After that we all
sat down to lunch in a large dining hall. I was seated between the
archbishop and a venerable admiral in the navy. Among other things,
the latter asked me if there were not many railroad and steamboat
accidents in America. O my countrymen, what trouble do you make us in
foreign lands by your terrible carelessness! I was obliged, in candor,
to say that I thought there was a shocking number of accidents of that
sort, and suggested the best excuse I could think of - our youth and
inexperience; but I certainly thought my venerable friend had touched
a very indefensible point.
Among other topics discussed in the drawing room, I heard some more
_on dits_ respecting spiritual rappings. Every body seems to be
wondering what they are, and what they are going to amount to.
We took leave of our kind host and his family, gratefully impressed
with the simplicity and sincere cordiality of our reception. There are
many different names for goodness in this world; but, after all, true
brotherly kindness and charity is much the same thing, whether it show
itself by a Quaker's fireside or in an archbishop's palace.
Leaving the archbishop's I went to Richmond's again, where I was most
agreeably entertained for an hour or two. We have an engagement for
Playford Hall to-morrow, and we breakfast with Joseph Sturge: it being
now the time of the yearly meeting of the Friends, he and his family
are in town.
LETTER XXIV.
MY DEAR S.: -
The next morning C. and I took the cars to go into the country, to
Playford Hall. "And what's Playford Hall?" you say. "And why did you
go to see it?" As to what it is, here is a reasonably good picture
before you. As to why, it was for many years the residence of Thomas
Clarkson, and is now the residence of his venerable widow and her
family.
Playford Hall is considered, I think, the oldest of the fortified
houses in England, and is, I am told, the only one that has water in
the moat. The water which is seen girdling the wall, in the picture,
is the moat: it surrounds the place entirely, leaving no access except
across the bridge, which is here represented.
After crossing this bridge, you come into a green court yard filled
with choice plants and flowering shrubs, and carpeted with that thick,
soft, velvet-like grass which is to be found nowhere else in so
perfect a state as in England.
The water is fed by a perpetual spring, whose current is so sluggish
as scarcely to be perceptible, but which yet has the vitality of a
running stream.
It has a dark and glassy stillness of surface, only broken by the
forms of the water plants, whose leaves float thickly over it.
The walls of the moat are green with ancient moss, and from the
crevices springs an abundant flowering vine, whose delicate leaves and
bright yellow flowers in some places entirely mantle the stones with
their graceful drapery.
[Illustration: _of Playford Hall._]
The picture I have given you represents only one side of the moat. The
other side is grown up with dark and thick shrubbery and ancient
trees, rising and embowering the entire place, adding to the retired
and singular effect of the whole. The place is a specimen of a sort of
thing which does not exist in America. It is one of those significant
landmarks which unite the present with the past, for which we must
return to the country of our origin.
Playford Hall is peculiarly English, and Thomas Clarkson, for whose
sake I visited it, was as peculiarly an Englishman - a specimen of the
very best kind of English mind and character, as this is of
characteristic English architecture.
We Anglo-Saxons have won a hard name in the world. There are
undoubtedly bad things which are true about us.
Taking our developments as a race, both in England and America, we may
be justly called the Romans of the nineteenth century. We have been
the race which has conquered, subdued, and broken in pieces other
weaker races, with little regard either to justice or mercy. With
regard to benefits by us imparted to conquered nations, I think a
better story, on the whole, can be made out for the Romans than for
us. Witness the treatment of the Chinese, of the tribes of India, and
of our own American Indians.
But still there is in Anglo-Saxon blood, a vigorous sense of justice,
as appears in our habeas corpus, our jury trials, and other features
of state organization; and, when this is tempered, in individuals,
with the elements of gentleness and compassion, and enforced by that
energy and indomitable perseverance which are characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxon mind, they form a style of philanthropy peculiarly
efficient. In short, the Anglo-Saxon is efficient, in whatever he sets
himself about, whether in crushing the weak or lifting them up.
Thomas Clarkson was born in a day when good, pious people imported
cargoes of slaves from Africa, as one of the regular Christianized
modes of gaining a subsistence and providing for themselves and their
households. It was a thing that every body was doing, and every body
thought they had a right to do. It was supposed that all the sugar,
molasses, and rum in the world were dependent on stealing men, women,
and children, and could be got in no other way; and as to consume
sugar, molasses, and rum, were evidently the chief ends of human
existence, it followed that men, women, and children must be stolen to
the end of time.
