The Red Hills: A Record of Good Days

Outdoors and In, with Things

Pennsylvania Dutch Cornelius
Weygandt
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THE RED HILLS
UNDER THE WELSH MOUNTAIN
 THE RED
HILLS
A Record of Good Days
Outdoors and In, With Things
Pennsylvania Dutch

BY

CORNELIUS WEYGANDT
PROFESSOR OP ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O P P E N N S Y L V A N I A

fGood-bye, proud world! I'm going home. '

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA· 1929
COPYRIGHT l»te· UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PRINTED IN U.S.A.
•

LONDON

HUMPHREY MILFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

 TO
S.M.W., C . N . W , and A.M.W.
 • .

.· ·. •γ . ·· ·.
• ·

PREFACE

I T IS no more possible to gen-

eralize about the Pennsylvania Dutch t h a n about any other
American stock. W e are of every sort and condition, j u s t as
a r e the New England P u r i t a n s , the Scotch-Irish of the Alle-
ghenies, and the Virginians from Tidewater or Valley. If you
come to conclusions about us from what our story-tellers have
written of us you will p u t us down as almost all of one class.
These writers have chosen, nine out of ten of them, t o consider
only the more primitive of us, f o r it is among such folk, as
Wordsworth long ago pointed out, t h a t you find emotions least
concealed, and language most picturesque.
Philadelphia, too, though it is as basically " D u t c h " as
Quaker, likes to emphasize our provincial ways. T o it we a r e
" C o u n t r y D u t c h . " I t s newspapers and the gossip of its people
dismiss us cavalierly, as the city is a p t to dismiss the c o u n t r y .
And this dismissal is often acquiesced in even by t h a t large p a r t
of Philadelphia t h a t is itself of ancestry come from Germany
in the first half of the eighteenth century, and resident on f a r m s
more or less remote from the city f o r a hundred years.
I have no quarrel with the phrase " C o u n t r y D u t c h " in itself,
b u t only with its use in a sense t h a t will narrow all to whom it
is applied to uniformity. N o r have I any quarrel with the
phrase "Pennsylvania D u t c h . " I t is " D u t c h " t h a t we call
ourselves, or "Deitsch," according to the language t h a t we
use, and it is " D u t c h " t h a t our neighbors and all our country-
men call us. I t is pedantry, and worse t h a n p e d a n t r y , to insist
on "Pennsylvania German." T h e rank and file of us do not so
vii
viii PREFACE
insist. We are as glad to be "Dutch" as New Englanders are to
be "Yankee."
We are, of course, pretty generally of middle-class origin, as
are most Americans whose forbears left Europe in Colonial
times. There were peasants among the first comers, and some
of us were held to the condition of farm laborers until a gen-
eration ago. There were upper-class folk among the German
settlers, and some families continued to send their sons back
to the old country to marry until as late as the early nine-
teenth century. We have, like other Americans, our share of
crests and coats of arms.
There was wealth among us almost from the earliest immi-
gration, before 1700. Homes more than comfortable were
plenty even before the Revolution. In the prosperous days that
followed quickly on that struggle's end, not a few estates that
can rightly be called manorial were laid out by German Amer-
icans in the triangle of southeastern Pennsylvania whose three
corners are Philadelphia and Easton and York.
There was learning among us from the first. Pastorius was
only one of the scholars among those who laid the foundations
of Pennsylvania Dutchland with the settlement of Germantown
in 1683. There were many artisans of high skill too among
the early immigrants; printers, potters, turners, gunsmiths,
weavers, wine-makers, and a score others. No output of Amer-
ica's eighteenth century press compares to the Martyr Book
of Ephrata, of 1748-49. David Rittenhouse, super-artisan and
scientist in one, is but the first in a long line of wideners of
horizons. Leidy is of the line, and not its least.
There were many of the makers of America among the
early emigrants from Germany, Conrad Weiser first among
them. No other man of the mid-eighteenth century was so effec-
tive a mediator between whites and Indians as he, and so potent
to reduce the danger of raids. From his day to General Per-
shing's, we have contributed our share of leaders to America.
 PREFACE ix
Good music flourished first in America among the Germans
of Pennsylvania. Even t o this hour, it has its place as one of
the recognized phases of social entertainment. The c o u n t r y
band is to be found everywhere in our " D u t c h " counties ; sing-
ing societies p r o s p e r ; and orchestras, often surprisingly large,
and playing the best music, are not uncommon in c o u n t r y
towns. Moravian churches are famous f o r their Bach and
H a y d n and M o z a r t , and the L u t h e r a n and Reformed Churches,
in many instances, do not, in this respect, fall f a r short of the
Moravian.
No other phase of our culture reveals more clearly the many
sorts and conditions of us, social, intellectual, and spiritual,
t h a n our churches. W e range all the way from the ritualistic
Lutherans, t h r o u g h the German Reformed and Moravians, t o
the Methodist-like Evangelicals, and such plain and Quaker-
like sects as Schwenkfelders and Dunkards, Mennonites and
Amish.
They will tell you t h a t the Pennsylvania Dutch are what
they are because of a hundred years and more of isolation.
They will tell you t h a t we have been cut off alike from the
Rhine Valley and the Switzerland from which we came, and
f r o m the English-speaking districts about us. Neither of these
statements is t r u e of a m a j o r i t y of us, though the one may be
t r u e of a remote countryside and the other of a sect. F r o m the
middle years of the eighteenth century, when the first g r e a t
waves of emigration from Germany had begun to subside, we
have never ceased t o be recruited by arrivals from Germany.
The Hessians who came here with the British armies re-
mained in large numbers. T h e opening u p of new areas of our
back country t h a t followed the establishment of normalcy
a f t e r the Revolutionary W a r brought many Germans. T h e
troubles in Germany t h a t led to Eighteen F o r t y - E i g h t forced
emigration, much of which found its way to Pennsylvania. T h e
eighteen-fifties saw no cessation of the flow.
X PREFACE
There were always among these later arrivals from Germany
workmen who brought the oldest traditions of their crafts as
they had persisted in the Fatherland, and other workmen who
brought the latest developments in their crafts. Think, too,
how many artisans from Germany were among the creators of
what we regard as distinctively American products, such as
Wistarburg and Stiegel glass. Caspar Wistar's glass blowers
and decorators in Alloway, New Jersey, were old-country
men. Such, too, were most of Stiegel's in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania.
Potters came to Stiegel's town of Manheim from Germany
even as late as the eighteen-fifties, and made, in Gibbel's pot-
tery, pitchers and sugar bowls and hanging baskets with
decorations that cannot be distinguished from those of South
German wares. So, too, came other potters from Germany,
about the same time, to Fritztown and Shillington in Berks
County.
England kept in constant contact with Pennsylvania Dutch-
land from 1790 to 1840 through the output of its potteries.
It decorated porcelain and soft paste to suit our taste. Spat-
terware with peacocks and tulips and pomegranates in gay
colors and those kinds of Leeds and Bristol and Staffordshire
known now as "gaudy Dutch" were made especially for us and
almost only for us.
Stiegel's glass went all over the colonies. Its successors
followed wherever it had gone, to supply the market it had
made. Our slipware was imitated in New Jersey and Long
Island and Connecticut potteries down to 1850.
Our people, home-loving though they are as a race, have
their restless elements, and "Dutchmen" with a wanderlust
found their way to all corners of the states. Young men were
always going to the cities, and settling there, some of them.
These men went home, naturally, from time to time, and kept
their country relatives in touch with the center. Always fami-
lies were moving west, and, from 1790 on, emigration to
 PREFACE xi
western Pennsylvania and Ohio was continuous. Families moved,
too, down into the Valley of Virginia. Immediately a f t e r t h e
Revolution loyalist Dutchmen emigrated to Ontario, giving
p a r t s of Canada much of the look of sections of their native
state. There grew up, thus, many outposts of Pennsylvania
west and south and north of Pennsylvania. T h e goings t o and
f r o between long-settled places and the outposts helped t o keep
all sections f r o m stagnating.
Always in the home counties of Pennsylvania there were
Americans of Scotch-Irish and Welsh and English stock side
by side with those of German stock. I n t e r m a r r i a g e and all
other social contacts tended to keep us a p a r t of America.
Most of us were bilingual, and English books found place side
by side on our shelves with books in L a t i n and German b r o u g h t
from the old country and with books in German printed by
S a u r and Billmeyer in Germantown and by the Brethren in
Ephrata.
In the pages t h a t follow I am chiefly concerned with those
characteristics and habits and modes of thought t h a t dis-
tinguish the Pennsylvania D u t c h from their (neighbors in
America. I t must not be forgotten, however, t h a t we were
never, as a whole, a people a p a r t , though clannish in some of
our orders, and clinging, in most of our orders, t o the ways
of our ancestors. I t is in the country t h a t we have remained
most conservative, and have retained Old-World habits and
objects of household a r t in the old tradition. And it is f r o m
the angle of the country t h a t I have looked a t ourselves and
our relations to the world.

CORNELIUS WEYGANDT
Germantown,
Christmas, 1928
 CONTENTS
«δ-

Ι : PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 3
The Red Hills
Georgical
Technical
Jocund
Picturesque
Under the Blue Mountain

II: THE PEACOCK IN HIS PRIDE 77

III : "SUNDRY SORTS OF EARTHEN WARE" 91

IV: ON T H E TRAIL OF THE TULIP 119

V: SPATTER AFTER ITS KINDS 147

VI : DEER : RAMPANT, TRIPPANT AND

LODGED 165

VII: THE LAST OF THE OLD POTTERS 181

Till: BICKEL'S IN MAY 195

IX: POMEGRANATES IN PLENTY 209

X: THE GAY AND BEAUTIFUL 225

 ILLUSTRATIONS

U N D E R T H E W E L S H MOUNTAIN Frontispiece

BARN SYMBOLS IN BERKS facing page 10

S I X L I T T L E MAIDS FROM SCHOOL " " 18

T H E LANCASTER CURB M A R K E T " " 18

T H E PEACOCK MOTIVE " " 80

P I E D I S H E S , PITCHERS, A N D BOWLS " " 94

FRACTUR IN T H E M A N N E R OF
EPHRATA " " 124

PEACE A N D P L E N T Y IN T H E R E D
HILLS " " 190

BLOCK-PRINT SHOWING T H E P E R S I A N
ORIGIN OF "DUTCH" MOTIVES " " 210
 Ι. M.
Oswald Seidensticker,
who taught me much of
my people
 . ····

PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH

The Red Hills

A ^ ^ í e n anyone refers to our

"Dutch" up country the first image that rises before my inward
eye is one of red hills. High ploughland rolls away from a climb-
ing road sparsely lined with cedars, ploughland as warm a
red as the freshly worn road I am following. As the ridge is
topped, another ridge, red like this one I am passing over,
shoulders up across a valley, and above and beyond the farther
hill low mountains lay their dim blue across the horizon.
So it is in Bucks and Montgomery and Berks; so it is in
Lebanon and Dauphin and York ; so it is in—many "Dutch"
places elsewhere. The redness of the soil is now because of
triassic sandstone, and now because of Mauch Chunk shale,
and now because of iron in the limestone. The blue of the moun-
tains in the offing is only the blue of distance, but for all that
a solid background to the little world we look upon. Always
they lie there, the Blue Mountains, the line, in many places,
between the " D u t c h " and other folks who have not such a
predilection for good land.
We have, of course, gone over the Blue Ridge, and over the
Alleghenies, and over the Plains. We have left our impress on
Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, on Iowa and Kansas and Cali-
3
4 THE RED HILLS
fornia. There are Swiss barns from the Atlantic to the Pacific ;
but it is the red hills of southeastern Pennsylvania that is our
home country, the center of our culture. It is said we could
smell limestone from the tidewater where we landed on our
coming to America, and it is certain we found our way to rich
land as if by instinct. We had no overmastering love for red
hills as such perhaps, but we found our way to them because,
so often, they enfolded the limestone valleys of our choice.
Red the color we did love and do love, even better than yel-
low or white. Red we love wherever it may be, in soil, in burnt
brick and tiling, in the paint we put on our barns, in the flowers
that make gay our dooryards in summer and our windows in
winter, in the many fashions of our household art. W e mad-
dered or red-stippled our rude furniture in pine, light-stands,
tables and cupboards. We put red into our woven coverlets
and patchwork quilts, into our rag carpets and hooked rugs,
into our samplers and door towels, on our painted tin and
enamelled glass, into ouT pottery, into our illuminated writing.
Nature, too, indulges us in red, not only in our soil, but
in the redtop of our fields, in the autumnal red of our maples
and oaks, and in a half dozen berried trees and shrubs, dog-
wood, viburnums and black alder prominent among them. These
vivider reds of berries, so much rarer than the duller reds of
soil and grass and autumn leaves, of barn paint and bricks
and roofs of tile, give sharpness to the sense of redness one
gets from our landscape as it appears from autumn to spring.
There are places where snow lies long in our undermountain
country, but even here there are more winter days when the
ploughed lands are bare and red than when they are white
with snow.
It so happens that my familiarity with our tier of counties
from Franklin to Monroe is largely the outcome of visits in
hard weather. I know Franklin and Berks at the top of spring,
and Adams and Montgomery in high summer ; I know Lancaster
and Lebanon in the late harvest of September; and North-
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 5
ampton and Monroe when the mountains are leopard pied in
black and red and gold, in black of spruce and red of maple
and beechen gold. At will I can recall our countryside at any
time of the changing seasons, but the image that comes up
out of memory without will at mention of it is of the red hills
of late fall and of the long winter and of early spring. A road
climbs, red and cedar lined ; ploughed land, red and bare, rolls
up to farm buildings of red and white ; beyond, low mountains
of misty blue dim into the gray of the sky.

GEORGICAL

I T is a worn witticism in Penn-

sylvania that we still vote for Andrew Jackson in Berks. This
saying, interpreted with sympathy for us, means that things
change so slowly in the heart of the Red Hills that people are
doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican W a r .
Interpreted without sympathy for us it means that the "Dumb
Dutch" do not know that the world moves. A libel, some of
us declare the last interpretation, a half libel others. There
are those among us who will admit it has in it a modicum of
truth, if it be taken, of course, figuratively. In any event it
serves to point out that we Pennsylvania Dutch are the most
conservative people in America. We still approve strongly of
all Andrew Jacksons, of their works and of their ways.
There is one large exception to our conservatism. We have
always been quick to accept new developments in farming, new
kinds of agricultural machinery, new ways of fertilizing land,
new breeds of stock, new grains and grasses and varieties of
fruit. Barred Rocks and silos and alfalfa became the vogue in
all the " D u t c h " counties as quickly as anywhere in the States.
Old ways, however, in household economy, in family govern-
ment, in allegiance to church and political party, did persist
among us longer than in almost any part of the country. Down
β THE RED HILLS
to 1900 the standards and the ways of living were about what
they had been for a century. We were still largely a fanning
people, with nearly all the old-country crafts demanded by a
farming people descending from father to son among artisans
who were also something of artists.
So, at the end of the nineteenth century, it could be said
that the barn was the symbol of the Pennsylvania Dutch, peo-
ple and countryside. The barn dominated the life of the farm
as its greater proportions dominated the many other buildings,
and the plantings of trees, orchard trees and shade trees both,
about the homeyard. The barn generally stood well out of the
dooryard, and sometimes across the road from the house, than
which it was from five to seven times larger. Forty feet by
sixty feet was a usual size for a bank barn, forty feet by eighty
feet no unusual size, and forty feet by a hundred feet of more
than rare occurrence.
All the family worked, at certain seasons, in and about the
barn. There were hard chores enough elsewhere for all hands.
All the year round the women folk had a heavy routine of
cleaning and cooking and handling of milk, and, in addition, at
this season and that, other special chores in house and summer
kitchen, ground cellar and smoke house, oven and garden.
Their daily trips to the barn to hunt eggs or tend chicks or
poults were sometimes a relief from duties about the house.
It was wearing labor they did in the barn at harvest time.
The men had, too, according to the season, heavy work in
fields and woodlot and limestone quarry. It was in and about
the barn, however, that all this work culminated. Here, and in
the offices hereabouts, all the yield of the farm was stored,
and the storing, like the producing and harvesting, demanded
determined and long-continued energy. It was haying, of course,
that brought all the household, family and help, to united effort
in the barn. In old days this turning in of the entire man power
of the place was almost universal, and on the poorer hill
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 7
farms, where hired help was lacking, the women folk lent a
hand with father and sons, until well to the end of last century.
In most cases all, young and old, weaker and stronger,
turned in with right good will. Family pride has always been
strong among us. We had to submit to a patriarchal system of
family control, but we knew that the place and all that in it
was would be left to us children. Father might take from son
every cent that the son earned until he was twenty-one, if that
son worked out, and as a matter of course father paid son
nothing for his work at home. Father might give son spending
money, or the son might have to get mother to "knock it
down" for him in one way or other, but, as a rule, when the
son was twenty-one and wished to marry, father would give
him a slice off the home farm to build upon and run, or help
to set him up for himself on some place in the neighborhood.
If the barn was in good upkeep, and full at the right time
of the year, it spoke to all the little world of the neighborhood,
and to the stranger who might come within our carefully shut
gates, of the prosperity of the place, our place. This was,
of course, in the days when the children intended to be farmers,
too, in the days before the cigar factory and clothing factory
and silk mill had invaded our countryside, and when there
were only the railroad and the foundry to draw away boys
from the farm, and very little at all to draw away the girls.
There were a few, as might be expected, who revolted against
the tyranny of the farm, as they were pleased to call it, even
before the eighteen-nineties, but they were the exceptions. Now,
fully half of the young folks, boys and girls alike, are gone
to town or working in the local factories that have been estab-
lished along the railroads which penetrate our countryside.
Those who did so revolt in the old days would say that it
wasn't right to be slaves to the farm, and yet they would not
advocate the cutting down of the size of the place. There were
farms of all acreages, of course, in our share of Pennsylvania,
but the quarter section had been the basis of the country's
8 THE RED HILLS
occupation, and one-hundred-and-sixty-acre farms and eighty-
acre farms were still prevalent in many sections. In others
there had already occurred that cutting up of the ancestral
place among the owner's sons, of which I have spoken. I have
come upon places, in Lancaster County oftenest, where there
were houses of all ages fairly close together on the pike, the
original quarter sections having been cut into ribbon-shaped
farms to accommodate the children who were willing to stay a t
home. It was curious that here, in a district almost solely de-
voted to farming, a division of land should have occurred very
like that arranged for in the laying-out of Germantown. In
Germantown the properties ran back, in narrow strips, for
more than a mile from Germantown Road towards the Wissa-
hickon Creek. This arrangement brought the houses side by
side on Germantown Road, ensuring that protection and that
easier co-operation in community efforts and those social ad-
vantages that come from a centered population.
Upstate, most of the farm acreage would be in cultivation
or in pasture, the woodlots being rather small, often not suffic-
ing to keep the farmer in fuel and posts and rails for fencing.
That being the case, we turned rather quickly to barbed wire
and patent iron gates and the like.
Such dissentients from the code of the farm as there were
would, in this yesterday, acknowledge the other side of the
case. If there were crops that had to be housed hurriedly and
under pressure lest they spoil; if there was stock that had to
be fed, no matter how tired you were after a day's work in
the fields ; if there was constant tinkering with farm machinery
of all sorts, from separator to windmill, still, after all, the barn
was a great and good thing.
What a place was the barn, say, of a November night and
the cold falling. The stock, fed and bedded, voice their con-
tent with gratulatory noises, as they stir placidly at the pleas-
ant task of eating in warm quarters. It is snug here in the
stables under the protection of the bank into which this lowest
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 9
level of the b a r n has been dug. You have a sense of all t h a t
mass of hay above you in the great lofts. I t is between you and
the menace of winter; it will spend but slowly, and keep all the
creatures in fine fettle until there is pasture again. I t is, di-
rectly or indirectly, food and shelter and money in the bank.
You have j u s t drawn from the store of oats and corn and
b r a n that fills the bins along the threshing floor above you.
There is wheat there, too, that you have not drawn. Yellow
and brown feeds have poured down the shoots in hurrying
streams. The barn teems everywhere with increase, in stock,
in grain, in the fruits of the earth. In the root cellars, dug
into the bank from the passage at the inner end of the stables
and extending out on either side of the barn bridge, are p o t a -
toes and pumpkins, carrots and turnips, mangels and sugar
beets, and apples and cabbages a f t e r their several kinds. All
is stored away safely against any degree of frost. Everything
you need f o r stock and man is here, right at hand. There is a
steer among the cattle, and there are hogs nearby, that will
find their way into the smoke house in due time. The cows
will give you milk, and cream, and butter all winter through.
T h e pullets in so protected a y a r d , with barn to north and
sheds to east and west, and with so mucli litter everywhere to
scratch in, will give you eggs no matter how snow flies.
You pass out from the stable doors. You pass on out from
under the overshoot of the barn. The pigeons roosting here
above you waken in the light of the lantern, and coo, and
move about softly, and coo, and settle again with sleepy mur-
murs. The little calls blend pleasantly with the noises from
within the barn, with the subdued whinnying from the horse
t h a t hates you to leave him, and with the snuffing and blowing
and soft trampling of the cattle. Your dog comes from some-
where in the darkness, nosing your hand. Your family are in
the lighted house across the way. The children are not old
enough yet to have absorbing interests away from home. You
are fortunate in your help, a stout boy of twenty, who calls
10 T H E RED H I L L S
everything about the place "ours." Let it snow. All t h a t mat-
ters most t o you in the world is here. Let it snow until you are
snowed in. W h a t ' s the difference if you can't get out f o r p a p e r
and mail? F o r a week, at any rate, you can do without the
world.
There are other memories of the barn to cherish t h a n this
of late November, but none more lasting. You can recall how
firm an oasis the barn was when all out-of-doors seemed ready
to dissolve in the spring thaws. How good, too, the b a r n was
to get to on those May days of plowing, when storm clouds
would g a t h e r in a trice, and driving rain break loose so wildly
t h a t the surface of even this shaly hill land would t u r n liquid
mud by the time you finished out the furrow to the field's end
and ploughed back to the roadside. You and y o u r beasts
housed, and the beasts rubbed dry, yon. would run u p to the
threshing floor to be sure the great doors were secure against
the wind. They would be, of course, and resounding to the vol-
leying of rain and recurrent bursts of hail. How loud the whole
dark interior was with reverberant noises ! Rain beating every-
where its ceaseless tattoo, on the old split shingles of the roof
and on the long boards of the north side! Wind whistling
through the hundred cracks of the boarding, and pushing so
hard everywhere t h a t the staunch old framing of oak would
creak and groan and all but stir on its foundations ! And the
thunder ! Expected, long waited for, as it was, when it came it
came with the quickness and surprise of an earthquake, and
seemed to shake all your little share of the world !
I f , in a moment's pause in the storm, you would open the
manhole in the b a r n door, you would see lightning stabbing
down in zigzags. They were short zigzags, so low were the
leaden clouds banked up, hardly higher than the fence-row
cherries, now strangely white, as they climbed the sudden hill,
in the illumination of all the landscape. You would sink back
on the pile of bags within the little door, content to rest a
spell while the storm went wild again. Were there not symbols
BARN SYMBOLS IN BERKS
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 11
on the barn? They would keep the lightning away. The barn
had stood there a hundred years on the open hilltop, with no
lightning rods and no high trees nearer than the pines before
the house a hundred yards away. Six-lobed the symbols were,
in weathered lead t h a t was still strikingly white against the
ironstone red of the wooden front. Six-lobed they were, within
their circle of four-foot diameter, the six petals of the con-
ventionalized tulip t h a t is the sign manual of all good things
in our folk culture. They were on the south side of the barn,
and only four of them, not the miraculous seven that keep away
all harm. Yet they had kept away the lightning for a hundred
years, and they were, no doubt, still potent, as sure in their
efficacy as anything in life may be.
There were pleasanter places t h a n the overhead on hot hay
days of June and J u l y , but even then the threshing floor was
a refuge from the sun-baked fields without. The great doors
p a s t which you drove in were open behind you and the smaller
doors on the south side open before you, and there was a
d r a u g h t drawing through. The wind was never still on these
heights. And if there was no shade about the barn save t h a t
cast by its own walls, the absence of trees gave the wind so
much the better access to all quarters of the lofts, through
the cracks between the boards of the sides, the slits in the stone-
work of the ends, the round windows above the slits in the high
gable, and the great doors to the threshing floor. There were
the other harvestings of wheat, of oats, of potatoes, of sec-
ond-crop hay, of corn, of buckwheat, and of apples, t h a t
brought you to the barn on all sorts of days the summer
through and all the fall.
How good it had been, too, in one of boyhood's moments of
stolen leisure, to climb u p the ladder from the threshing floor
and to work your way across the hay to the little window, cir-
cular and bricklined, which looked out westward toward the
Blue Mountain. You were so high you could see over the roof
of the tenant house. Beyond lay the near valley, with t h a t
12 THE RED HILLS
abrupt g a p in its further hill through which ran the road to
Saylorsburg. Beyond was a line of mountains, the Blue Moun-
tains. They were, in their misty mole-grey, the perfect back-
ground to the banked masses of oaks, ruddy brown these
October days, that covered so thickly the nearer hills. How
soon, you would wonder, would those Bluebergers up there be
plucking their geese, and the feathers, turned to snow-flakes,
be whitening all the red ploughland.
There are other symbols of the Pennsylvania Dutch than
the barn. We are, no more than any other stock, wholly a
farming people. Yet we have stuck to the farm more faithfully
than any other stock in America. That faithfulness has been
due as much, I think, to our love of doing what we want to do
in our own way, as to our innate love of the soil. Though the
farmer may be a slave to his farm he is freer of the domination
of his fellow men than any other man in modern life. Yesterday,
when he spun his own flax, wove his own woolen cloth, and
tanned his own leather, he was still freer. The farmer has obvi-
ously more of the necessities of life on his own place than any
other man.
We have stuck to our ancestors' ways of worshiping God
with a resoluteness unusual in America. Our plain clothes sects
have even preserved that distinctive dress that marks the
elect from the world's people. Quaker bonnets are all but gone,
but Mennonite bonnets are still plenty in the country districts.
They are not infrequent even on the streets of the cities within
easy access to which the Mennonites live. They were surpris-
ingly numerous among the crowds at the Sesqui-Centennial in
Philadelphia in the autumn of 1926. A large part of the social
as well as the religious life of the countryside is still centered
in the churches. The country roads are alive with all sorts of
vehicles on the way to church on Sunday mornings, and, with
the whole countryside, almost deserted during the hours of
service.
So you might write down church, too, as a symbol of the
 PENNSYLVANIA D U T C H 13
Pennsylvania Dutch. I t has so thoroughly permeated o u r lives
t h a t it inspires even the details of our household a r t s . T h e
bells and pomegranates of Solomon's temple are repeated on
our f r a c t u r and on the china made in England f o r o u r market.
Since the "bells" of this combination are very like t o tulips in
shape, we have forgotten the origin of the bells and pome-
g r a n a t e s motive in our decoration and a d a p t the pomegranate
flower until it looks not unlike a full-blown tulip. W e use three
tulips as representative of the T r i n i t y on many different ob-
j e c t s , on painted tin, on pie plates of slipped clay, and on bed
quilts and woven coverlets. W e p u t Bible stories on stove
plates, often with the utmost naïveté, as in t h a t one of the
eighteenth century which represents Joseph fleeing from the
wiles of P o t i p h a r ' s wife. Yesterday we h u n g on the wall—and
in many homes it still hangs there—our favorite psalm, copied
by the school-master in f r a c t u r , with a border of soft-toned
reds and greens and blacks.
T h e backyard shop of the artisan might, too, be taken as a
symbol of the Pennsylvania Dutch. So, again, might the office
of the country doctor, with its books, not all medical by any
means, and its almost inevitable collection of some sort. T h e
t r u t h is, of course, t h a t there are as many kinds of us as of
any other people numbering a million. W e are not all farmers
and artisans and merchants and men of the professional classes.
W e are as diversified in our occupations as in our religions.
Our varying church backgrounds account f o r some of the
differences among us. T h e Lutherans, Reformed, and Moravi-
ans have always had high ideals of education, and the Men-
nonites, Dunkards, and Evangelicals have been gradually won
over t o the belief t h a t they must thoroughly educate their
young people. These l a t t e r sects now have colleges of their
own. Only the Amish are content with the education t h a t ends
a t fourteen.
I t is true, of course, t h a t f a r m i n g is the basic occupation of
all self-supporting countries, and t h a t men the world over have
14 THE RED HILLS
an almost instinctive desire to be raising crops and to be
breeding stock. Despite the constant and increasing drift to
town from the country, we see many men, when they have
made their little pile in the city, centering the interest of their
later y e a r s in some country place they have bought. Often a
man of this sort will get back the farm on which he was born,
and steal away to it whenever he is able, to play there with an
orchard, or a field of alfalfa, or Brown Swiss cattle.
It is a matter of the utmost seriousness to America that it
is easier for most men to make a comfortable living in some
city occupation than on the f a r m ; that they can have a rea-
sonable leisure on the farm only when they do not have to make
a living out of it. The effectives, the successful men on farms
today, outside of a few producers of specialties, are those who
love hard work and plenty of it. Fortunately, we Pennsylvania
Dutch have still a love for hard manual labor on the farm above
that possessed by any other Americans, and we have an equally
deep love of the freedom from interference with our lives by
other people which proprietorship of a farm brings.
It is true, then, that the Pennsylvania Dutch are more
basically farmers than any other American stock. And it is
true that the barn, the great Swiss barn, where all the life of
the farm centers, is the most concrete symbol of the Penn-
sylvania Dutch. If our fellow Americans are to know us well
even as farmers, they must know more of us, however, than
can be seen in the barn alone. They might learn of several
sides of our natures if they were to go with us to our country
fairs, to the Lancaster F a i r , to the Reading F a i r , to the Allen-
town Fair. Our fairs are held in the fall, before killing frosts,
while nearly all the many fruits of the farm are still at prime.
Nowhere in the world is there more or better proof of the
fatness of land than at the Allentown F a i r . The variety and
abundance and excellence of the foods on exhibition are be-
yond what you would imagine possible of any one section of
countryside.
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 15
The Twelfth Street M a r k e t in Philadelphia has, of course,
a g r e a t e r variety of foods, drawing as it does on F l o r i d a and
Texas, California and South A f r i c a , besides its nearer sources
of supply. Not even the T w e l f t h Street M a r k e t , though, has a
more abundant supply t h a n the Allentown F a i r , or one of
greater excellence. Such vegetables and f r u i t s and meats re-
veal our Red Hills as a valuable land of plenty.
No finer live-stock of all kinds could be gathered together
than t h a t on exhibition a t Allentown. You will find fowl of
every sort and breed, from least known t o best known, f r o m
Dorking to Rhode Island Red in chickens, from Aylesbury t o
Indian Runners in ducks, from Black Norfolks to Giant Bronze
in turkeys. So, too, you will find it in sheep and cattle and
horses, all the varieties and many specimens of each.
There are those who do not habitually think of the Red
Hills as an apple country. I t is true t h a t the apple has not
in the p a s t adapted itself to our countryside in the way t h a t
it has to New E n g l a n d . Escapes from the orchard are not
everywhere roadside trees as they are f u r t h e r northward. I t is
the E u r o p e a n cherry, throwing back to its ancestor, the maz-
zard, t h a t is our fence-row tree in German Pennsylvania, and
t h a t now and then a d a p t s itself to forest growth and spires
u p with oak and hickory in the frequent post-woods. Cherries,
too, both cultivated varieties and seedlings, have been planted
from old time, as in Germany, along the roads and f a r m lanes.
Yet from the time of the settlement of Germantown in 1683,
it has been the custom to plant appletrees back of the house.
I n town they were necessarily few. In the country where there
was room, there was usually an acre of o r c h a r d . T h e trees so
planted were not, j u d g i n g from their descendants, brought over
by the Germans from the homeland, but were of the stocks al-
ready in the countryside, Finnish and Swedish and English.
I know those who hold t h a t Rambo and Vandervere, Maiden
Blush and Bellflower, characteristic Delaware Valley apples,
are all of Swedish origin, b u t I know no proof of such state-
16 THE RED HILLS
ments. By the time t h a t these varieties were named we were al-
ready everywhere on tidewater the mixed people we are now in
the cities of eastern Pennsylvania, and it is mere guesswork to
say to which of our strains these four so good apples are due.
None of these four varieties is largely planted now, as is t h a t
other apple of early local popularity, the Winesap. As Stayman
Winesap it has been for some years the standard winter apple
of the many young orchards of the Red Hills, from Jericho
Mountain in Bucks to the mountains about Chambersburg.
There are, however, a number of apples Pennsylvania Dutch
by place of birth, if not always by the blood of the people on
the farm on which they originated. They call the Belmont
apple "Mama Beam" in Lancaster County where it originated,
on t h a t farm of Jacob Beam, which also brought the F a n n y
into being. The Blue Mountain apple is of " D u t c h " origin, as
are the Evening P a r t y , Ewalt, Fallawater, Hiester, Klaproth,
Smith's Cider, Smokehouse, Susan's Spice, W a t e r , W i n t e r
Sweet, Paradise and York Imperial. From the outer fringe of
Dutchland comes the Winter Banana apple, originated on the
f a r m of David Flory, near Adamsboro, Indiana. The names
Flory and Adams give it a Tulpehocken flavor. I know well a
red hill where the Adamses once lived, and a t whose foot Florys
live now. I t was only a little distance from here t h a t the
Hiester apple originated. This apple was never widely dis-
seminated. Indeed of all these " D u t c h " apples other than the
Stayman Winesap and Winter Banana only the Fallawater,
Smith's Cider, Smokehouse and York Imperial were ever largely
planted. Today, of the four, only the York Imperial comes t o
market in large quantities. The place of origin of this apple is
marked by a monument. I t is today almost as profitable com-
mercially as the Winter Banana. Neither of them is really what
they called yesterday a "dessert apple." T h e Winter Banana is
very beautiful and the York Imperial a good keeper, but they
both fall short of the best apples, Spitzenburgs and Northern
Spies and Newtown Pippins. The Smokehouse, on the other
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 17
hand, is a delicious apple early in the winter, and it is a thou-
sand pities it is not more generally grown.
A truer revelation of the Pennsylvania Dutch georgical than
that of the fairs or apples will be found in our curb markets.
In the days of my youth we were still strongly represented
among those who sold in the stalls of our wooden-shedded street
markets in Philadelphia, on Spring Garden Street, for instance.
Now what is left of our city street markets is largely a hag-
gling of foreigners. You must go up country now to find the
true curb market. Even here it is dwindling. There are few
wagons at the curb in Easton. Most of Reading's marketing
is now under shedding. The glory of the curb market in Lan-
caster is over, and its banishment into a great market house
very imminent. I saw this Lancaster curb market toward its
end, on the last day of 1926. It was not then what it was in its
heyday, but it was still a very interesting market to visit. It
revealed the richness of Lancaster County, the garden county
not only of Pennsylvania but of all America. On this day of my
last visit the Lancaster curb market was dominantly a fowl
market, with butter and eggs and apples running a not too close
second to the chickens and turkeys, geese and ducks. What is
offered for sale differs, of course, with the season, but the
market people are always the same, all but all Pennsylvania
Dutch.
Even at this late day in the world's history, the people of
the Lancaster curb market were not only dominantly "Dutch"
but dominantly "plain clothes people," Mennonites and Amish.
The market ran, like a flattened U of uneven sides, round from
Duke Street, where it extended one city block ; to Vine Street,
where it extended for two blocks; to Prince Street, where it
extended for nearly two blocks. Its stands lined only one side
of the street. On Duke Street there were wagons and trucks,
touring cars and limousines backed up to the curb, and their
owners selling from trestles and tables placed on the sidewalk
close to the curb. On Vine Street there were many wagons and
18 THE RED HILLS
c a r s against the curb, and a t least a dozen wagons, their horses
stabled a t the inn nearby, standing end t o end on the other
side of the street from the curb stands. Here and there stood a
wagon, j u s t backed in, with a woolly horse between the s h a f t s .
Most of these were only one-horse wagons, the small affairs
known as Amish wagons, t h a t close up tight with glass doors
on both sides of the dashboard to keep out the cold. Such
wagons cannot hold half the load possible to a two-horse spring
wagon, long the typical farm wagon of southeastern Penn-
sylvania.
T h e number of the horse-drawn vehicles was, indeed, a strik-
ing feature of the market. I should say t h a t they made u p a t
least a third of the perhaps one hundred and twenty vehicles
present a t the time of my attendance. Comparatively few of
the farmers were selling directly from the back of the wagon.
There were several glass cases on trestles, to keep the produce
out of the dust of the street, besides the trestles and tables of
which I have written. Nearly half of the sellers, however, had
only a basket or a box with a board across its t o p to hold their
offerings, or j u s t a basket of eggs or apples standing on the
sidewalk. On such a board would be a half-dozen fowls, all
cleaned and ready f o r the oven, with their delectable lights and
livers and f a t piled neatly on top. Many were decked with
parsley or other greens. As one fowl would sell, the supply in
many cases was replenished from the a d j a c e n t wagon, but with
some the half dozen was a p p a r e n t l y the whole stock in t r a d e .
One immaculate looking limousine, seven-passenger, produced
a handsome young man of twenty-five who carefully laid out
the carcases of a dozen and a half roasting fowls on a wide
board across light trestles, and stood, peajacketed and hands
in pockets, waiting f o r customers. H e exuded such affluence
t h a t it seemed he could have bought u p readily all his possible
p a t r o n s . I watched him a short while, and as I watched he
quickly made two sales at good prices. H e was evidently known
and trusted. He was not above his job, and his richly fashioned
THE LANCASTER CURB MARKET
 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH 19
c a r was only the symbol, no doubt, of his hard work and keen
trading.
Near this large car was an old woman sitting on a box with
nothing f o r sale but a basket of eggs. She, perhaps, had come
in by trolley, or had been given a lift on some neighbor's wagon.
Such an humble seller was, though, the exception. Most of the
market folk looked prosperous.
There was no soliciting of prospective customers t h a t I saw,
and I made two slow rounds of the market from end to end,
standing around now and then to take in what I could of its
details. My visits were shortly a f t e r the beginning of the mar-
ket, a t a little a f t e r one o'clock, and again, a f t e r an hour's
interval, well towards three. Meanwhile I had visited the stalls
in the North Market House, from which the same sort of people
sold the same sort of produce under the protection of a roof.
Here the produce was displayed on high and crude stands,
almost old enough to be considered antiques.
Selling was brisker when I returned to the curb market
at three o'clock than it had been earlier. The cider by the
glass and gallon j a r was going very quickly, and many people
with heavily laden baskets were pushing about through the
crowds. Apple-butter was by this time going fast, too, being
ladled out by the pint into paper cartons instead of into the
redware crocks in which it always was bought in my boyhood.
Such of these crocks as remain now in this countryside are
mostly in the hands of collectors or cherished by the housewives
with the care bestowed on what they know can no longer be
bought in the shops.
A f t e r the fowls, butter, eggs, and apples, cider and smear-
case and apple-butter were more in evidence than anything
else. There were three truck loads of oranges, grapefruit and
bananas displaj'ed along the curb, and one vendor of cran-
berries who did a good trade. Everything else, however, came
apparently from the neighborhood. There was a good deal of
fresh pork f o r sale, and some sausage, both fresh and smoked,
20 THE RED HILLS
and some scrapple, but there undoubtedly would be more later
when hog killing had occurred on most of the farms.
There was a good deal of meat jelly, pigsfoot most of it,
and chicken jelly. There was mincemeat. Black walnuts, both
cracked and whole, were in such plenty as I had never seen, tes-
t i f y i n g to the continued presence of this limestone-loving tree
through this limestone country. There were English walnuts,
too, and of local raising. T h e apples were very fine indeed.
They were mostly Stayman Winesaps and Y o r k Imperials, with
a few Grimes Golden and Smokehouses.
There were a good many vegetables in glass, beans, beets,
peas, corn, and asparagus. There were dried beans, limas and
white kidneys chiefly, and popcorn on the ear. There were fresh
carrots, and cabbage, and turnips, and beets, and an abundance
of frame-raised lettuce. There were pumpkins and sweet pota-
toes and white potatoes. There was cornmeal for sale on many
stands. Here and there were doughnuts, pies, and the daintiest
of rosettes in pastry. There were preserves and fruit jellies.
Cut dried apples, or suits, were on many stands. There was a
profusion of parsley, and many strong herbs of the sage and
sweet marjoram sorts. Our housewives know that the making
or marring of meat jellies and wursts and stuffing lies in the
seasoning.
A purchase of mine of the grand total of twenty cents en-
listed the united efforts of three tables. I bought a dozen of the
pastry rosettes at the middle table. I had no basket to put them
in; so I begged for a box that they might not be broken on
the seventy miles back to Germantown. The Mennonite girl
from whom I bought the rosettes asked for a box from two
broad brims on her right, and the woman in worldly garments
to her left volunteered a paper bag. All were as interested in
my picayune purchase as if I had bought an ox. I had already
several packages. T h e lady of the brown bag was very sym-
pathetic about the bother many bundles are. I looked for
 PENNSYLVANIA D U T C H 21
irony on the faces of the broad-brims, a t so much fuss over
nothing, but I did not find it there.
T h e background of the curb market was a p a r t of the j o y
I had in it. Above me as I purchased my fastnachts, rose Holy
Trinity, a Lutheran Church of colonial architecture, with
great urns above the roof at one end and a finely proportioned
spire at the other, standing out, white and graceful, above its
walls of red brick. There are in Lancaster many old houses of
brick, with second-story porches at the side and box-bushes in
the backyard, and some of these old houses composed them-
selves pleasantly in the distance as I gazed down the lines of
market tables. The bonnets and broad-brims of Amish and
Mennonites lent picturesqueness to the market itself.
The " D u t c h " we speak is not particularly pleasant t o the
ear, but I should have been glad to hear more of it than I did.
T h i r t y years of school in English only has had its inevitable
results. Most of the buying was in English, and the talk among
the sellers, countrymen all, was generally in English and not
bad English a t t h a t . I t had, of course, some of it, the rising
inflection and peculiar intonation of the "Country D u t c h , "
but the "alreadys" and the " y e t s " were not so much in evi-
dence as they used to be.
The sun was out when I began my round of the market ;
the air was little tainted with smoke ; no wind was noticeable.
I t was as fine a winter day as we have in this latitude. Then,
about four o'clock, it suddenly clouded up. T h e day went dead ;
and I hurried to an earlier train homeward than I had intended
to take.
Some of these people I had seen selling their produce on the
curb came from the places through which I was now passing,
Bird-in-hand, Ronk, Paradise, and Gap. Some will be heading
homeward, an hour or two later, to quaint New Holland, up by
the Welsh Mountain. The woolly horses of others will be plod-
ding on towards E p h r a t a , where was the Pietist cloister, and
where are still the strange tall houses of wood t h a t sheltered
22 T H E RED H I L L S
the high mystics and humble artists of the community. Others
again of the market people will follow the white road to Man-
heim, Manheim of the Red Rose, where drove so often in old
time Baron Stiegel with his coach and six, each horse white
and of white plumed headdress. There will be those among the
farmers who will find their way westward through the d a r k to
Mount J o y ; and southwestward to the Susquehanna ; and
southward to the Strasburg hills; and f u r t h e r southward to
Peach Bottom, places of little resort but of snug prosperity.
My thoughts take me, with the dispersing market folk, to a
score of places long known to me but of late unvisited, where
are houses of stone and old brick, orchard environed, with
great white barns and broad tobacco fields. Slow moving creeks,
picturesquely bridged at grist mills and little forges, once busy
enough but now sleepy and half forgotten, rise one by one
before my inward eye and fade away again.
As night closes in about my eastward-moving train the farms
are blotted out, but the furnaces make known their presence
even more pronouncedly than by day, with high chimneys
blowing flares against the dark.
There are other features and occasions of our life t h a t I
might describe to further my account of the Pennsylvania
Dutch in things gcorgical, but I think I have written enough
in the way of such revelation. I do not, therefore, sing the
praises of harvest home, of apple-butter boiling, of hog killing,
of tobacco fields pungent in the August noon. I t is time to
speak of t h a t other side of our life that comes to mind with
the furnace flares. We have labored much, and for years, with
iron and steel, the many of us who are iron-masters and en-
gineers and mechanics. I think of t h a t charcoal burner of our
blood whose glowing stack burned down through the soil and
turned molten an outcrop of iron ore. I think of the great
business and the great fortune that came of this chance dis-
covery of an iron mountain. I think of the great mills f a r across
country from the iron mountain, the steel mills of Bethlehem,
 PENNSYLVANIA D U T C H 23

and the p a r t the " D u t c h " have played in their development.

We are our country's best farmers beyond a doubt, but we are
good artisans, too.

TECHNICAL

T h e Pennsylvania D u t c h have
pride in the work of their hands. They have loyalty t o the c r a f t
they follow. There is a code f o r this trade, and a code f o r t h a t ,
a code which, in many cases, has been handed down f r o m
f a t h e r to son for several generations. The preachment t h a t is
abroad in the land, t h a t it is a slave's morality to do a full
day's work, falls on irresponsive ears among the Red Hills. If
a " D u t c h " bricklayer can lay fifteen hundred bricks in a d a y
he does not like to restrict himself to the eight hundred t h a t
custom dictates. He joins the union, of course, when he goes to
town, but, in most cases, only so he can work on union j o b s ,
and not because of a feeling t h a t he needs protection against
the "bosses." H e expects to be in business f o r himself some
day, he is a strong individualist, he does not like to be told what
to do either by "boss" or by labor leader. Give him his head and
he will work hard and do the j o b as well as he can. And t h a t is
generally well indeed.
The Pennsylvania Dutch artisan has in him something of the
spirit of the guildsman of medieval times. H e has, too, some-
thing of t h a t guildsman's habits. H e likes to go on the road in
his youth, working a t a j o b here and a j o b there. F i f t y years
ago he would push westward to the Mississippi. Now he often
reaches the Pacific coast. This journeying is of his own initia-
tive and not under the compulsion of a requirement such as
t h a t which sent him who would be a master carpenter a hun-
dred and more years ago on the round of eastern cities f r o m
Charleston to Portsmouth.
Two years of travelling generally contents our " D u t c h "
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—a beauty, but vain; so runs the bond. ‘But’ is the favourite
monosyllable of envy and self-love. Raphael could draw and Titian
could colour—we shall never get beyond this point while the world
stands; the human understanding is not cast in a mould to receive
double proofs of entire superiority to itself. It is folly to expect it. If a
farther claim be set up, we call in question the solidity of the first,
incline to retract it, and suspect that the whole is a juggle and a piece
of impudence, as we threaten a common beggar with the stocks for
following us to ask a second alms. This is, in fact, one source of the
prevalence and deep root which envy has in the human mind: we are
incredulous as to the truth and justice of the demands which are so
often made upon our pity or our admiration; but let the distress or
the merit be established beyond all controversy, and we open our
hearts and purses on the spot, and sometimes run into the contrary
extreme when charity or admiration becomes the fashion. No one
envies the Author of Waverley, because all admire him, and are
sensible that admire him how they will, they can never admire him
enough. We do not envy the sun for shining, when we feel the benefit
and see the light. When some persons start an injudicious parallel
between him and Shakspeare, we then may grow jealous and uneasy,
because this interferes with our older and more firmly rooted
conviction of genius, and one which has stood a severer and surer
test. Envy has, then, some connexion with a sense of justice—is a
defence against imposture and quackery. Though we do not willingly
give up the secret and silent consciousness of our own worth to
vapouring and false pretences, we do homage to the true candidate
for fame when he appears, and even exult and take a pride in our
capacity to appreciate the highest desert. This is one reason why we
do not envy the dead—less because they are removed out of our way,
than because all doubt and diversity of opinion is dismissed from the
question of their title to veneration and respect. Our tongue, having a
license, grows wanton in their praise. We do not envy or stint our
admiration of Rubens, because the mists of uncertainty or prejudice
are withdrawn by the hand of time from the splendour of his works.
Fame is to genius—
‘Like to a gate of steel fronting the sun,
 That renders back its figure and its heat.’

We give full and unbounded scope to our impressions when they are
confirmed by successive generations; as we form our opinions coldly
and slowly while we are afraid our judgment may be reversed by
posterity. We trust the testimony of ages, for it is true; we are no
longer in pain lest we should be deceived by varnish and tinsel; and
feel assured that the praise and the work are both sterling. In
contemporary reputation, the greater and more transcendant the
merit, the less is the envy attending it; which shows that this passion
is not, after all, a mere barefaced hatred and detraction from
acknowledged excellence. Mrs. Siddons was not an object of envy;
her unrivalled powers defied competitors or gainsayers. If Kean had
a party against him, it was composed of those who could not or
would not see his merits through his defects; and in like manner,
John Kemble’s elevation to the tragic throne was not carried by loud
and tumultuous acclamation, because the stately height which he
attained was the gradual result of labour and study, and his style of
acting did not flash with the inspiration of the God. We are backward
to bestow a heaped measure of praise, whenever there is any
inaptitude or incongruity that acts to damp or throw a stumbling-
block in the way of our enthusiasm. Hence the jealousy and dislike
shown towards upstart wealth, as we cannot in our imaginations
reconcile the former poverty of the possessors with their present
magnificence—we despise fortune-hunters in ambition as well as in
love—and hence, no doubt, one strong ground of hereditary right.
We acquiesce more readily in an assumption of superiority that in
the first place implies no merit (which is a great relief to the baser
sort), and in the second, that baffles opposition by seeming a thing
inevitable, taken for granted, and transmitted in the common course
of nature. In contested elections, where the precedence is understood
to be awarded to rank and title, there is observed to be less acrimony
and obstinacy than when it is supposed to depend on individual
merit and fitness for the office; no one willingly allows another more
ability or honesty than himself, but he cannot deny that another may
be better born. Learning again is more freely admitted than genius,
because it is of a more positive quality, and is felt to be less
essentially a part of a man’s self; and with regard to the grosser and
more invidious distinction of wealth, it may be difficult to substitute
any finer test of respectability for it, since it is hard to fathom the
depth of a man’s understanding, but the length of his purse is soon
known; and besides, there is a little collusion in the case:—
‘The learned pate ducks to the golden fool.’

We bow to a patron who gives us a good dinner and his countenance

for our pains, and interest bribes and lulls envy asleep. The most
painful kind of envy is the envy towards inferiors; for we cannot bear
to think that a person (in other respects utterly insignificant) should
have or seem to have an advantage over us in any thing we have set
our hearts upon, and it strikes at the very root of our self-love to be
foiled by those we despise. There is some dignity in a contest with
power and acknowledged reputation: but a triumph over the sordid
and the mean is itself a mortification, while a defeat is intolerable.
 ON PREJUDICE

The Atlas.]
[April 11, 1830.

Prejudice, in its ordinary and literal sense, is prejudging any

question without having sufficiently examined it, and adhering to our
opinion upon it through ignorance, malice, or perversity, in spite of
every evidence to the contrary. The little that we know has a strong
alloy of misgiving and uncertainty in it: the mass of things of which
we have no means of judging, but of which we form a blind and
confident opinion as if we were thoroughly acquainted with them, is
monstrous. Prejudice is the child of ignorance; for as our actual
knowledge falls short of our desire to know, or curiosity and interest
in the world about us, so must we be tempted to decide upon a
greater number of things at a venture; and having no check from
reason or inquiry, we shall grow more obstinate and bigoted in our
conclusions, according as they have been rash and presumptuous.
The absence of proof, instead of suspending our judgments, only
gives us an opportunity to make things out according to our wishes
and fancies; mere ignorance is a blank canvas on which we lay what
colours we please, and paint objects black or white, as angels or
devils, magnify or diminish them at our option; and in the vacuum
either of facts or arguments, the weight of prejudice and passion falls
with double force, and bears down everything before it. If we enlarge
the circle of our previous knowledge ever so little, we may meet with
something to create doubt and difficulty; but as long as we remain
confined to the cell of our native ignorance, while we know nothing
beyond the routine of sense and custom, we shall refer everything to
that standard, or make it out as we would have it to be, like spoiled
children who have never been from home, and expect to find nothing
in the world that does not accord with their wishes and notions. It is
evident, that the fewer things we know, the more ready we shall be to
pronounce upon and condemn, what is new and strange to us; that
is, the less capable we shall be of varying our conceptions, and the
more prone to mistake a part for the whole. What we do not
understand the meaning of must necessarily appear to us ridiculous
and contemptible; and we do not stop to inquire, till we have been
taught by repeated experiments and warnings of our own fallibility,
whether the absurdity is in ourselves or in the object of our dislike
and scorn. The most ignorant people are rude and insolent, as the
most barbarous are cruel and ferocious. All our knowledge at first
lying in a narrow compass (bounded by local and physical causes)
whatever does not conform to this shocks us as out of reason and
nature. The less we look abroad, the more our ideas are introverted;
and our habitual impressions, from being made up of a few
particulars always repeated, grow together into a kind of concrete
substance, which will not bear taking to pieces, and where the
smallest deviation destroys the whole feeling. Thus the difference of
colour in a black man was thought to forfeit his title to belong to the
species, till books of voyages and travels, and old Fuller’s quaint
expression of ‘God’s image carved in ebony,’ have brought the two
ideas into a forced union, and Mr. Murray no longer libels men of
colour with impunity. The word republic has a harsh and
incongruous sound to ears bred under a constitutional monarchy;
and we strove hard for many years to overturn the French republic,
merely because we could not reconcile it to ourselves that such a
thing should exist at all, notwithstanding the examples of Holland,
Switzerland, and many others. This term has hardly yet performed
quarantine: to the loyal and patriotic it has an ugly taint in it, and is
scarcely fit to be mentioned in good company. If, however, we are
weaned by degrees from our prejudices against certain words that
shock opinion, this is not the case with all; for those that offend good
manners grow more offensive with the progress of refinement and
civilization, so that no writer now dare venture upon expressions that
unwittingly disfigure the pages of our elder writers, and in this
respect, instead of becoming callous or indifferent, we appear to
become more fastidious every day. There is then a real grossness
which does not depend on familiarity or custom. This account of the
concrete nature of prejudice, or of the manner in which our ideas by
habit and the dearth of general information coalesce together into
one indissoluble form, will show (what otherwise seems
unaccountable) how such violent antipathies and animosities have
been occasioned by the most ridiculous or trifling differences of
opinion, or outward symbols of it; for, by constant custom, and the
want of reflection, the most insignificant of these was as inseparably
bound up with the main principle as the most important, and to give
up any part was to give up the whole essence and vital interests of
religion, morals, and government. Hence we see all sects and parties
mutually insist on their own technical distinctions as the essentials
and fundamentals of religion, and politics, and, for the slightest
variation in any of these, unceremoniously attack their opponents as
atheists and blasphemers, traitors and incendiaries. In fact, these
minor points are laid hold of in preference, as being more obvious
and tangible, and as leaving more room for the exercise of prejudice
and passion. Another thing that makes our prejudices rancorous and
inveterate, is, that as they are taken up without reason, they seem to
be self-evident; and we thence conclude, that they not only are so to
ourselves, but must be so to others, so that their differing from us is
wilful, hypocritical, and malicious. The Inquisition never pretended
to punish its victims for being heretics or infidels, but for avowing
opinions which with their eyes open they knew to be false. That is,
the whole of the Catholic faith, ‘that one entire and perfect
chrysolite,’ appeared to them so completely without flaw and
blameless, that they could not conceive how any one else could
imagine it to be otherwise, except from stubbornness and
contumacy, and would rather admit (to avoid so improbable a
suggestion) that men went to a stake for an opinion, not which they
held, but counterfeited, and were content to be burnt for the pleasure
of playing the hypocrite. Nor is it wonderful that there should be so
much repugnance to admit the existence of a serious doubt in
matters of such vital and eternal interest, and on which the whole
fabric of the church hinged, since the first doubt that was expressed
on any single point drew all the rest after it; and the first person who
started a conscientious scruple, and claimed the trial by reason,
threw down, as if by a magic spell, the strongholds of bigotry and
superstition, and transferred the determination of the issue from the
blind tribunal of prejudice and implicit faith to a totally different
ground, the fair and open field of argument and inquiry. On this
ground a single champion is a match for thousands. The decision of
the majority is not here enough: unanimity is absolutely necessary to
infallibility; for the only secure plea on which such a preposterous
pretension could be set up is, by taking it for granted that there can
be no possible doubt entertained upon the subject, and by diverting
men’s minds from ever asking themselves the question of the truth of
certain dogmas and mysteries, any more than whether two and two
make four. Prejudice in short is egotism: we see a part, and
substitute it for the whole; a thing strikes us casually and by halves,
and we would have the universe stand proxy for our decision, in
order to rivet it more firmly in our own belief; however insufficient
or sinister the grounds of our opinions, we would persuade ourselves
that they arise out of the strongest conviction, and are entitled to
unqualified approbation; slaves of our own prejudices, caprice,
ignorance, we would be lords of the understandings and reason of
others; and (strange infatuation!) taking up an opinion solely from
our own narrow and partial point of view, without consulting the
feelings of others, or the reason of things, we are still uneasy if all the
world do not come into our way of thinking.
 THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

The Atlas.]
[April 18, 1830.

The most dangerous enemies to established opinions are those

who, by always defending them, call attention to their weak sides.
The priests and politicians, in former times, were therefore wise in
preventing the first approaches of innovation and inquiry; in
preserving inviolate the smallest link in the adamantine chain with
which they had bound the bodies and the souls of men; in closing up
every avenue or pore through which a doubt could creep in; for they
knew that through the slightest crevice floods of irreligion and heresy
would break in like a tide. Hence the constant alarm at free
discussion and inquiry; hence the clamour against innovation and
reform; hence our dread and detestation of those who differ with us
in opinion, for this at once puts us on the necessity of defending
ourselves, or of owning ourselves weak or in the wrong, if we cannot,
and converts that which was before a bed of roses, while we slept
undisturbed upon it, into a cushion of thorns; and hence our natural
tenaciousness of those points which are most vulnerable, and of
which we have no proof to offer; for, as reason fails us, we are more
annoyed by the objections and require to be soothed and supported
by the concurrence of others. Bigotry and intolerance, which pass as
synonymous, are, if rightly considered, a contradiction in terms; for,
if in drawing up the articles of our creed, we are blindly bigoted to
our impressions and views, utterly disregarding all others, why
should we afterwards be so haunted and disturbed by the last, as to
wish to exterminate every difference of sentiment with fire and
sword? The difficulty is only solved by considering that unequal
compound, the human mind, alternately swayed by individual
biasses and abstract pretensions, and where reason so often panders
to, or is made the puppet of, the will. To show at once the danger and
extent of prejudice, it may be sufficient to observe that all our
convictions, however arrived at, and whether founded on strict
demonstration or the merest delusion, are crusted over with the
same varnish of confidence and conceit, and afford the same firm
footing both to our theories and practice; or if there be any
difference, we are in general ‘most ignorant of what we are most
assured,’ the strength of will and impatience of contradiction making
up for the want of evidence. Mr. Burke says, that we ought to ‘cherish
our prejudices because they are prejudices;’ but this view of the case
will satisfy the demands of neither party, for prejudice is never easy
unless it can pass itself off for reason, or abstract undeniable truth:
and again, in the eye of reason, if all prejudices are to be equally
respected as such, then the prejudices of others are right, and ours
must in their turn be wrong. The great stumbling-block to candour
and liberality is the difficulty of being fully possessed of the
excellence of any opinion or pursuits of our own, without
proportionably condemning whatever is opposed to it; nor can we
admit the possibility that when our side of the shield is black, the
other should be white. The largest part of our judgments is prompted
by habit and passion; but because habit is like a second nature, and
we necessarily approve what passion suggests, we will have it that
they are founded entirely on reason and nature, and that all the
world must be of the same opinion, unless they wilfully shut their
eyes to the truth. Animals are free from prejudice, because they have
no notion or care about anything beyond themselves, and have no
wish to generalise or talk big on what does not concern them: man
alone falls into absurdity and error by setting up a claim to superior
wisdom and virtue, and to be a dictator and lawgiver to all around
him, and on all things that he has the remotest conception of. If mere
prejudice were dumb, as well as deaf and blind, it would not so much
signify; but as it is, each sect, age, country, profession, individual, is
ready to prove that they are exclusively in the right, and to go
together by the ears for it. ‘Rings the earth with the vain stir?’ It is
the trick for each party to raise an outcry against prejudice; as by this
they flatter themselves, and would have it supposed by others, that
they are perfectly free from it, and have all the reason on their own
side. It is easy indeed, to call names, or to separate the word
prejudice from the word reason; but not so easy to separate the two
things. Reason seems a very positive and palpable thing to those who
have no notion of it but as expressing their own views and feelings;
as prejudice is evidently a very gross and shocking absurdity (that no
one can fall into who wishes to avoid it), as long as we continue to
apply this term to the prejudices of other people. To suppose that we
cannot make a mistake is the very way to run headlong into it; for, if
the distinction were so broad and glaring as our self-conceit and
dogmatism lead us to imagine it is, we could never, but by design,
mistake truth for falsehood. Those, however, who think they can
make a clear stage of it, and frame a set of opinions on all subjects
by an appeal to reason alone, and without the smallest intermixture
of custom, imagination, or passion, know just as little of themselves
as they do of human nature. The best way to prevent our running
into the wildest excesses of prejudice and the most dangerous
aberrations from reason, is, not to represent the two things as having
a great gulph between them, which it is impossible to pass without a
violent effort, but to show that we are constantly (even when we
think ourselves most secure) treading on the brink of a precipice;
that custom, passion, imagination, insinuate themselves into and
influence almost every judgment we pass or sentiment we indulge,
and are a necessary help (as well as hindrance) to the human
understanding; and that, to attempt to refer every question to
abstract truth and precise definition, without allowing for the frailty
of prejudice, which is the unavoidable consequence of the frailty and
imperfection of reason, would be to unravel the whole web and
texture of human understanding and society. Such daring anatomists
of morals and philosophy think that the whole beauty of the mind
consists in the skeleton; cut away, without remorse, all sentiment,
fancy, taste, as superfluous excrescences; and, in their own eager,
unfeeling pursuit of scientific truth and elementary principles, they
‘murder to dissect.’ But of this I may say something in another paper.
 THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

It is a mistake, however, to suppose that all prejudices are false,

though it is not an easy matter to distinguish between true and false
prejudice. Prejudice is properly an opinion or feeling, not for which
there is no reason, but of which we cannot render a satisfactory
account on the spot. It is not always possible to assign a ‘reason for
the faith that is in us,’ not even if we take time and summon up all
our strength; but it does not therefore follow that our faith is hollow
and unfounded. A false impression may be defined to be an effect
without a cause, or without any adequate one; but the effect may
remain and be true, though the cause is concealed or forgotten. The
grounds of our opinions and tastes may be deep, and be scattered
over a large surface; they may be various, remote and complicated,
but the result will be sound and true, if they have existed at all,
though we may not be able to analyse them into classes, or to recall
the particular time, place, and circumstances of each individual case
or branch of the evidence. The materials of thought and feeling, the
body of facts and experience, are infinite, are constantly going on
around us, and acting to produce an impression of good or evil, of
assent or dissent to certain inferences; but to require that we should
be prepared to retain the whole of this mass of experience in our
memory, to resolve it into its component parts, and be able to quote
chapter and verse for every conclusion we unavoidably draw from it,
or else to discard the whole together as unworthy the attention of a
rational being, is to betray an utter ignorance both of the limits and
the several uses of the human capacity. The feeling of the truth of
anything, or the soundness of the judgment formed upon it from
repeated, actual impressions, is one thing: the power of vindicating
and enforcing it, by distinctly appealing to or explaining those
impressions, is another. The most fluent talkers or most plausible
reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
 To deny that we can, in a certain sense, know and be justified in
believing anything of which we cannot give the complete
demonstration, or the exact why and how, would only be to deny
that the clown, the mechanic (and not even the greatest
philosopher), can know the commonest thing; for in this new and
dogmatical process of reasoning, the greatest philosopher can trace
nothing above, nor proceed a single step without taking something
for granted;[60] and it is well if he does not take more things for
granted than the most vulgar and illiterate, and what he knows a
great deal less about. A common mechanic can tell how to work an
engine better than the mathematician who invented it. A peasant is
able to foretell rain from the appearance of the clouds, because (time
out of mind) he has seen that appearance followed by that
consequence; and shall a pedant catechise him out of a conviction
which he has found true in innumerable instances, because he does
not understand the composition of the elements, or cannot put his
notions into a logical shape? There may also be some collateral
circumstance (as the time of day), as well as the appearance of the
clouds, which he may forget to state in accounting for his prediction;
though, as it has been a part of his familiar experience, it has
naturally guided him in forming it, whether he was aware of it or not.
This comes under the head of the well-known principle of the
association of ideas; by which certain impressions, from frequent
recurrence, coalesce and act in unison truly and mechanically—that
is, without our being conscious of anything but the general and
settled result. On this principle it has been well said, that ‘there is
nothing so true as habit;’ but it is also blind: we feel and can produce
a given effect from numberless repetitions of the same cause; but we
neither inquire into the cause, nor advert to the mode. In learning
any art or exercise, we are obliged to take lessons, to watch others, to
proceed step by step, to attend to the details and means employed;
but when we are masters of it, we take all this for granted, and do it
without labour and without thought, by a kind of habitual instinct—
that is, by the trains of our ideas and volitions having been directed
uniformly, and at last flowing of themselves into the proper channel.
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner
of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives
to speak a language correctly or idiomatically. They do not succeed in
this from knowledge or reflection, but from inveterate custom, which
is a cord that cannot be loosed. In fact, in all that we do, feel, or
think, there is a leaven of prejudice (more or less extensive), viz.
something implied, of which we do not know or have forgotten the
grounds.
If I am required to prove the possibility, or demonstrate the mode
of whatever I do before I attempt it, I can neither speak, walk, nor
see; nor have the use of my hands, senses, or common
understanding. I do not know what muscles I use in walking, nor
what organs I employ in speech: those who do, cannot speak or walk
better on that account; nor can they tell how these organs and
muscles themselves act. Can I not discover that one object is near,
and another at a distance, from the eye alone, or from continual
impressions of sense and custom concurring to make the distinction,
without going through a course of perspective and optics?—or am I
not to be allowed an opinion on the subject, or to act upon it, without
being accused of being a very prejudiced and obstinate person? An
artist knows that, to imitate an object in the horizon, he must use less
colour; and the naturalist knows that this effect is produced by the
intervention of a greater quantity of air: but a country fellow, who
knows nothing of either circumstance, must not only be ignorant but
a blockhead, if he could be persuaded that a hill ten miles off was
close before him, only because he could not state the grounds of his
opinion scientifically. Not only must we (if restricted to reason and
philosophy) distrust the notices of sense, but we must also dismiss
all that mass of knowledge and perception which falls under the head
of common sense and natural feeling, which is made up of the strong
and urgent, but undefined impressions of things upon us, and lies
between the two extremes of absolute proof and the grossest
ignorance. Many of these pass for instinctive principles and innate
ideas; but there is nothing in them ‘more than natural.’
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to
find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any
circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may
play the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were
to wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and
multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand
still. Even men of science, after they have gone over the proofs a
number of times, abridge the process, and jump at a conclusion: is it
therefore false, because they have always found it to be true? Science
after a certain time becomes presumption; and learning reposes in
ignorance. It has been observed, that women have more tact and
insight into character than men, that they find out a pedant, a
pretender, a blockhead, sooner. The explanation is, that they trust
more to the first impressions and natural indications of things,
without troubling themselves with a learned theory of them; whereas
men, affecting greater gravity, and thinking themselves bound to
justify their opinions, are afraid to form any judgment at all, without
the formality of proofs and definitions, and blunt the edge of their
understandings, lest they should commit some mistake. They stay for
facts, till it is too late to pronounce on the characters. Women are
naturally physiognomists, and men phrenologists. The first judge by
sensations; the last by rules. Prejudice is so far then an involuntary
and stubborn association of ideas, of which we cannot assign the
distinct grounds and origin; and the answer to the question, ‘How do
we know whether the prejudice is true or false?’ depends chiefly on
that other, whether the first connection between our ideas has been
real or imaginary. This again resolves into the inquiry—Whether the
subject in dispute falls under the province of our own experience,
feeling, and observation, or is referable to the head of authority,
tradition, and fanciful conjecture? Our practical conclusions are in
this respect generally right; our speculative opinions are just as likely
to be wrong. What we derive from our personal acquaintance with
things (however narrow in its scope or imperfectly digested), is, for
the most part, built on a solid foundation—that of Nature; it is in
trusting to others (who give themselves out for guides and doctors)
that we are all abroad, and at the mercy of quackery, impudence,
and imposture. Any impression, however absurd, or however we may
have imbibed it, by being repeated and indulged in, becomes an
article of implicit and incorrigible belief. The point to consider is,
how we have first taken it up, whether from ourselves or the
arbitrary dictation of others. ‘Thus shall we try the doctrines,
whether they be of nature or of man.’
So far then from the charge lying against vulgar and illiterate
prejudice as the bane of truth and common sense, the argument
turns the other way; for the greatest, the most solemn, and
mischievous absurdities that mankind have been the dupes of, they
have imbibed from the dogmatism and vanity or hypocrisy of the
self-styled wise and learned, who have imposed profitable fictions
upon them for self-evident truths, and contrived to enlarge their
power with their pretensions to knowledge. Every boor sees that the
sun shines above his head; that ‘the moon is made of green cheese,’ is
a fable that has been taught him. Defoe says, that there were a
hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to
the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a
man or a horse. This, then, was a prejudice that they did not fill up of
their own heads. All the great points that men have founded a claim
to superiority, wisdom, and illumination upon, that they have
embroiled the world with, and made matters of the last importance,
are what one age and country differ diametrically with each other
about, have been successively and justly exploded, and have been the
levers of opinion and the grounds of contention, precisely because, as
their expounders and believers are equally in the dark about them,
they rest wholly on the fluctuations of will and passion, and as they
can neither be proved nor disproved, admit of the fiercest opposition
or the most bigoted faith. In what ‘comes home to the business and
bosoms of men,’ there is less of this uncertainty and presumption;
and there, in the little world of our own knowledge and experience,
we can hardly do better than attend to the ‘still, small voice’ of our
own hearts and feelings, instead of being browbeat by the effrontery,
or puzzled by the sneers and cavils of pedants and sophists, of
whatever school or description.
If I take a prejudice against a person from his face, I shall very
probably be in the right; if I take a prejudice against a person from
hearsay, I shall quite as probably be in the wrong. We have a
prejudice in favour of certain books, but it is hardly without
knowledge, if we have read them with delight over and over again.
Fame itself is a prejudice, though a fine one. Natural affection is a
prejudice: for though we have cause to love our nearest connections
better than others, we have no reason to think them better than
others. The error here is, when that which is properly a dictate of the
heart passes out of its sphere, and becomes an overweening decision
of the understanding. So in like manner of the love of country; and
there is a prejudice in favour of virtue, genius, liberty, which (though
it were possible) it would be a pity to destroy. The passions, such as
avarice, ambition, love, &c., are prejudices, that is amply exaggerated
views of certain objects, made up of habit and imagination beyond
their real value; but if we ask what is the real value of any object,
independently of its connection with the power of habit, or its
affording natural scope for the imagination, we shall perhaps be
puzzled for an answer. To reduce things to the scale of abstract
reason would be to annihilate our interest in them, instead of raising
our affections to a higher standard; and by striving to make man
rational, we should leave him merely brutish.
Animals are without prejudice: they are not led away by authority
or custom, but it is because they are gross, and incapable of being
taught. It is, however, a mistake to imagine that only the vulgar and
ignorant, who can give no account of their opinions, are the slaves of
bigotry and prejudice; the noisiest declaimers, the most subtle
casuists, and most irrefragable doctors, are as far removed from the
character of true philosophers, while they strain and pervert all their
powers to prove some unintelligible dogma, instilled into their minds
by early education, interest, or self-importance; and if we say the
peasant or artisan is a Mahometan because he is born in Turkey, or a
papist because he is born in Italy, the mufti at Constantinople or the
cardinal at Rome is so, for no better reason, in the midst of all his
pride and learning. Mr. Hobbes used to say, that if he had read as
much as others, he should have been as ignorant as they.
After all, most of our opinions are a mixture of reason and
prejudice, experience and authority. We can only judge for ourselves
in what concerns ourselves, and in things about us: and even there
we must trust continually to established opinion and current report;
in higher and more abstruse points we must pin our faith still more
on others. If we believe only what we know at first hand, without
trusting to authority at all, we shall disbelieve a great many things
that really exist; and the suspicious coxcomb is as void of judgment
as the credulous fool. My habitual conviction of the existence of such
a place as Rome is not strengthened by my having seen it; it might be
almost said to be obscured and weakened, as the reality falls short of
the imagination. I walk along the streets without fearing that the
houses will fall on my head, though I have not examined their
foundation; and I believe firmly in the Newtonian system, though I
have never read the Principia. In the former case, I argue that if the
houses were inclined to fall they would not wait for me; and in the
latter I acquiesce in what all who have studied the subject, and are
capable of understanding it, agree in, having no reason to suspect the
contrary. That the earth turns round is agreeable to my
understanding, though it shocks my sense, which is however too
weak to grapple with so vast a question.
 ON PARTY SPIRIT

The Atlas.]
[April 25, 1830.

Party spirit is one of the profoundnesses of Satan, or in more

modern language, one of the dexterous equivoques and contrivances
of our self-love, to prove that we, and those who agree with us,
combine all that is excellent and praiseworthy in our own persons (as
in a ring-fence) and that all the vices and deformity of human nature
take refuge with those who differ from us. It is extending and
fortifying the principle of the amour-propre, by calling to its aid the
esprit de corps and screening and surrounding our favourite
propensities and obstinate caprices in the hollow squares or dense
phalanxes of sects and parties. This is a happy mode of pampering
our self-complacency, and persuading ourselves that we and those
that side with us, are ‘the salt of the earth;’ of giving vent to the
morbid humours of our pride, envy, and all uncharitableness, those
natural secretions of the human heart, under the pretext of self-
defence, the public safety, or a voice from Heaven, as it may happen;
and of heaping every excellence into one scale, and throwing all the
obloquy and contempt into the other, in virtue of a nickname, a
watch-word of party, a badge, the colour of a ribbon, the cut of a
dress. We thus desolate the globe, or tear a country in pieces, to show
that we are the only people fit to live in it; and fancy ourselves angels,
while we are playing the devil. In this manner, the Huron devours
the Iroquois, because he is an Iroquois, and the Iroquois the Huron
for a similar reason; neither suspects that he does it, because he
himself is a savage and no better than a wild beast; and is convinced
in his own breast that the difference of name and tribe makes a total
difference in the case. The Papist persecutes the Protestant, the
Protestant persecutes the Papist in his turn; and each fancies that he
has a plenary right to do so, while he keeps in view only the offensive
epithet which ‘cuts the common link of brotherhood between them.’
The church of England ill-treated the Dissenters, and the Dissenters,
when they had the opportunity, did not spare the church of England.
The Whig calls the Tory a knave, the Tory compliments the Whig
with the same title, and each thinks the abuse sticks to the party-
name, and has nothing to do with himself or the generic name of
man. On the contrary, it cuts both ways; but while the Whig says
‘The Tory is a knave, because he is a Tory,’ this is as much as to say, ‘I
cannot be a knave, because I am a Whig;’ and by exaggerating the
profligacy of his opponent, he imagines he is laying the sure
foundation, and raising the lofty superstructure of his own praises.
But if he says, which is the truth, ‘The Tory is not a rascal because he
is a Tory, but because human nature in power, and with the
temptation, is a rascal,’ then this would imply that the seeds of
depravity are sown in his own bosom, and might shoot out into full
growth and luxuriance if he got into place, which he does not wish to
appear till he does get into place.
We may be intolerant even in advocating the cause of Toleration,
and so bent on making proselytes to Free-thinking as to allow no one
to think freely but ourselves. The most boundless liberality in
appearance may amount in reality to the most monstrous ostracism
of opinion—not in condemning this or that tenet, or standing up for
this or that sect or party, but in assuming a supercilious superiority
to all sects and parties alike, and proscribing in the lump and in one
sweeping clause all arts, sciences, opinions, and pursuits but our
own. Till the time of Locke and Toland a general toleration was never
dreamt of: it was thought right on all hands to punish and
discountenance heretics and schismatics, but each party alternately
claimed to be true Christians and orthodox believers. Daniel Defoe,
who spent his whole life, and wasted his strength in asserting the
right of the Dissenters to a toleration (and got no thanks for it but the
pillory), was scandalized at the proposal of the general principle, and
was equally strenuous in excluding Quakers, Anabaptists, Socinians,
Sceptics, and all who did not agree in the essentials of Christianity,
that is, who did not agree with him, from the benefit of such an
indulgence to tender consciences. We wonder at the cruelties
formerly practised upon the Jews: is there anything wonderful in it?
They were at the time the only people to make a butt and a bugbear
of, to set up as a mark of indignity and as a foil to our self-love, for
the feræ naturæ principle that is within us and always craving its
prey to hunt down, to worry and make sport of at discretion, and
without mercy—the unvarying uniformity and implicit faith of the
Catholic church had imposed silence, and put a curb on our jarring
dissensions, heart-burnings, and ill-blood, so that we had no
pretence for quarrelling among ourselves for the glory of God or the
salvation of men:—a Jordanus Bruno, an Atheist or sorcerer, once
in a way, would hardly suffice to stay the stomach of our theological
rancour, we therefore fell with might and main upon the Jews as a
forlorn hope in this dearth of objects of spite or zeal; or, as the whole
of Europe was reconciled in the bosom of holy mother church, went
to the holy land in search of a difference of opinion and a ground of
mortal offence; but no sooner was there a division of the Christian
world than Papist fell upon Protestant, Protestants upon schismatics,
and schismatics upon one another, with the same loving fury as they
had before fallen upon Turks and Jews. The disposition is always
there, like a muzzled mastiff—the pretext only is wanting; and this is
furnished by a name, which, as soon as it is affixed to different sects
or parties, gives us a license, we think, to let loose upon them all our
malevolence, domineering humour, love of power and wanton
mischief, as if they were of different species. The sentiment of the
pious English bishop was good, who, on seeing a criminal led to
execution, exclaimed, ‘There goes my wicked self!’
If we look at common patriotism, it will furnish an illustration of
party-spirit. One would think by an Englishman’s hatred of the
French, and his readiness to die fighting with and for his
countrymen, that all the nation were united as one man in heart and
hand—and so they are in war-time—and as an exercise of their
loyalty and courage; but let the crisis be over, and they cool
wonderfully, begin to feel the distinctions of English, Irish, and
Scotch, fall out among themselves upon some minor distinction; the
same hand that was eager to shed the blood of a Frenchman will not
give a crust of bread or a cup of cold water to a fellow-countryman in
distress; and the heroes who defended the wooden walls of Old
England are left to expose their wounds and crippled limbs to gain a
pittance from the passenger, or to perish of hunger, cold, and neglect
in our highways. Such is the effect of our boasted nationality: it is