BELLOC-On Something - THE IRONMONGER
There is a force in Gaul which is of prime consequence to all Europe. It
has canalized European religion, fixed European law, and latterly launched
a renewed political ideal. It is very vigorous to-day.
It was this force which made the massacres of September, which overthrew
Robespierre, which elected Napoleon. In a more concentrated form, it was
this force which combined into so puissant a whole the separate men--not
men of genius--who formed the Committee of Public Safety. It is this
force which made the Commune, so that to this day no individual can quite
tell you what the Commune was driving at. And it is this force which at
the present moment so grievously misunderstands and overestimates the
strength of the armies which are the rivals of the French; indeed, in that
connexion it might truly be said that the peace of Europe is preserved
much more by the German knowledge of what the French army is, even than
by French ignorance of what the German army is.
I say the disadvantages of this force or quality in a commonwealth are
apparent, for the weakness and disadvantages of something extraneous to
ourselves are never difficult to grasp. What is of more moment for us
is to understand, with whatever difficulty, the strength which such a
quality conveys. Not to have understood that strength, nay, not to have
appreciated the existence of the force of which I speak, has made nearly
all the English histories of France worthless. French turbulence is
represented in them as anarchy, and the whole of the great story which has
been the central pivot of Western Europe appears as an incongruous series
of misfortunes. Even Carlyle, with his astonishing grasp of men and his
power of rapid integration from a few details (for he read hardly anything
of his subject), never comprehended this force. He could understand a
master ordering about a lot of servants; indeed, he would have liked
to have been a servant himself, and was one to the best of his
ability; but he could not understand self-organization from below. Yet
upon the existence of that power depends the whole business of the
Revolution. Its strength, then, (and principal advantage), lies in the
fact that it makes democracy possible at critical moments, even in a large
community.
There is no one, or hardly any one, so wicked or so stupid as to deny the
democratic ideal. There is no one, or hardly any one, so perverted that,
were he the member of a small and simple community, he would be content to
forgo his natural right to be a full member thereof. There is no one, or
hardly any one, who would not feel his exclusion from such rights, among
men of his own blood, to be intolerable. But while every one admits the
democratic ideal, most men who think and nearly all the wiser of those
who think, perceive its one great obstacle to lie in the contrast between
the idea and the action where the obstacle of complexity--whether due
to varied interests, to separate origins, or even to mere numbers--is
present.
The psychology of the multitude is not the psychology of the individual.
Ask every man in West Sussex separately whether he would have bread made
artificially dearer by Act of Parliament, and you will get an overwhelming
majority against such economic action on the part of the State. Treat them
collectively, and they will elect--I bargain they will elect for years
to come--men pledged to such an action. Or again, look at a crowd when
it roars down a street in anger--the sight is unfortunately only too
rare to-day--you have the impression of a beast majestic in its courage,
terrible in its ferocity, but with something evil about its cruelty and
determination. Yet if you stop and consider the face of one of its members
straggling on one of its outer edges, you will probably see the bewildered
face of a poor, uncertain, weak-mouthed man whose eyes are roving from
one object to another, and who appears all the weaker because he is under
the influence of this collective domination. Or again, consider the jokes
which make a great public assembly honestly shake with laughter, and
imagine those jokes attempted in a private room! Our tricky politicians
know well this difference between the psychologies of the individual
and of the multitude. The cleverest of them often suffer in reputation
precisely because they know what hopeless arguments and what still more
hopeless jests will move collectivities, the individual units of which
would never have listened to such humour or to such reasoning.
The larger the community with which one is dealing, the truer this is; so
that, when it comes to many millions spread upon a large territory, one
may well despair of any machinery which shall give expression to that very
real thing which Rousseau called the General Will.
In the presence of such a difficulty most men who are concerned both for
the good of their country and for the general order of society incline,
especially as they grow older, to one, or other of the old traditional
organic methods by which a State may be expressed and controlled. They
incline to an oligarchy such as is here in England where a small group of
families, intermarried one with the other, dining together perpetually
and perpetually guests in each other's houses, are by a tacit agreement
with the populace permitted to direct a nation. Or they incline to the
old-fashioned and very stable device of a despotic bureaucracy such as
manages to keep Prussia upright, and did until recently support the
expansion of Russia.
The evils of such a compromise with a political idea are evident enough.
The oligarchy will be luxurious and corporately corrupt, and individually
somewhat despicable, with a sort of softness about it in morals and in
military affairs. The despot or the bureaucracy will be individually
corrupt, especially in the lower branches of the system, and hatefully
unfeeling.
"But," (says your thinker, especially as he advances in age) "man is so
made that he cannot otherwise be collectively governed. He cannot
collectively be the master, or at any rate permanently the master of his
collective destiny, whatever power his reason and free will give him over
his individual fate. The nation" (says he), "especially the large nation,
certainly has a Will, but it cannot directly express that Will. And if it
attempts to do so, whatever machinery it chooses--even the referendum--will
but create a gross mechanical parody of that subtle organic thing, the
National soul. The oligarchy or the bureaucracy" (he will maintain, and
usually maintain justly) "inherit, convey, and maintain the national
spirit more truly than would an attempted democratic system."
General history, even the general history of Western Europe, is upon the
whole on the side of such a criticism. Andorra is a perfect democracy, and
has been a perfect democracy for at least a thousand years, perhaps since
first men inhabited that isolated valley. But there is no great State
which has maintained even for three generations a democratic system
undisturbed.
Now it is peculiar to the French among the great and independent nations,
that they are capable, by some freak in their development, of rapid
communal self-expression. It is, I repeat, only in crises that
this power appears. But such as it is, it plays a part much more real and
much more expressive of the collective will than does the more ordinary
organization of other peoples.
Those who attacked the Tuileries upon the 10th of August acted in a manner
entirely spontaneous, and succeeded. The arrest of the Royal Family at
Varennes was not the action of one individual or of two; it was not Drouet
nor was it the Saulce family. It was a great number of individuals (the
King had been recognized all along the journey), each thinking the same
thing under the tension of a particular episode, each vaguely tending to
one kind of action and tending with increasing energy towards that action,
and all combining, as it were, upon that culminating point in the long
journey which was reached at the archway of the little town in Argonne.
To have expressed and portrayed this common national power has been the
saving of the principal French historians, notably of Michelet. It has
furnished them with the key by which alone the history of their country
could be made plain. Nothing is easier than to ridicule or deny so
mystical a thing. Taine, by temperament intensely anti-national, ridiculed
it as he ridiculed the mysteries of the Faith; but with this consequence,
that his denial made it impossible for him to write the history of his
country, and compelled him throughout his work, but especially in his
history of the Revolution, to perpetual, and at last to somewhat crude,
forms of falsehood.
Not to recognize this National force has, again, led men into another
error: they will have it that the great common actions of Frenchmen are
due to some occult force or to a master. They will explain the Crusades
by the cunning organization of the Papacy; the French Revolution by the
cunning organization of the Masonic lodges; the Napoleonic episode by the
individual cunning and plan of Bonaparte. Such explanations are puerile.
The blow of 1870 was perhaps the most severe which any modern nation has
endured. By some accident it did not terminate the activity of the French
nation. The Southern States of America remain under the effect of the
Civil War. All that is not Prussian in Germany remains prostrate--
especially in ideas--under the effect of the Prussian victory over it. The
French but barely escaped a similarly permanent dissolution of national
character: but they did escape it; and the national mark, the power of
spontaneous and collective action, after a few years' check, began to
emerge.
Upon two occasions an attempt was made towards such action. The first was
in the time of Boulanger, the second during the Dreyfus business. In both
cases the nation instinctively saw, or rather felt, its enemy. In both
there was a moment when the cosmopolitan financier stood in physical peril
of his life. Neither, however, matured; in neither did the people finally
move.
Latterly several partial risings have marked French life. Why none of them
should have culminated I will consider in a moment. Meanwhile, the foreign
observer will do well to note the character of these movements, abortive
though they were. It is like standing upon the edge of a crater and
watching the heave and swell of the vast energies below. There may have
been no actual eruption for some time, but the activities of the volcano
and its nature are certain to you as you gaze. The few days that passed
two years ago in Herault are an example.
No one who is concerned for the immediate future of Europe should neglect
the omen: half a million men, with leaders chosen rapidly by themselves,
converging without disaster, with ample commissariat, with precision and
rapidity upon one spot: a common action decided upon, and that action most
calculated to defeat the enemy; decided upon by men of no exceptional
power, mere mouthpieces of this vast concourse: similar and exactly
parallel decisions over the whole countryside from the great towns to the
tiny mountain villages. It is the spirit of a swarm of bees. One incident
in the affair was the most characteristic of it all: fearing they would
be ordered to fire on men of their own district the private soldiers and
corporals of the 17th of the Line mutinied. So far so good: mutinies are
common in all actively military states--the exceptional thing was what
followed. The men organized themselves without a single officer or
non-commissioned officer, equipped themselves for a full day's march to
the capital of the province, achieved it in good order, and took quarters
in the town. All that exact movement was spontaneous. It explains the
Marshals of the Empire. These were sent off as a punishment to the edge
of the African desert; the mutiny seemed to the moneydealers a proof of
military defeat. They erred: these young men, some of them of but six
months' training, none of them of much more than two years, not one of
them over twenty-five years of age, were a precise symbol of the power
which made the Revolution and its victims. The reappearance of that power
in our tranquil modern affairs seems to me of capital importance.
One should end by asking one's self, "Will these unfinished movements
breed a finished movement at last? Will Gaul move to some final purpose
in our time, and if so, against what, with what an object and in what a
manner?"
Prophecy is vain, but it is entertaining, and I will prophesy that Gaul
will move in our time, and that the movement will be directed against the
pestilent humbug of the parliamentary system.
For forty years this force in the nation of which I speak, though so
frequently stirred, has not achieved its purpose. But in nearly every
case, directly or indirectly, the thing against which it moved was the
Parliament. It would be too lengthy a matter to discuss here why the
representative system has sunk to be what it is in modern Europe. It
was the glory of the Middle Ages, it was a great vital institution of
Christendom, sprung from the monastic institution that preceded it, a true
and living power first in Spain, where Christendom was at its most acute
activity in the struggle against Asia, then in the north-west, in England
and in France. And indeed, in one form or another, throughout all the old
limits of the Empire. It died, its fossil was preserved in one or two
small and obscure communities, its ancient rules and form were captured by
the English squires and merchants, and it was maintained, a curious but
vigorous survival, in this country. When the Revolution in 1789 began the
revival of democracy in the great nations the old representative scheme of
the French, a very perfect one, was artificially resurrected, based upon
the old doctrine of universal suffrage and upon a direct mandate. It was
logical, it ought to have worked, but in barely a hundred years it has
failed.
There is an instructive little anecdote upon the occupation of Rome in
1870.
When the French garrison was withdrawn and the Northern Italians had
occupied the city, representative machinery was set to work, nominally
to discover whether the change in Government were popular or no. A tiny
handful of votes was recorded in the negative, let us say forty-three.
Later, in the early winter of that same year, a great festival of the
Church was celebrated in the Basilica of St. Peter and at the tombs of the
Apostles. The huge church was crowded, many were even pressed outside the
doors. When the ceremony was over the dense mass that streamed out into
the darkness took up the cry, the irony of which filled the night air of
the Trastevere and its slums of sovereign citizens. The cry was this:
"We are the Forty-three!"
It is an anecdote that applies continually to the modern representative
system in every country which has the misfortune to support it. No one
needs to be reminded of such a truth. We know in England how the one
strong feeling in the elections of 1906 was the desire to get at the South
African Jews and sweep away their Chinese labour from under them.
The politicians and the party hacks put into power by that popular
determination went straight to the South African Jews, hat in hand, asked
them what was their good pleasure in the matter, and framed a scheme in
connivance with them, by which no vengeance should be taken and not a
penny of theirs should be imperilled.
In modern France the chances of escape from the parliamentary game, tawdry
at its best, at its worst a social peril, are much greater than in this
country. The names and forms of the thing are not of ancient institution.
There is therefore no opportunity for bamboozling people with a sham
continuity, or of mixing up the interests of the party hacks with the
instinct of patriotism. Moreover, in modern France the parliamentary
system happened to come up vitally against the domestic habits of
the people earlier and more violently than it has yet done in this
country. The little gang which had captured the machine was violently
anti-Christian; it proceeded step by step to the destruction of the
Church, until at the end of 1905 the crisis had taken this form. The
Church was disestablished, its endowments were cancelled, the housing of
its hierarchy, its churches and its cathedrals and their furniture were,
further, to be taken from it unless it adopted a Presbyterian form of
government which could not but have cankered it and which was the very
negative of its spirit. So far nothing that the Parliament had done really
touched the lives of the people. Even the proposal to put the remaining
goods of the Church under Presbyterian management was a matter for the
theologians and not for them. Not one man in a hundred knew or cared
about the business. The critical date approached (the 11th of December,
if I remember rightly). Rome was to accept the anti-Catholic scheme of
government or all the churches were to be shut. Rome refused the scheme,
and Parliament, faced for once with a reality and brought under the
necessity of really interfering with the popular life or of capitulating,
capitulated.
What has that example to do, you may ask, with that movement in the south
of France, which is the text of these pages? The answer is as follows:
In the south of France the one main thing actually touching the lives
of the people, after their religion (which the complete breakdown of
the anti-clerical threat had secured), was the sale of their principal
manufacture. This sale was rendered difficult from a number of reasons,
one of which, perhaps not the chief, but the most apparent and the most
easily remediable, was the adulteration and fraud existing in the trade.
Such adulteration and fraud are common to all the trade of our own time.
It was winked at by the gang in power in France, just as similar dirty
work is winked at by the gang in power in every other parliamentary
country. When the peasants who had suffered so severely by this
commercial corruption of our time asked that it should be put a stop to,
the old reply, which has done duty half a million times in every case of
corruption in France, England, or America for a generation, was given to
them: "If you desire a policy to be effected, elect men who will effect
it." As a fact, these four departments had elected a group of men, of whom
Laferre, the Grand Master of the Freemasons, is a good type, with his
absorbing interest in the destruction of Christianity, and his ignorance
and ineptitude in any other field than that of theology.
The peasants replied to this sophistry, which had done duty so often and
had been successful so often in their case as in others, by calling upon
their Deputies to resign. Laferre neglected to do so. He was too greatly
occupied with his opportunity. He went down to "address his constituents."
They chased him for miles. And in that exhilarating episode it was
apparent that the peasants of the Aude had discovered in their simple
fashion both where the representative system was at fault and by what
methods it may be remedied.
Stand on the side of a stream and consider two things: the imbecility of
your private nature and the genius of your common kind.
For you cannot cross the stream, you--Individual you; but Man (from whence
you come) has found out an art for crossing it. This art is the building
of bridges. And hence man in the general may properly be called Pontifex,
or "The Bridge Builder"; and his symbolic summits of office will carry
some such title.
Here I will confess (Individual) that I am tempted to leave you by the
side of the stream, to swim it if you can, to drown if you can't, or to
go back home and be eaten out with your desire for the ulterior shore,
while I digress upon that word Pontifex, which, note you, is not only a
name over a shop as "Henry Pontifex, Italian Warehouseman," or "Pontifex
Brothers, Barbers," but a true key-word breeding ideas and making one
consider the greatness of man, or rather the greatness of what made him.
For man builds bridges over streams, and he has built bridges more or less
stable between mind and mind (a difficult art!), having designed letters
for that purpose, which are his instrument; and man builds by prayer a
bridge between himself and God; man also builds bridges which unite him
with Beauty all about.
Thus he paints and draws and makes statues, and builds for beauty as well
as for shelter from the weather. And man builds bridges between knowledge
and knowledge, co-ordinating one thing that he knows with another thing
that he knows, and putting a bridge from each to each. And man is for ever
building--but he has never yet completed, nor ever will--that bridge they
call philosophy, which is to explain himself in relation to that whence
he came. I say, when his skeleton is put in the Museum properly labelled,
it shall be labelled not Homo Sapiens, but Homo Pontifex;
hence also the anthem, or rather the choral response, "Pontificem
habemus," which is sung so nobly by pontifical great choirs, when
pontifications are pontificated, as behooves the court of a Pontiff.
Nevertheless (Individual) I will not leave you there, for I have pity
on you, and I will explain to you the nature of bridges. By a bridge
was man's first worry overcome. For note you, there is no worry so
considerable as to wail by impassable streams (as Swinburne has it).
It is the proper occupation of the less fortunate dead.
Believe me, without bridges the world would be very different to you. You
take them for granted, you lollop along the road, you cross a bridge. You
may be so ungrateful as to forget all about it, but it is an awful thing!
A bridge is a violation of the will of nature and a challenge. "You
desired me not to cross," says man to the River God, "but I will." And
he does so: not easily. The god had never objected to him that he should
swim and wet himself. Nay, when he was swimming the god could drown him at
will, but to bridge the stream, nay, to insult it, to leap over it, that
was man all over; in a way he knows that the earthy gods are less than
himself and that all that he dreads is his inferior, for only that which
he reveres and loves can properly claim his allegiance. Nor does he in the
long run pay that allegiance save to holiness, or in a lesser way to
valour and to worth.
Man cannot build bridges everywhere. They are not multitudinous as are his
roads, nor universal as are his pastures and his tillage. He builds from
time to time in one rare place and another, and the bridge always remains
a sacred thing. Moreover, the bridge is always in peril. The little
bridge at Paris which carried the Roman road to the island was swept away
continually; and the bridge of Staines that carried the Roman road from
the great port to London was utterly destroyed.
Bridges have always lived with fear in their hearts; and if you think
this is only true of old bridges (Individual), have you forgotten the Tay
Bridge with the train upon it? Or the bridge that they were building over
the St. Lawrence some little time ago, or the bridge across the Loire
where those peasants went to their death on a Sunday only a few months
since? Carefully consider these things and remember that the building and
the sustaining of a bridge is always a wonderful and therefore a perilous
thing.
No bridges more testify to the soul of man than the bridges that leap
in one arch from height to height over the gorge of a torrent. Many of
these are called the Devil's Bridges with good reason, for they suggest
art beyond man's power, and there are two to be crossed and wondered at,
one in Wales in the mountains, and another in Switzerland, also in the
mountains. There is a third in the mountains at the gate of the Sahara, of
the same sort, jumping from rock to rock. But it is not called the Devil's
Bridge. It is called with Semitic simplicity "El Kantara," and that is
the name the Arabs gave to the old bridges, to the lordly bridges of the
Romans, wherever they came across them, for the Arabs were as incapable
of making bridges as they were of doing anything else except singing love
songs and riding about on horses. "Alcantara" is a name all over Spain,
and it is in the heart of the capital of Portugal, and it is fixed in the
wilds of Estremadura. You get it outside Constantine also where the bridge
spans the gulf. Never did an Arab see bridges but he wondered.
Our people also, though they were not of the sort to stand with their
mouths open in front of bridges or anything else, felt the mystery of
these things. And they put chapels in the middle of them, as you may see
at Bale, and at Bradford-upon-Avon, and especially was there one upon old
London Bridge, which was dedicated to St. Thomas a Becket, and was very
large. And speaking of old London Bridge, every one in London should
revere bridges, for a great number of reasons.
In the first place London never would have been London but for London
Bridge.
In the second place, bridges enable the people of London to visit the
south of the river, which is full of pleasing and extraordinary sights,
and in which may be seen, visibly present to the eye, Democracy. If any
one doubts this let him take the voyage.
Then again, but for bridges Londoners could not see the river except
from the Embankment, which is an empty sort of place, or from the windows
of hotels. Bridges also permit railways from the south to enter London.
If this seems to you a commonplace, visit New York or for ever after hold
your peace.
All things have been degraded in our time and have also been multiplied,
which is perhaps a condition of degradation; and your simple thing, your
bridge, has suffered with the rest. Men have invented all manner of
bridges: tubular bridges, suspension bridges, cantilever bridges, swing
bridges, pontoon bridges, and the bridge called the Russian Bridge, which
is intolerable; but they have not been able to do with the bridge what
they have done with some other things: they have not been able to destroy
it; it is still a bridge, still perilous, and still a triumph. The bridge
still remains the thing which may go at any moment and yet the thing
which, when it remains, remains our oldest monument. There is a bridge
over the Euphrates--I forget whether it goes all the way across--which the
Romans built. And the oldest thing in the way of bridges in the town of
Paris, a thing three hundred years old, was the bridge that stood the late
floods best. The bridge will remain a symbol in spite of the engineers.
Look how differently men have treated bridges according to the passing
mood of civilization. Once they thought it reasonable to tax people who
crossed bridges. Now they think it unreasonable. Yet the one course was
as reasonable as the other. Once they built houses on bridges, clearly
perceiving that there was lack of room for houses, and that there was
a housing problem, and that the bridges gave a splendid chance. Now no
one dares to build a house upon a bridge, and the one proceeding is as
reasonable as the other.
The time has come to talk at random about bridges.
The ugliest bridge in the world runs from Lambeth to the Horseferry Road,
and takes the place of the old British trackway which here crossed the
Thames. About the middle of it, if you will grope in the mud, you may or
may not find the great Seal of England which James II there cast into
the flood. If it was fished up again, why then it is not there. The most
beautiful bridge in London is Waterloo Bridge; the most historic is London
Bridge; and far the most useful Westminster Bridge. The most famous bridge
in Italy to tourists is the old bridge at Florence, and the best known
from pictures the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. That with the best chance
of an eternal fame is the bridge which carries the road from Tizzano to
Serchia over the gully of the muddy Apennines, for upon the 18th of June,
1901, it was broken down in the middle of the night, and very nearly cost
the life of a man who could ill afford it. The place where a bridge is
most needed, and is not present, is the Ford of Fornovo. The place where
there is most bridge and where it is least needed is the railway bridge
at Venice. The bridge that trembles most is the Bridge of Piacenza. The
bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge that
frightens you least is the bridge in St. James's Park; for even if you
are terrified by water in every form, as are too many boastful men, you
must know, or can be told, that there is but a dampness of some inches in
the sheet below. The longest bridge for boring one is the railway bridge
across the Somme to St. Valery, whence Duke William started with a
horseshoe mouth and very glum upon his doubtful adventure to invade these
shores--but there was no bridge in his time. The shortest bridge is made
of a plank, in the village of Loudwater in the county of Bucks, not far
from those Chiltern Hundreds which men take in Parliament for the good of
their health as a man might take the waters. The most entertaining bridge
is the Tower Bridge, which lifts up and splits into two just as you are
beginning to cross it, as can be testified by a cloud of witnesses. The
broadest bridge is the Alexandre III Bridge in Paris, at least it looks
the broadest, while the narrowest bridge, without a shadow of doubt, is
the bridge that was built by ants in the moon; if the phrase startles you
remember it is only in a novel by Wells.
The first elliptical bridge was designed by a monk of Cortona, and the
first round one by Adam....
But one might go on indefinitely about bridges and I am heartily tired of
them. Let them cross and recross the streams of the world. I for my part
will stay upon my own side.
I have thought it of some value to contemporary history to preserve the
following document, which concerns the discovery and survey of an island
in the North Atlantic, which upon its discovery was annexed by the United
States in the first moments of their imperial expansion, and was given the
name of "Atlantis."
The island, which appears to have been formed by some convulsion of
nature, disappeared the year after its discovery, and the report drawn up
by the Commissioners is therefore very little known, and has of course
no importance in the field of practical finance and administration. But
it is a document of the highest and most curious interest as an example
of the ideas that guided the policy of the Great Republic at the moment
when the survey was undertaken; and English readers in particular will
be pleased to note the development and expansion of English methods and
of characteristic English points of view and institutions throughout the
whole document.
Any one who desires to consult the maps, etc., which I have been unable
to reproduce in this little volume, must refer to the Record Office at
Washington. My only purpose in reprinting these really fascinating pages
in such a volume as this is the hope that they may give pleasure to many
who would not have had the opportunity to consult them in the public
archives where they have hitherto been buried.
A. 2. E. 331 ff.
REPORT OF THE THREE COMMISSIONERS APPOINTED BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC TO REPORT UPON THE POTENTIAL RESOURCES, SITUATION, ETC., OF THE NEW ISLAND KNOWN AS "ATLANTIS," RECENTLY DISCOVERED IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND ANNEXED TO THE REPUBLIC, TOGETHER WITH A RECOMMENDATION ON FUTURE TREATMENT OF SAME.
TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC.
YOUR HONOUR,
[Sidenote: Preamble.]
Your Honour's three Commissioners, Joshua Hogg, Abraham Bush and Jack
Bimber, being of sound mind, solvent, and in good corporeal health, all
citizens of more than five years' standing, and domiciled within the
boundaries, frontiers or terms of the Republic, do make oath and say, So
Help Them God:--
[Sidenote: Arrival off Atlantis.]
I. That on the 20th of the month of July, being at that time in or about
Latitude 45 N. and betwixt and between Longitude 51 W. and 51.10° W., so
near as could be made out, the captain of the steamboat "Glory of the
Morning Star" (chartered for this occasion only by the Government
of the Republic, without any damage, precedent or future lien whatsoever),
by name James Murphy, of Cork, Ireland, and domiciled within the aforesaid
terms, boundaries, etc., did in a loud voice at about 4.33 a.m., when it
was already light, cry out "That's Hur," or words to that effect. Your
three Commissioners being at that moment in the cabin, state-room or cuddy
in the forward part of the ship (see annexed plan), came up on deck and
were ordered or enjoined to go below by those having authority on the
"Glory of the Morning Star." Your three Commissioners desire individually
and collectively to call attention to the fact that this order was
obeyed, being given under the Maritime Acts of 1853, and desire also to
protest against the indignity offered in their persons to the majesty of
the Republic. (See Attorney-General's Plea, Folio 56, M.) At or about
6.30 a.m. of the same day, July 20th, your Commissioners were
called upon deck, and there was put at their disposal a beat manned by
four sailors, who did thereupon and with all due dispatch row them towards
the island, at that moment some two miles off the weather bow, that is
S.S.W. by S. of the "Glory of the Morning Star." They did then each
individually and all collectively land, disembark and set foot upon the
Island of Atlantis and take possession thereof in the name of Your Honour
and the Republic, displaying at the same time a small flag 19" x 6" in
token of the same, which flag was distinctly noted, seen, recorded and
witnessed by the undersigned, to which they put their hand and seal,
trusting in the guidance of Divine Providence.
JOSHUA HOGG
ABRAHAM BUSH
JACK BIMBER.
[Sidenote: Shape and Dimensions of the Island]
II. Your Commissioners proceeded at once to a measurement of the aforesaid
island of Atlantis, which they discovered to be of a triangular or
three-cornered shape, in dimensions as follows: On the northern face from
Cape Providence (q.v.) to Cape Mercy (q.v.), one mile one furlong and a
bit. On the south-western face from Cape Mercy (q.v.) to Point Liberty
(q.v.), seven furlongs, two roods and a foot. On the south-eastern face,
which is the shortest face, from Point Liberty (q.v.) round again to Cape
Providence (q.v.), from which we started, something like half a mile, and
not worth measuring. These dimensions, lines, figures, measurements and
plans they do submit to the public office of Record as accurate and done
to the best of their ability by the undersigned: So Help Them God. (SEAL.)
[Sidenote: Appearance and Structure of the Island.]
III. It will be seen from the above that the island is in shape an
Isosceles triangle, as it were, pointing in a north-westerly direction
and having a short base turned to the south-east, contains some 170 acres
or half a square mile, and is situate in a temperate latitude suited to
the Anglo-Saxon Race. As to material or structure, it is composed of sand
(see its specimens in glass phial), the said sand being of a yellow
colour when dry and inclining to a brown colour where it may be wet by the
sea or by rain.
[Sidenote: Springs and Rivers.]
IV. There are no springs or rivers in the Island.
[Sidenote: Hills and Mountains.]
V. There are no mountains on the Island, but there is in the North a
slight hummock some fifteen feet in height. To this hummock we have
given (saving your Honour's Reverence) the name of "Mount Providence"
in commemoration of the manifold and evident graces of Providence in
permitting us to occupy and develop this new land in the furtherance of
true civilization and good government. The hill is at present too small
to make a feature in the landscape, but we have great hopes that it will
grow. (See Younger on "The Sand Dunes of Picardy," Vol. II, pp.
199-200.)
[Sidenote: Harbours.]
VI. The Island is difficult of approach as it slopes up gradually from the
sea bottom and the tides are slight. At high water there is no sounding
of more than three fathoms for about a mile and a half from shore; but at
a distance of two miles soundings of five and six fathoms are common, and
it would be feasible in fine weather for a vessel of moderate draught to
land her cargo, passengers, etc. in small boats. Moreover a harbour might
be built as in our Recommendations (q.v.). There is on the northern side
a bay (caused by indentation of the land) which we think suitable to the
purpose and which, in Your Honour's honour, we have called Buggins' Bay.
[Sidenote: Capes and Headlands.]
VII. These are three, as above enumerated (q.v.); one, the most
precipitous and bold, we have called Cape Providence (q.v.) for
reasons which appear above; the second, Cape Mercy, in recognition
of the great mercy shown us in finding this place without running on it
as has been the fate of many a noble vessel. The third we called Point
Liberty from the nature of those glorious institutions which are
the pride of the Republic and which we intend to impose upon any future
inhabitants. These titles, which are but provisional, we pray may remain
and be Enregistered under the seal, notwithstanding the "Act to Restrain
Nuisances and Voids" of 1819, Cap. 2.
[Sidenote: Climate.]
VIII. The climate is that of the North Atlantic known as the "Oceanic."
Rain falls not infrequently, and between November and April snow is not
unknown. In summer a more genial temperature prevails, but it is never so
hot as to endanger life or to facilitate the progress of epidemic disease.
Wheat, beans, hops, turnips, and barley could be grown did the soil permit
of it. But we cannot regard an agricultural future as promising for the
new territory.
HERE ENDETH your Commissioners' Report.
(Seal)
BELLOC-On Something - THE IRONMONGER