Then without mentioning names he told the story of Lord Rufford, Goarly, and Scrobby, in such a way as partly to redeem himself with his audience. He acknowledged how absolutely he had been himself befooled, and how he had been done out of his money by misplaced sympathy. He made Mrs. Goarly’s goose immortal, and in imitating the indignation of Runce the farmer and Bean the gamekeeper showed that he was master of considerable humour. But he brought it all round at last to his own purpose, and ended this episode of his lecture by his view of the absurdity and illegality of British hunting. “I can talk about it to you,” he said, “and you will know whether I am speaking the truth. But when I get home among my own people, and repeat my lecture there, as I shall do—with some little additions as to the good things I have found here from which your ears may be spared—I shall omit this story as I know it will be impossible to make my countrymen believe that a hundred harum-scarum tomboys may ride at their pleasure over every man’s land, destroying crops and trampling down fences, going, if their vermin leads them there, with reckless violence into the sweet domestic garden of your country residences; and that no one can either stop them or punish them! An American will believe much about the wonderful ways of his British cousin, but no American will be got to believe that till he sees it.”
“I find,” said he, “that this irrationality, as I have ventured to call it, runs through all your professions. We will take the Church as being the highest at any rate in its objects.” Then he recapitulated all those arguments against our mode of dispensing church patronage with which the reader is already familiar if he has attended to the Senator’s earlier words as given in this chronicle. “In other lines of business there is, even here in England, some attempt made to get the man best suited for the work he has to do. If anyone wants a domestic servant he sets about the work of getting a proper person in a very determined manner indeed. But for the care—or, as you call it, the cure—of his soul, he has to put up with the man who has bought the right to minister to his wants; or with him whose father wants a means of living for his younger son—the elder being destined to swallow all the family property; or with him who has become sick of drinking his wine in an Oxford college;—or with him, again, who has pleaded his cause successfully with a bishop’s daughter.” It is not often that the British public is angered by abuse of the Church, and this part of the lecture was allowed to pass without strong marks of disapprobation.
“I have been at some trouble,” he continued, “to learn the very complex rules by which your army is now regulated, and those by which it was regulated a very short time since. Unhappily for me I have found it in a state of transition, and nothing is so difficult to a stranger’s comprehension as a transition state of affairs. But this I can see plainly;—that every improvement which is made is received by those whom it most concerns with a horror which amounts almost to madness. So lovely to the ancient British, wellborn, feudal instinct is a state of unreason, that the very absence of any principle endears to it institutions which no one can attempt to support by argument. Had such a thing not existed as the right to purchase military promotion, would any satirist have been listened to who had suggested it as a possible outcome of British irrationality? Think what it carries with it! The man who has proved himself fit to serve his country by serving it in twenty foughten fields, who has bled for his country and perhaps preserved his country, shall rot in obscurity because he has no money to buy promotion, whereas the young dandy who has done no more than glitter along the pavements with his sword and spurs shall have the command of men;—because he has so many thousand dollars in his pocket.”
“Buncombe,” shouted the inimical voice.
“But is it Buncombe?” asked the intrepid Senator. “Will anyone who knows what he is talking about say that I am describing a state of things which did not exist yesterday? I will acknowledge that this has been rectified—though I see symptoms of relapse. A fault that has been mended is a fault no longer. But what I speak of now is the disruption of all concord in your army caused by the reform which has forced itself upon you. All loyalty has gone; all that love of his profession which should be the breath of a soldier’s nostrils. A fine body of fighting heroes is brokenhearted, not because injury has been done to them or to any of them, but because the system had become peculiarly British by reason of its special absurdity, and therefore peculiarly dear.”
“Buncombe,” again said the voice, and the word was now repeated by a dozen voices.
“Let anyone show me that it is Buncombe. If I say what is untrue, do with me what you please. If
