experienced the same churlish reception that the disguised angel encountered in that well known fable. "He will vouchsafe This day to be our guest. Bring forth and pour Abundance, fit to honour and receive Our heavenly stranger."-Milton. It cannot, however, be said that England is a petty state, that has always been at war for the mastery, like Rome; and we must therefore look for some other cause in her history or constitution to account for the national dislike for strangers indicated by her dictionary. That this feeling does exist, not only in cities, where municipal and other honours are considered to be the exclusive right of the townsmen, but also in the remotest valleys of our land, where there are no prizes to be striven for, is shewn both by Johnson's illustrative quotation, and by the barbarous saying, attributed indifferently to the inhabitants of the Lancashire and of the Yorkshire valleys. Shylock represents the city feeling, when he says— "You did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me, as you spurn a stranger out 66 And the Tim Bobbin, who asks his fellow: "Bill, does thou know who that is?" "No." Why, then, cobble a stone at him;" expresses the country feeling in an unmistakable manner. Whence then does our national dislike for strangers arise? It may perhaps be found in our insular position; but I question much whether jealousy of foreigners has any share in producing the dislike of strangers, which is present in parts of the country far removed from the sea, and where the idea of a foreigner must be of the vaguest and most indistinct nature. Besides which, the Greeks were as much insular in their habits as ourselves; and inhospitality to strangers is not a special charateristic of Islanders in other parts of the world. I believe that it is mainly to be attributed to the operation of our Poor Laws; and that it has arisen from them in a very natural manner. When the legislature first thought fit to make the support of its own poor and destitute inhabitants compulsory upon the land, instead of leaving them to casual or spontaneous charity, it adopted the territorial division which was familiar to the nation, and decreed that each parish should be compelled to provide for its own poor. And whilst the means of transit from one part of the country to another were very defective, and there was but little migration from place to place, this arrangement was convenient, and on the whole worked well enough. But when a thickly peopled parish sent its able-bodied labourers into a more thinly peopled district, their strength and services indeed were valuable, but there was the possibility that the new comers might become a burden upon the adopted parish, through sickness or old age: and the law was obliged to settle under what circumstances the old parish should cease to be responsible, and the new one should become chargeable in case of need. The fear of future expense on this score eventually settled deep in the English heart, and became a constant source of jealousy against people from a distant, or even from an adjoining parish; and a person who might by possibility become eventually chargeable, became on this account a stranger and an enemy, although in other respects he might be a well known, upright, and valuable workman or neighbour. Every non-parishioner thus became a "stranger," and, as an Englishman naturally takes troubles before they come, he became an enemy also-a person to be spurned from our threshold, or stoned from our borders. The form which this fear has assumed in some of our agricultural counties has been productive of great evil, both to masters and servants. Twelve months' unbroken servitude entitled the servant to support from the parish in which the service was performed; and in order to prevent this chargeability from coming into effect, it became the custom for farmers to engage their farm servants for a year all but a day. At the end of this time the service terminated, and the labourer had no claim upon his adopted parish, even if he was re-engaged after an interval of only a single day. Convenience gradually caused all the servants to leave at the time of year when there was some fair or gathering, which would bring employers and employed mutually together; and in some parts of the country it is still the case, that at a certain period of the year every house is destitute of servants for a longer or shorter period; and even if the farmers' domestics return at the expiration of this period, the family must be content to do without servants as best it can, during the interregnum. The precaution which was thus taken by the master to guard against a possible future expense, arising from their aged or infirm servants, has recoiled upon themselves; and no one can estimate the evil fully, until he has experienced it himself, or in the family of some one nearly connected with him. This evil both to masters and servants has now been materially removed, by various alterations of the Poor Laws; and one which has very recently come into effect will probably reduce it to a minimum, by having made a large district, embracing many parishes, chargeable with the poor of the whole, instead of making it the interest of each parish to get rid of as many of the poorer inhabitants as possible, and the policy of each to stone out all new comers from their territory. If we now turn to the Hebrew, we meet with a curious circumstance in that dictionary. Not only does stranger mean simply an unknown person, a stranger, neither friend nor enemy, guest nor intruder, but there is no word in that language which implies Host; neither is there any word to indicate Guest; and yet the hospitality of the Jew is a most striking feature in his character; and there are perhaps few things upon which more stress is laid by Moses, in his summing up of the law in Deuteronomy, than the care and kindness which are to be shown to the stranger, simply because he is a stranger. "The LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Deut. x. 17-19. "And thou shalt keep the feast, and thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God, thou, and thy son, and thy Levite, and thy stranger, and the fatherless and the widow; and thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt." -xvi. 11, 12. "Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land."-xxiii. 7. "Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land. Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger: but thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing. Thou shalt leave thy gleanings in the field for the stranger; that the LORD thy God may bless thee."- xxiv. 14, to the end. These, and many similar injunctions, all based upon the same grand principle, that Israel was a stranger in the land of Egypt and the LORD redeemed him from thence, took such deep root in the heart of the nation, that every man was a Host, simply because he was a Jew; and there was no necessity for a special word, because the thing was implied in the very fact of his belonging to that nation. And if the Jew as a matter of course was a host, the stranger was a guest by the same rule; and the words Jew and stranger, therefore, contained all that was requisite on the subject. Having illustrated the purpose of this paper at so much length, in the foregoing remarks upon the word stranger, a much briefer allusion to some other words* on our list will indicate how they also illustrate national character; and the next to be noticed, is not less diverse in its meanings than the one which has been so fully examined. The Greek love of art and science was so deeply engrafted in his nature, that he assumed, as a matter of course, that as soon as a man had leisure for so doing, he would at once devote himself to study; and leisure and study was accordingly synonymous with him. His sociable and gossiping disposition indisposed him, however, for solitary study, and a school was therefore naturally associated with the idea of study, and the same word expressed all three. As, however, it was The words which have been examined, in preparing this paper, have sometimes a natural connection with one another, and at other times have been taken almost at random, or as their interest happened to become apparent. The subjects of the paper are, Stranger, Leisure, Art, Work, Rejoice, and Victory: but many others which have been examined have possessed equal interest. The method adopted has been to take common English words of well known signification, and find their nearest representatives in the three selected languages. The Greek and Latin offered no difficulties in this respect: but as I am not acquainted with Hebrew, I am indebted to Dr. Ginsburg for telling me what is the proper Hebrew representative of the words under review. He then found the words in the Hebrew Lexicon, and left me to copy the English meanings given for them. Beyond this he is not responsible, and he is not accountable for any erroneous inferences drawn from the Hebrew dictionary. |