thousand pounds. The writer knows what he is
writing about, having been acquainted in his early
years with an individual who was turned adrift with
Bligh, and who died about the year ’22, a lieutenant
in the navy, in a provincial town in which the writer
was brought up. The ringleaders in the mutiny
were two scoundrels, Christian and Young, who had
great influence with the crew, because they were genteelly
connected. Bligh, after leaving the “Bounty,”
had considerable difficulty in managing the men who
had shared his fate, because they considered themselves
“as good men as he,” notwithstanding,
that to his conduct and seamanship they had alone
to look, under Heaven, for salvation from the ghastly
perils that surrounded them. Bligh himself, in
his journal, alludes to this feeling. Once,
when he and his companions landed on a desert island,
one of them said, with a mutinous look, that he considered
himself “as good a man as he;” Bligh, seizing
a cutlass, called upon him to take another and defend
himself, whereupon the man said that Bligh was going
to kill him, and made all manner of concessions; now
why did this fellow consider himself as good a man
as Bligh? Was he as good a seaman? no, nor a
tenth part as good. As brave a man? no, nor
a tenth part as brave; and of these facts he was perfectly
well aware, but bravery and seamanship stood for nothing
with him, as they still stand with thousands of his
class; Bligh was not genteel by birth or money, therefore
Bligh was no better than himself. Had Bligh,
before he sailed, got a twenty-thousand pound prize
in the lottery, he would have experienced no insolence
from this fellow, for there would have been no mutiny
in the “Bounty.” “He is our
betters,” the crew would have said, “and
it is our duty to obey him.”
The wonderful power of gentility in England is exemplified
in nothing more than in what it is producing amongst
Jews, Gypsies, and Quakers. It is breaking up
their venerable communities. All the better,
some one will say. Alas! alas! It is making
the wealthy Jews forsake the synagogue for the opera-house,
or the gentility chapel, in which a disciple of Mr.
Platitude, in a white surplice, preaches a sermon
at noon-day from a desk, on each side of which is
a flaming taper. It is making them abandon their
ancient literature, their “Mischna,” their
“Gemara,” their “Zohar,” for
gentility novels, “The Young Duke,” the
most unexceptionably genteel book ever written, being
the principal favourite. It makes the young
Jew ashamed of the young Jewess, it makes her ashamed
of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera-dancer,
or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently
the case, the cast-off Miss of the Honourable Spencer
So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept
the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the
Bengal Native Infantry; or, if such a person does not
come forward, the dishonourable offer of a cornet
of a regiment of crack hussars. It makes poor