The Devil's Making Read Online Free PDF Page A

while I was trying on the boots, that Begbie was a tough customer who travelled by horseback or foot hundreds of miles on circuit, in snow or sun, pitching his own tent in the forest, living off wild game, handing out impartial judgement in the mining camps in an attempt to make Americans into peaceful British citizens. He is known both as a hanging judge and as an Indian-lover: he has hanged quite a few Indians, but believes they have title to the land they live and hunt in. This is apparently unpopular with the Legislature.
    Our conversation turned out to be momentous after its initial parryings.
    â€˜An odd letter.’ He held it up delicately. ‘It describes you as a very able young man, but it leaves out something. You began in Divinity and concluded in Jurisprudence. But it doesn’t say why.’
    â€˜I lost my faith.’ I felt as if back on the Ariadne, and resolved not to be pompous.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜You know of the debate at Oxford between Dr Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. That was eight years ago, before I was there, but it still echoed. My father is a very earnest sort of parson with evangelical leanings. We used to argue about Low Church versus High Church, with me favouring High Church for the sake of the argument I suppose. But at Oxford, after the Wilberforce debacle, people seemed to have retreated from argument into an emphasis on ritual.’ Here I began to flounder. I remembered Charles Dickens’s remark that High Churchmen were all dandies. Though a Cambridge man, as a dandy Begbie would almost certainly be High Church. ‘At any rate I was so wearied by the High versus Low Church question that Darwin’s Origin of Species took me by storm.’
    â€˜Do you think Darwin is an atheist?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜I don’t think he is. He ends The Origin thus: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…” Not the words of an atheist.’
    â€˜Indeed not.’
    â€˜I’ve always wondered why people think he is one then. Haven’t you?’
    â€˜I believe it’s because of his emphasis on Natural Law.’
    â€˜Ah, that’s why you changed to studying the law.’
    â€˜Yes’.
    â€˜You’ve come to the right place, Mr Hobbes, to pursue an investigation of Natural Law. You’ll learn things about it they don’t know at Oxford or in the Inns of Court – or even at Cambridge. I believe there are three laws. Natural Law, God’s Law, and the Law of the Land – which in this Colony is the Common Law of England. You may have been taught it approximates to Natural Law, but I discover every day that they are different. Have you seen Mr de Cosmos?’
    â€˜No’.
    â€˜That is he.’ He gestured grandly to the window and those arguing men gesticulating outside, whose heads we could see passing now and then, the man with the coal-scuttle beard, the most vehement. ‘Amor de Cosmos – Lover of the Cosmos. A Canadian whose real name is Bill Smith. But that is by the by. You cannot yet practice the law of the land here. A pity you didn’t go to the bar in England. It would be good to have a barrister of your background – in the long run, that is. There’s no work now. And no solicitor will take you on for articling – unless you pay him a fortune for doing nothing to teach you. It’s a bad time. And I should say right away, I have no personal need of your services: I have my clerk already. Have you much money?’
    â€˜Very little.’
    â€˜If you had you might go into farming. You look as if you have the energy. Then we could eventually make a Magistrate of you. But that’s a time ahead. Who knows what will happen? Our Americans here are mostly good citizens. They like British orderliness. But if the United States were permitted to annex this