THE CHEAPEST NATION IN THE WORLD.
ONCE upon a time, to say that a thing was English was equivalent to saying that it was good ; for the English merchant and the English maker took a pride not only in the cheapness but in the solidity of their wares ; they would boast that it was not all "out- Bide show," but good to the core. " Nous avons change tout cela " : cheapness.is the great object now, the one paramount object ; and the only check upon the production of an utterly worthless article, in the competition to produce the cheapest, is some con- dition or bond under penalty. If British goods have not quite lost their character for goodness in the markets of the world, they are 'labour 1)0. But we feel the direct effects of the system nearer argr, ..aid in nothing more than in the state of our buildings, pub- ..,Cand private. We, boasting to be the wealthiest and most civi- lized nation of the world, possess no class of buildings, with scarcely an exception, that are not unstable, rickety, and tawdry or ludi- crously ugly. There have existed, ages past, nations that we could have " bought up," but that had so much hearty pride in their work as to make it stand good in all time : the palaces of the rude middle ages see the " splendid mansions " of our auction-bills rise and fall as the oak witnesses the growth and decay of mushrooms. The Egyptians, the ancient Hindoos, have left us specimens of their building art ; the Greeks; even the Etru- rians and Pelasgians, peoples who have disappeared from his- tory. Despotism may have been the compelling power to some of these structures, but it was not to all; and in all cases there must somewhere have been a pride in the goodness and solidity of the work. In our worldly wisdom we forego that honest pride. Our dwellings are, in malice prepense, calculated to last just ninety- nine years. No one, however, takes a pride that they should do even that ; but it is in the bond. They often do not last so long: a clause is occasionally put into the lease to forbid dancing, lest too much hilarity should bring the house down : to see a house propped up, is one of the commonest of sights, the tenement con- fessing its sickly constitution by the resort to crutches : nay, some- times the structure, even of a public kind, will not stand to be built. We had an instance last week, in the ruin of an incomplete edifice at a railway-terminus, which toppled down upon the work- men, killing one and wounding others. Railways are the grand characteristic of our day : one might have supposed, a priori, that the builders, our pontifices maximi, would take a just and laudable pride in rendering some part of the structure at least a monument of the high estate and power of the English people—a monument to stand as a record and a lesson for all ages. Alas! railway-directors have their chief pride in the high price of shares. If some concession be made to the popular love for what is "hand- some," the concession is made with a sneer at the " humbug," and a clumsy effort at compliant*, without a sense of the beautiful. Nay, the whole affair is turned over to a " contractor." The strength, the beauty, and the durability, no doubt, are put in the bond or contract; but there is no life in the dry stipulation : it is altogether overridden by the limitation of price. We all know the value of mere bonds, ever since we chuckled at the cheat put upon Shylock. Language, law, and penalty, are incapable of binding the conscience or defining the future, unless read by some moral construction of the bond. Now, competition in its excess has pared down bargains between the projectors of buildings and the contractors, so that a mere literal compliance is all that is to be expected. The projector, eager to get as much as he can for his money, enters into a contract, stipu- lating a variety of things; for the execution of which he is no longer responsible, since he has shuffled off the responsibility upon the Contractor: the contractor, eager to make as much money as he can by the bargain, often so hard that it requires much ingenuity to make any thing, does as little as he can ; complying with the letter of the contract, but caring nothing on earth for the thing to be done : he sometimes retransfers part of his responsibility to an- other contractor, who has a still more remote interest in the pro- ject, and only the motive to realize the price and evade the penalty stipulated by the middle-man. Thus, Messrs. G BISSELL and PETO, the contractors for the railway where this disgraceful and fatal ruin happened, write to the papers—" Although we are the contractors for the whole of the works at that station, our firm was not con- cerned in the erection of the iron roofing to which the accident occurred, nor were any of our workmen employed therein." And that must be taken to exonerate Messrs. GRISSELL and PETO ! Perhaps it may ; but what does it say for the nation that endures such a system ? Why, it is to such a system that we intrust our very greatest national buildings ; and, if we mistake not, Messrs. GRISSELL and PETO, who thus exonerate themselves, are contractors for work done to the new Parliament Palace at Westminster.
This is one part of the larger question, the increasing practice among us of substituting guarantees and bonds for honest pride and good feeling. The observant man will not fail to detect evil re- sults of the practice in every quarter of society. The very strict- ness with which we bind each other down provokes the disposition to circumvent the stipulater. A bond that professes to provide for every thing seems to exonerate the conscience : the man who would hesitate to circumvent a helpless orphan avowedly trusting in his kind heart, or even the active and sagacious friend trusting, with only so much stipulation as to make the mutual meaning plain, in his integrity and good feeling, would think it fine fun to outwit the Yankee who thought he had driven a hard and inevitable bargain. The system substitutes a parchment bond for "stuff o' the con- science " : can more be said against it ? Yes ; it is damned not only in its nature but in its effects : we see men on all sides re- ferring more and more to "the agreement," less and less to what is just and generous; we see official oaths and securities fructify in peculation; shipmasters starving or poisoning their passengers with bad food, because some special kind of biscuit or pork was not in the bond ; English goods losing their once unimpeachable and pro- verbial character ; our very houses tumble about our ears, or stand upon crutches in the public way ; our great national edifices de- pend for their stability upon the soundness of some contract, or stare us in the face with miserable poverty of design—like the Na- tional Gallery—a laughingstock to ourselves ; and there are more such brewing, as witness the British Museum. Our great public edifices are like to tumble of their own accord ; or we wish they would, to save our shame in the eyes of strangers. All this may be a fit retribution upon a "sharp" or " acute " people, with whom it is a point of popular morals to outwit the unwary; but is it suitable to a great nation ? We appear sometimes to forget that a nation has a character as well as individuals; and that while we admire and seek to emulate the greatness of the Romans, the taste of the Italians and Greeks, or of the barbarous Hindoos, we record our- selves in our monuments, what we have been called, a "nation boutiquiere."
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