Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 19, Dec 1851

I have only further to add, that the parcel intrusted to me was safely delivered, and that I have reason to believe Mrs. Hendrick remained to her last hour ignorant of the sad fate of her son. It was her impression, induced by his last letter, that he was about to enter the South-American service under Cochrane, and she ultimately resigned herself to a belief that he had there met a brave man's death. My promise was scrupulously kept, nor is it by this publication in the slightest degree broken; for both the names of Hendrick and Pickard are fictitious, and so is the place assigned as that of the lieutenant's birth. That rascal Sparkes, I am glad to be able to say – chasing whom made me an actor in the melancholy affair – was sent over the herring pond for life.

THE TUB SCHOOL

Speaking without passion, we are bound to state, in broad terms, that the founder of the Diogenic philosophy was emphatically a humbug. Some people might call him by a harsher name; we content ourselves with the popular vernacular. Formidable as he was – this unwashed dog-baptized – with a kind of savage grandeur, too, about his independence and his fearlessness – still was he a humbug; setting forth fancies for facts, and judging all men by the measure of one. Manifestly afflicted with a liver complaint, his physical disorders wore the mask of mental power, and a state of body that required a course of calomel or a dose of purifying powders, passed current in the world for intellectual superiority; not a rare case in times when madness was accounted potent inspiration, and when the exhibition of mesmeric phenomena formed the title of the Pythoness to her mystic tripod.

Diogenes is not the only man whose disturbed digestion has led multitudes, like an ignis fatuus, into the bogs and marshes of falsehood. Abundance of sects are about, which their respective followers class under one generic head of inspiration, but which have sprung from the same hepatic inaction, or epigrastic inflammation, as that which made the cynic believe in the divinity of dirt, and see in a tub the fittest temple to virtue. All that narrows the sympathies – all that makes a man think better of himself than of his "neighbors" – all that compresses the illimitable mercy of God into a small talisman which you and your followers alone possess – all that creates condemnation – is of the Diogenic Tub School; corrupt in the core, and rotten in the root – fruit, leaves, and flowers, the heritage of death.

A superstitious reverence for a bilious condition of body, and an abhorrence of soap and water, as savoring of idolatry or of luxury – according to the dress and nation of the Cynic – made up the fundamental ideas of his school; and to this day they are the cabala of one division of the sect. We confess not to be able to see much beauty in either of these conditions, and are rather proud than otherwise of our state of disbelief; holding health and cleanliness in high honor, and hoping much of moral improvement from their better preservation. But to the Tub School, good digestive powers, and their consequence, good temper, were evidences of lax principles, and cleanliness was ungodliness or effeminacy; as the unpurified denouncer prayed to St. Giles, or sacrificed to Venus Cloacina. Take the old monks as an example. Not that we are about to condemn the whole Catholic Church under a cowled mask. She has valuable men among her sons; but, in such a large body, there must of necessity be some members weaker than the rest; and the mendicant friars, and do-nothing monks, were about the weakest and the worst that ever appeared by the Catholic altar. They were essentially of the Tub School, as false to the best purposes of mankind as the famous old savage of Alexander's time. Dirt and vanity, bile and condemnation, were the paternosters of their litany; and what else lay in the tub which the king over-shadowed from the sun? All the accounts of which we read, of pious horror of baths and washhouses – all the frantic renunciation of laundresses, and the belief in hair shirts, to the prejudice of honest linen – all the religious zeal against small-tooth combs, and the sin which lay in razors and nail-brushes – all the holy preference given to coarse cobbling of skins of beasts, over civilized tailoring of seemly garments – all the superiority of bare feet, which never knew the meaning of a pediluvium, over those which shoes and hose kept warm, and foot-baths rendered clean – all the hatred of madness against the refinements of life, and the cultivation of the beautiful: these were the evidences of the Diogenic philosophy; and of Monachism too; and of other forms of faith, which we could name in the same breath. And how much good was in them? What natural divinity lies in fur, which the cotton plant does not possess? Wherein consists the holiness of mud, and the ungodliness of alkali? wherein the purity of a matted beard, and the impiety of Metcalfe's brushes, and Mechi's magic strop? It may be so; and we all the while may be mentally blind; and yet, if we lived in a charnel-house, whose horrors the stony core of a cataract concealed, we could not wish to be couched, that seeing, we might understand the frightful conditions of which blindness kept us ignorant.

But bating the baths and wash-houses, hempen girdles, and hairy garments, we quarrel still with the animus of Diogenes and his train. Its social savageness was bad enough – its spiritual insolence was worse. The separatism – the "stand off, for I am holier than thou" – the condemnation of a whole world, if walking apart from his way – the substitution of solitary exaltation for the activity of charity – the proud judgment of God'S world, and the presumptuous division into good and evil of the Eternal; all this was and is of the Cynic's philosophy; and all this is what we abjure with heart and soul, as the main link of the chain which binds men to cruelty, to ignorance, and to sin; for the unloosing of which we must wait before we see them fairly in the way of progress.

How false the religion of condemnation! – how hardening to the heart! – how narrowing to the sympathies! We take a section for the whole, and swear that the illimitable All must be according to the form of the unit I; we make ourselves gods, and judge of the infinite universe by the teaching of our finite senses. They who do this most are they whom men call "zealous for God's glory," "stern sticklers for the truth," and "haters of latitudinarianism." And if all the social charities are swept down in their course, they are mourned over gently; but only so much as if they were sparrows lying dead beneath the blast that slew the enemy. "'Tis a pity," say they, "that men must be firm to the truth, yet cruel to their fellows; but if it must be so, why, let them fall fast as snow-flakes. What is human life, compared to the preservation of the truth?" Ah! friends and brothers – is not the necessity of cruelty the warrantry of falsehood? The truth of life is Love, and all which negatives love is false; and every drop of blood that ever flowed in the preservation of any dogma, bore in its necessity the condemnation of that dogma.

Turn where we will, and as far backward as we will, we ever find the spirit of the Diogenic philosophy; and clothed, too, in much the same garb and unseemly disorder as that in vogue among the dog-baptized. Ancient East gives us many parallels; and to this day, dirty, lazy fakirs of Hindostan assault the olfactories, and call for curses on the effeminacy of the cleanly and the sane. Sometimes, though, the Diogenites assume the scrupulosity of the Pharisee, and then they retain only the crimes of the Inquisition, not the habits and apparel of the Bosjesmen. Take the sincere Pharisee, for instance; regard his holy horror of the Samaritan (the Independent of his day) for failing in the strict letter of the law; hear his stern denunciations against all sinners, be they moral or be they doctrinal, mark the unpitying "Crucify him! crucify him!" against Him who taught novel doctrines of equality and brotherhood, and the nullity of form; see the purity of his own Pharisaic life, and grant him his proud curse on all that are not like unto him. He is a Cynic in his heart, one who judges of universal humanity by the individualism of one. Then, the hoary, hairy, dog-baptized, who scoffed at all the decencies of life, not to speak of its amenities, and had no gentle Plato's pride of refinement, with all the brutal pride of coarseness – did Diogenes worthily represent the best functions of manhood? Again, the monks and friars of the dark ages, and the hermits of old, they who left the world of man "made in the image of God," because they were holier than their brethren, and might have naught in common with the likeness of the Elohim; they who gave up the deeds of charity for the endless repetition of masses and vespers, and who thought to do God better service by mumbling masses in a cowl, than by living among their fellows, loving, aiding, and improving – were not all these followers in the train of Diogenes? – if not in the dirt, then in the bile; if not in the garb, then in the heart. Denouncers, condemners; narrowing, not enlarging; hating, not loving; they were traitors to the virtue of life, while dreaming that they alone held it sacred.

And now, have we no snarling Cynics, no Pharisee, no Inquisitor? Have we taken to good heart the divine record of love, of faith, which an æsthetic age has sublimated into credos, and left actions as a caput mortuum? Have we looked into the meaning of the practical lesson which the Master taught when he forgave the adulteress, and sat at meat with the sinners? or have we not rather cherished the spiritual pride which shapes out bitter words of censure for our fellows, and lays such stress on likeness that it overlooks unity? The question is worthy of an answer.

The world is wide. Beasts and fishes, birds and reptiles, weeds and flowers – which here are weeds, and there are flowers, according to local fancy – the dwarfed shrub of the Alpine steeps, and the monster palm of the tropical plains; the world is wide enough to contain them all, and man is wise enough to love them all, each in its sphere, and its degree. But what we do for Nature, we refuse to Humanity. To her we allow diversity; to him we prescribe sameness; in her we see the loveliness of unlikeness, the symmetry of variation; in him we must have multitudes shaped by one universal rule; and what we do not look for in the senseless tree, we attempt on the immortal soul. Religion, philosophy, and social politics, must be of the same form with all men, else woe to the wight who thinks out of the straight line! Diagonal minds are never popular, and the hand which draws one radius smites him who lines another equal to it in all its parts, and from the same centre-point. The Catholic denies the Protestant; the Episcopalian contemns the Presbyterian; the Free Kirk is shed like a branching horn; the Independent denounces the Swedenborgian; the Mormonite is persecuted by the Unitarian. It is one unvarying round; the same thing called by different names. Now all this is the very soul of Diogenism. Cowl, mitre, or band – distinctive signs to each party – all are lost in the shadow of the tub, and jumbled up into a strange form, which hath the name of Him of Sinope engraved on its forehead. Separatism and denunciation against him who is not with thee in all matters of faith, make thee, my friend, a Cynic in thy heart; and, though thou mayst wear Nicoll's paletots and Medwin's boots, and mayst prank thyself in all imaginable coxcombries, thou art still but a Diogenite, a Cynic, and a Pharisee; washing the outside of the platter, but leaving the inside encrusted still, believing falsely, that thou hast naught to do with a cause, because thou hast not worn its cockade.

Yet, are we going past the Tub School, though it lingers still in high places. We see it in party squabbles, not so much of politics to-day, as of the most esoteric doctrines of faith. We hear great men discussing the question of "prevenient grace," as they would discuss the composition of milk punch, and we hear them mutually anathematize each other on this plain and demonstrable proposition. We call this Diogenism, and of a virulent sort, too. We know that certain men are tabooed by certain other men; that a churchman refuses communion with him who is of no church, or of a different church; and that one Arian thinks dreadful things of another Arian. We call these men Pharisees, who deny kindred with the Samaritans – but we remember who it was that befriended the Samaritans. We know that monks still exist, whose duty to man consists in endless prayers to God (in using vain repetitions as the Heathens do); who open their mouths wide, and expect that Heaven will fill them; who hold the active duties of life in no esteem; and separate themselves from their fellows in all the grandeur of religious superiority. We can not see much difference between these men, the Hindoo fakirs, and the unsavory gentlemen of the Grecian tub. They are all of the same genus; but, Heaven be praised! they are dying out from the world of man, as leprosy, and the black plague, and other evils are dying out. True enlightenment will extirpate them, as well as other malaria. If Sanitary Commissions sweep out the cholera, acknowledged Love will sweep out all this idleness and solitary hatred, and make men at last confess that Love and Recognition are grander things than contempt and intolerance; in a word, that real Christianity is better than any form whatsoever of the Diogenic philosophy of hatred.

GOLD – WHAT IT IS AND WHERE IT COMES FROM

Road-mending is pretty general at this time of the year, and upon roads now being newly macadamized we may pick up a good many differing specimens of granite. On the newly-broken surface of one of them, four substances of which it is composed can be perceived with great distinctness. The more earthy-looking rock, in which the others seem to be embedded, is called felspar; the little hard white stones are bits of quartz; the dark specks are specks of hornblende, and the shining scales are mica. Felspar, quartz, hornblende, and mica are the four constituents of granite. These are among the rocks of the most ancient times, which form a complete barrier to the power of the geologist in turning back the pages which relate the story of our globe. Layer under layer – leaf behind leaf – we find printed the characters of life in all past ages, till at last we come to rocks – greenstone, porphyry, quartz, granite, and others – which contain no trace of life; which do not show, as rocks above them do, that they have been deposited by water; but which have a crystalline form, and set our minds to think of heat and pressure. These lowest rocks are frequently called "igneous," in contradistinction to the stratified rocks nearer the surface, which have been obviously deposited under water. Between the two there is not an abrupt transition; for above the igneous, and below the aqueous, are rocks which belong to the set above them, insomuch as they are stratified; while they belong to the set below them – insomuch as they are crystalline, contain no traces of life, and lead us by their characters to think of heat and pressure. These rocks, on account of their equivocal position, are called metamorphic.

Under the influence of air, combined with that of water – water potent in streams, lakes, and seas, but not less potent as a vapor in our atmosphere, when aided by alternations in the temperature – granite decomposes. We noticed that one of the constituents of granite – felspar – was a comparatively earthy-looking mass, in which the other matters seemed to be embedded. In the decomposition of granite, this felspar is the first thing to give way; it becomes friable, and rains or rivers wash it down. Capital soil it makes. When the constituents of granite part in this way, quartz is the heaviest, and settles. Felspar and the others may run with the stream, more or less; quartz is not moved so easily. Now, as our neighbors in America would put it, "that's a fact;" and it concerns our gossip about gold.

Below the oldest rocks there lie hidden the sources of that volcanic action which is not yet very correctly understood. Fortunately, we are not now called upon for any explanation of it: it is enough for us that such a force exists; and thrusting below, forces granite and such rocks (which ought to lie quite at the bottom), through a rent made in the upper layers, and still up into the air, until, in some places, they form the summit of considerable mountains. Such changes are not often, if ever, the results of a single, mighty heave, which generates a great catastrophe upon the surface of the earth; they are the products of a force constantly applied through ages in a given manner. In all geologic reasoning we are apt to err grossly when we leave out of our calculation the important element of time. These lower rocks, then – these greenstones, porphyries and granites, sienites and serpentines – thrust themselves in many places through the upper strata of the earth's crust, in such a way as to form mountain ranges. Now, it is a fact, that wherever the oldest of the aqueous deposits – such as those called clay-slates, limestones, and greywacke sandstones – happen to be superficial, so as to be broken through by pressure from below, and intruded upon by the igneous rocks (especially if the said igneous rocks form ranges tending at all from north to south), there gold may be looked for. Gold, it is true, may be found combined with much newer formations; but it is under the peculiar circumstances just now mentioned that gold may be expected to be found in any great and valuable store.

In Australia, the gold discoveries, so new and surprising to the public, are not new to the scientific world. More than two years ago, in an "Essay on the Distribution of Gold Ore," read before the British Association, to which our readers will be indebted for some of the facts contained in the present gossip, Sir Roderick Murchison "reminded his geological auditors that, in considering the composition of the chief, or eastern ridge of Australia, and its direction from north to south, he had foretold (as well as Colonel Helmersen, of the Russian Imperial Mines) that gold would be found in it; and he stated that, in the last year, one gentleman resident in Sydney, who had read what he had written and spoken on this point, had sent him specimens of gold ore found in the Blue Mountains; while, from another source, he had learnt that the parallel north and south ridge in the Adelaide region, which had yielded so much copper, had also given undoubted signs of gold ore. The operation of English laws, by which noble metals lapse to the crown, had induced Sir Roderick Murchison to represent to Her Majesty's Secretary of State that no colonists would bestir themselves in gold-mining, if some clear declaration on the subject were not made; but, as no measures on this head seemed to be in contemplation, he inferred that the government may be of opinion, that the discovery of any notable quantity of gold might derange the stability and regular industry of a great colony, which eventually must depend upon its agricultural products." That was the language used by Sir Roderick Murchison in September, 1849; and in September, 1851, we are all startled by the fact which brings emphatic confirmation of his prophecy.

But it is not only about the Blue Mountains, and in other districts, where the gold is now sought, that the geologic conditions under which gold may be sought reasonably are fulfilled. Take, for example, the Ural Mountains. In very ancient times the Scythian natives supplied gold from thence; and gold was supplied also by European tribes in Germany and elsewhere. Most of those sources were worked out, or forgotten. Russia for centuries possessed the Ural, and forgot its gold. Many of us were boys when that was rediscovered. The mountains had been worked for their iron and copper by German miners, who accidentally hit upon a vein of gold. The solid vein was worked near Ekatrinburg – a process expensive and, comparatively, unproductive, as we shall presently explain. Then gold being discovered accidentally in the superficial drift, the more profitable work commenced. It is only within the last very few years that Russia has discovered gold in another portion of her soil, among the spurs of the Altai Mountains, between the Jena and the Lenisei, and along the shores of Lake Baikal. This district has been enormously productive, and, for about four years before the discovery of gold in California, had been adding largely to the gross amount of that metal annually supplied for the uses of society. The extent of this new district now worked is equal to the whole area of France; but all the gold-bearing land in Russia is not yet by any means discovered. The whole area of country in Russia which fulfills the conditions of a gold-bearing district is immense. Eastward of the Ural Chain it includes a large part of Siberia; and also in Russian America there is nearly equal reason for believing that hereafter gold will be discovered.

Before we quit Asia, we may observe, that the Chinese produce gold out of their soil; and although many of the mountain ranges in that country tend from east to west, yet the conditions of the surface, and the meridional directions of the mountains too, would indicate in China some extensive districts over which gold would probably be found in tolerable abundance. Gold exists also in Lydia and Hindostan.

Now to pass over to America, where, as we have already said, the Russians have a district in which gold may some day be discovered. In many districts along the line of the Rocky Mountains, especially in that part of them which is included in the British territory, gold may be looked for. The gold region of California has been recently discovered. Gold in Mexico, where the conditions are again fulfilled, is not a new discovery. Gold in Central America lies neglected, on account of the sad political condition of the little states there. There is gold to be found, perhaps, in the United States, some distance eastward of the Rocky Mountains. Certainly gold districts will be found about the Alleghanies. Gold has been found in Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia; it exists also in Canada, and may, probably, be found not very far north, on the British side of the St. Lawrence. In the frozen regions, which shut in those straits and bays of the North Pole, to which early adventurers were sent from England on the search for gold, gold districts most probably exist, although the shining matter was not gold which first excited the cupidity of our forefathers. Passing now to South America, New Granada, Peru, Brazil, La Plata, Chili, even Patagonia, contain districts which say, "Look for gold." There are one or two districts in Africa where gold exists; certainly in more districts than that which is called the Gold Coast, between the Niger and Cape Verd; also between Darfur and Abyssinia; and on the Mozambique Coast, opposite Madagascar. In Australia, the full extent of our gold treasure is not yet discovered. In Europe, out of Russia, Hungary supplies yearly one or two hundred thousand pounds worth; there is gold in Transylvania and Bohemia; the Rhine washes gold down into its sands from the crystalline rocks of the high Alps. The Danube, Rhone, and Tagus, yield gold also in small quantities. There are neglected mines of gold in Spain.

To come nearer home. In the mining fields of Leadhills, in Scotland, gold was washed for busily in the time of Queen Elizabeth. It is found also in Glen Turret, in Perthshire, and at Cumberhead, in Lanarkshire. Attempts have been made to turn to account the gold existing in North Wales and Cornwall. About sixty years ago, gold was found accidentally in the bed of streams which run from a mountain on the confines of Wicklow and Wexford, by name, Croghan Kinshela. A good deal of gold was collected by the people, who, having the first pick, had soon earned about ten thousand pounds among them by their findings. Government then established works, and having realized in two years three thousand six hundred and seventy-five pounds by the sale of gold, which it cost them more than that amount to get, they let the matter drop, judiciously.

Let nobody be dazzled, however, by this enumeration of gold districts, which is not by any means complete. It is quite true that there is no metal diffused so widely over the world's surface as gold is, with a single exception, that of iron. But with regard to gold, there is this important fact to be taken into account, that it is not often to be obtained from veins, but is found sprinkled – in many cases sprinkled very sparingly; it is found mixed with quartz and broken rock, or sand and alluvial deposit, often in quantities extremely small, so that the time lost in its separation – even though it be the time of slaves – is of more value than the gold; and so the gold does not repay the labor of extraction. It is only where a gold district does not fall below a certain limit in its richness, that it yields a profit to the laborer. Pure gold in lumps, or grains, or flakes, is to be found only at the surface. Where, as is here and there the case, a vein of it is found deep in connection with the quartz, it is combined with other minerals, from which it can be separated only by an expensive process; so that a gold vein, when found, generally yields less profit than a field. As for gold-hunting in general, the history of every gold district unites to prove that the trade is bad. It is a lottery in which, to be sure, there are some prizes, but there is quite the usual preponderance of blanks.