The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-19 00:00:00

nary circumstances? Ordinary circumstances!
Show me the English child who will build a per-
fect, practically perfect, hexagon, and alter it to
suit circumstances ! Why each an ordinary degree
of education in the children of our shires would
be deemed visionary, impracticable, the dream of
an enthusiast! The bees have it, and we the
wonderful say, " Pooh ! you have only instinct,
it is nothing in you. Give ma instinct, and
I could do the same." " Instinct !" says
the bee, " nonsense! ho when a central comb
gets detached, which in proportion to me is as big
as your clumsy houses in proportion to you, and I
support it by pillars and alter it to suit circum-
stances, you call that instinct, do you ? Pray what
do you call it in your engineer who built a tubular
bridge over some straits or other of yours with his
naked eye, and boasted his ignorance of mathe-
matics ? had he only instinct ? ' But the instances
wo quote are the veriest fragment of the evidence,
which demonstrates as clearly as the sun in heaven
that the bees are an organised polity, a civilised
community, differing from us no doubt more than
Turks or Chinamen from Christians, but bound
together by ties of language, experience, affection,
common aims, in a word all, perhaps even more
than all, the ties wherewith we are bound together.
Pray if the bees were our size and we theirs, what
would they think of us ? Our language they would
describe as a hum, our finest flights of eloquence as
a rather louder hum than usual, our music as comi-
cal chirping, our books as curious scraps of industry,
to serve, as far as they could see, curiously base uses,
our houses as showing a very incomplete sense of
symmetry, our relations to one another as being
almost incomprehensible, and excepting in the one
cardinal fact that, with the exception of one or two
varieties of the insect man, one male went with one
female, all other relations as below the pains of a
bee of the world to understand. Perhaps some poor
eccentric bee might waste her precious life and die
in a garret in the attempt to fathom the useless
mystery of that:pretty and curious little two-legged
and two-handed insect man ; but the vacation of
the publiceminded bee would bid her attend to very
much higher matters.
THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON MEN CONSI-
DERED AS ANIMALS !—English society is so varied,
it is marked off into se many classes, and these
classes are so intermixed, that even those who have
had the best opportunities of forming a wide and
accurate judgment can scarcely venture to say they
understand it. But there is one thing which per-
vades all English society and is found in every class,
and that is, a large amount of daily happiness. Be-
low a certain level, indeed, happiness cannot be said
to exist. There is a degree of poverty which forbids
any enjoyment whatever, and it must be owned
that there is a large portion of the population of
England which is not happy, simply because it has
not a fair chance of health. Millions in England
do not get enough good air and enough food to
make life anything but a long burden. The agricul-
tural population in manycoun tries never gets enough
to eat. 'rho men are half-starved, and the women
and children are the constant prey of those num-
berless diseases which spring from insufficient
nourishment. In large towns, the very look of the
inhabitants, and especially of the young, tells its
own tale; and it is a mockery to speak of *pie
ness when the body is exposed to such endless pri-
vations, and the mind is dulled with constant care,
and an overpowering sense of helplessness. But if
these poor wretches are put aside, and a moderate
ch.ince of good health is once secured, every class in
England is happy in its way. Nor is it easy to say
which class is the happiest. An English nobleman,
for example, with a handsome place and a fine
estate, with au incontestable position in the best
society, able to fill his house with the visitors he
likes best, with the opportunity of being scientific,
or literary, or agricultural, or sporting, or simply
nothing, just as much or as little as he pleases—
with every one inside his gates treating him as a
blessed being from a brighter world, and every
one outside delighted to have been spoken to,
or even nearly spoken to, by him—seems as if he
had everything the world could give him.
But when we turn from surveying him to
surveying a person of a different class, we do not
find the elements of happiness:much diminished. A
successful professional man who is not engaged in a
pursuit which perpetually occupies and interests
him, who is getting together a moderate fortune,
who has a comfortable well appointed home, and
who has all the resources which educatton can offer
at his command, has as happy a life as mortal can
desire. Ho is not, however, better off than the
manufacturer whose zeal and perseverance have
placed him at the head of a groat business,who counts
the hands he employs by thousands, and who tastes
every hour the pleasures of sustained practical ac-
tivity and of setting in motion the practical activity
of others. He, again, may be rivalled in happiness
by one of his own hands, who delights in his own
punctuality, industry, and thrift, who honestly be-
lieves that he sucks in wisdom from his Mechanics'
Institute, who educates his children tea higher pitch
than he himself has reached, and chuckles over the
thought of the store he has confided to the
Savings'-bank. None of these men, again,
is better off, so far as the sense of pre-
sent enjoyment goes, than the higher kind of
labourer, who gets good wages by leading a life in
the open air, who is at ease about the position of
his wife and family, and who earns daily the glo-
rious appetite that gives to his lump of fat bacon
and his pipe of coarse tobacco a divine relish un-
known to the luxurious or even to those who work
hard, but in a less appetising way. Then, in one

sense, all happy men are on a level, and there are
no summits in society. Every class is apt to fancy
that those below it must be unhappy because they
have not got what it itself possesses. But this is a
mere fancy. The mass of mankind is utterly indif.
ferent to the feelings and wants and possessions of
those with whom it is not brought into daily fami.
liar coatect. The human mind easily accommodates
itself, in the absence of positive suffering, to that
condition of things in which it finds itself placed.
It is no better to be a duke, eating venison end
drinking claret, than to be a day labourer, eating
bacon and drinking that thick blown beverage
which is invested in the country with the sacred
name of beer. They both have the enjoyment of
eating ; and if the duke can get a perception of
savour and perfume with a less amount of physical
readiness for food and drink, the labourer has, to a
degree beyond all comparison, a greater pleasure in
filling up a meal void in his system, and in satisfy-
ing a genuine physical want. After the meal is
over, the labourer has to go on working, and the
duke may if ho likes do nothing. But to be occu-
pied is much pleasanter than to be idle, and the
easiest way to be occupied is to be forced to use
exertion. It is the power of choice as to industry
or idleness that makes rich people miserable. Nor
is there any reason to suppose that a labourer's
work is distasteful to him. It sums distasteful to
those who view it from the outside as philosophical
spectators, because they think how they themselves
would like it, and they knoiw that they would con-
sider three or four hours of hedging and ditching in
a drizzling rain very poor full. But the labourer
does not think about doing
it—he does it. His mind'
is reduced, by the kindness of Providence, very much
to the state of pure blank which is suited to agricul-
tural occupations. What can be more dreary to look
at than the way in which a cow walks over a field,
for even biting at damp grass ? But the cow neither
likes nor dislikes its ordinary grass. It is forced,
by habit and animal instinct, to bend its head down
and go on nibbling—and the labourer is forced,
by habit and the wish for a certain number of shil-
lings a week, to go on hedging and ditching. But
it is said time labourer has no intellectual enjoyments,
no pleasant books to read,
no nice people to talk to.
As to books, he neither has th m nor wants them ;
he no more troubles himself about them than most
educated Englishmen trouble themselves about not
understanding the beauties of Persian poetry. He
leaves book learning to his betters, who he hopes
like it, just as we leave Persian poetry to the Asiatic
Society, and hope that it suits them. And as to
having no nice society, that is a matter of taste.
The labourer sees great fun in discussing the caps.
bilities of the different
pigs, donkeys, and bulls of
the neighbourhood over a publichouse tire, in drat-
ting the farmers, and in blessing his eyes if he ever
saw such a rum chap as the parson. The labourer,
perhaps, has not such fine and such complicated re-
ligious feelings as his superiors, but this is only a
negative disadvantage. It is one that, by the very
nature of things, he cannot feel, for if he felt it he
would be on the way to have these feelings; and as
for a contented view of a future state, that, as experi.
ence shows, can be produced by a proud consciousness
of having helped to stub Thornaby waste as fully as
in any other way. But the common sense of man-
kind has long ago pronounced that, although the
amount of happiness or enjoyment may present no
perceptible variations in
specimens of different
dosses, and although we may be very thankful that
man is so constituted that, wherever there is health
and the absence of remorse, there a reasonable
amount of happiness is within the reach of every
one, yet happiness is of different kinds in itself,
and there is a higher and a lower happiness. There
is no difference between simple and savoury food to
a hungry man, bat there is such a thing as savouri-
ness. The lot of men in different classes of Eng-
lish life may possibly not be very unequal, but the
happiness of one class may be more refined, varied,
and constant than that of another class. There
are, that is to say,
summits in English society.
And what are these summits ? It appears to us
there are more especially two. There are two
classes of men who, each in their way, have
everything that life has to give them.
There are the great nobility, and there are
the educated professional classes who can con-
mand a competence. It is very difficult to say which

has the brighter fortnne,the more rounded and coma
pitted existence of the two. Each has in perfection
what a great number has to a moderate extent and
.vish to have more abundantly. An English or
Scotch duke has almost everything that is commonly'
thought to make up prospeti y, and he has it to n
very extraordinary degree. He has got to the end
of that vast striving to be great which consumes so
much of the time and thoughts of Englishmen, He
is a very big man wherever he goes, and in his own
district he is something prodigiously great. It is
a sumptuous and splendid thing to move about from
one huge castle or palace to another, and to know,
wherever be goes, that all this is his ; or, to speak
more accurately, that he has a life interest in it.
lie has the best of everything always provided for
him- If he has a fancy for science, the heads of
the scientific world will tell him all their secrets in
the simplest way, and show him exactly the right
sort of instruments to use, and do all his
calculations for him. If ho is religious,
Exeter Hall will not only lick his shoes, but
clean them afterwards, to get them on the proper
platform. If he likes literature, he can have so many
literary people to talk to him that ho can fancy
their remarks are his own. If he wishes for poli-
tics! distinction, he grins his experience at once,
and can enter the Cabinet while he is still a boy;
and as to the ple -„sures of the heart and the affec-
tions, half the improper women in London will run
after him directly he shows himself. People who do
not live in the society of dukes, and possibly some
of those who do, are apt to forget how great men
they are—but let a stranger penetrate into a great
duke's country, and he will then know how very
much one mortal can be above another. And he
will realise this as he can realise it only on his
native soil, We are never properly impressed with
Continental grandeur—and there are, for instance,
many honest Scotchmen who would smile at the
glory of the Czar of Russia, but are fully overcome
by that of the Dake of Hamilton. The duke is on
one of the summits, yet we cannot but think that
the educated professional man with a competence
—let us say the Dean of St. Paul's or of West.,
minister—is on the other. He has not got the
pride of wealth, and he has everything else that
wealth can give except its pride. A man wants
nothing really for himself more than two or three
thousand a year can give him. Everything that is
really nice to eat and drink may be had for money.
So long as a man has carriages to ride in,it cando him
no immediate good that he has carriages for other
persons to ride in. The interchange of social cour-
tesies is, to say the least, as pleasant in the house of
the humbler man as in that of the duke, and, what
is of the highest consequence, the women are quite
as well educated and as substantially well-bred,
The intellectual pleasures may be tasted to the uts
most in such a station, and there is generally more
devotion to them, and a more habitual relish of them
than in a higher rank, If statior. is to be measured
by opportunities of doing good, which it is often
theoretically but never practically, there are quite
enough opportunities in the simpler life, and there
is none of the anxious burden of deciding how
charities are to be given on a very large scale. Even
out of doors the duke has not nearly so much the
best of it as is thought. It is true that if he goes
out shooting he will have the opportunity of killing
more birds; if he hunts, he will ride better horses;
if he drives, he will preside over a much more mag-
nificent turn-out. But the pleasure of easy and
splendid sport resides much more in the impression
it produces on others than in the sport itself. Many
a humble squire or farmer who walks hard about
his fields until he has picked up half-a-dozen brace
of birds has had a much pleasanter day than a duke
who has killed a hundred pheasants at the corner of
a wood. But the duke and his shooting are men-
tioned in the county newspaper, and the squire is
not mentioned. This is the difference, and every
one must allow that it is a real pleasure and a legis
timate source of happiness to be mentioned in a
county newspaper, which is only one of many signs
of a high station. But then it must be remembered
that if the duke has the pleasures of high station,
he has the burdens too. He is always watched
whatever he does ; always stared at wherever he
goes ; always talked about, even if he is as quiet as
he can be, and lies in bed all the day long. His
humbler rival escapes publicity, and this is a great
thing.rißut even if the burden of great station is not
equal to its delights, yet the conditions of the two
men, which in nine points out of ten are equal, may
on the tenth point be said to be equalised by the supe-
riority which the inferior has in the choice of his so-
ciety. He need not ask to his house, or visit, any but
friends ; whereas the duke is a duke, and is expected
to behave as such by countless people whom he
wishes at the bottom of the Red Sea. But it may
be said, if the educated professional man is on a sum-
mit, why not others ? The answer is obvious. In
the first place, we must cut out all persons who are
in the same line as dukes, but not so high—all peers,
county magnates and so forth—for they have evi-
dently a summit above them, on which the duke is
placed, In the next place, we must cut out all per-
sons who wish to enter this list, all persons whose
aim it is to found families, buy great estates, get
titles, and even those who desire great professional
success; for they all own that happiness ls income
plete without some accession of grandeur approxi
mating them, however remotely to dukes. Then,
among professional persons, we must cut out all
those whose professioes are not compatible with the
highest education, forother wise they lose the greatest
pleasure of the intellect, and they do not mix in
circles where the women are highly educated and
thoroughly refined. Lastly, we must exclude edu-
cated professional people who have not got a com-
petence, for their happiness is spoilt by pecuniary
anxiety, and there are many positive pleasures—
such as travelling, and good wine, and patronising
promising relations--which they cannot enjoy. The
number of persons, therefore, who are on this sum-
mit is not very large, but neither is the number on
the ducal summit; and England may think herself
very lucky that she has as many on each summit as
she has, for she has far more than any other coun-
try in the world,

THE " LONDON REVIEW."—A PENNY FOIL ITS
THOUGLlTS.—Cheapness is a characteristic of our
age. Your penny will work more wonders now than
your pound could a century ago. We may be literally
"penny wise" without being " pound foolish ;" we
may eat penny ices in Italian salons, and penny
pine apples at the costermongea's stall. Some wit
and poet of cur happier times should annihilate
" The Splendid Shilling" by writing " The
Splendid Penny." Ho might range from
cyclopredies to steamboats, and yet find matter for
still more glorious Ights. He might even emulate
the achievements of Shakspere as recorded by Dr
Johnson. Existence would " see him spurn her
bounded reign," and "panting Time" would cer-
tainly " toll after him in vain." For we may look
into the future at the moderate cost of one penny,
and may put ourselves in possession of the fate of
empires and the policy and actions of great men a
whole year in advance. " Old Moore's Penny Al-
manack" will suffer no man to be ignorant of
coming events who cares to be informed. We have
no occasion to wait for the sunset of life to acquire
that mystical lore which enables us to see the ad-
vancing shadows before the lagging substance.
Old Moore, for the merely nominal consideration of
a penny, makes us all partakers of his most occult
knowledge. His almanack is a prospective news
paper for the ensuing year; in fact we don't see
why people should go to the expense and trouble
of buying and reading newspapers, when they only
chronicle after the event what Moore has revealed
before it. It is true they enter somewhat more into
detail than the prophet ; but this is mere idleness
and frivolity. All reasonable minds are interested
in broad results rather than in petty minutia. To
such persons " Old Moore's Almanack" is a sort of
essence of the journals of the world, stewed down
to a portable form, and anticipating the laggards
who, for the sake of a few unimportant particulars,
prefer to wait for the event. To be enabled to buy
such a jar of potted meat—minus the bone and
offal—for a penny, is certainly one of the great pri-
vileges of the time ; and we cannot wonder if the
publication finds a large sale. See what you get
for your money in this latest issue—the Almanack
for 1865! Besides the hieroglyphic and prophecies
for the coming year, and the almanack properly
so called, we have a number of " beautiful engrav-
ings representing sea-fishing;" portraits of the
American Generals, Lee and Grant ; lists of fairs
and markets ; tide-tables ; the' rising and setting of
the planets and phases of the moon ;tables of stamps
and taxes; an enumeration of " the principal fixed
and moveable feasts ; law and university terms ;
articles of the calendar—in short, as Old Moore
himself says on his title-page, in a burst of lofty
generalization, at once modest and dignified, "all
that can be desired or expected in an Almanack."
By the expenditure of another halfpenny, you may
have your pennyworth of wisdom secured to you in
a " rich coloured wrapper," all yellow and blue and
red, with a hieroglyphic on the front, and a picture
of an exquisite young lady in hat and curls, with
the most languishing of eyes and the most delicious
of shoulders, on the back. But this is simply a con-
cession to the artistic tastes of the wealthy three-
halfpenny classes, of which the penny public need
not feel jealous. Ail the solid worth of Moore is to
be had for the lower sum, and the affluent may wal-
low, if they will, in the luxury of ornamentation.
" Old Moore," as usual, begins with proving to the
sceptical how all his forecastings for the existing
year have been fulfilled. He "likes to speak by the
card," and therefore comes to the point at once with-
out any nonsense. Now, did he not say, with re-
ference to March, 1864, that "there are omens of
danger to the heads of Royal houses abroad ?" and
did not the King of Wurtemberg die? Yes, cer-
tainly—only he did'nt die in March. Then, again,
he " foreshadowed the Conference upon the great
Danish question thus—' Misunderstandings 4141 ex.