California under the influ-
ence of a kindred hallucination. For Dick came to a
place where, even in his own day, there were cook-
shops and wine vaults for such as had money, and
rich merchants with shoes to clean, from whom scraps
of meat and the shelter of a roof might be earned,
though accompanied by the drawback of cross words
and fisticuffs from crabbed old Cicely, the cook.
Our modern Whittingtone will find nothing of
the kind in California. We will not belie the country :
it is healthy enough, " barren : beggars all ; marry
good air." But men cannot live on a wholesome atmo-
sphere alone ; they require shelter from the night
dews and food to eat. And in both these indis-
pensable', more especially the last, the modern El
Dorado is scandalously ill-provided. Whittington
found the mice of London a plague, and was glad to
expend his only penny in the purchase of a cut to rid
him of them. But to the Californian gold-hunter
mice and such small deer would be as welcome as
ever they were to Poor Tom. There is but one edible
commodity in the region—wild horses. Now horse-
flesh may be, for aught we know, delicate and nutri-
tious food, though it does not appear that the benign
Beget t of Hanover had great success iii persuading his
subjt eta to substitute it for beef during the last
scarcity. But there is this disadvantage connected
with the Californian horses, that they are as wild as
Maseppa's" desert born." The receipt for conking
them begins, like old Mother GLASSE'S celebrated re-
ceipt,—" first catch your horse."
Nor is the gold land of the Whitttngtons of 1848
so easily aooessible as that which played before the
infant imagination of their prototype. Hungry he
might at times be ; but in his days charities like that
of St. Cross had not all got into the hands of noble
and reverend rectors, and he might " stoutly jog
the footpath way, and merrily bend the style," till he
came to his destination. But to reach California
• man must " put a girdle" round half
the globe without Puck's celerity of loco,
motion. There is the Isthmus of Panama between
London and San Francisco, a halting-place that at
present marvellously resembles the station in the
royal game of goose, which has a skeleton delineated
upon it. In one of his recent communications our New
York correspondent informed ns that Cruces and
Panama were months ago overcrowded with American
adventurers who could find no means of conveyance
to carry them further. Our countrymen who follow
in this wild-goose chase will be detained in that pes-
tilential climate, waiting their turn to be carried off,
till they are " carried off "in a rather unpleasant
sense of the phrase.
Yet it is notorious that there are at this moment
crowds of " peremptory galls" embarking for Cali-
fornia, as eagerly as in a less experienced age they
thronged on board the shi of Itar, eta u, the picturesque
inventor of the art of " blowing a cloud." Tnis is cha-
racteristic of our countrymen. When one recalls the
number of pestilential tropical swamps in which
Englishmen have found or sought to establish a foot-
ing—Arracan, the Mosquito coast, Sierra Leone, the
Niger, Labuan—eum multir aliis—one is almost
tempted to surmise that death by yellow fever and
cognate diseases has attractions irresistible for the
race. The chance of a protracted residence in
Panama possibly attracts, instead of repelling.
And not lees characteristic is the fact that we
have already agents speculating upon this epidemic
infatuation. Already advertisements are beginning
to show themselves in the public journals, inti-
mating that Mr. So-and-So undertakes to forward
intending emigrants to the gold country, and
furnish them with all necessary information. We
do believe that if a sufficient number of Englishmen
could be found desirous to make an expedition to the
infernal regions, some ingenious gentl- man would be
found in London to open an agency office, and inform
the publio that a residence of many years in their
place of destination enabled him to controvert autho-
ritatively the absurd prejudices that prevailed re-
specting its salubrity and amenity, and to put them
upon the surest and most expeditious way of reach-
ing it.
We have no intention to call in question the
existence of g hi in California, though we may have
our doubts as to the extent of the region and the
quantity of the gold. But we know, from the. expe-
rience of past ages, that it is not those whr, go to a
gold country who become the owners of the precious
metal. They are merely the wretched slaves who pick
it up for the use of others; the Aladdin sent down
into the magic cave to hand up the lamp VI the magi-
cian, and to be shut ap to die of starvatioin for their
pains. The true and only way of getting a share of the
Californian gold is to stay at home anti make the ar-i
tides which those who gather it mr,st bay with it.
We may, and most likely will, min tt,e gold if we go
in search of it; but if we remain at home, and work
steadily and honestly, the gold is sir re to come to us.
Therefore, let every honest Cockr my who is haunted
by visions of Californian advrratnre, listen to the
turn again" of Bow hello, even though no promise
be added that he shall in time become Lord Mayor
of Loodoc."