On Something (Dodo Press) (17 page)

[Sidenote: Capes and Headlands.]

VII. These are three, as above enumerated (q.v.); one, the most
precipitous and bold, we have called Cape
Providence
(q.v.) for
reasons which appear above; the second, Cape
Mercy
, in recognition
of the great mercy shown us in finding this place without running on it
as has been the fate of many a noble vessel. The third we called Point
Liberty
from the nature of those glorious institutions which are
the pride of the Republic and which we intend to impose upon any future
inhabitants. These titles, which are but provisional, we pray may remain
and be Enregistered under the seal, notwithstanding the "Act to Restrain
Nuisances and Voids" of 1819, Cap. 2.

[Sidenote:
Climate
.]

VIII. The climate is that of the North Atlantic known as the "Oceanic."
Rain falls not infrequently, and between November and April snow is not
unknown. In summer a more genial temperature prevails, but it is never so
hot as to endanger life or to facilitate the progress of epidemic disease.
Wheat, beans, hops, turnips, and barley could be grown did the soil permit
of it. But we cannot regard an agricultural future as promising for the
new territory.

HERE ENDETH your Commissioners' Report.

(
Seal
)

* * * * *

Your Commissioners being also entrusted with the privilege of making
Recommendations, submit the following without prejudice and all pursuants
to the contrary notwithstanding.

As to the
land
: your Commissioners recommend that it should be
held by the State in conformity with those principles which are gaining
a complete ascendancy among the Leading Nations of the Earth. This might
then be let out at its full value to private individuals who would make
what they could of it, leaving the Economic Rent to the community. For
the individual did not make the land, but the State did.

This power of letting the land should, they recommend, be left in the
hands of a
Chartered Company
. Your Commissioners will provide
the names of certain reputable and wealthy citizens who will be glad to
undertake the duty of forming and directing this company, and who will act
on the principle of unsalaried public service by the upper classes, which
is the chief characteristic of our civilization. I. Jacobs, Esq., and Z.
Lewis, Esq. (to be directors of the proposed Chartered Company) have
already volunteered in this matter.

Your Commissioners recommend that the Chartered Company should be granted
the right to strike coins of copper, nickel, silver and gold, the first
three to be issued at three times eight times and twice the value of
the metals respectively, the said currency to be on a gold basis and
mono-metallic and not to exceed the amount of $100
per capita
.

Your Commissioners further recommend that the same authority be empowered
to issue paper money in proportions of 165% to the gold reserve, the right
to give high values to pieces of paper having proved in the past of the
greatest value to those who have obtained it.

Your Commissioners recommend the building of a stone harbour out to sea
without encroaching on the already exiguous dimensions of the land. They
propose two piers, each some mile and a half long, and built of Portland
rock, an excellent quarry of which is to be discovered on the property
of James Barber, Esq., of Maryville, Kent County, Conn. The stone could
be brought to Atlantis at the lowest rates by the Wall Schreiner line of
floats. In this harbour, if it be sufficiently deepened and its piers set
wide enough apart, the navies of the world could be contained, and it
would be a standing testimony to the energy of our race, "which maketh
the desert to blossom like a rose" (Lev. XXII. 3, 2).

Your Commissioners also recommend an artesian well to be sunk until fresh
water be discovered. This method has been found successful in Australia,
which is also an island and largely composed of sand. It is said that this
method of irrigation produces astonishing results.

Finally, in the matter of industry your Commissioners propose (not, of
course, as a unique industry but as a staple) the packing of sardines. A
sound system of fair trade based upon a tariff scientifically adjusted
to the conditions of the Island should develop the industry rapidly.
Everything lends itself to this: the skilled labour could be imparted
from home, the sardines from France, and the tin and oil from Spain. It
would need for some years an export Bounty somewhat in the nature of
Protection, the scale of which would have to be regulated by the needs
of the community, but they are convinced that when once the industry was
established, the superior skill of our workmen and the enterprise of
our capitalists would control the markets of the world.

As to political rights, we recommend that Atlantis should be treated as a
territory, and that a sharp distinction should be drawn between Rural and
Urban conditions; that the inhabitants should not be granted the franchise
till they have shown themselves worthy of self-government, saving, of
course, those immigrants (such as the negroes of Carolina, etc.) who have
been trained in the exercise of representative institutions. All Religions
should be tolerated except those to which the bulk of the community show
an implacable aversion. Education should be free to all, compulsory upon
the poor, non-sectarian, absolutely elementary, and subject, of course,
to the paramount position of that gospel which has done so much for our
dear country. The sale of Intoxicants should be regulated by the Company,
and these should be limited to a little spirits: wine and beer and all
alcoholic liquors habitually used as beverages should be rigorously
forbidden to the labouring classes, and should only be supplied in
bona
fide
clubs with a certain minimum yearly subscription.

IN CONCLUSION your Commissioners will ever pray, etc.

MS. note added at the end in the hand of Mr. Charles P. Hands, the curator
of this section:

(
The Island was lost—luckily with no one aboard—during the storms
of the following winter. This report still possesses, however, a strong
historical interest
).

I knew a man once. I met him in a wooden inn upon a bitterly cold day.
He was an American, and we talked of many things. At last he said to me:
"Have you ever seen the Matterhorn?"

"No," said I; for I hated the very name of it. Then he continued:

"It is the most surprising thing I ever saw."

"By the Lord," said I, "'you have found the very word!" I took out a
sketch-book and noted his word "surprising." What admirable humour had
this American; how subtle and how excellent a spirit! I have never seen
the Matterhorn; but it seems that one comes round a corner, and there it
is. It is surprising! Excellent word of the American. I never shall forget
it!

An elephant escapes from a circus and puts his head in at your window
while you are writing and thinking of a word. You look up. You may be
alarmed, you may be astonished, you may be moved to sudden processes of
thought; but one thing you will find about it, and you will find out quite
quickly, and it will dominate all your other emotions of the time: the
elephant's head will be surprising. You are caught. Your soul says loudly
to its Creator: "Oh, this is something new!"

So did I first see in the moonlight up the quite unknown and quite
deserted valley which the peak of the Dead Man dominates in a lonely
and savage manner the main crest of the Pyrenees. So did I first see a
land-fall when I first went overseas. So did I first see the Snowdon range
when I was a little boy, having, until I woke up that morning and looked
out of the windows of the hotel, never seen anything in my life more
uplifted than the rounded green hills of South England.

Now the cathedral of St. Front in Perigeux of the Perigord is the most
surprising thing in Europe. It is much more surprising than the hills—for
a man made it. Man made it hundreds and hundreds of years ago; man has
added to it, and, by the grace of his enthusiasm and his disciplined
zeal, man has (thank God!) scraped, remodelled, and restored it. Upon my
soul, to see such a thing I was proud to be an Anthropoid, and to claim
cousinship with those dark citizens of the Dordogne and of Garonne and of
the Tarn and of the Lot, and of whatever rivers fall into the Gironde. I
know very well that they have sweated to indoctrinate, to persecute, to
trim, to improve, to exterminate, to lift up, to cast down, to annoy, to
amuse, to exasperate, to please, to enmusic, to offend, to glorify their
kind. In some of these energies of theirs I blame them, in others I
praise; but it is plainly evident that they know how to binge. I wished
(for a moment) to be altogether of their race, like that strong cavalry
man of their race to whom they have put up a statue pointing to his wooden
leg. What an incredible people to build such an incredible church!

The Clericals claim it, the anti-Clericals adorn it. The Christians bemoan
within it the wickedness of the times. The Atheists are baptized in it,
married in it, denounced in it, and when they die are, in great coffins
surrounded by great candles, to the dirge of the
Dies Iræ
, to the
booming of the vast new organ, very formally and determinedly absolved
in it; and holy water is sprinkled over the black cloth and cross of
silver. The pious and the indifferent, nay, the sad little army of
earnest, intelligent, strenuous men who still anxiously await the death
of religion—they all draw it, photograph it, paint it; they name their
streets, their hotels, their villages, and their very children after it.
It is like everything else in the world: it must be seen to be believed.
It rises up in a big cluster of white domes upon the steep bank of the
river. And sometimes you think it a fortress, and sometimes you think it
a town, and sometimes you think it a vision. It is simple in plan and
multiple in the mind; and after all these years I remember it as one
remembers a sudden and unexpected chorus. It is well worthy of Perigeux of
the Perigord.

Perigeux of the Perigord is Gaulish, and it has never died. When it was
Roman it was Vesona; the temple of that patron Goddess still stands at its
eastern gate, and it is one of those teaching towns which have never died,
but in which you can find quite easily and before your eyes every chapter
of our worthy story. In such towns I am filled as though by a book, with a
contemplation of what we have done, and I have little doubt for our sons.

The city reclines and is supported upon the steep bank of the Isle just
where the stream bends and makes an amphitheatre, so that men coming in
from the north (which is the way the city was meant to be entered—and
therefore, as you may properly bet, the railway comes in at the other side
by the back door) see it all at once: a great sight. One goes up through
its narrow streets, especially noting that street which is very nobly
called after the man who tossed his sword in the air riding before the
Conqueror at Hastings, Taillefer. One turns a narrow corner between houses
very old and very tall, and then quite close, no longer a vision, but a
thing to be touched, you see—to use the word again—the "surprising"
thing. You see something bigger than you thought possible.

Great heavens, what a church!

Where have I heard a church called "the House of God"? I think it was in
Westmorland near an inn called "The Nag's Head"—or perhaps "The Nag's
Head" is in Cumberland—no matter, I did once hear a church so called. But
this church has a right to the name. It is a gathering-up of all that men
could do. It has fifty roofs, it has a gigantic signal tower, it has blank
walls like precipices, and round arch after round arch, and architrave
after architrave. It is like a good and settled epic; or, better still, it
is like the life of a healthy and adventurous man who, having accomplished
all his journeys and taken the Fleece of Gold, comes home to tell his
stories at evening, and to pass among his own people the years that are
left to him of his age. It has experience and growth and intensity of
knowledge, all caught up into one unity; it conquers the hill upon which
it stands. I drew one window and then another, and then before I had
finished that a cornice, and then before I had finished that a porch,
for it was evening when I saw it, and I had not many hours.

Music, they say, does something to the soul, filling it full of
unsatisfied but transcendent desires, and making it guess, in glimpses
that mix and fail, the soul's ultimate reward or destiny. Here, in
Perigeux of the Perigord, where men hunt truffles with hounds, stone set
in a certain order does what music is said to do. For in the sight of this
standing miracle I could believe and confess, and doubt and fear, and
control, all in one.

Here is, living and continuous, the Empire in its majority and
its determination to be eternal. The people of the Perigord, the
truffle-hunting people, need never seek civilization nor fear its death,
for they have its symbol, and a sacrament, as it were, to promise them
that the arteries of the life of Europe can never be severed. The arches
and the entablatures of this solemn thing are alive.

It was built some say nine, some say eight hundred years ago; its apse was
built yesterday, but the whole of it is outside time.

In human life, which goes with a short rush and then a lull, like the wind
among trees before rains, great moments are remembered; they comfort us
and they help us to laugh at decay. I am very glad that I once saw this
church in Perigeux of the Perigord.

When I die I should like to be buried in my own land, but I should take it
as a favour from the Bishop, who is master of this place, if he would come
and give my coffin an absolution, and bring with him the cloth and the
silver cross, and if he would carry in his hand (as some of the statues
have) a little model of St. Front, the church which I have seen and which
renewed my faith.