Andrew Pringle, Esq., to the Reverend Charles SnodgrassMy Dear Friend--London undoubtedly affords the best and the worst specimens of the British character; but there is a certain townish something about the inhabitants in general, of which I find it extremely difficult to convey any idea.Compared with the English of the country, there is apparently very little difference between them; but still there is a difference, and of no small importance in a moral point of view.The country peculiarity is like the bloom of the plumb, or the down of the peach, which the fingers of infancy cannot touch without injuring; but this felt but not describable quality of the town character, is as the varnish which brings out more vividly the colours of a picture, and which may be freely and even rudely handled.The women, for example, although as chaste in principle as those of any other community, possess none of that innocent untempted simplicity, which is more than half the grace of virtue; many of them, and even young ones too, "in the first freshness of their virgin beauty," speak of the conduct and vocation of "the erring sisters of the ***," in a manner that often amazes me, and has, in more than one instance, excited unpleasant feelings towards the fair satirists.Thismoral taint, for I can consider it as nothing less, I have heard defended, but only by men who are supposed to have had a large experience of the world, and who, perhaps, on that account, are not the best judges of female delicacy."Every woman," as Pope says, "may be at heart a rake"; but it is for the interests of the domestic affections, which are the very elements of virtue, to cherish the notion, that women, as they are physically more delicate than men, are also so morally.
But the absence of delicacy, the bloom of virtue, is not peculiar to the females, it is characteristic of all the varieties of the metropolitan mind.The artifices of the medical quacks are things of universal ridicule; but the sin, though in a less gross form, pervades the whole of that sinister system by which much of the superiority of this vast metropolis is supported.The state of the periodical press, that great organ of political instruction-- the unruly tongue of liberty, strikingly confirms the justice of this misanthropic remark.
G- had the kindness, by way of a treat to me, to collect, the other day, at dinner, some of the most eminent editors of the London journals.I found them men of talent, certainly, and much more men of the world, than "the cloistered student from his paling lamp"; but I was astonished to find it considered, tacitly, as a sort of maxim among them, that an intermediate party was not bound by any obligation of honour to withhold, farther than his own discretion suggested, any information of which he was the accidental depositary, whatever the consequences might be to his informant, or to those affected by the communication.In a word, they seemed all to care less about what might be true than what would produce effect, and that effect for their own particular advantage.It is impossible to deny, that if interest is made the criterion by which the confidences of social intercourse are to be respected, the persons who admit this doctrine will have but little respect for the use of names, or deem it any reprehensible delinquency to suppress truth, or to blazon falsehood.In a word, man in London is not quite so good a creature as he is out of it.The rivalry of interests is here too intense; it impairs the affections, and occasions speculations both in morals and politics, which, I much suspect, it would puzzle a casuist to prove blameless.Can anything, for example,be more offensive to the calm spectator, than the elections which are now going on? Is it possible that this country, so much smaller in geographical extent than France, and so inferior in natural resources, restricted too by those ties and obligations which were thrown off as fetters by that country during the late war, could have attained, in despite of her, such a lofty pre-eminence--become the foremost of all the world-- had it not been governed in a manner congenial to the spirit of the people, and with great practical wisdom? It is absurd to assert, that there are no corruptions in the various modifications by which the affairs of the British empire are administered; but it would be difficult to show, that, in the present state of morals and interests among mankind, corruption is not a necessary evil.I do not mean necessary, as evolved from those morals and interests, but necessary to the management of political trusts.I am afraid, however, to insist on this, as the natural integrity of your own heart, and the dignity of your vocation, will alike induce you to condemn it as Machiavellian.It is, however, an observation forced on me by what I have seen here.
It would be invidious, perhaps, to criticise the different candidates for the representation of London and Westminster very severely.I think it must be granted, that they are as sincere in their professions as their opponents, which at least bleaches away much of that turpitude of which their political conduct is accused by those who are of a different way of thinking.But it is quite evident, at least to me, that no government could exist a week, managed with that subjection to public opinion to which Sir Francis Burdett and Mr.Hobhouse apparently submit; and it is no less certain, that no government ought to exist a single day that would act in complete defiance of public opinion.
