The Sun.
London, England, 1850-10-11 00:00:00

women in a state of emaciation, hectic children, and
ghastly men were to be eeerawandering with a threat-
ening carelessness about shops and warehouses loaded •11
with riches ; the constables and the troops were in-' _ Neseesi
sufficient, after 'the scandalous process of th,.> Qucep-,-
to bridle that perpetual sedition of discontent and:isfOY
hunger. The painful consciousness of a temps*.
hanging over Great Britain was felt in the air. ',A
Cabinet, the author and victim of that false position, ,:,./\
sunk under the effort. A statesman sought in dei6e?e4e)o
spair a refuge against the difficulties which he saw is
accumulating on his country, and which he could no s,kr.AeVN
longer dominate but by force. I avow that I myself,
at that time young and a foreigner, and not yet
knowing either the solidity or the elasticity of the
institutions and the manners of England, was deceived,
like everybody else, by these sinister symptoms of a
fall, and that I prognosticated, as everybody else also
did, the approaching decline and fall of that great and
mysterious country. The Ministry of Mr. Canning
placed me happily in the wrong.
I saw England again in 1830, a few months after
our revolution of July. At that time the political
Government of England was moderate, reasonable,
and wise. It endeavoured, as Lord Palmerston, as
Sir Robert Peel, as the Duke of WeLington have
done, after the revolution of February, to prevent a
collision on the Continent between the revolution and
the counter-revolution. It then refused, as it refused
in 1848, to be a party to an anti-French or anti-Re-
publican coalition. It proclaimed not only the right
and independence of nationalities, but also the sight
and independence of revolutions. It thus, humanely
avoided irritating the revolutionists. It spared Eu-
rope the effusion of much blood. But in 1830 it was
the misery of the English and Irish proletaires that
frightened the regards, and brought consternation
to the thoughts of observers. Ireland was literally
dying of inanition. The manufacturing districts of
the three kingdoms having produced more than the
world could consume during the fifteen years of peace,
left an overflow of manufactures; the masses, ema-
ciated, vitiated in body and mind, and vitiated by their
hatred against the class of society who possess. The
manufacturers had dismissed armies of workmen
without bread; these black columns were to be seen,
with their mud-coloured jackets, dotting the avenues
and streets of London, like columns of insects whose
nests had been upset, and who blackened the soil un.
der their steps.
The vices and brutishness of these masses of prole-
Soiree, degraded by ignorance and hunger—their al-
ternate poverty and debaucheries—their promiecu-
ousness of ages, of sexes, of dens of fetid straw—their
bedding, in cellars and garrets—their hideous cla-
mours, to be met with at certain hours of the morning
in certain lanes of the unclean districts of London—
when that human vermin emerged into the light of
the sun with bowling, groaning, or laughter that was
really Satanic, would .have made the masses of fri,e
creatures really envy the fate of the black slaves of
our colonies—masses which are abased and flogged,
but at all events loathed ! I; was the recruiting of
the army of Marius; all thet was wanting was a fhg.
Social war was visible thete, with all its borrsrs and
its tunes. Everybody saw it, and I myself fore-
boded it like everybody else. These s 3 mptoms struck
toe as such evidence of en approaching overthrow for
a constitution which thus allowed its vices to staguete
and mantle, that having same portion of my patri-
mony in England, I hastened to remove it, and to
place it where it would be sheltered from a wreck
which appeared to me to be inevitable. During that
time the aristocracy and the great proprietary of Eog-
land appeared insensible to these prognostics uf social
war, scandalised the eyes of the public by the con-
trast of their Asiatic luxury with these calamities,
absented themselves from their pr parties during
whole years, and were travelling from Paris to Naples
and to Florence, while at the same time propagating
speculative or incendiary liberalism with the Liberals
of the Continent. Who would not have trembled for
such a country ?
This time (September, 1850) I was struck, in
visiting England, with an impression wholly opposed
to the impressions which I have just depicted to you.
I arrived in London, and I no longer recognised that
capital, excepting by that immense cloud of smoke
that that vast focus of English labour or leisure raises
in the heavens, and by that overflowing without
limits of houses, workshops, and chateaux, and agree-
able residences (demesnes de plaisance), that a city of
two millions six hundred thousand inhabitants casts
year after year beyond its walls, even to the depths
of her forests, her fields, and her hills. Like a po •
lypus with a thousand branches, London vegetates
and engrafts, so to speak, on the common trunk of
the City quarters on quarters, and towns upon towns.
These quarters, some for labour, and others for the
middle classes ; some for the choice leisure of the
literary classes, and others for the sumptuosities of
the aristocracy and for the splendours of the crown,
not only attest the increase of that city which en-
larges itself in proportion to its inhabitants, but they
testify to the increase of luxury, of art, of riches,
and of ease, of all which the characters are to be
recognised in the disposition, in the architecture, in
the ornaments, in the spaciousness, and in the luxury,
sometimes splendid, sometimes modest, cf the habi-
tations of mau. In the west two new towns—two towns
of hotels and palaces—two towns of Kings of civili-
zation, as the ambassador of Carthage would have
said—havel sprung up. Towards the green and
wooded heights of Hampstead, that St. Cloud
of London, is a new park, including pastures, woods,
waters, and gardens in its grounds, and surrounded
by a circle of houses of opulent and varied architec-
ture, of which each represents a building capital
that it. frightens one to calculate. Beyond the soli-
tude inclosed in the capital, other towns aed suburbs
Bove commenced and are rapidly climbira•, step by
step, and hillock after hillock, these heights. Iu
these places arise chapels, churches, schools, hospi-
tale, psehensiary prisons on new models, which
tak,-s avv,,y from them their sinister aspect mai
,tion, h hold out moral health and cur-
reeiion to the guilty in place of punishment and
braieline. In the‘r places is to he so en hvdges
hou,es appropriated to all the conditions of life and
fortune, but ell surrounded by a court or a little gar-
den, which affords the fami'y rural recollections, the
hreetinng of vegetation, and the feeling of nature
present even to the very heart of the tows's.
This new London, which is almost rural, creeps
already up these large hills, and spreads itself from
season to season in the fields which environ them, to
go, by lower, more active, and more smoky suburbs,
to rejoin, as far as the eye can see, the Thames, be-
yond which the same phenomenon is reproduced on
the hills and in the plains on the other side. In sur-
veying this the eye loses itself, as if on the waves of
the ocean. On every side the horizon is too narrow to
embrace that town, and the town continues beyond
the horizon ; but everywhere also the sky, the air, the
country, the verdure, the waters, the tops of' the oaks,
are mixed with that vegetation f stones, of marble, or
of bricks, and appears to make of new London not an
arid and dead city, but a fertile and living province,
which germinates at the same time with men and
trees, with habitations and fields • a city of which the
nature has nut been changed, but in which, on the
contrary, nature and civilisation respect each other,
seek for and clasp each other, for the health and joy
of man in a mutual embrace.
Between these two banks of the river, and between
its steeples and its towers—between he tops of its
oaks, respected by the constructors of these new quar-
ters, eou perceive a moveable forest of masts, which
ascend and descend perpetually the course of the
Thames, and streak it with a thousand lines of smoke,
which the steamers, loaded with passengers, stream out
like a river of smoke above the river of water which car-
ries them. But it is not in the newly-constructed quar-
ters alone that London has changed its appearance, and
presents that image of opulence, of comfort, and of
labour, with thriving—the City itself, that furnace
at the same time blackened and infect of this human
ebullition, has enlarged its issues, widened its streets,
ennobled its monuments, extended and straightened
its suburbs, and made them more healthy. The ig-
noble lanes, with their suspicious taverns, where the
population of drunken sailors, huddled together like
savages in dregs and dust, have been demolished.
They have given place to airy streets, where the
passers-by coming back from the docks, those eutre-
pots of the four continents, circulate with ease in car-
riages or on foot, to spacious and clean houses, to mo-
dest but decent shops, where the maritime population
find, on disembarking, clothes, food, tobacco, beer,
and all the objects of exchange necessary fur the re-
tail trade of sea ports ; these streets are now as well
cleaned from filth, from drunkenness and obscenity,
as the other streets and suburbs of the City. One
can pass through them without pity and without dis-
gust ; one feels in them the vigilance of public mo-
rality and the presence of a police which, if it cannot
destroy vice, can at all events keep it at a distance
from the eves of the pa-s, re by, and resider even the
cloaci inoffensive.
In the country diarists an I secondety towns around
Lund ,n the sails traost'oriteatioe is ob. ervable. The
innumerable rallwa, s c. hick run in e vet y direetion all
over Eoglatel have eove;ed the soil w t.h stations, coal
des O's, new hou-es for the persons employed, elegant
ffi..es ler the administration, viaducts, bridges ewer
the lines to private properties ; and all there things
iinpart to E.,gland, from the sea to London, the
pearence of a coun! ry which is being. cleared,
upd
ePriy?b.'idn g
where the meet iitd,
end everything residences fair thePtlnis'iesl:sr.e
being
alive in this ; one feels that the people are eager
is smoking, burning on, so p:rfectl;
to seiz.i on the new sense of circulation which Prod-
dence has just bestowed en man.
Such is England in a physical sense, sketched
broadly. As to political England, the following are
the changes which struck me. 1 describe them as I
reviewed, with sincerity, it is true, but not unmixed
with astonishment. The appearance of the people in
the street is no longer what filled me with conster-
nation twenty years ago. In place s-f those ragged
' bands of beggars—men, women, and children—who